PJ Harvey is an English singer and artist from the West Country.
Her characteristic style comes through in everything she does: in her lyrics, her music, her voice, in her sculptures, even in her hobby of jam and chutney making.
She has a truly unique style and she refuses to follow anyone else‘s. She doesn’t conform to any pre-established models: not even her own.
She is also very versatile, forever changing her own style both in fashion and in music. Although she writes a lot she prefers to start a fresh when collecting material for her albums rather than recycling previous prose as she feels her views often change.
And she doesn’t like to be defined by what she produces either. She resents the media for trying to constraint her into a set, fixed model of herself, based on the lyrics she writes.
She is deeply introspective person, who doesn’t reveal much of herself, and who can easily clam up on interviews if asked about her personal life, her believes and thoughts.
But she concedes that she is homely, she is the happiest around her family, and that one day she would like to have children too, if she finds the right partner.
She needs to make an impact in her environment, in order to make it her own. She sees her music and her sculpture as the means to re-shape her surroundings and to create a long lasting influence.
Her desire to influence and to create a deeply personable space extends also to gardening, and to the use of aromatherapy in order to recreate an environment where she can be comfortable and at home whilst on an recording studio or on tour.
PJ Harvey is extremely defensive when it comes to being associated with the lyrics she writes: she denies that they have anything to do with who she is, and yet she promotes them as a deep raw reality that she immerses herself and from which she resurfaces out of breath from the depths of her own subconscious bringing to the surface sinister and strange characters, deep emotions and confronting us with phantoms, and taboos that are part of the collective subconscious.
That’s why she provokes such strong feelings in some people. As she unleashes the worst and ugliest side of collective imaginary through her lyrics, bringing out a witches’ brew of sinister and tragic figures, and forcing us to confront our own shadows whether we like it or not.
PJ Harvey claims to sleep very little, about 4 hours a day, and to have very vivid dreams and she keeps a dreams journal.
Some of her quotes:
Dreams and Imagination:
“I have massive dreams, dream extravaganzas every night," announces Polly Jean Harvey. "It's very enjoyable. Sometimes they seem so real that I'm not really sure which is my real life. Is this my day life or my night life? I don't always know."
"I always think it's so sad that when we get older we tend to stop playing with our imagination like we do when we're young," she says. "When you're a child, you can make anything happen. You can make people happen, just conjure them out of thin air if you want someone to play with. I love dreaming because that's my child side just running rampant every night. It might be my subconscious trying to tell me something about myself or about other people. I think of the most incredulous things in my dreams and that's a very healthy thing to do if you're in a creative mode like I am. It's all part of keeping your imagination going."
Infancy and teenage years:
"I was more interested in working as hard as possible than in dating," she avers. "Other reasons were to do with where I lived, there really weren't that many people around. I looked like a boy until I was fourteen. I was a real tomboy. I was extremely shy. I still am. I thought of myself as very ugly and didn't have a lot of confidence at that kind of level. I didn't think anybody would want to date me. Having said that, I was extremely confident in other areas like the work I was doing because of the sheer amount of work I was putting into it."
Music, art and perfectionism:
"Music was a release," she recalls. "It was everything to me. It was both the physical and emotional side that I was lacking in other areas, and still is.
"Music is so much more moving, physically moving. I find that artwork involves too much intellectualising. I'd rather if it just affected me in a way that I don't really have control over than rationalising a painting or a piece of work. That's why I chose to do sculpture. It's more of a physical thing. It affects the space around you. It's a little bit closer to what music does."
"It's very confusing for me, this perfectionism of mine. Why is anybody like that? Why is anybody driven to choose a very hard way of expressing themselves? There are much easier ways. You're trying to make something that's perfect and that is impossible. You're trying to achieve the impossible the whole time which is not an easy way to go."
Sixth Sense:
"I physically hate recording studios," she states "When I get to the studio, I immediately have to try and make it better in terms of lighting and making different smells and filling it with personal bits and materials. Different aromatherapy smells and oils, candles. Turning the lighting down. Recording studios are so anonymous and have had so much music made in them, different music, which I don't want in there when I'm in there. Rooms and old houses, they carry a certain sort of vibration with them. It's the same in studios. The music that has been made in them during the last ten or twenty years is still around in there. You want to clear the room if you want to get it ready to make your music.”
