Art, a Self-Soothing Exorcism
It's something that just kind of happens - a piece of you being chipped off into your art - it seeps through the work even when you're not intending for it to. That is why it’s hard to let people see it and consume it. People now get to take something intimate of yours into their mouth (so far so good…) and chew on it (less fun). Maybe they’ll spit it out in disgust or worse yet, find it tasteless.
Which piece of you precisely gets imbued into the art is out of your control. Sometimes, it’s the best of you. Other times, parts you wish didn’t exist. In this way, art can be an exorcism. You can let your monsters loose in a way that’s plausibly deniable, like carelessly forgetting to close the gate on a bunch of demonic farm animals who will now stampede towards the nearby town.
In business, many great companies were started by the founders trying to solve a personal problem or create a product that they themselves wished they had. Art can be much the same way. You will often find yourself making beautiful things that you want to have, to possess, to inhabit. You make art that gives you a sense of comfort. You’re showing the world things that give you emotional security or aesthetic respite. This is the flip side of exorcism, it’s crafting angels into existence.
So art can be a vehicle for absent-minded demon farmers or a conduit for comfort, and many things in between. For me, it’s a self-soothing exorcism.
This little ramble was inspired by a post on SuzyQs' Letter but I won’t tell you which one. Go check it out if you’re curious.
LOVE THIS ONE "BOO"
(Amusement) - Meanwhile, I cut myself open and let the drops of my essence form words on pages. Staining the pages until they're wet and dripping and saturated, unable to take more of me in for having been soaked through and through. Each piece of writing imperfectly capturing a portion of myself, but almost always capturing the most important elements I wanted to pin down. There is the illusion of volition in that, the illusion of some amount of intentionality at play, but since the best of me is captured in the moments of semi-fugue flow states and it feels like something coming through me being called to the page, I can resonate with the bit about it not always being under our control. Many a daydreaming wanderings have occured where I try to grasp at a mere fraction of what I felt and saw in such dazed states of deep playful imaginative immersions in other world and other states of being.
Anyway, well done, enjoyed the article.