The Ecstasy of a Cripple
Jocelyn Woods
Video Feature: Jocelyn Woods: The Ecstasy of a Cripple
As a model, Jocelyn transcends all definitions and cultural expectations of what a model is. Her modeling is not only a vehicle for personal self expression, it is the transmission of a message. In her images and her words, Jocelyn seeks to free us from the illusion of being separate. With her project, Ecstasy of a Cripple, she eloquently illuminates a universal sense of limitless shared divinity and bliss.
Jocelyn took some time to reflect on some questions we offered about her work. We invite you to take your time with her answers… let them linger in your experience, as if sipping a fine wine.
(You can support the Ecstasy of a Cripple II here: http://igg.me/at/WeAreTheCure)
What is beauty?
Beauty is that which takes me beyond the mediocrity of the known, beyond the horizon of the fishbowl, into what the Toltec Seers refer to as the Unknowable. Beauty is that which inspires me, whether through resplendent wonder or awestruck horror: a displacement out of the matrix of linearity: a poetic immersion that so confounds my mind that I am rendered speechless upon the edge of a cliff where there is no choice but to jump into the ocean of limitless being. To be seized at the core with the open-throttled Song of Self sung back to me, through me, until the idea of separateness is an impossibility, and that which was prior deemed as impossible becomes the only possibility I desire. To behold with honor is to resurrect; to mutually behold the Unknowable Self gazing back at you and see through It’s eyes, is to have eternal life. Beauty is apocalypse. To loose all identity and feel the parts sucked through you like a cosmic-blowing liquid-honey-orgasm. Perplexion is the goop that bardic wonderment is made of. I want to be so enchanted by Art that I loose my mind. All linear constructs dissolve. It is the penultimate orgasm and yet it has no end. It is eternal unveiling. Apokolipsis ad infinitum.
I’m curious about the title of your work “Ecstasy of a Cripple”. Could you break that title down for us?
What does it mean? The word “cripple” is used poetically here, as part of the puzzling poetry, and like much else, is not what it “seems.” Honoring the truth that I am beyond description altogether, I dropped the attempt to name or define myself or the project; instead, I present a curious riddle. This project has at its core an unrelenting spark that will burn and dissolve themes that are steeped in taboo, religious belief systems, and assumptions. Both “cripple” and “resurrection” are words that have been steeped in this very mesh. By using them in the poetic perspective, a curious thing happens, for poetry is a medium in which that which “is not” can be used to touch the mystery of “what is” without creating the mirror that, for example, a reflective perspective would generate.
The title “Ecstasy of a Cripple” is a poetic murmuring whose riddle kisses the cheek of the Unknowable. It is sheer arrogance to assume anything can be known. The moment we define something, we deny it: hence only the unreal and artificial can be described. In the Poetic Perspective, however, we can blabber the Bright Speech (as the ancient Celts called it) which presents a riddle. The riddle does not define a mystery into a linear construct, but rather provides a door into the mystery. If one can be confounded until the mind lets go, the door shall crack to admit a glimpse of eternity. If one can then toss the shrouds of identity and individuation into the sea, then one has become the Door of Everything.
What is the primal function of the neuromuscular system but to Perceive and Respond to that which it encounters? What is the neuromuscular junction but a portal of antagonists which when rectified yields (as all portals must do) to a fusion of Poetic Perspective? Of this disease I have carried the semblance, the ghost of sub-atomic particles used to store memory, with diagnostic abnormalities that are still perplexing my medical doctors, leaving me as a bearer of a “rare, atypical” aberration that contradicts itself in its own manifestive findings: “You cannot presume to know me,” speaks my blood; “You cannot assume to understand me!” exclaims my muscle tissue, “You behold a mystery!” says my flesh when under the microscope of examination. “You Know Nothing.” As it is, as it as, all or nothing at all, my body the vehicle of a riddle that pairs within its rhyme the dance of seemingly contradictory natures, inclined to be a vehicle of perplexion until the mind leaps over the cliff into the ocean of my rapture. “Ecstasy of a Cripple”: rapture in the “I know not” of my wonder.
Listening to you speak, I hear a wisdom that could be expressed through any number of creative outlets. What has you choose to express yourself through modeling?
To hang suspended between life and death can at first be interpreted as a sensation of indescribable heaviness and tension. I have been hung there multiple times, in suffering illnesses, and felt as though I was the burden of flesh hungrily craved by two opposite starving worlds.
Yet it became apparent to me that the dilemma of choosing between the land of the dead or the land of the living only remains a crisis so long as we presuppose the law that only one can be chosen of the two.
In reality they are but mirroring dreams. Upon which shall we shine the flashlight of awareness? It was in beholding the unreality of both dreams that I made the lucid decision to combine two disintegrated parts into remembered wholeness: only then could neither side of the mirror claim me as currency. In the resolution of soul and body one becomes a resurrected being. Upon convalescence from a dangerous respiratory infection I found that the body is most malleable when it is healing. Furthermore, in releasing identification with either the soul or body as disintegrate and tyrannical isolated segments (inaccurate bifurcation causing distortion and externalization), it is remembered as an incorruptible, fluidly renewing field, contrary to the belief that matter is immutable solidity.
