I had a nightmare...

[Roehampton] Sept. 18---At the Kensington Museum.---also of Michael Angelo’s paintings at the Vatican: the might, with which I was more deeply struck than ever before, though this was in the dark side of the courts and I could not see well…a masterly realism…: there is the simplifying and strong emphasizing of anatomy of Rubens….in Raphael…Velasquez, but here force came together from both sides---

   I had a nightmare that night.  I thought something or someone leapt onto me and held me quite fast: this I think woke me, so that after this I shall have had the use of reason.  This first start is, I think, a nervous collapse of the same sort when one is very tired and holding oneself at stress not to sleep yet/…..only on a greater scale and with a loss of muscular control reaching more or less deep; this one to the chest and not further…the seat of themós.  …It made me think of how the souls in hell would be imprisoned in their bodies as in prisons and of what St. Theresa wrote of the ‘the little press in the wall’ where she felt herself to be in her vision.  ~Hopkins, ‘Journal’, pp.218-219

St. Faustina and Sr. Marie of St. Peter both spoke of the same experience.

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There have been quite a few treatises I have studied on the 'inner' experiences of Hopkins, all of which have a particular flavor, slant and most of the time, bias.  The last post which aligned Hopkins with Lacan has been weighing on my thoughts.  Lacan himself had difficulty with Freud's 'drive'.  There is so much more to God's creation, man and woman,...created in His Image. Then, I remembered something I had read:

The Religious Affiliation of Luis Buñuel

Surrealism and Communism were also driving influences for Buñuel during much of his life; both movements functioned essentially as his religion at various times. Along with celebrated painter Salvador Dali, Buñuel the filmmaker was considered a leader of the Surrealist movement. Ironically, while Buñuel grew up as a devout Catholic and left Catholicism as a young man, Salvador Dali became a devout convert to Catholicism later in life.

From: John Baxter, Buñuel, Carroll & Graf Publishers: New York City (1994),…

Like Hopkins Buñuel had a penchant for asceticism.  He had been schooled by Spanish Jesuits…. “Physically and spiritually Buñuel lived always in exile, fleeing from a Spain and a Church which, nevertheless, as his films made obvious, lurked always at his shoulder.”

'Luis, it's curious,' [Serge]Silberman said. 'You were born in Zaragoza, you're Catholic; you were brought up by the Jesuits. Me, I was born on the border of Poland and Russia; I was brought up by lay Jews, and yet look at us; we understand one another.'

There is considerable material in Buñuel 's autobiography about his support of Communism, which he eventually rejected. Here is one excerpt, from My Last Sigh: The Autobiography of Luis Buñuel, page 166:

I remained sympathetic to the Communist party until the end of the 1950s, when I finally had to confront my revulsion. Fanaticism of any kind has always repelled me, and Marxism was no exception; it was like any other religion that claims to have found the truth. In the 1930s, for instance, Marxist doctrine permitted no mention of the unconscious mind or of the numerous and profound psychological forces in the individual. Everything could be explained, they said, by socioeconomic mechanisms, a notion that seemed perfectly derisory to me. A doctrine like that leaves out at least half of the human being.

I could say this of the poets Lorca and Campbell and Hopkins: 

…Born in the black aurora of disaster,
Can look a common soldier in the face:
I find a comrade where I sought a master :
For daily, while the stinking crocodiles
Glide from the mangroves on the swampy shore,
He shares my awning on the dhow, he smiles,
And tells me that he lived it all before.
Through fire and shipwreck, pestilence and loss,
Led by the ignis fatuus of duty
To a dog’s death — yet of his sorrows king —
He shouldered high his voluntary Cross,
Wrestled his hardships into forms of beauty,
And taught his gorgon destinies to sing. ~Roy Campbell, Luis de Camões