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The Alchemy of Art Jamie Andreas I have been around a good number of years, long enough to see many things, and to do a lot of thinking and feeling about what I have seen. I have been "around the block". In my conception, after the age of 40, you have been "around the block". Whoever you are, and whatever you are able to see and understand about life, will most likely have been seen and understood by then. Whoever you really are will have displayed itself. Whatever there is for you to learn, it will have presented itself to you. If you didn't get it the first time around the block, you probably won't get it the second time either, not unless you learn how to pay attention. If we pay attention, life is a profound event. It has always been that way for me. I have never been able to do anything other than be intensely connected, and intensely affected, by what is around me, by the world and everything in it. The greatest curse and torment about being this way, is to come to the awareness, gradually or brutally, that almost everyone else is not living this way. It is especially difficult if the immediate people around you are severely NOT connected to what is around them. Of course, this means they are not connected to what is inside of them either. Every child lives in this state of intense and immediate connection to their world. And almost every child loses this connection as they become adults. This intensity, this unobstructed openness, this "being with what is" is not allowed in the adult world. The adult world is a shadowy place where truth is not allowed, it is controlled by those with power, and those seeking power. Truth is threatening, and so are those who proclaim it. As a teenager, I was in a profound and urgent crisis. The years that had accumulated as I grew up in a large family, a family that only I, amongst all my seven siblings, realized was in its own alcoholic torment, had provided me with plenty to think and feel about! Being so profoundly affected by people who were living in delusion, denying everything that was in front of their faces, and condemning me for saying the truth, being alone in my awareness and alone in the despair it brought, only helped to make deeper the feeling of emptiness that was my unavoidable response to what the world seemed to be. I desperately sought to find something that was real, something that was deep, and most of all, something that was true. Fortunately, I had the intuition that something could be found, and I found things. I found the power of my own mind, and used it vigorously to search. But it wasn't until the power of music was revealed to me that I knew I had found the deepest of the deep, and the truest of the true. And so I pursued music with unrelenting passion. I began to worship at its altar, and I still do. I have never regretted it. As I moved into what was supposed to be adulthood, I felt I was in a life and death struggle. As I looked out at the world I knew I would be moving into, and living in, I was, to put it plainly, scared to death. I was trying to find the solution to a very big problem. I was trying to resolve two opposing "facts" that were standing in front of me, staring at me. One fact, a fact that I was almost afraid to admit, was that I knew there was no chance of me ever being happy in this lifetime unless I was able to be a musician, able to be a guitarist, able to be an artist. And I knew it had to be "total", not part time. Things became much more complicated when I realized that I had to master the classical guitar, popular styles weren't enough. That made things a whole lot more difficult! The other "fact" was that everyone I knew (or so it seemed) was telling me how impossible it would be to actually fulfill these desires. At best, I was told that it would be so difficult, and have such an effect on my life or the lives of others around me, that I was being selfish for even thinking of doing such a thing. I was told by "professionals" that I had started music too late, started the physical development necessary to play the classical guitar too late, and on and on and on. If I had listened to any other voice than the burning need I felt inside, I would be dead, depressed, or useless. I have since learned there are many people like me. There are many people whose connection to their internal reality, and how it moves in tandem with their external reality, is far too strong to ignore, or be modified by another person or an outside force. These people either become artists, or go crazy, and sometimes do both.
Although most people lose the awareness of the intensity of their inner selves as they go through life, they do not lose that inner self, or its depth. It cannot be lost because it is what we are, it is reality. It does not go away because we close our eyes. The price of maintaining the awareness is very great, greater than most people are willing to pay. However, just as we are compelled by nature to daily shed the external cloak we wear by day, and return to our purer and more intrinsic self in sleep, so are we impelled to visit the life giving springs of art and music, that reveal the reality that transcends our "ordinary" world, and takes us back to the depth of the inner reality we have lost touch with. Just as our dreams bring us the true contents of our psyche, instead of the manufactured "product" we call our personality, we turn to all forms of art, and especially music, the highest of all arts, truly, to keep us alive in the fullest sense of the word. We must have what music gives us, because it is giving us ourselves. The artist is simply making available to us a means by which we can feel ourselves, and know ourselves. George Carlin defined his job as a comedienne when he said "I'm just here to remind you of all the funny things you didn't notice". The artist is here to give you back the intensity of feeling you have inside you but do not pay attention to. He or she does so by what they create, and they are driven to create. They are driven to create because they have no choice, they cannot NOT feel life as others do, and they must respond. And that response is the creative process itself, and the created products. And so it is quite a psychological symbiosis that occurs between the artist and the receiver of the art. John Lennon, a perfect example of someone whose inner intensity left him no choice but to pursue the life of an artist, commented on this symbiosis when he said "People use me so they can feel all the things they're not feeling in their life". Yes, just as the creation of art is a healing and balancing process for the artist, the reception of art is a healing and balancing process for everyone else. The interesting thing is that the artist experiences nothing essentially different than anyone else, the artist just uses it differently. The artist takes the raw emotional intensity of life that is there for everyone, and does not let the pain of it become a reason to withdraw, or shut down in any way. They do not stop paying attention to their inner life, they do not live according to concepts and standards made by others, but only by their own truth. While others can live in a fake world, or a partial