What the hand knows: Über Trance, Zeichnen und die Kunst des Überschreitens

There is a drawing by Horst Janssen — Die alte Siemers, 1962 — in which a face seems to arrive and then dissolve in the same moment. The lines do not outline; they accumulate. They flicker. You look for the portrait and find instead a vibrating web, a nervous surface that keeps collapsing back into itself. It is as if the hand refused to fix what the eye perceived — as if the drawing enacted a condition of in-between rather than a moment of capture. 

I have been thinking about this image for weeks now, alongside a question that does not resolve easily: what does it mean to think through the hand? And what does the hand know that the mind, in its ordinary waking state, can actually not?

The word trance comes from the Latin transire — to cross over, to pass beyond. A threshold word. It designates what happens when ordinary waking consciousness — that self-monitoring, self-narrating apparatus — temporarily recedes, and something else takes its place. Not irrationality. Not absence. Something more like intensified presence: a state in which perception, action, and thought collapse into one another, and the boundaries of the self become permeable.

This is, neurologically speaking, what happens when the so-called Default Mode Network — the neural system responsible for self-referential thinking, for the constant murmur of inner narration — powers down. The French composer and researcher Corine Sombrun, who spent fifteen years learning Mongolian-shamanic trance and studying it in collaboration with neuroscientists, describes what she calls an inner technology of the body: the capacity, which she argues is latent in every human being, to induce such states without chemical assistance. During trance, she reports, time recedes, pain recedes, the senses sharpen, and the self undergoes transformation. 

What strikes me in Sombrun's account is the phrase inner technology. It resists the exoticization that usually accompanies talk of trance — the shamanic drum, the substance, the faraway ritual. It insists on something structural, something trainable, something already present in the body, waiting for the right conditions.

Janssen's drawing, I want to argue, creates those conditions on paper.

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I came to the connection between trance and artistic practice through a different route — through film, and through Maya Deren.

Deren is a figure who appears at several of the crossings I seem to keep encountering: between ethnography and art, between the body and the camera, between documentation and enactment. In the 1940s, she made experimental films — Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), At Land (1944), Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946) — that were concerned, above all, with the perception of time and the permeable boundary of the self. They do not tell stories; they perform states. A woman walks through a landscape that keeps folding back on itself. The cut is not narrative; it is psychological.

In 1947, Deren traveled to Haiti on a Guggenheim Fellowship. She studied Vodou over several years, participated in ceremonies, filmed rituals, and reflected theoretically on the relationship between art, the body, and ecstasy. Her planned film on Haitian trance — Divine Horsemen — was published only posthumously, in 1985. She did not finish it. Perhaps because the thing she was filming refused to be finished, refused to be fixed.

Deren understood trance not as an exotic religious phenomenon but as an aesthetic practice: a threshold between movement, spiritual permeability, and cinematic form. The body, in her thinking, is a medium for an energy that both exceeds and permeates the individual. The loa — the Vodou spirits — do not inhabit the believer from outside; they arise from within, through the rhythm of the drum, the movement of the dance, the repetition that takes the self out of itself. The body becomes a cheval, a horse. The rider is not quite oneself, and not quite other.

This is, I think, structurally cognate with what happens when Janssen draws. Not because Janssen is invoking spirits — but because the mechanism of surrender is similar: the relinquishing of the planning, narrating, self-monitoring mind, and the allowing of another kind of intelligence to move the hand.

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The surrealists had their own version of this. André Masson drew with his eyes closed, attempting to silence the mind through literal blindness — not metaphorical darkness but the real deprivation of the visual as regulator. Joan Miró and Roberto Matta developed practices of automatic mark-making in which the line was understood as the trace of the unconscious rather than the inscription of conscious intention. Their aim: to get the critical, reflective apparatus out of the way, and to discover what the body already knew.

