by Roman McClay
“And the artist, no matter how self-aware he is, is totally unaware of this right side the whole time. But the only way to access it is to say what is in your balls. If you speak purely from reason and polite bourgeois bullshit, if you create anything without putting your entire corpus -even the bad parts of you- into it regardless of what other fucking people will think, then it is the right hemisphere, the shamanic, the unconscious that will suffer; for it is this zone that holds your most dark and most beautiful parts. That is what will be left out of your art, your life artistry, if you refuse to show your malice too.
“But I suspect the audience and artist are not quite evolved enough to discern these new deeper meanings and metaphors of this type of artist; only the avant garde and the denizens of the future -say 50-100 years- will get the grander, unconscious point .
“This artist that I propose is more in general terms; he is a more robust and capacious human being. He is bigger; his life artistry is bigger and so it can contain self-conscious artistic semiotics and unconscious ones as well that inform and imbue human experiences, native human -evolutionary or Darwinian- modes of being with a larger, more complete, more nuanced, more chiaroscuro tableau . Look, right up and down the scale from big to little, from cosmic to atomistic, from cultural to individual, he creates; and it doesn’t mean the artist is merely engaging in propaganda because the face-value of the art is self-aware.
“The great artist can be engaged in the doing of both; he can story tell, he can be self-aware of the meaning and yet be totally unaware of an even deeper meaning that the species hasn’t yet caught up to and therefore misses. His subconscious can be too far ahead. His future may be the only place his metaphors -his darkest beauty- make sense.
“This larger, unconscious, purely artistic or purely mythological element rises up off the self-conscious part of the story -the part that some think isn’t very good story telling because it’s self-consciously moralizing- right? It rises up off that part that is recognized as moralizing and this part has an unconscious part that neither artist nor audience can yet discern; and it -like the atmosphere- goes unnoticed; it’s just the air we future beings breathe. Anaerobic beings had no idea the atmosphere was changing for the benefit of beings not yet born.
“But, there it is the entire time; it is this beautifully rendered and confused and ethereal and dreamlike collection of qualia that is out of control, out of the hands of the artist, and as of yet too opaque and abstruse for even a sagacious audience; an audience made up of sharp people who miss it completely because it is too oriented for whatever natural atmosphere future men will breathe. The prow of the ship always takes the most wind resistance, the tip of the spear the most blood and guts and is dented most against the bone.
“As does the artist. And look, the artist misses the meaning often too; the artist himself would deny there is another layer of storytelling and metaphor and semiotics and proto-language describing a newly discovered human-animal mode of being. He’d say, no, I knew what I was doing all along! But that is wrong. For the third layer is invisible as of yet.
“But, there it is waiting to be discovered; there it is, something more. Just as the earlier myths began as grunting stories, then they transmitted semiotics, then they began to create more complex -recursive- language, then religion came, and then law and self-aware humans which probably only happened 12,000 years ago. The self-aware part came later -via the collapsing of the bicameral mind via the fusing of the corpus callosum- according to Jaynes this only happened 10-12,000 years ago.
“So, it took hundreds of thousands of years of hand-puppet goddamn storytelling, then inchoate language, then more complex poems and religion to finally get -to produce- the numina, the spirit, the noble gas that self-awareness or consciousness needed to breathe. And so, it’s taken millennia of self-awareness being used in art -despite the propagandistic nature of it according to some- to create a new level of mode of human conduct, a new strata to the culture and a new way of being authentically artistic that allows for self-awareness.
“In other words, we allow religion into art without balking, without getting all upset at its propagandistic nature, even though religion was the new brain state, right? Before consciousness man was religious. In the long line of human brain states, over millennia, articulated religion was the new news before we lost the voices. It was as rational and high-tech as you can get man. We used to be propitiating apes, man. We came from instincts and mimicked behavior, from hearing voices, man. Religion was an improvement; it was like the bill of rights compared to the schizophrenic shit that came before. Hitchens said religion was our first attempt at philosophy and science. He was right and wrong.