world, the artist embraces all of it, joyous or tragic. The artist takes all of what is inside, nothing is left unowned, and because he embraces it all, he finds the truth within it. Then, through a truly alchemical process, he or she transmutes that truth into the essence of all art, and that essence is what we call Beauty. The artist searches for truth, and discovers beauty. Beauty means "that in which we see ourselves". That is what it is. Whatever it is we find beautiful, whether it is a painting or a sunset, it is beautiful because we are seeing a part of ourselves in it. The artist allows us to see ourselves truly, even if we are not quite able to see ourselves clearly otherwise. We lose ourselves amid the challenge and pain of life, but the artist never loses himself. The artist takes the truth of what is, the good and the bad, and like the ancient alchemist who sought to change base metals into gold, the artist transmutes the stuff of life into Beauty, a reflection of our humanity. Otto Rank, an early disciple of Sigmund Freud, spent his life examining the role of the artist, and the psychological and spiritual significance of Art. He wrote: "This very essence of a man, his soul, which the artist puts into his work and which is represented by it, is found again in the work by the enjoyer, just as the believer finds his soul in religion or in God, with whom he feels himself to be one." And so, the artist must not lose his soul, as do so many people, or there will be nothing to deliver to others. Life defeats most people. Life is a constant demand for change, and so life is a constant stress. The usual reaction to that stress is withdrawal, a lowering of the force of life, a lowering of awareness itself, a deadening of the soul. This is the common condition of most people, and has been poetically described by Thoreau in his summarizing statement "most men live lives of quiet desperation". Psychologically speaking, this means most people are, to one degree or another, neurotic. Neurosis is the state that results when the ceaseless demand for change that we call life is resisted, and most do offer that resistance. Ernest Becker, a major proponent of the work of Otto Rank, also believed in the salvatory nature of Art. The artist saves his or her own life, and allows others to be saved as well. in his book "The Denial Of Death", Becker writes: "Rank asked why the artist so often avoids clinical neurosis when he is so much a candidate for it because of his vivid imagination, his openness to the finest and broadest aspects of experience, his isolation from the cultural world view that satisfies everyone else. The answer is that he takes in the world, but instead of being oppressed by it, he reworks it in his own personality, and recreates it in the work of art. The neurotic is precisely the one who cannot create. We might say that both the artist and the neurotic bites off more than he can chew, but the artist chews it over in an objectified way, and spews it out again, as an external, objective work project. The neurotic cannot marshal this creative response embodied in a specific work, and so he chokes on his introversions. The artist has similar large scale introversions, but he uses them as material.” Do you understand the implications of this? It means the artist is doing what everyone must do. Just as the comedienne saves us from the deadening effects of our own humourlessness, the artist saves us from our own living spiritual death. Becker is saying that all people face the choice to be either creative, or neurotic. It isn't the artist who is crazy, it's everybody else! The first human right is the freedom to feel. It is more primary than our coveted "freedom of speech" because it is nothing more than the freedom to speak to ourselves, and it is a freedom most people do not really have, or use. Speech, self expression, and all creative acts, are the outgrowth, the products, of our freedom to feel. On the biological level, the urge to survive is the strongest force there is, and on the psychological and spiritual level, the urge for self-expression is the strongest force there is, because self-expression IS the survival of the mind and spiritual self. If we are not self-expressing, we are not alive, we do not exist. There may be a body walking around and talking, but there is no soul coming into being. And so, we are all called, in our way, to be artists. We are all called to experience the full reality of ourselves, and give expression to that. We will do that, or we will pay the price. This is the true meaning of Shakespeare's "to be or not to be, that is the question." Our creative life, or the lack of it, is the answer to that question. There is a book I came upon a few years ago. I could not believe, when I happened upon this book, that I finally found someone else saying what I have said all my life: most people are dishonest, with themselves and everyone else, and it is the root cause of human misery. In his book "Radical Honesty", Brad Blanton, PhD., makes this the radical premise of his message. After a lifetime of therapizing celebrities, politicians, rich and poor, he sees the inability to know or admit our real feelings to ourselves or others as the reason all these suffering people were coming to him for help, lying on his couch and choking on the contents of their own minds and lives. After reading the book, I wished I could send a copy to every person on the planet. His message is more urgent than any I can think of, and it would change the world as we know it if it were understood. Honesty, which is simply the commitment to truth above all else, is the fountainhead of Art. It is "awareness made actual" which, in essence, is the same as the creative product of the artist (this is why blues players say "tell the truth brother" when they want to hear great playing!). To begin our own artistic journey, and to continue on its path, we must be founded ultimately and completely on our ability to "be with what is" for us, and to communicate that to others. To do this is to transform ourselves, others, and the world. The only thing you will regret at the end of your life is everything you wanted to do and didn't, and everything you wanted to say, but didn't. And the reason you will have something to regret will because you did not really FEEL your life, feel yourself, and so be true to yourself. Charles Dickens' "The Christmas Carol" is in reality a sermon on this subject. Jacob Marley warns Ebenezer Scrooge that he is in danger of sharing the torments of the damned, and those torments are the full feeling of the pain and suffering of this human world that they did not feel or do anything about while alive. Now they do feel it, but have no power to act. We must feel it now. We must do it now. Recognize the vastness and depth of you own existence. Embrace it all, feel it all. Allow the mysterious alchemical power of your inborn creativity to transmute your life, your feelings, and your reality, into the communication of truth and beauty we call Art.
Copyright @2003 by Jamie Andreas. All rights Reserved.
If you enjoyed this essay...you will love "Deeper"...
Transcendent Wisdom on Being a Guitarist
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