Earlier were Hilma af Klint and Emma Kunz — artists whose spiritual drawing methods treated the hand not as a tool of will but as a channel. Kunz drew in meditative states with a pendulum that functioned, she believed, as a translator of invisible forces. The geometry she produced is uncanny: enormous sheets of paper covered in colored webs, spiraling structures, grids that seem to pulse. The question of whether the pendulum works — whether it accesses something real or is merely a device for inducing the right internal state — may be less important than the recognition that the device is necessary. Something has to trick the mind into stepping back.

Cy Twombly called it letting the hand think. This formulation interests me because of its grammatical peculiarity: not thinking with the hand, which would place the mind still in charge, but letting the hand think, which is a gesture of abdication. The artist as the one who gets out of the way.

And what remains when the artist gets out of the way? The line. The trace. The evidence of a body that was present, moving, in a state of heightened absorption — what psychologists call flow, what artists call trance, what neuroscientists describe as a temporary deactivation of self-referential processing. These are not the same thing, and I do not want to flatten the differences. But they share a structure: the temporary dissolution of the boundary between the one who makes and the thing being made.

In Art Brut — in Augustin Lesage, in Adolf Wölfli — trance-drawing becomes something still more extreme. These are artists who did not experience themselves as creators at all, but as instruments. Lesage, a coalminer who began drawing in his forties after voices told him to, produced enormous, meticulous canvases covered in symmetrical, jewel-like structures. He could not have planned them; they accumulated, session by session, under a direction he attributed to the spirit world. Wölfli, from his room in the Waldau psychiatric clinic in Bern, produced thousands of pages of densely interwoven drawing and text, described by Jean Dubuffet as one of the most extraordinary works of art he had ever encountered. The obsessive repetition, the refusal of the white margin, the structures that recall both mandala and musical score — these are characteristics not of a planning mind but of a mind that has found its rhythm and will not stop.

Sombrun's research suggests that what Lesage and Wölfli experienced as external direction may have been something neurologically specific: the DMN offline, the censoring self absent, and the hand following a logic that belongs to deeper or other layers of processing. This does not reduce the experience. It locates it.

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Janssen's drawings arise from what he himself described as states of intense absorption: obsessive, serial, driven. His portraits and self-portraits in particular — those nervous accretions of line, those faces that keep dissolving and reconstituting — carry a quality that I can only call psychic density. They are not representations of a person but topographies of an encounter: between the hand and the surface, between the conscious mind and whatever moves beneath it.

Die alte Siemers is this encounter made visible. The face is there and not there. The lines search, tangle, overlap. They do not arrive at a definitive outline because the process they enact — the process of seeing, remembering, inscribing — is never definitively complete. The drawing is a record of a state, not a record of a face. A Stimmungsbild in the most precise sense: a mood-image, an image of inner weather.

Deren wanted to do something similar with film — to place the medium itself in a state of trance, to transform the cut and the frame into a rhythmic organism that makes experience palpable rather than legible. She did not quite succeed, or perhaps she succeeded in ways she could not recognize. Divine Horsemen was finished only after her death, from the footage she left behind. The film exists as an assemblage of materials that outlived the intention that produced them — which is itself a kind of trance logic, a logic in which what is made exceeds what is planned.

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I keep returning to the question of what the hand knows. Not in a mystical sense — or not only in a mystical sense — but in the sense that Sombrun means when she speaks of inner technology: an intelligence that is distributed through the body, that processes in parallel with the narrating mind, that sometimes knows before the mind does.

Rancière writes about the partage du sensible — the distribution of the sensible, the division of what can be seen, heard, said, felt, within a given order of experience. What drawing in a trance-adjacent state might do is temporarily reorganize this distribution: making the hand more sensitive, the eye less controlling, the mark more responsive to what is actually there rather than to what the mind expected to find. A redistribution of perception.

Whether this is what happens when Janssen draws, I cannot know. But the drawings propose it. They are, in the fullest sense, evidence of a practice — not of representation, but of encounter. Each line a flicker. Each session a crossing.

What would it mean to look at drawing this way — not as the record of what was seen, but as the trace of a particular state of being in the world? And what would it mean to practice drawing as Sombrun practices trance: as a trainable, bodily technology for reaching a different quality of attention?

These are questions I am still inside. The paper remains vibrating.