Plural Like the Universe

Obsessed, bewildered

By the shipwreck

Of the singular

We have chosen the meaning

Of being numerous.

• George Oppen, Of Being Numerous (1975)

Consider this: the immensity of Creation that produced the elementary particles and our solar system. Now consider the flow of blood through our bodies and minds. How it all unfolds each day we step into the studio. Galaxies with hundreds of billions of stars dancing on the tip of our brush. The leap into appearance.

The self-reflexive awareness of our particular earthly function is the quantum fluctuation of those elementary particles lulled into light. No different from the mysterious images erupting from studio procedures and experiments of a realm of generative potentiality. We are unified and multiform within Creation’s outpouring.

What is meant by “universe” when I say, “Plural like the universe”? Simply put, being open to many unexpected perspectives. A diversity of views within unity that permits our evolution and involution giving identity to the work when applied. A circling inward. Making space between the folds of the brain for wider coils of expanded intricacies. Frequencies that includes at one and the same time the cosmic, biological, and psychic. Contractions that are creatively complementary.

I argue for something more than a monistic studio world. I insist on competing universes, paradigms of many turnings, multilayered with many selves. The diversity of our tendencies and impulses which offers the possibility of expressing what suits us at the moment. To let go of our current system of constraints which offers impermanent satisfaction at the cost of our vitality and imagination. Concealed yet unborn universes carrying the meaning of image-making to the very thickness of the work. Not simply coming from some “where” or going to another “where” but fast moving towards the synchronistic and holistic. In other words, approaching a master archetype.

Consider this: it is impossible to study our work without studying ourselves. It is impossible to understand ourselves without understanding the universe. The same so-called laws governing the universe govern the world and create our work. By studying the universe and our work we learn of their parallel nature. The emergent universe is the fundamental context of our creative work. Its meaning, value, purpose. Whatever churns and continues to churn in extremis, exists within the studio and our practice. It was there at the dawn of existence.

We are the intersection and connection of an infinite number of random parts of the universe. Events, spirit, energy. Relationships, ideas. We are never separated, disconnected, unplugged. We are a series of encounters with ourselves, a succession of echoes of our own being. Not just admiration for the greater creature we think we are. A radical amazement whereby we not only see things far beyond our world, but in our work. A seeing- in that often goes unseen. A plurality of ways of self-consciously attending, so that each way of taking the work into view is also a way of embracing memory, reverence, respect, awareness, and expanding consciousness.

The same power that animates the body, the physical response to the work, is a reflection of conscious interpretation which entertains and makes judgments. The maker of images not only attends to something far larger in the work but catches sight of soul or psyche. The perception that is active in the apprehension of significance and meaning. A cosmic imagination of multiplicity provides us psychologically with a kaleidoscope of possibilities. We dissolve the physical and literal encrustation that shuts down creative flow. A pluralism of thought that becomes the dreaming reality of desire from earthly fixity to a far less solid behavior that shrinks under the heft of our inventiveness.

To have the entire universe within us in the studio! To realize our humanity through our work is to know that we are in miniature sun, moon, stars, and planets. In that glow, bottomless as it is elusive, we find cosmic intimacy. An aura sensed and destined.

We find this “plurality” in the works of Shakespeare, Keats, Coleridge, Whitman. In William James’s “eaches.” The “heteronyms” of Fernando Pessoa’s radical embodiments that multiply the imagination. Living simultaneously and in sequence as manifold artefact-minds of distinct subjects. For us, it is to give complete exteriority to what is interior. Conjoining the contradictory the work plays with us, allowing us to become transformed by moving beyond a single view to the instantiation of human activity that is “universal” or “cosmic”. Even an accident of the brush presents new fields of expression that can bring the work fully into its own. With sudden intention, internal necessity, and fittingness.

Plurality, from the Greek plethos, is that which is theoretically divisible into noncontinuous parts. “Multiple”, “plus”, and “more” allows free, many-sided and lateral thinking. Polymorphic beings that produce plural-significant knowing, seeing, creating. Not elevating interpretation to a single center but to identify many nuclei of growth. Not a system but an outlook for symbolizing the reality of the work to account for a far-ranging and more profound aesthetic experience.

Plural is to be greater than one. Not two or more people in one body, “headmates”, or “alters”. But the recognition of more than one ultimate principle. A diversity of different ideas, beliefs, or views of our work rather than a monological approach, method, or meaning. A dialectical gift of many things making up the expanded reality of the work equally commensurate. To be surprised by the work in as many ways as possible, and to discover something of beauty and value in this astonishment.

To be plural like the universe is to be conscious of our multiplicity. Not as a sense of fragmentation but rather as “I am what is around me” (Wallace Stevens). An attentiveness that is everything: contemplation, desire, recollection, revery, inspiration. First-person positions in which we have an intersubjective transference with hundreds of ideas and metaphors. Like the Vedic god Rudra who dreams of being a bee who dreams of being an elephant who dreams of being a bee.

Being plural like the universe has three elements: the one I am, the transitory subject matter that is multiple, and the horizon of possibility that does not contradict the necessity of identity. A tuning that is macrophysically biological and psychic. The everyday sublime from which individual selves nucleate and distil.

