I Want My Art to Address 

the Mysteries of the Soul

I want my art to address the mysteries of the soul. When I say “my” art, I mean the art I resonate with, the cinema I watch, the books I read, the paintings I’m drawn to, the poetry I read and/or write. By “mystery” I’m referring to those things which are often demoted or promoted to the category of fantasy. The ghosts, the dreams, the poems, the simple acknowledgement of the meta-physicalities representing the greater scheme of life itself; the things we live on top of and take no notice or give much thought to until they act up and act out in a primal bid for our attention. Building our lives (houses and malls and highways) on the burial ground of ancient ways that occasionally bubble up through the cracks of “civilization” in sympathy ( and synchronicity) with the Gods. Psychologist James  Hillman reminds us that “soul enters only via symptoms, via outcast phenomena like the imagination of artists or alchemy or “primitives,” or of course, disguised as psychopathology.” That’s what Jung meant when he said the Gods have become diseases: the only way back for them in a Christian world is via the outcast.

I want an art that causes the invisible to overthrow my lazy reliance on the seen. I want insight! Eyes are not the only organs capable of seeing truth. The heart sees, the hands see, the nose sees, even the mind when toppled from its egoic throne is capable of seeing things it could not have foreseen. 

In our time we are living with an existential threat on a daily basis. Great swaths of the world are being infected by a global pandemic whose organic blueprint breeds without discrimination. Yes, some of us are more vulnerable than others. But the ones less vulnerable are being coopted as carriers (terrorists with a virus strapped to their breasts). The breath, which has long stood for the basis of life itself has been turned into the deliverer of disease and death. We live in a moment where the simple epithet “I can’t breathe” has taken on a plethora of meanings. None of them good. And I am encouraged to reach figuratively for higher ground. 

I offer that now is the time to ponder our human parameters in a new light. In other words, our chronic time-worn boundaries that may be keeping the once unthinkable, from becoming possible. If we were to know how much time we have, or the width of the island we find ourselves roaming, or the breadth of the dream we are invested in as if our bodies ended where the rest of the world began; would this not assist us in navigating our lives? I am not referring to any mundane measure of time but rather to a multi-dimensionality that we have hitherto excluded as being an invariable part of ourselves. Consider for a moment this maxim attributed to Plato: Do thy job and know thyself. I interpret this to mean that if we were to do our job we would surely see that our first priority is to know who we are and what is proper for us. Therefore it would be prudent for the knower of oneself to no longer take extraneous business for one’s own, but loving and cultivating oneself before anything else, refusing superfluous occupations and useless thoughts and projects. True folly would derive from getting what one wanted, yet never thinking one has obtained enough; so wisdom tells us we ought be always content with the present and never displeased with what is. This is not so much about closing doors, but about knowing a door when you see one. 

Where does my body end

and the world begin?

How is an island like a lifetime?

What vessel holds me

as if I were a flower?

Why is no souvenir 

of a dream possible?

If I hold a stone in my palm

all night, will I have

taken it with me? If so,

where will we have traveled?

What if my guardian angel

occupies the same space

as I do?

How shall I differentiate us?

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