“It was not our first attempt, it was the version 4.0, the one right before reason which is v.5.0. And it was the best we could do as the voices receded and the old ways didn’t work. And religion was used in art, consciously, self-consciously and it was not propaganda, because it was still only half conscious. It still had half of itself unknown to the artist and public alike. And this was only because they put their all into it; they didn’t hedge or worry or hold back. They just drew Mary or Jesus or God on the wall as those icons came to them in their visions.
“Man -like ape, like wolf- began with modes of being, then proto-language, then semiotics, then mores or religion, then self-awareness; so it stands to reason that there is a next level after self-awareness, we do not stop here, where we are now. No way. There is a heightened self-awareness let’s say, a post-consciousness that is next, and in order to get there, we must allow for art -for the artist- to use -to consciously use- metaphor. For the hidden part, the deeper part, the part inline with the gods is still there, and it is only us that is unaware of it now, for we have not the lungs to breathe this new noble gas, this new type of spirit that our future selves will no doubt breathe in from what we now exhale. But that spirit is there, accumulating in the air. We cannot breathe it yet, but it is there.
“It’s no different or no more propagandistic than the way the conscious use of religion before the modern era or the conscious use of language before that, or the conscious use of semiotics in the cave paintings of Lascaux before that were all used in genuine art and not propaganda.
“And this is because they had this next level in them that the artist wasn’t yet aware of, the audience wasn’t aware of, and only later, when the beneficiaries of that art had matured and evolved could they look back on them and say, oh see, the symbol of the bear meant an unknown nature that man was discerning he was separate from, or the use of words like belly, in Beowulf meant proto-consciousness, the symbolic mind, of that which man was dimly aware, but suspicious of maybe, was emerging in him. Or, they would say, the use of language like sacrifice in Cain and Abel was putting into language the notion of the future rewards for loss now, and thus moving the abstraction of time into a reified and concrete notion in man’s head,” Blax said this as he paced and the light of the emerging morning grew bright but diffuse enough to light under their eyes and protuberations not merely above them as the sun often does.
“And the use of religion, the inclusion of religious people like Jesus or God or religious precepts in art like Michelangelo’s frescos at the Sistine Chapel were introducing not just propaganda -that is to say not just conscious moralizing- but also story telling at a higher level. He -and others- were obsessively reifying the idea of man being able to reach the gods or the god-like.
“See, the emergence of a more self-aware, and empowered, man and artist, with this relatively new and young mental phenomenon of self-awareness in men like Michelangelo was still opaque to them and so the religious symbolism was self-consciously moralistic, and instructive and useful, but there was also, unbeknownst to the artist or the audience of the time, a deeper symbolism and thus story in that mise-en-scène : man was becoming self-aware on the ceiling of that chapel, and he was breaking through the seal of the priesthood, right?
“The chapel’s dome was
used by Michelangelo , I submit unconsciously, as mere story, life story, life artistry. He was telling his own story as he told Creation’s .
“Think about it, he -and his type of artist- was consciously using religious imagery or religion or law, in marked departure from artists before him who only used simple language, and before them only symbols and before that incipient internal paradigms of being like dance, and his use of law slash religion consciously in art would have seemed like overt propaganda to the quote more nuanced or mere storytellers of previous epochs and yet the subtleties of the placement of the famous image on the ceiling is bursting with storytelling and unconscious symbolism and instruction that man is getting ready to hit the ceiling of what religion, mere religion can contain.
“He is dramatizing that a new set of codes is about to be required to handle the complexification that man is both creator of and victim to; Michelangelo was pre-figuring a post-religious society where man was going to not only reach God as the conscious symbolism showed, but was at that time rising to the heavenly vault, and was ascending beyond it; man was going to surpass God and religion, he was going to leave the envelope of the vault itself and was going to meet, touch and then fly away from God.
