Carl Jung and St. Teresa of Avila

I'm working on a new text drawing taken from the writings of the Christian mystic St. Teresa of Avila. The book is called 'The Interior Castle', and it describes the seven mansions that are entered as one gets progressively closer to the Presence of God. I'm cutting the letters from 'Mysterium Coniunctionis' by Carl Jung, which many consider to be his master work. The book uses alchemy as a metaphor for the process of the arriving at the conjunction, or union of opposites, which is a necessary component in psychology and spirituality. Where there are opposites there is duality, separation, and conflict. When opposites can be held simultaneously and redefined as a paradox, there is the possibility of resolution and realignment. The 'mysterium coniunctionis', or 'mysterious conjunction', refers to this accomplishment. It's also referred to in Jungian psychology as the 'sacred wedding', when the male and female components of the individual align and fuse, or 'wed', and the person recognizes her/himself as a fully conscious and realized chimp.

Enlightened? Jung wouldn't go there. For him, enlightenment was all about the union of opposites: when opposing factions unite, there is a synthesis, and from that paradoxical unity springs forth Self-realization. He would have considered enlightenment as the end point of the individuation process, the fully realized Self, whereas mystics such as St. Terry used the metaphor of Christ and His Bride to describe the blissful state of having awakened to one's Self. Check it out:

God dissolved my mind – my separation.

I cannot describe my intimacy with Him.

How dependent is your body’s life on water and food and air?

I said to God, “I will always be unless you cease to be,”

And my Beloved replied, “And I would cease to be if you died.”

- St. Teresa of Avila

An advaitan! Who knew? She was pretty serious about this wedding stuff. She was hot for God all right - some of her writings get downright saucy. I'm having fun creating the text; I'm making the letters into a castle. Even has a little moat and drawbridge. And turrets, of course. I think St. Teresa wouldn't mind being associated with Jung, and had she lived four centuries later, she might have sought him out as her analyst. Clearly she had unresolved Father issues.

As for Jung, I suspect that he too would be okay with my pairing him up with Teresa. White western male authority figure teams up with white female submissive mystic - talk about a union of opposites. I'm sure they would've made a lovely couple.

Above: There's the old girl herself. Looks to be painted by a post-PreRaphaelite. I suspect that she wasn't this sexy, but it's anyone's guess.

Joy, Obsession, and Early Netherlandish Painting

I went to the Met yesterday with the intention of hunting down some joy and dragging it back to my loft. I figured if I, an artist and relentless appreciator of art and beauty, can't find a slice of joy at the Met, then I should throw in the towel on this art shtick and get my accounting degree. Thanks to good genes and superb health, I've probably got another four decades to roam the earth, and I figure if I can't be joyful, then I might as well learn a trade wherein I can make a little money.

Good news. I found it. Joy, that is, and not where you might think. I found it in the Early Netherlandish painters, of all places. Specifically in the breathtaking work of Gerard David. No kidding - go check him out. I've spent time looking at his paintings before, because I appreciate the obsessive quality of the work. His tireless attention to detail is mind-blowing. You can and will get completely lost in his fabrics. I mean, check out Gabriel's cape and wings in the painting above. It's astonishing. Every square inch of each painting is a visual delight. He absolutely loved painting textures, from interwoven gold threads to velvety, jewel-encrusted robes to bales of straw.

Now, before I go any further, let me clarify something. I can't honestly say that looking at these supremely beautiful works of art made my cup overflow with joy. Appreciation, yes, but joy? I'd have had to paint them myself to experience that, which is sort of the point. Mine was a vicarious kind of joy; I felt David's joy. In fact, I sort of entered his joy, ever briefly, as I imagined the ridiculous amount of fun he must have had in mixing colors, manipulating paint, and using his flawless technique to reproduce the sensuous textures. Total bliss. Almost as fun as cutting the letters out of holy books.

