In my heart
Grew love of art,
But from my brain
Strange creatures came.
From Godhead huge forms of thought by their own weight break free as from the face of a mountain, slide and crumble down, falling and splashing as into the Sea. Nearby a human silhouette of a floating black substance which could be oil or volcanic ash is pulled and twisted out of shape by whorls of ripples, then obliterated by waves which leap and crash into each other. As the giant clumps of fragments fall from above, scattering underwater like cluster bombs, some whirling off alone like comets leaving behind dust-tails, others splitting off fist-shaped and streaming down to punch lifeforms to pulp, much smaller forms of thought which live in the loose and wavy folds of consciousness like camouflaged fish in a coral reef are startled out of their hiding places and shimmer and flash as they jerk and dart in panic around the ghost clouds slowly rising and drifting across the Sea floor.
. . .
Correlated in imagination to the eerie and bizarre creatures which haunt the darkest and deepest parts of the Sea – such as the Dragonfish and Angler, Lamprey and Hagfish, Bathysaurus ferox and Fang-tooth, the Tongue-eating louse and Barrel-eye, Giant Isopod and Giant Spider crab, the Piglet and Vampire squid – are the spawned hybrids begotten by collisions of protean forms, elusive and enigmatic entities, monstrous but thrilling in perversity, which lurk in the deepest and darkest parts of the human soul.
. . . . .
Often I wonder as an artist if I choose my own subject matter or if the subject matter chooses me. As with other of my images in the past as they developed, I came close at times to abandoning this phantasmagorical image and even to destroying it. I don’t begin an image intending it to turn out strange or weird. I retain the desire to make Beautiful Art, elevated and pure, even as an image under my concentrated gaze turns twisted and grotesque. I close my eyes, trembling in anticipation, reach out to touch the hem of the gown of the Goddess, only to open my eyes and find a Goblin leering back at me. Beauty clings as a residue to my art, lining its entrails. It exists in it not as a living presence but as a haunted memory. I swim in the God Spillage.
. . . . . . .
Only recently I discovered this remarkable insight by Carl Jung from his Commentary on “The Secret of the Golden Flower”:
“We think we can congratulate ourselves on having already reached such a pinnacle of clarity, imagining that we have left all these phantasmal gods far behind. But what we have left behind are only verbal specters, not the psychic facts that were responsible for the birth of the gods. We are still as much possessed today by autonomous psychic contents as if they were Olympians. Today they are called phobias, obsessions, and so forth; in a word, neurotic symptoms. The gods have become diseases; Zeus no longer rules Olympus but rather the solar plexus, and produces curious specimens for the doctor’s consulting room, or disorders the brains of politicians and journalists who unwittingly let loose psychic epidemics on the world.”
THE ART OF JOHN DOCKUS 