This is not a metaphor. In Eachin, it is a lived instruction—daily, tactile, awkward, luminous. When we tie our arms together to begin, we are not preparing to paint as ourselves. We are preparing to get out of the way. We become tethered to the unknown. We enter dusinki, the physical labor of loosening the ego’s grip. Paint moves not because we direct it, but because something other, something imaginal moves out ahead, we follow.
James Hillman taught: Stay with the image. No interpretation, no analysis. Linger inside the mystery it offers. “Image is psyche,” Hillman wrote, not a symbol pointing beyond, but presence itself. In Eachin, this instruction becomes process. We do not paint what we see. We stay with what appears. The brush is moved by our shared surrender to this imaginal force. Two people painting, yet neither authoring. We give our limbs to the image, and let it work itself out through us.
To stay with the image in Eachin is not passive reverence; it is participatory bewilderment. The image unfolds as we follow it. We never get ahead of it. We do not resolve it—we revolve around it. We orbit the moment of emergence. The paint is the psyche’s speech, stammered and strange. Our only responsibility is not to interrupt.
And this is why the paintings become strangers to us. Not artifacts of what we knew, but traces of what we touched. Hillman spoke of the soul’s movement as imaginal, curved, and multiple. Eachin honors that curvature. There is no point of arrival. There is only the act of remaining—inside the tension, inside the field of dusinki, where our tied bodies forget ownership and enter a different geometry.
That geometry is lewst: two parallel lines that meet at the point of infinity. You and I, painting as one body, are two consciousnesses suspended in the paradox of lewst. The meeting point is not physical. It is imaginal. It is the image itself. We converge in what is not ours, and that convergence gives rise to a third presence, which becomes the essence of unknowing.
Hillman’s call to stay with the image is a call to devotion, not definition. In Eachin, we live this devotion with our limbs, our refusals, our repetitions. The paintings are not final products. They are what remains when we have stayed with the image long enough for it to become stranger than us—and more truthful. When we have allowed the psyche to paint.
So we return. Every day. To the tie. To the paint. To the not-knowing. We return not to make meaning, but to be made by the image.