Someone was admiring the work alongside me, so we shared our mutual admiration of David's incredible mastery of the medium and his obsession with detail. Since we were equally enthralled with the work, I asked him if he thought the work expressed joy. Oh yes, absolutely! he said. Case closed. There's no way that a painter could do what he has done without fully immersing himself in the process and thereby losing himself in the act of painting. I speak with some authority here, since I'm a painter, and have had moments of experiencing this "loss" of self. Blissful indeed.

I then started thinking that maybe artists are uniquely situated to experience joy. See, I think that joy can only be accessed when we lose ourselves a little, and merge into something greater than our solitary little lives. As my friend Claude says, joy is a feeling of being connected to the oneness of all being. And as artists we have the perfect vehicle to transport us out of ourselves and enter into the flow of creativity. So I walked around the Met galleries looking for paintings that exhibited this "self-loss" due to absorption in the process. There were a lot of them. Naturally the paintings varied wildly, but the common thread was an apparent obsession with the medium: these artists simply loved to paint. And those paintings that, though technically sound, seemed flat and rote were, I suspect, painted by craftsmen who had inherited their talent, or were forced into the family trade, and performed their task as a means of income. Not much pleasure in it, and it shows.

But my big realization of the day, and the one that will keep me out of accounting school, is that joy showed up all over the place - in the work of the masters, the lesser artists, and the unknowns. Joy popped up wherever and whenever it so chose. And presumably buried in some out-of-the-way attic in the Netherlands, there are paintings that will never see the light of day, in which joy lives, breathes, and attests to itself.

Above: The Annunciation, 1506, oil on wood. Gerard David (c.1455 - 1523) was the leading painter in Bruges, where his paintings were popular, so he made a decent living as an artist. But after his death, his work was forgotten until the 1860s, when he was rediscovered.

Joy and Its Discontents

The subject of joy keeps coming up for me. In fact, I'm sort of getting it from every direction, in an upside-the-head kind of way. Not having had much contact with it myself, I'm hardly the one to dispense any wisdom on the subject. It's a mystery to me. I hear that there are those who can get all weepy and joyful when they see a flock of geese flapping south. I too can appreciate the beauty of it, but for me it's more of a visual thing. I'm more apt to watch their formation and feel bad for the goose that's bringing up the rear.

My friend Claude thinks that joy, as opposed to happiness or pleasure, is larger than we are; more expansive, more universal, and not bound by external circumstances. (I'm more or less quoting him here). Joy indicates an acceptance of what is, a thankfulness, and the feeling of being connected to the oneness of all being. Sounds good to me! Sign me up. If only it were so easy.

But before joy can be fully cultivated, or maybe even partially plowed, there has to be a rooting out of sadness. Ah, so there's the rub. Not only sadness, but anger, resentment, jealousy - all that fun stuff that clogs the pipes. So there's a lot of work that goes into this business of joy. Most of us are pretty entrenched in our issues, and unwilling, unable, or simply too dang busy to set about the nasty task of unclogging the pipes.

It's a wonder that anyone ever experiences joy.

But see, I have a theory. I think that the sadness, anger, resentment, jealousy, et al serve a purpose, albeit a slightly twisted one. (Hey, I'm an advaitan; I think everything serves a purpose). They bore into the bones, sinews, and eventually the soul, burrowing complex passages wherein they fester, so that these troubling emotional states become impossible to eliminate. The only solution is to transform them. Now, how you set about doing that is not the subject of this blog, and I'm not the gal for the topic. Go visit Rodney Stevens if you want to find out how to access joy. But my theory, currently being researched in overseas laboratories, is that all the deep recesses which now harbor pain can and will be transformed into pockets of irrepressible joy. In other words, the depth of your potential joy is determined by how deep your current pain has burrowed.

So if you're a miserable ol' sot who can barely scrape yourself out of bed in the morning, good news! You'll be stuffed with joy - a veritable sausage of bliss - while the rest of us blokes will have to settle for being upbeat and chipper. But it's no free ride, unless of course you choose to pop a pill. It's a shortcut, but a cheap substitute. And besides, it's cheating, and you'd be denying yourself the real deal. The work of accessing joy is essential; it's a process-oriented task, and ultimately a joy-full one. Like pulling weeds, I guess, although the metaphor is somewhat trite, since I haven't pulled a weed in twenty years. But I hear it's fun.