“And Michelangelo was capturing the moment of contact but the thing that he wasn’t aware of was that he was predicting the loss of God too and that is the part that modern audiences get at the subconscious, story-telling level which is why the Sistine Chapel is still considered great art and not mere religious propaganda which it might have been if one was merely using some flat theory of propaganda in the 15th century.
“If modern art critics were around then they would have said Michelangelo knew what he was doing and was too overtly using God and religious symbolism to moralize. They wouldn’t have seen the unconscious part. They too would have missed it; just as the artist himself did. Because if transported back then with no notion of what was to come, they would have been blind to the loss of God he was unconsciously predicting. Nobody in that epoch would think secularism would take hold in man. But it did. And Michelangelo -subconsciously- predicted it.
“And there is art today that seems moralizing and self-conscious and overt but it has as atmosphere above it, created by it, a mythological, symbolic, ineffable, pre-linguistic element that people will just feel and not know it; and the artist himself won’t know it either; but in 100 years the modern people who came after -but because of, due to, that tableau in which that art was part and parcel of- in later years people will get the symbolism and say, oh, look here’s the unconscious part; everyone thought he was moralizing about X but really he was prefiguring Y. He was predicting our new world and now that that world is here, we can see it, we can see what he only felt, hinted at, unconsciously, in his balls. Savvy?” Blax stopped and looked at each Jack and tried to discern if they go this main point.
“Herman Melville is the example from the 19th century of this,” Jack Three said into the void of Blax’s staring and silence, he had read the book twice more after it had been assigned by Tania three years ago, and he had found it hypnotizing and arousing all at once. Jack thought of it idiopathically, unprompted, unsearched for; it rose, it breached, it rammed his ship as often as any art ever had. He felt it rise in him now and he wanted to belch out all that sea water in him.
“I mean, he was consciously using religious symbolism and consciously using political and legal language to moralize, and he was even using subterfuge by using sarcasm vis-à-vis religion, but there was something evaporating off his roiling sea and the soundings and spoutings of the whale, the effluvium of God, the symbolic God, to create -I think unconsciously- a world in which man wouldn’t die. I think that death -death as a thing- was his hobbyhorse, and death was the great injustice that he blamed God for,” Jack said and paused to see if maybe he ought stop; the other Jacks often rolled their eyes at his ideas he thought. But Blax tilted his head and encouraged him -with his silence- to go on.
“But, I think he was intuiting that death was about to become a luxury, an option, that the man he was prefiguring -unawares- was Ishmael: the survivor of total death . The immortal man.
“See, with the death of everyone on the whale boats and the Pequod and his own other selves- Queequeg , his atavistic, noble, savage self; Ahab his individualistic, proud, secular or rebellious self; Fedallah the mystic barbarism of self, all of who died- well with that total death, he yet, well, he survived. Who was he ?
“Who was Ishmael? He was the self-aware self. I think the self-aware self,” Jack said as they all remained quiet which made him press on.
“Melville unbeknownst to him, to himself, was creating in the storytelling, the symbolism, the unarticulated conceit that all of the world that would be left to natural man -as modern society encroached on every part of the world- was this brain in a vat, the self-aware, consciousness only. He was implying symbolically, unconsciously that the savage and noble body and the rebellious soul of Queequeg and dismasted but proud Ahab , and the ineffable artist & mystic of Fedallah was being extirpated from modern life,” Jack twisted his mouth just slightly to denote a humility in his theory; that he was slightly unconfident in how this analysis would be received by his peers and this great man of his future; what he had begun to think was somehow his future self.
Blax up-righted his head and felt this wave, then shoal, of new ground, being built shakily beneath him like a sand bar out in the ocean and off the coast of his already large land mass of country. He felt the desire to test it out, to tentatively step out onto the beach of this island built by his subaltern, his younger -possible- alternative to himself.
