I have whiplash from the amount of times I’ve changed my mind over the past two years. I’ve taken training, courses, done mentorships all in attempt to pinpoint where it is I’m going and what it is that I have to offer, yet still I felt lost (hello misaligned undefined identity center), but over the past two weekends of MA lectures, a deep realization has settled. I will never be able to please all the parts of myself and I have to allow all of them a seat at the table. The monotheistic Jung states “only a unified personality can experience life, not that personality which is split up into partial aspects” and I disagree. Why must I amalgamate all of my parts into a cohesive whole? Why can’t I writhe and teem in multitudes? Why shouldn’t I remain poly and pagan? If my parts can befriend one another and work together as the assemblage that they are, why would I demand that they merge? They are already one in the sense that they are housed in the same body and I don’t see any reason that loving them in their separateness is any less psychologically beneficial than asking them to integrate. I am not a monotheist, not in spirit, not in soul. At least, not yet.
I don’t see the world objectively, scientifically, or from a distance. I don’t want to look at it with impartial eyes, taking steps back, observing, dissecting. I see the world with mood and intimacy, I take steps forward. I don’t want to observe my life, I want to live in it. I want to take pictures of in-breaths and body parts, full landscapes and botanical details, fuck trying to make it make sense. I like images with a sensual soul because they satisfy my shadow. I like hints of hauntings and the uncanny because they speak to the dark and unknown spaces of the unconscious. I like dramatic images. I like softness. I need you to feel like you are in a dream or a fantasy when you look at my images because that is how I see the world, not as a rationalist or a materialist, but life as mythologem.
I am made of symbols.
I am a walking metaphor.
What I have been exploring over the past year is the artistic gaze of the masculine – to frame without sentimentality, but I suck at it and why is sentimentality a “bad” thing? I am a woman in love, I am a mother. I am sentimental as fuck. Why shouldn’t my sentiment be considered art? I’ve worried that fully embracing the feminine gaze would mean I wouldn’t get a seat at the boys club we call Art and Academia, and I want a seat. But that was an assumption, not a truth. Art and Academia are in love with mythos too.
I know my tastes and the ways they like to evolve and they are chthonic tastes, wild tastes, the tastes of dirt and sweat and growls at the back of the throat. My taste is eruption, climactic, lightning bolts that paralyzes me while I lay in ecstatic elation. They are weeds and vines that block the view, mystery and madness and wild cackling in the wind. “Resist not feminine ferality, resist not the chthonic gaze” I speak over myself.
And so it is
