Someone wise recently reminded me that the most important religious festival on the pre-Hispanic Mexica calendar in Tenochitlan was Flor y Canto – Flower and Song. Nothing, the Mexica knew, pleased the gods more than art. So they came from all over what is now the Republic, the poets, feather workers, gold smiths, jade carvers, dancers, musicians and sculptors to make their offerings.
Further south among the Maya it was known that Mother Earth created human beings to make beautiful things. Period. She calls humans her “beautiful jade earrings” the word for humans in a Maya dialect. But if the earrings cease to please her and be beautiful she will just throw them away and get new ones. That is the only use Mother Earth has for humans – to make beauty.
And Jung said, “Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes her its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks her own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through her. As a human being she may have aims, personal goals and a will, but as an artist she is “Human” in a higher sense – she is collective woman, a vehicle and moulder of the collective unconscious of womankind.”
And Leonard Schlain in his book ART & PHYSICS tells us that artists are the prophets, the seers and tracing the history of art from Giotto to contemporary painters like Magritt, builds a very credible case that artists unconsciously and symbolically anticipate, predict and paint the scientific discoveries of their age. He was a surgeon who loved art.
And Garcia Lorca said, “Artists are the first shot and the last paid.” In the hacienda I had to build in order to house all the women I am there is a room where Cassandra Chicken Little lives. (Other tenants are La Loca, La Pintora, La Guerrillera Peligrosa, La Viejona Agria, La Media Bruja, La Profundamente Contenta, The Phoenix, and some who are hiding from the cops, there is The Hermit of course, The Mystic, some just can’t be allowed to use the credit cards, socialize. turned loose in the Jeep or just prefer to remain anonymous.)
And with every year I paint and write, the more it feels like channeling, the more I wonder who is painting, where it comes from. Only that being a maker of beautiful earrings is a joyous job and I might even agree to come back if I can be an artist again and make more earrings for Mother Earth. I think I would like to be an artist in Tenochitlan before the Conquest, or a fly on the wall in Maximillian’s and Carlotta’s palace, see San Francisco Bay in 1,400, watch what really happened at Acoma – no – I want to meet Sor Juana Inez de La Cruz, Nezhuacoyotl, Freida and that’s just Mexico – I can’t make up my mind! See how greedy I am?)
NATURE is the greatest artist. And it says in the I Ching that when one sees good – imitate it. When one sees evil – don’t do it.
Creativity is the antidote to violence, beautiful symbols can bring social change without violence, bypass the chatterbox, linear mind and reach the heart.
And to seal my argument, Einstein said, “Imagination is greater than knowledge. Knowledge is limited and imagination encompasses the cosmos.” In my paintings I can make it rain, make it day, night, winter or summer, I can invite animals, I can make my skeletons do anything, I have the power to play with joy in my little imaginary cosmos.
The cherry on top: Miguel Unamuno said, “El azar es el ritmo intimo del universo.” “Serendipity is the intimate rhythm of the universe.” If I never know how it is going to turn out, then who is painting?
The moon is full in Pices, the sign of the psychic, the mystic, the heart that bleeds for the burning world.