Okay, so I'm off to the Met today, hoping to hunt down a few slivers of joy. There's that Rembrandt portrait that always gets me in the gut. Is that joy? I dunno - I'll have to get back to you on that.

Stain

As I've mentioned elsewhere, I'm drawn to the metaphor of a stain. It's such a precise image: that of a mark so deeply entrenched that it is indelible, or, if you prefer, eternal. The soul is stained by circumstances beyond its control, most often determined by the conditions in which we were raised. So the stain that we carry through life is our permanent baggage, which sounds more fatalistic than I intend. It doesn't have to be a burden. It can be a gift. It's all in how we perceive it, and how we allow it to take shape in our lives.

The oyster makes a pearl by coating the irritant that slips into its shell. I see stains in a similar way: inherited scars that cannot be overcome, so they must be worked with and around. In so doing, they become an intrinsic part of the person.

But there's another kind of stain that we all share, whether or not we realize it. We're stained with the desire to return to the unity from which we emerged. We experience life as separation, which can be terribly painful, and which leads us down all kinds of erroneous paths. So this stain is a lovely stain, in a sense, because it keeps us hungry for something that cannot be sated by an earthly pleasure. I'm resisting the temptation to call it God, but I haven't an alternative. We're hungry for That. It's a divine stain, and it drives us inward to find the source of our hunger.

The above text drawing is from the Dhammapada, Chapter 18 ("Stains") written by the Buddha. I cut the letters from chapter 14 of the book of Job in the Old Testament of the Bible. Job is a little cranky about having lost his wife, kids, property, riches, reputation, influence, health, iPhone, virtually everything that he held dear. I'll quote him, to give you a taste of his misery:

"Let the day perish wherein I was born and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived. Let that day be darkness; let not God regard it from above, neither let the light shine upon it. Let darkness and the shadow of death stain it....." (Job 3:3)

Hey, Job - I hear ya. It's not easy being me, either.

So even though our stains can be excruciating, they carry within them the power, if approached maturely and consciously, to transform us into compassionate human beings. And if all else fails, it gives us something to whine about at the pub.

Above: Stain: The Dhammapada, Ch. 18 ("Stains") from the Old Testament of the Bible, the book of Job, Ch. 14. 2010.

Ziggurat of Text

Ever since my full time job ended a few weeks ago, I've had a lot of time to work in my studio. Which, btw, is now my kitchen table, due to complaints in the lumbar department. I guess it's time to invest in a good chair - one with back support. Either that or remove the spikes from the seat of my current one. I've been working on some smaller text drawings, which I can finish in a week or less. I love the size (approximately 11" x 14") because I can experiment and be playful and try out new ideas without committing myself to months of intensive labor. Even I like to have a bit of fun every now and again.

I've started piling up the letters and creating little towers of text. When I cut up my holy books, I form passages letter by letter, which twist and turn in serpentine lines around the paper. Thus far in my process, the entire passage that I'm transcribing has been legible, should anyone choose to read it. (To my knowledge no one has, not even I). But it will be impossible to read the entire passage from start to finish on my newest pieces, due to the fact that some of the text gets buried. It doesn't trouble me much that the passage can't be read, since my work was never intended to be didactic. I'm an artist, not a pedagogue or evangelist.

Now, I realize that the new "text piles" aren't going to send shock waves through the art world. No one has called me yet for an interview. And the two or three people who have seen them haven't needed the smelling salts that they were offered as they viewed the work. Nonetheless, I am enthralled and inextinguishable. I get all goofy just thinking about them: what I want to do with the next one, how I can create more depth with them, and so on.

Some people consider my labor intensive work to be the most intensely self-soaked activity imaginable. The work of the artist has no apparent benefit, thus it's seen as an indulgence of the artist and an extravagance of the affluent. But making art is what artists do, what we can do, and what we have to do. Art as an expression of pure creativity is the foundation of our society. Most people don't realize this. They assume that the standard of good living is affluence. But money in itself is worthless. No one really wants money - they want the things that money will buy them. Which are legion, pleasurable, and vacuous.