Synesthesia:
Synesthesia is the cross of over of two or more senses, it is a fairly rare ability and it is thought to occur when there are more nervous connections than usual in person‘s brain. The most common expression of this is synesthetes to see sounds as colours. In PJ’s case there seems to be an association between smell and colours, and smells as sounds which is more rare.
"Very often when I'm writing a song, I'll start off with nothing but a picture in my head. Smells are also important to me. A smell will evoke a feeling which I want to create or a colour. It's very much based on visual things and on my senses, sensations. I carry a lot of stuff with me wherever I go. Photographs, pictures, personal objects that I like, and smells. I take my smells everywhere with me. They're really important to me."
Running out of time:
"I want to be happy and I want to feel that I'm using my time here as well as I possibly can. That means working hard and playing hard and loving hard. Doing everything I can to the full. I'm very conscious of not wasting time. There just seems like so little time and so many things I'd love to do with my time here. I might get run over tomorrow. I'm a very impatient person."
Her appearance:
"it's that combination of being quite elegant and funny and revolting, all at the same time, that appeals to me. I actually find wearing make-up like that, sort of smeared around, as extremely beautiful. Maybe that's just my twisted sense of beauty."
"that was kind of a mask. It was much more of a mask than I've ever had. I was very lost as a person, at that point. I had no sense of self left at all" about her image for the “To Bring You My Love” tour.
PJ Harvey Homeopathic remedy is Hyoscyamus Niger:
It is popularly known as Henbane, part of the Nightshade family, with narcotic and hallucinogenic properties, the active ingredients being atropine, hyoscyamine and scopolamine.
It combines muscle relaxant and anti-spasmodic properties, but it can produce both great excitement as well as profound relaxation and apathy.
It has been used as a “Truth Serum”, for “brainwashing”, sleeping draughts, and until more recently in sleeping pills, anti-allergy tablets, and in patches for motion sickness. It has also known to induce priaprism, and it has been used to treat passive forms of psychosis.
It has a long folkloric tradition, we known it was used in Neolithic rituals; the Vikings buried the seeds with their dead; it was associated with the rituals of passage between life and death in classic Greece, and old German tribes used to spike their beer giving it extra power.
During the Medieval period the plant was associated with witches rituals such as “intercourse with the devil“ when they used as an ointment to rub on their genitals.
It was also used in childbirth to inducing “twilight sleep” relieving the pain and inducing amnesia of the birthing experience, although the church strongly opposed to this claiming that women were supposed to suffer pain in order to give birth.
The homeopathic version of this drug, is used to treat insomnia, wild and vivid dreams and hallucinations, alternate states of rage and apathy, nervous tics, certain types of epilepsy, eye disturbances with by pupil dilation, sexual problems, and passive forms of psychosis.
Psychologically individuals who do well on Hyoscyamus have a jealous personality, have either extreme aversion to sex and to their own body if repressed, or in advance states of psychosis who have an excessive preoccupation with sex and a tendency to exposing their genitals, and even masturbate in public. They are suspicious people, who mistrust strangers, but require the constant company of their close circle of friends and family.
We can see that PJ Harvey lives in the psychological sphere of this remedy if just through her dreams and her creative process.
She has a clear awareness of the collective unconscious, and she can easily access parallel realities that she enters during sleep: light becomes darkness and fantastic creatures part ghosts part devils exist in a world of dreams.
Her comment about not knowing what is more real: her dreams or her awake phase is typical of Henbane’s induced “Twilight Sleep”. And so it is the feeling of wearing a mask, and that’s how Polly describes her transformational process when she worked on her “Love Is” tour.
The Hyoscyamus patient has a very pale face and dilated pupils and so has Harvey.
Some individuals can be extremely controlled censoring themselves and not allowing their subconscious to invade their daily lives. Being extremely sensitive to extra-sensorial energies around them that they can travel in between alternate and parallel realities, lose touch with their physical reality and blurring the line between madness and sanity.
Polly has found the right balance by allowing the controlled release of subconscious through her art rather than repressing these aspects of her psyche.
By the Undercover Homeopath
