MIDNIGHT BLOSSOMS; DARKNESS FALLS

I assigned myself the project of doing a collage every day for a year. I assembled each collage early in the morning, just after waking when the remnants of the previous night's dreams had not yet evaporated and were still haunting. I did this every day for a year. I treated each collage as if it were a short story or a theatrical presentation. With the borders of the collage forming a proscenium, the collage elements form the stage and the scenery on which the protagonist appears. The environment, the foreground, the background, and the surrounding symbolic objects – the theatrical “props” – provide hints as to the nature and possible outcome of each drama (apparently, I do not dream in comedies). This does not mean that the collages tell stories in the normal sense. They should not be accessible using ordinary consciousness. In fact, if when one of the collages was done and I felt I "understood" it, I immediately discarded it. These are for the act of appreciation by the unconscious mind along with the conscious.

- Arthur Taussig – 2012

Reason is the organ of truth, but imagination is the organ of meaning.
- C. S. Lewis

The man who speaks with primordial images speaks with a thousand tongues; he entrances and overpowers, while at the same time he raises the idea he is trying to express above the occasional and the transitory into the sphere of the ever-existing. He transmutes personal destiny into the destiny of mankind, thus evoking all those beneficent forces that have enabled mankind to find a rescue from every hazard and to outlive the longest night. That is the secret of effective art.
- C. G. Jung

My most important problem was destroying the line of demarcation that separates what seems real from what seems fantastic.
- Garcia Marquez

Whether we listen with aloof amusement to the dreamlike mumbo jumbo of some red-eyed witch doctor of the Congo, or read with cultivated rapture thin translations from the sonnets of the mystic Lao-tse; now and again crack the hard nutshell of an argument of Aquinas, or catch suddenly the shining meaning of a bizarre Eskimo fain' tale: it will be always the one, shape-shifting yet marvelously constant story that we find, together with a challengingly persistent suggestion of more remaining to be experienced than will ever be known or told.
- Joseph Campbell