It's not wealth that gives our lives meaning, nor is it even the beautiful things that it can buy. Underneath the strata of cultural values there runs a currency that gives meaning to our existence, and that is the role of art, writing, music, and any pure creative expression. This artistic currency is the Fort Knox of our culture - any culture - from the time we huddled around the fire at the back of a dank cave. Without this gold standard, we would have nothing to work, live, or strive for. What about family, you ask? Isn't that a worthy standard? The continuation of the species for its own sake, without access to the wealth of creative expression that I'm talking about, creates more problems than we as a society can handle. While some contribute to society by procreating, others do so by simply creating. So yes, my art is a contribution of sorts, and if that seems pompous or indulgent, just be thankful that I didn't breed. Civilization will be that much more civil without my neurotic DNA tainting the gene pool.

Please don't read the above as a defense for what I do as an artist. I don't feel the need to justify my creative endeavors, any more than a banker needs to justify the (to me) absurd occupation of handling and making piles of money every day. For what purpose? So that it can be traded for cool and beautiful things? I'll leave you with the following question:

Given the choice, which would you prefer: to make enough money that you could buy beautiful artwork, or to have the ability, vision, and inclination to make it yourself?


Above: Union of Opposites: Song of Solomon, Chapter II (from the Bible), from Mysterium Coniunctionis by Carl Jung. 7.5" x 5".

This is an example of the "text towers" that I'm talking about. The square reads from the outside to the center, and it rises up slowly in steps, forming a ziggurat of type. The innermost square is piled up a good 1/4". It's a problem to get them to scan well, since the depth makes the background blurry. Haven't figured that part out yet.

Liberation from 2009

A new year. Bring it on. Last year I spent January 1st in an emergency room on 23rd and 7th with an epic bladder infection, as well as a host of other afflictions. It was like something out of the dark ages, including the cloud of locusts that followed me down Broadway to get my prescription filled. I should've realized then/there that it was going to be a rough year at the monastery. But I got a good feeling about 2010. I smell love, I taste redemption, and I hear rumors of peace, at least in my own heart.

Wish I could say the same about the world at large - it's scary out there. If the latest events in Afghanistan are any indication, we're heading into some deep do-do. Then there are the countless people at home who are severely affected by the tanked economy. My business is slow. A dear friend in California will likely get laid off from his job of 23 years, and his anxiety is off the charts. Many, many changes happening in the lives of people with whom I'm in regular contact. Stressful times, to say the least.

How is it possible, in times such as these, not to be completely self-absorbed? When the shifting sands keep you anxiety-ridden, and when you're not sure if a month from now you'll still be married, employed, or solvent, how do you remain calm and centered and grounded in non-being?

WARNING: This might be corny. Blogger is not responsible for any nausea incurred. See doctor immediately if there is prolonged dizziness and/or vomiting.

In my experience, the best way to take the focus off oneself is to help somebody out. It doesn't have to be a big deal; in this case, size doesn't matter. It really works. By doing a small act of kindness, you literally force the self-obsessed mind out of its ME rut and engage it elsewhere. A fundamental shift happens when you reach out, even in a small way, to a fellow chimp. Myopic thoughts cease, the veil lifts for a moment, and you get a whiff of liberation. It's only a short fix, though. And I forgot to mention that there's one rule: you're not allowed to think about how grand you were for whatever you just did. Nope, you have to skip the parade, forgo the acceptance speech, and release your good deed into the celestial spheres.

You'll immediately want another fix. It's selfish, in a way, but not a bad addiction, and there's never a shortage of opportunity. Humans need help. You need to stop focusing on yourself. It's a win-win. You'll start looking for ways to help someone. And the more you offer it, the less time your mind has to get cranked on itself. I guarantee results, or your money back.

So enjoy 2010, and may it bring you many opportunities to disengage your mind, help someone out, and experience the odd bout of liberation.

Vajravarahi Abhibhava Mandala, Central Tibet, 14th century