P. C. BACON

pcbacon

BEYOND THE VEIL (1991) ~ egg tempera on rawhide by pcbacon, artist.

Though I chose egg tempera for its transparent color clarity, I was still disappointed with the results. The colors were not accurate– too heavy looking and feeling. Why rawhide? I wanted a soft, uneven surface instead of a flat plane that paper or canvas offers. Why I was concerned with these issues, I wasn’t sure. This was not my typical approach to creating- making demands. After the work was done, I knew it had something to do with what happens after we loose the physical body to the death process, but that was the extent of it.

Ten years later, in 2001, I got the answer. I began reading Journey of Soul: Case Studies of Life Between Lives by Michael Newton, PhD. The book is based on case studies of his clients, while under hypnosis, recounting their experience after physical death– life between lives.

His clients accurately describe in detail the images and feeling found in my painting: BEYOND THE VEIL (1991).

In chapter: “Gateway to the Spirit World”, Case 4 describes the experience: “Things are layered, like a cake… levels of light… translucent indented… woven together…stratified threads…variations in thickness and color refraction in the layers…they’re rounded…they curve away from me, as I float through them…I move across.”

In chapter: “Orientation”, Case 11 refers to the souls’ orientation to a spiritual environment as…“I hear such terms as chambers, travel berths…this place is most often called "the place of healing.”

Chapter: “Transition”, Case 14 shares “…islands of misty veils.” Newton states that he is told the most outstanding characteristic of the spirit world is a continuous feeling of a powerful mental force directing everything in uncanny harmony. People say this is a place of pure thought…it’s strange, “although everything appears to go on straight when my Soul is drifting…that changes into a feeling of roundness when I’m moving fast on a line of contact…the speed lines seem to bend. They curve in a more obvious direction for me and give me less freedom of movement.”

Question: “Can you describe the movement of your Soul along these curving contact lines?”

Answer: “It’s just more purposeful– when my Soul is being directed someplace on a line– it’s like I’m in a current of white water only not as thick as water– because the current is lighter than air– well, it’s as if we are all swimming– being carried along, in a swift current which we can’t control– under somebody’s direction– up or down from each other in space with nothing solid around us.”

Question: “Do you see other Souls traveling in a purposeful way above and below you?”

Answer: “Yes, it’s as if we start in a stream and then all of us returning from death are pulled into a great river together.”

Question: “Later in your normal travels as a Soul, is it the same as being propelled around in streams and rivers as you have just described?”

Answer: “No, not at all. This is different. We are like salmon going up to spawn, returning home. Once we get there, we are not pushed around this way; then we can drift.”

In chapter, Transition" Dr. Newton states: “I have touched upon the commonality of word usage to describe spiritual phenomena. I regularly hear such water-words as currents, streams used to explain a flowing directional movement, where a sky-word like cloud denotes a freedom of motion associated with drifting.”

There isn’t only one kind of artist in the world, one way of becoming an artist. There is, above all, a need to articulate your own source of being so you will recognize that source and know who you are. How could you be an artist if you didn’t explore your own inner life?

There is something in the human being I would call, in the most general terms, a need to transcend the corporeal being and become a person identified by his or her individuating qualities. Every artist I’ve known has been distinguished, almost from birth, by knowledge of that need to become a self, not just a living body.

As Blake put it, “We must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s.” You have to practice being yourself, and not merely exist as a number in a world of billions of numbers. Think of, let’s say, Hopkins, a complicated human being, intensely aware not only of his inner self but of the world around him, the natural world. It is a blessing he left this record of his presence on this earth.

The creative gift has very complex origins; you’re accumulating and digesting experience, trying to discover its meanings, instead of stuffing it into a closet and moving on to whatever happens to you next.

Every experience you have is a lesson in how to live for the next one and if you never learn anything from the experiences of the past, you never mature either as a person or as an artist.

My sense is that you’re born with a more or less empty vault. Perhaps the first experiences are even before that, in the womb, and the vault begins to fill with jewels or painful memories. Each memory of a disastrous experience is there, not only as a wound but as a warning. You have to learn how to recognize the return of the same dilemma you’ve been through before. You have to look at the tag and the price.

Different kinds of memories enter into the making of the self, but among those, there are a few absolutely central memories. They may be traumatic, but they are the crystallization of the creative person’s treasure house. Certainly every poet can be identified by the key images that haunt his or her imagination. If you read Keats and Wordsworth in sequence, even though they impinge on each other in many important ways, the identification of any passage in the poems of either one is very clear.

In a sense, all creativity is a process of giving meaning to what is on a universal scale meaningless. The plant and the poet and the gardener collect these disparate, disorganized raindrops, sun rays, passing birds, and make something formal.

Creativity gives form to what in nature is ambiguous, suggestive. Language wasn’t there at the beginning. It was created after people had gone through all sorts of experiences and needed to become expressive in order to give meaning to the life.

Paul Celan’s formulation that the poem is “solitary and on its way” strikes the ideal balance. A poet needs both the awareness of the self and the desire to know others, to share one’s sense of being with others. The poet in the very act of writing the poems is reaching out to others. This search is to find a vessel– to create a vessel first– that will reach others. Art must have a social sense, a sense of the society in which we live and thrash.

As an artist, you are a representative human being– you have to believe that in order to give your life over to that effort to create something of value. You’re not doing it only to satisfy your own impulses or needs; there is a social imperative. If you solve your problems and speak of them truly, you are of help to others, that’s all. And it becomes a moral obligation.

Excerpt from The Wild Braid by Stanley Kunitz

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.