The Blessed Connector
There is risk involved whenever we immerse ourselves in the creative process, since what we are likely to find—if we stay with it long enough—is ourselves. What we discover probably borders somewhere on the rapturous and the hazardous. Yet in spite of it all, there is a way to create ourselves whole; there is a way to come out the other end of the process intact.
In general, the more we immerse ourselves in a craft and remain connected there, the more we develop finer capacities for arriving at the complexity and detail regarding our subject matter. The self that we discover becomes more specific in regard to its references and associations and, as a result, becomes more potentially isolating as well.
The image of the tree might best illustrate the hazard. If the widest portion of the tree—that being the trunk—represents the majority number of people and the most widely accepted form of meaning and understanding commonly held, then with every slight growth in the complexity of your ideas are you pulled farther away from the trunk and onto limbs thinner and smaller in girth until you arrive at the outermost reaches, the most attenuate bifurcations, and perhaps the one branch that is so singularly different and apart from those around it that its meager girth can only be explained by the fact that you are the only one left, the only one out there on that branch, for, indeed, it has become your branch. That branch represents the singular idea that has emerged as a function of your essential uniqueness, that individual humanity your self announces.
Where you end up eventually is at a level—or, by then, a point—of detail so singularly essential and authentic that scarcely any form other than its own can exist there. However, at such a moment as the one when you discover your individual self, you also begin to sense your distance from the girth offered at the tree’s trunk. Having soared into evanescence where the air is thinnest—the branch at your feet no more than a gossamer—that most narrow strip causes quite an uneasy feeling in the pit of your stomach and in your head, a feeling perhaps of peril. Fear starts to whelm at the realization that, not only are you profoundly alone, but that your lovely branch is about to snap and hurl you over the edge into the madness that, in actual terms, is your own mind.
Or, put another way, consider the depth of say, an ocean sea. While having evolved the detail of your concepts until you reach the most profound leagues of meaning, feelings of joy are tempered somewhat by a sense that the weighted majesty of all the water above is about to crush in on you for real, you who now finds himself at a dangerous distance from the ocean’s surface where the fine air is. You now wade in increasingly grave waters, overwhelmed by the ocean's heft, make no mention of the sheer vastness of the sea itself. And the mortal density and pressure of the water ever-increasing above your head causes in you a shudder.
In cases of both the tree and the sea, the hazards are clear. Death by falling is almost as certain as death by drowning.
The prize in all of this, however, is your soul. To be an artist, is, indeed, a desperate condition, because it threatens to hurl you into the madness that is multiplicity—a multiplicity of which you are an isolated part and which alienates you from others. Once an artist has undergone the analytical task of perceiving all the other forms of authenticity swirling around her in the form of information that might possibly become her building material, it nearly becomes a matter of life and death that she works synthetically to reconstitute the detail into a unified form that reconnects her to something necessarily larger. To remain in multiplicity is to endure alienation, which one can only do for so long without attempting to reclaim one's base, without attempting a resurfacing, the self necessarily seeking merger for it to become whole.
For the sake of your own survival as a creative being—an existence which may or may not require your role as an actual artist—you must use some form of synthesis as a way of returning to the wide girth of a trunk that will support you, a way of re-emerging at the ocean’s surface to breathe an air that will sustain you. At both of these locations—the trunk and the surface—are where you will find the glory and the grief of a mass: a mass that will stabilize you on one hand, and for whose superficiality might frustrate you on the other. Still, no person is truly alone, but rather the very self that you deem authentic and as essentially unique could only have existed because of and through others and makes you no less accountable to the community that is your source.
I have always stated that language acquisition fosters deeper understanding, and deeper understanding, in turn, compels one to chase after more language. Language, being representative by nature, is synthetic. It reflects the assemblage or creation of a constituted meaning as well as a vehicle for communicating that meaning and connecting to others. Language—and eloquence, even—is the thread that leads you back down the maze of branches towards the trunk of the tree or leads you back to the marvelous air skimming the ocean's surface.
Lest we become so isolated as to fall over the edge or drown into madness, we must see the meanings we create as a form of communication. The gift of language!—positively selected as the vehicle blessedly connecting I with We.