It takes de se (“of oneself” in Latin) imagining on our part. An entire outlook that contains an emotional cognitive and sensory bearing. The attitude we hold toward practice and work. Our mental state with regard to what we do and how others see what we do. Thinking of oneself as a “meeting place” we become a forum for many ways of seeing and knowing. Ineluctable identifications with the materials and techniques of one’s practice that trace our imperceptible irrational anima to the universe.

This indwelling strives to see the work from the expansiveness of other perspectives, especially if there is a lack of salient presence in the work. The idea there are multiple truths or ways of knowing, being, and fundamental values that require different methods of analysis, is certainly not new or unique. Ambiguity, paradox, unfinished reflections are proper to this kind of awareness as contradiction, uncertainty, doubt. A fully experienced image depicts a total sensation that is not seen but intuited. It is the familiar (or not so familiar) that creates the image of itself. A metaphorical view in which every action is an expression of something else.

We sustain countless fluid fantasies and impressions. We are nurtured by dissolving materialistic and literalistic “one-point perspectives” for the radiation of archetypal significance, accommodation, symbol, and idiosyncratic metaphorization against which to draw an actual situation. Glimpsing a universe of prospects congealed within it, we find an image for each spark of inspiration. Flashes of psychological lumen in polycentric images are discovered in mercurial visions.

Trial and error, exploring new applications, finding hidden nuances, and radical arrangements. Counter-vailing influences, self- negotiations, chance solutions that have us leave the cliffs of habit in order to imagine our work not only in different ways but as a continent feature of oneself. Embodying plurality of thought in studio practice with “cosmic consciousness” our inner reach touches outer space. A universalizing phenomenology that feels like an all-encompassing spaciousness surpassing thought and imagination in its width and swiftness of its embrace. If you want to see it all you must stand erect with the miracle of your being.

“Creating is living doubly”, penned Albert Camus in his essay, Absurd Creation. The sensation remains as I re-read the quote and with it the constant attraction of a universe inexhaustible. We must find a common ground for our nostalgia, our longing. Perhaps a universe hedged with reason or lighted up with analogies. The outcome of an unexpressed philosophy. Or just to bite on something that is never a kiss but an intense rumination. The basic binding energy that galaxies aesthetic experience.

All of this exists in the “emptiness” of our potential. But it is for us to awaken to it. Drawn into a universe permeated with allurement in a thousand different ways. To be no more, no less, than a star nebula drawn into being. It is not something one acquires or wishes for but the realization of something that you already are. Significant moments when the universe desires to show what we are feeling and experiencing. The way the rose grows from a blind hand.

Being plural is to witness our work in all its manifestations and complexity, good and bad. It is in this releasement beyond us to find the first outlines of our imaginal imprint. We look into the work, sniffing out connections to other realities. We scan for hints, look them up in the books. We surf online for hidden dimensions of our work, or that may point to the enigma not only of our imagery but of ourselves. Human-heartedness that locates our work in the broadest conceivable context.

We change direction, if need be, in light of our true and false beliefs about being an artist. We lay claim to metaphysical exclusiveness that allows us to foray onto new paths of self-knowledge beyond small artsy talk to a larger dialogue. Not only within us but with the world that transcends time and space. Form, content, brushwork, the days of static are over. Deploying a method of the rhizome that permits us to spread like a celestial plant and colonize new areas, we are grounded in the insight of poet Paul Celan: “Reality is not. It has to be searched for and won.”

It is an affirmation of freedom and a claim to authenticity. Not hoping to find certainties, but mysteriesin the essence of what we are doing. A charism that is a trusted knowing that channels inner authority outside our usual looking glass and refusal of grace. More than another thema, it is a matter of determining not what one’s vision should but could be. The repose between forms and the blossoming discharge of color, our fragile dream-shapes and the dark patience of space beyond the limits of earthly measurements.

What I am proposing are not shadows in the darkness but a light for a founding event. An unfolding core of new ideas. A flow of belief lifting elements from all modes of preexisting messages. Integrating them into a new way of looking at the work in order to produce an original totality. The transfer of materials and metaphors, sudden thoughts and ideas, from one context to another. The use of contrasting images without recourse to an overall unifying idea. A plurality of domains, objects or fields, of sense. Multiple meanings, ways of seeing, freely flowing and fleeing into new possibilities. An open-ended proliferation of mentalistic vocabularies.

A new centering that rolls on us unaware. The glow of openworkthat bends toward the warm winds of understanding rather than maintaining a reductive view to fit the familiar. Teasing our eyes into new beginnings with a fluid attitude by dissolving materialistic and literalistic perceptions so that the spirit incites accommodations buried and bubbling. Or in the manner of Psyche whose wings are those of the multihued butterfly that has sloughed off the cocoon.

The breath of our pluralism is also its depth. A resonance and transcendent function of intuition. We sacralize the work toward an advancing theology of the image the texture of angel-matter.

The dust of sorrows settles. Time passes and leaves without our counting. We cradle our known practices. Paradoxically, we want our images to roar and rise on heaven’s hill. Not to prowl on knocking knees in the grace of becoming “whatever you please” (Lat.quodlibet). That is simply too risky, too feverish, too entangling.

We conceive ourselves. We burrow through the skin of old light. Thoughts populate our heads like spiro bacteria. In the freshness of our immense designs, they inch through the summary of our lives. Foam trails from percepts complementary and interdependent dance along the artery, circulate like the lymph, forever figured in the drift of stars.

A distant dance for a new divination.

Foreshortened.

Nebulized.

Diffracted.

Numberless.