He felt some alignment to his new beginning vector -a possible past now seen- and he felt his eyes hot and wet as a clear and saline and breaching line of water spilled over his left eye and an unseen stream rivulet ran down his slightly ruddy check and into the grey foothills of his mountainous black beard further down, and then disappeared into that ecosystem of tenebrous, igneous, heaving, ascending noir-terroir .
“The Author -via mere story telling at this point you’re saying- was foreshadowing the loss of savage man and noble man and man capable of living in mystery or freedom?” Blax asked as his voice was slightly staccato as the emotion seemed to pull on his neck and throat like a leash held in the hand of the limbic system.
The other Jacks had not noticed the wet eyes or the one drop fall from that high left eye into that craggy rocky range of beard, but they did notice this quake in his voice; the sound of some plate tectonic in his capacious breast plate and they all conspired to look away -not with their eyes but- with their minds. They wouldn’t fault him yet, and they wouldn’t let it connect -that rumble and release- to their own locked plates; they’d keep their own tension of buried continental shelf of selves separate from his vibration now. Like the group delusion undone, it was the thing conspired to go unnoticed.
“Yeah,” Jack Three said as his voice vibrated a bit, a nearly imperceptible aftershock to his Lt’s barely registered quake. “I think he could feel it, and only now are audiences even able to discern it in the text; you know due to radical life extension now; and the way everyone is so civilized now over all other values; maybe 10 or 12 guys in the world would get that .
“I mean even his overt but cloudy symbolism of his anger with God is barely discerned -even- today, so his next level and unconscious symbolism of the death of death, the death of wildness, the death of natural man will not be able or likely to be articulated for a while.
“It will remain buried and it’s why Moby Dick is a timeless piece of art. It is subconsciously -and therefore more powerfully- reaching into man’s fear of the new horizon, but that fear can only be articulated from a position on the leading edge of the last generation’s terre incognita .
“Melville had to go to the antipodes , right LT, that’s what you call them?” Jack Three made sure as the word felt strange in his mouth, he liked for Blax to hold his hand a bit when trying out
words the man had taught him so recently. Blax nodded approvingly and so Jack went on.
“He went to the edge of the known moral universe, with his conscious propagandistic or language-filled mind in order to reach with his unconscious and blind and barbaric hand into the dark of the zone beyond the event horizon. He stuck his heart into the dark where his mind pointed, had pointed the way. He used his modern ship, to carry -smuggle- ancient Fedallah in the hold. And mankind followed.
“Whether they know it or not; and maybe we’re the only ones who know that’s what he was saying, or can feel that’s what he was feeling; and our art, our life artistry will reflect that conscious knowledge and it will be our dark hearts that exist in an even further out horizon that become articulate and known consciously to the next generation. But it remains opaque to us as we are still just now describing the unconscious story of a 19th century whaler and sailor,” Jack Three furrowed his brow and pursed his lips and then looked to either side of him at his comrades; searching for any sign of concurrence or contretemps .
“I hadn’t thought of any of that; but it rings so true in my head and heart and balls that I can’t help but be placed in a state of limbo right now; it demands more of me. Of all of us. I feel a strange mixture of reverence for you and chagrin for -or in- myself because you are me; and thus, technically, I must have been capable of getting that or you wouldn’t have got it. But I failed to see it; so I feel ashamed.
“I feel both; an admixture of pride and chagrin; and awe,” Blax said and righted himself, for he felt he was showing too much emotion too soon. He walked the line again; and then spoke loudly.
“Self-esteem isn’t at all what people think. We alphas are insecure; congenitally insecure. It’s built into the genome. No chimp is more insecure than the alpha chimp. Read your Franz de Waal. Our confidence isn’t located where homme moyen’s is. We are dubious of the way other’s see us; of our value in the world’s eyes. We are jealous and insecure when it comes to others. This is where we diverge from the ersatz confidence of others; they feel quite at home with others and that people like them and they are likable. However, they lack confidence where we have it.