FIFTH ISSUE: The Volcano Part 3

Introducing the character-image with whom I had my first verbal interaction. (WARNING: Potentially NSFW images) Also, an address to my readers.

Shadow of the Rainbow Savannah

My friend and brother
Folded up behind a rock
Like Psyche’s brush with suicide
Sorts through seeds and corn and teeth
The contents of a forager’s harvest
Smile welcome home
At a distance he shimmers like he’s coated in chromium

But a close up defines his gray goose flesh
Songlining, wayfinding, sandwalking traveler
Teach me your technology
Theseus by Ariadne’s thread
Jamaican braid from inside his head
Vanishes wide in lands of promise
Savanna may be pretty but she isn’t honest

I ask his name 
The Giant One
Do you go by others?
I’m desperate to remember
Where from I know his warmth
So I scan through every frequency
For whispers and words
Endlessly associated
Sentenced to oblivion

Impatient for the golden sphere
I compel which only manufactures doubts
How is it I can struggle while his smile stretches
What would you have me manifest
In that world I know, above us?
He screams a cipher,

“Find my bride.”
”Where do I start?”
But my question only echoes
While he penetrates the field
And pumps his seed into the delta
Feeds the Tree of Life
And we climb up into heavenly nest
Where carcass scraps rot from eagle meals
I fathom heights
He twists the stars 

Dearest friends,

I figure its the right time for another update.

I first want to thank everyone who’s taken time out of their day to engage with the site. It took a lot of push from loved ones, specifically my wife, Natasha, for me to overcome the fear of rejection. I am someone who can get very comfortable living as a critic and a cynic. I’ve learned to protect myself from pain by inhabiting these characters, making them the main parts of my persona. By maintaining a distance from life, with an attitude of smug superiority, I keep from having to be vulnerable. Meanwhile I still experience an urge to create. This combination of traits allows me to exist in fantasy, a state of mind that isn’t meant to be lived in for long periods of time. Fantasy indulged too long is delusion, a state I know all too well. The fear is that if I bring art out of fantasy, and into reality, where it can be criticized by others, it will no longer satisfy me to make it. “Then who will I be?” says the Ego. It’s an unhealthy relationship to art itself. That’s me turning art into an object, like a drug, to distract myself from the pain of being human.

What I’m learning to do now, by completing the creative cycle, sharing with others, is to treat art as a conscious process, and also as a gift. Whether or not I can every prove it empirically, the results in my life are the most fulfilling at the level of soul when I treat creative inspiration as if it comes from elsewhere. Inspiration then doesn’t belong to me, but rather is only mine to steward. I am thereby responsible to respect it, and ultimately pass it along to others. This keeps me from closing the loop independently of others, isolating myself, and losing touch with reality.

My hope is that by expressing these images and maybe even by the mere mention of dreaming, I’m able to inspire creativity in others. One of my fellow creators said recently that she thinks she’s begun to dream again simply because we’ve been talking about dreaming. I know that I began to pay more attention to my dream life after a few consecutive days of reading about dreaming. So, I think it’s entirely possible that these images could stir up, or draw others’ attention toward the imagination and the images of their individual, and in the collective unconscious.

In Issue Three: The Volcano - Part One, I included some background info about the origins of this project and what I found inspiring that led to sharing art. I want to expand on that some now.

At the basic level, it’s been very important, like lifesaving, for me to have some kind of relationship to an objective reality. I’ve spent most of my life with a desire to learn about spirituality and mysticism but with a sort of esoteric intention. What I mean is that I wanted there to be a dogma, or truth beyond explanation that was only available to those who were smart enough, or evolved enough to grasp and implement it. I didn’t know that’s what I wanted at the time, but when I drove my life into the ground by way of drug addiction and could no longer deny my own limitations, or numb the teachings of pain, my mind cleared and the only option I had was spiritual recovery. Part of that process was a rigorous self-examination during which I got to see the implications of my past behavior in relationships. As far as recovery goes, I’m very much still convalescing but I can recognize that I was not conscious of my patterns of behavior, nor was I conscious of how they affected my relationships, or even my environment. The fact that I wasn’t conscious, means that I was unconscious.

So Jung’s theory of a collective unconscious and his experiments bringing empiricism (consciousness) to the occult, dreams, art (unconsciousness), gave me new insights on what might have helped me finally change a way of life that had become unchangeable. Bringing light to the images of the unconscious, thereby rendering known what has lived only in darkness, and then manifesting those images through the creation of art, allows me to distance unhealthy and unwanted aspects of my personality. This is a wholesome process. It makes me whole, which allows me to participate in parts of life that fear has kept at arms length.

Trying to put this all into words is purely theoretical and doesn’t mean much without the actual daily practice of creating. God, for me, is a process. It’s the process by which what is dark (unknown) becomes light (known). It happens outside and inside my psyche, with and without my involvement. This is paradoxical, which is appro pro when talking about spirituality. Even as I write these words, I’m aware of doubt, skepticism, and confusion that these abstractions might trigger. So let me try to bring this down to earth for your sake and mine.

Whether or not I claim to believe in God is pragmatically arbitrary when you look at how I live. I am always in worship of something. Historically, I’ve been a worshipper of things that change the way I feel. Inherently there’s nothing morally wrong with this, but it left me at an impasse. I couldn’t see how to continue on living the way I was. I needed something permanent. The implication is that as a human being, read: mortal, the only permanence I can experience is in principle. Meaning it can only live in my imagination.

Every morning, I sit in a blue armchair on my south-facing front porch, close my eyes, set an intention by asking God (that of which I am not conscious) for the ability to set aside all expectations in order to experience a new set of images, images that will sustain me spiritually until I sit down again tomorrow, or take a break midday to get grounded. I think many people who consider themselves religious engage in this sort of practice. But I have learned that if I want to experience results in my life, I must turn the images I receive from the unconscious into three dimensional material. I have to make them matter.

So I usually pull out my phone to capture enough of them in words that I can later come back to work with/on them. My goal is to transmit my experience to the best detail I can, maintaining full acceptance that I’ll never be able to perfectly reproduce them. I started this practice using prose narrative because I felt an obligation to make linear sense of the images. I’ve found, however that poetry is far more efficient and allows the reader’s mind to connect the dots without the interference of my guesswork.

Then I use various containers to give limitations to creativity. Sequential images (Comics panels), Substack newsletter, etc.

The effect of this practice on my life is ephemeral but the best I can say is that I feel more like myself than I have since I was in middle childhood. This type of routine seems to bring the rest of life into balance. I can speculate that it is due to nurturing the concerns of the soul, but it really doesn’t matter why it works. It just does.

If you’ve read this far, I thank you and I hope you found it worthwhile. I have added some orange buttons for those who want to leave comments.

Until next week!

Sincerely

Damon Bailey

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