On Being An Artist

In the story of King Kong a massive door separates the islanders from Kong. Kong lives in a world of natural forces and represents the primitive powers within.

Imagine that universe is your unconscious.

In this world of inchoate and symbolic energies, there are no words, there are no names, only unimaginably powerful primal energies. They are subtle and deadly. Any of these energies may strike suddenly or attack slowly and persistently.

A true artist is the explorer and sometimes hunter of these creatures and worlds of the unconscious. It is more than frightening, because it is The Unknown. And because it is unknown, it is the most terrifying of all universes and worlds: the self and beyond.

No one who enters this world returns the same. Some do not return at all. It takes an unusual courage and distinctive stamina to travel into the unknown and return with an artifact to share. To hunt in the unconscious and bring something back alive requires a strong heart; a flexible and quick mind; and a score of lateral intelligences specifically able to deal efficiently and effectively with scary shit.

And when one returns from such an adventure, the contemporary world of conformity and social mores seems, in comparison: bland, gray, boring, silly, supercilious, false and arrogant. When one has fought ogres, barely escaped the whirlpool of despair, seen the Light-web of Unity and drunk the sweet water from the Fountain of Life, the world of so-called “normalcy” seems more than strange- it feels absurdly shallow.

Thus when you meet a true artist, their way of speaking or thinking seems odd and out of place. Perhaps their thought process is incomprehensible or jumps in non sequiturs. This is because that is the breed of person that is needed and survives in the arcane jungle of the unconscious. One does not return from the unknown if one cannot adapt.

The great door that separates the islanders from the primal world is the gateway between the conscious and unconscious. Without that door the unconscious would spill into the conscious world and we would have to come to grips with giant apes climbing skyscrapers, which is unpleasant.

The artist is the interpreter and presenter of what has been discovered in the world beyond the conscious. The artist does their best to present this discovery as clearly with craft and clarity for you. The artist makes it as safe as possible for you to see beyond the artifact back to its origin, which, you soon discover, is within your own self.

The true artist cannot be placed within psychological profiles, unless the test maker actually travels to the frightening universe of the unconscious and returns to talk about it. A psychologist will then know it is not quantifiable.

The world and population of the unconscious does not support statistics. The artist lives and survives outside of the quantifiable because that is the only way to endure in The Unknown.