Freud compared the mind to an iceberg. Our conscious is everything that we see above water and our subconscious is everything below the surface. I first became that much of writing was subconscious some months after finishing my third book. I realized I'd writing 100,000 words or so about hunger. Yes, it was horror with a decent monster, but all that time I was writing about monsters, I was also writing about hunger. But not, the emotion limited to the intake of food. My soul ( or some deep part of me) was / is hungry. To my own ears this sounds rather melodramatic but it's true. So I wrote a whole book about hunger and not one word of it was conscious. Now that's not to say, I won't bring the themes out as I edit it.
The unconcious is a nonverbal beast. It has no words of it's own so it enters out lives in odd ways. We do things and we don't entirely understand why we're doing them. I have a theory that what drives humans to dance, sing, and write stories is an unconscious need to share our experiences. Carl Jung, a psychologist, purposed that all of the human experience is contained in the collective unconscious. I purpose that the collective unconscious is very real. It is all around us, in the music, art, movies and literature we share. How else can we explain why one mention of fire by Robert frost calls to mind Dante's inferno? Ultimately, I think transference of knowledge is at the core of what drives us to tell stories, to read, to watch and to sing about them. Sopa and Pipa are bills that are supposed to help stop piracy but they grant the US government the right to control the internet. While I'm for stopping piracy, these bills are not the way.
If your as appalled by these bills as I am, you can sign the petition and tell your friends to sign it. You can also blog about it. When I was a kid, I used to draw, mostly horses, but I could copy anything I saw or remembered seeing. Most of my pictures were drawn with a number two pencil. Later, when I was in middle school, I was introduced to pencil sets. I drew some incredible fish with a cheap set of colored pencils. My teacher handed me a set of water colors. Not the kind that comes in a tube, but the kind that is comes in a tray of twelve. I painted a picture of some water lilies and the forest. I remember my teacher coming to stand and watch. She said it could have been painted by a professional. I don't know by what standard she judged this. Art was always something I could just do and I never really cared if I was good at it. I can't judge know because the painting was lost, as was so much of my art, after I entered foster care at age 14. I continued to draw a little here and there, and even took up painting after college. Paints and canvas are not terribly portable, so I gave up all artistic pursuits outside of writing when I came to the ROK (Republic of Korea). It wasn't really a sacrifice or it hadn't seemed like it. I never wanted it the way I wanted and still want to write. I saw art as thing that took time away from writing.
Two days ago (as of writing this) I bought myself a gift. It's a electronic drawing pad and pen. I wanted this so I could make electronic mind maps for my books. But I have a copy of Artrage. I drew a horse, a nose and a mouth. I drew the horse because I know to draw them from memory. I drew the nose and the mouth for practice. But something much more important happened when I was drawing and I want to put what that was in to words. I've written a dozen sentences and deleted them all. Art was something could always just do and I think it's something I need to do, even if it takes time away from other pursuits. |
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