A Forest of Ideas

Book excerpt: Blake Parker worked on this series of writings in the last year of his life while he lived with a terminal diagnosis of cancer. It is a mixture of poetry, dialogues, book reports, and short essays, formed as a sort of shorthand to a number of concepts, primarily from sociology and anthropology, which he saw as useful, if not actually essential, for understanding symbolic interpretation and the essence of the therapeutic process within a social and cultural context. He designed the psychoanalytic and therapeutic diagrams to clarify concepts and as teaching aids for art therapy students and therapists. Blake uses a phenomenological understanding of metaphor in order to throw light upon the process of social construction, creativity, and conceptions of mysticism or spirituality. The book includes some of his personal reflections regarding death, dying, creativity, and the meaning of life. The "notes" are essentially a hermeneutic of mysticism, a moving from the parts to the whole and the whole to the parts. It is a forest of ideas and ramblings in interpretive frameworks that emerged and is presented in a circular spiral.