It was the sensation of this fluidity that inspired me to begin using the body as an artistic medium in itself. When I model, I feel the body shapeshifting to express the emotive attitude or state of consciousness. The body is an absolutely limitless, living work of art that embodies the disrobed self-recognition of divine perfection.
Billions of dollars are ushered into pharmaceutical research, and relatively minuscule attention is invested into enhancing the quality of life of those living with diseases. The message encoded in the manifestation of disease can never be heard this way. Disease is merely an unsung song. Full expression restores incorruptibility. Soul has virtually gone bankrupt in disenfranchised suppression, selling out to the belief systems that promulgate and peddle the artificial reality of perceived solidity and fatalism.
At the benefit of a contrived segregation (yielding the illusion of control), soul and body are antagonistically opposed game pawns and Passion has lain dead. Pornography is the result of the core disempowerment of humankind caused by suppression of authentic sexuality. The images for this series were inspired to catalyze the Resurrection of Passion, the joining of seemingly diametrically opposed poles in fertile embrace. It is the healing of a core schism. We are the cure we have been waiting for.
What has been the most rewarding part of creating this body of work?
The magic of mutual beholding. Model, photographer and viewer fusing through art that ripples exponentially through the cosmos, inspiring expression. Thomas Dodd, the Bard that he is, wordlessly and instantly communed with my vision; flesh merged with lens. Take, for example, the image “Ascension” as an illustrative example of our symbiosis: the Fall and Resurrection being combined as a single multi-eon event, renders a depth of resolution that takes my breath away. When I first beheld the image, I gasped. I felt that somehow Thomas has accessed my DNA in this image as well as my healing. I behold in this image a Bridge: between seemingly irreconcilable events, between ecstasy and agony, between the GAP. The V-shaped rocky landscape speaks to me of a profound convergence in chiaroscuro tones: light and dark, death and life, stillness and motion. The tempestuous stirring of the storm clouds and the hopeful rays of light in the riddlesome float of my figure that seems both still and silently lifted. The Tempest and The Temple.
Isee my DNA in the riddle between shadowed skin and illumined clouds. Some will see this as religious art, others damn it as sacrilege. Yet it is neither. It is a paradoxical elucidation of the cosmic story that was overlaid by the glamour and brainwash of conspiracy. The cross being placed in the third eye is like the resolution of the 4 directions through restored Sight, for what was the Fall and its resultant circumstances but a peculiarity of vision? What was the ecstasy and agony of humankind — the Kingdom of Joy and Suffering — but the exploration of the dense depths whereby the Core of Man evolved the Cosmos? What was the pain and cyclic grief of the Embodiment of the Infinite but the dreamlike fixation on a creation of the heart? What is this story but that which I have carried in my DNA for so long that the record-keeping mutated and crippled me? My gown, a vestment of sacred vows or the garb of the dead? My body: a living corpse or a corpse living? There is no such thing as death or resurrection of the body. Our true body is Incorruptible Matter. This image is the Bridge.
Your images and your words beautifully direct my attention towards the capacity to feel limitless and free. You seem like a champion for all of us to feel free within ourselves. I’m grateful, and also find myself curious if there are any ways that this process of making art has been hard for you… or if there are ways that it hurts?
The visions come effortlessly. I see them in detail and then convey them to the best of my ability to the photographer. The physical logistics are at times slightly challenging, having a neuromuscular disease, however it presents an opportunity to design innovative poses. Due to severe scoliosis resulting from my condition, the most versatile positions are often while I am lying down. Immense patience on the part of my caregivers is required to position my body exactly as I describe to them, making adjustments to keep my spine comfortable at the same time. It is a great deal of physical work on their part, for which I am deeply grateful. Patience is one of Thomas’s tremendous virtues, which is invaluable considering I had a sudden and unexpected episode of exacerbated weakness and respiratory fatigue during his visit here, which put us in a time crunch. With his kind understanding and diligence, we were able to accomplish a bulk of the shoot in the hours just before his plane flight took off.
What do you want people to experience when they look at your work?
I would wish for viewers to experience rapture. Yet each viewer shall contribute to the Resurrection through their unique perspective. Some might feel uncomfortable,
conflicted; others curious or intrigued. Part of the alchemy in these images is to shatter limiting paradigms, to break down walls of confinement and open the sluice gates.
Jocelyn helps us see that surfaces only tell part of any one persons story. One encounter with Jocelyn, her modeling and her message will have you more likely to experience others (and yourself) with a sense of appreciation, and maybe even curiosity. You might find yourself contemplating the unseen depths of others, so that you instinctively begin to assume that each and every one of us is a true miracle.
Also be sure to see the rest of Jocelyn Woods Ecstasy of a Cripple portfolio right here at Model Society.
