MUSING MUD III: Either the Work of Art is a Neurosis or a Neurosis is a Work of Art

Either the Work of Art is a Neurosis or a Neurosis is a Work of Art: An Ekphrasis

The question of what art is in itself can never be answered 

The poet becomes a clinical case 

a red, newborn sun, rising up out of the depths of the water

In the undifferentiated chaos of the magical mentality

As long as we ourselves are caught up in the process of creation, we neither see nor understand;

Indeed 

We ought not understand, for nothing is more injurious to immediate experience than cognition

Poetry evokes out of words the resonance of the primordial word.

Elucidation 

art; it is constantly at work educating the spirit of the age, con­juring up the forms in which the age is most lacking

We feel reassured by this explanation,

and turn back to our picture of a well-ordered cosmos

allowing unknown and mysterious

powers to act upon man and carry him on the wings of the night

to a more than personal destiny

It is a vision seen…

a tremendous intuition striving for expression

The secret of creativeness, like that of the freedom of the will,

is a transcendental problem which the psychologist cannot answer, but can only describe

___

I found myself at the edge of a cosmic abyss

Since I know nothing at all, I shall simply do whatever occurs to me

Any time 

in my life, 

when I came against a blank wall, I painted a picture or hewed stone

I would find the particular images which lie behind emotions

There are higher things than the egos will, and to these one must bow

following the old Greek maxim “Give away all that thou hast, then shalt thou receive”

The essential thing is to differentiate oneself from these unconscious contents by personifying them, and at the same time to bring them into relationship with consciousness

What a dreary world it would be if the rules were not violated sometimes!

pen, try to plant the results of my experience in the soils of reality

I could not confine myself to generally understandable material

I stormed against destiny

Excerpts from:

Collected Works of C. G. Jung “On The Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry”, “Confrontation with the Unconscious” by C. G. Jung