PENKNIFE

7 COLOURS is a long text that was a catharsis, an exorcism of my 7 selves. once i had located them inside myself, i allowed them to speak and express their personalities, their fears and desires, and somehow they took the form of 7 colours. the speaking voice was at times my own, speaking about the colour, or to the colour, and other times the narration was being done by something else entirely. sometimes the colours spoke up as individuals, and other times the colours spoke as different tribes, as flags representing a nation, an identity, a religion. these tribes existed on a mystical island which could be my physical body or the universe of my holographic mind.

seeing emotions inside myself comes from daoism or the chakra system in yoga. these maps below charts the flow of internal energy. in daoism they cirulate and replenish the storage centres – the dan tians.

i can’t remember when i came across an odd spiritual psychology book one day. it mixed the chakra system with the imagery of native american totem poles, saying that (if we only imagine so) we can each have a totem pole of different animals living up and down us in our organs and emotions. reading this book, i understood something new about myself and about my interior life: we are many and infinite.

i learnt that my emotions lived in their own dimension, with me and around me, as well as being inside me and a part of me. as personalities, they knew me well, and i knew them, like i had known them all my life; but suddenly i could talk to them, listen to them, and i realised they had a lot to say.

during this time i was living in a mucus-coloured flat in a random neighbourhood on the edge of a large town. it was calm there and my inner world expanded greatly during this time. however, having nobody around made me introspective and smoking weed sent my imagination into wild places. one night i thought i saw the devil in a corner of the room where i slept. i thought the neighbour below me had a demon parasite living on his energy, and it had found me as a new victim. i was very suspicious of the neighbour; i thought maybe he had murdered somebody because of all the scary things i felt coming up out of the floor. shuddering, evil vibes. i moved the bed into the living room and slept there.

this cast of colours grew out of me, and i let them ramble. i had no idea what they were saying, i just prepared a space for them to speak their mind and tell their story, and away they went. i allowed them to reference each other and reinvent themselves. i felt them like a family of schizophrenic spirits who needed to let off steam. i needed to let them out, and i wrote them untill they were fully exorsised.

the setting is kind of an island. i painted it to try to understand it myself. if you look you can see the black pirates, the white moon, the red city, the grey factory, the mushroom forest, the blue palace, and yellow spain. the island view makes them a kind of united federation, ruled by no one and rife with internal politicking. although there is no leadership, there is a kind of established role for each colour, whether illegal or controlling, none the less these powers did find a balance among themselves.

each colour also had its own hero or protagonist. they were: mushroom man, pink man, bug man, the fish angels, the holy ghost, the void, and spain… they were each looking out for me in their own way, as well as looking out for themselves.

although it can feel frightening and intangible, i benefit from this kind of jungian journey for self-discovery and going through crises or for vomiting confused and contradictory feelings.

you can get this pdf here: