POETIC THERAPY: POETIC HEALING EXPERIENCE AND TRANSLUCENT DRAWINGS

Jurate Sucilaite „The light of the depths“

(HOMO LIBER, 2022, drawings by Romas Klimavicius)

Therapy, poetic therapy, in its extended form, connects different experiences, leads to different modes of creativity. Verbal therapy, reading, writing, comprehension therapy, such therapy has a wealth of direct and even more hidden forms. Poetry, essays, drawing, there are strange, derivative connections. Let’s try these integral joints and we will travel a long and patient route. It is not only a route of a direct conversation for another or of catching another misfortune; it is also an auto therapeutic route. Such a route that comes to life, where urban healing and healing visions are brought to life. The first part of the book is dedicated to the dangers of social isolation, the emergence of barriers, and the second part is dedicated to overcoming personal selfisolation during the pandemic experience. Both parts of the book directly complement each other, because different forms of recollections and reenactments, guided by their own impulses, are expressed here. The creator and therapist herself combines direct poetic practice and the possibilities of such practice with reconstructions of experiences, essays, and emotional notes. We are introduced to very different modes of well-being, to unexpected, sometimes completely alternative forms of insightful, rounded creatives. This book is a creative collaboration between therapist Jurate Sucilaite and artist, painter Romas Klimavicius. Let’s try to discuss here a therapeutic and creative partnership. The metaphor of the light of the depths, here is a broad metaphor of the subconscious mind, which in individual and collective expression takes the reader to the restorative field of creation. According to them, the depths are found in a creative, intimate environment, in an organic environment of space and time, in a personal imaginary memory. The author herself states that writing this book was a way for her to overcome the pandemic situation. At the same time, it was a way to present many clinical cases requiring a creative approach in a completely different way. She looks at those clinical cases through the prism of cultural criticism. The prism of cultural criticism here is that extended poetics, where the disease is treated as a disorder of cultural and social communication. Illness or adversity isolates a specific person, personally limits them, deprives them of all direct forms of openness. All the mentioned negative effects have a certain counterbalance ,and the author sees that counterbalance in her work. There is a means of rescuing the depth of the psyche, and this depth that has its own light, opening up to itself. The means of opening can be seen through other, poetic openings, through the broad level of poetic practice, a level of poetic practice from several components. One of such components is the level of writing, speaking and talking. The therapist understands the practice of writing as a classic poetic dimension-mimesis, repetition. The next level is the level of reading, listening. The necessary level of understanding is born and created from listening and reading. At the level of meaning, at the level of the inner light as a resource, at the level of the reserve, restoration takes place. Meaning is either discovered or gathered, created, thanks to poetic attentiveness. The book, written in the form of an easy essay, introduces us to the world of poetic practice, which is sophisticated, receptive, and profound. The world of poetry, not only closed rhetoric, not only the world of private practice, is a world that restores many things, opens many things anew. Poetry, in its original and its extended sense, opens the depths. When attacked, when calamity strikes, when meaning and hope disappear, poetry opens its depths, in which there is healing and healing light. The author herself shares significant fragments of poetic practice situations in the first part of the book.

In the second part, the author shows help to herself, thanks to the opening of poetry. Poetic therapy as a form of art therapy is a new phenomenon that requires transferring a set of humanitarian knowledge into treatment practice. Requiring a mechanistic understanding of the psyche to be complemented by an understanding of culture. The approach to the disease here is a case of cultural disturbance, inconsistency, and communicative confusion. The plane seen through the poetic prism, through the poetic text or perception, is the plane of verbal interaction, dialogue. Such a therapeutic plane is seen poetically, and becomes a search for alternatives rather than a set of direct directives. The book is delicately designed, carefully inlaid with excellent drawings by Romas Klimavicius. And this is a conscious choice. For those, who find the poetic route shown by the therapist insufficient, they can be guided by the drawings in the book. Poetic therapy is a way out through poetic dialogue. You need to find the connection, find the lost sensory connections. One such sensory connection is verbal communication. A violation as an insult is a verbal vulnerability that can be restored thanks to poetic language itself. One of the first criteria of poetic therapy is the sense of language, which is also part of poetic thinking. Another important criterion is attentiveness. The training of attention, the concentration of attention, this constitutes attentiveness, attentiveness, recognition possibilities. An even more important criterion in poetic therapy is nature, because it is part of the soul. The sensation within must communicate with the sensation of the environment. Without finding yourself in yourself, you can find yourself, a part of yourself can be found in the surrounding sense of nature. Thanks to the poetic word, one’s own words are purified and purified. To hear yourself is to hear your inner promptings. Therapy works on the principle of a mirror: hear, understand, and reflect. The basis of healing power is sensitive, restorative sensitive.

After this review, let’s move on to the drawings of the book itself. In this book, Romas Klimavicius’ drawings introduce us to the original poetic experience in a different way. Drawing can sometimes be found as a means of creative liberation, situational salvation. And these drawings lead to a poetic experience, to such a situation where the perception of a drawing turns into a kind of creativity. Poetic experience is not a drawing just as an addition to something, as some formal, procedural illustration, because this artist here presents a translucent, universally visible image of a drawing. You can look at it from different points of view, being on different sides. Visibility perceived is opened to the visibility of the drawing here and the transparent sphere. Because the poetic experience of life is a transparent experience, not an illustration, but an illustration from a broader and primary point of view. It is a drawing chalk, through which you can look, with which you can frame different, diverse, painful, troubled experiences. Poetic experience is a mythic and primordial integral, integral experience of life. Adversity and trouble are destruction, fragmented, fragmented experiences.

The drawing here is a texture in its own way, a texture of a lively and fresh pattern, an animistic texture. That is why there are so many animistic paraphernalia. And such animistic, slow perceiving, extended-view animistics unexpectedly turns into yet another therapeutic attribute. Movements and gestures of animals, which easily turn into ornamentation, physiological symbolism, totemic expression, such ornamentation is unifying ornamentation that finds and collects scattered experience. The translucent basis of the drawing, the opportunity provided by mutual viewing, is a broader phenomenological-visual hint. A hint is drawn about the artificiality of boundaries and separations. The implication is that there is no great difference between internal or external, visual or tactile experience. And a hint that the reading experience is a visual experience. Much more important is the connection between life and the light of life that is created and opened through the drawing. Drawing is that important unifying, harmonizing aspiration, equal to the aspiration of perception. Translucent design allows both to rise from the inside out and to descend into the depths from the outside. Therefore, this strategy of presenting drawings, of their gathering, is an association with an overlapping experience. Scary, painful, unpleasant formations, the sloppiness of the situation, the emerging social exclusion, it is being thrown into a specific visible, perceptible situation. The drawing shows the ability to find and collect, to remember and to ascend to a safe and stable state in the very image. Therefore, in these drawings of the author, a laconic and integral, harmonized and open situation is expected. These transparent drawings