ELEMENTAL MUSE

Elemental: ‘Of primitive natural forces or passions.’

Primitive natural forces? Who are we to call natural forces primitive? It’s not as if we are separate from the force of nature and can force ourselves against it. Not without dire consequence for the whole which includes us within it.

So is it really a mystery why what we call ‘our passions’ tend to be so destructive? If we pit our natural force against what we are one-with, what other result is possible?

Duality is in the suicidal delusion of mind that believes itself ‘civilized’ by contrast with, ‘primitive’: 1. ‘Of an early simple stage of development.’ 2. ‘Basic. Crude.’

Whereas, if what we call ‘civilization’ wasn’t so perpetually, glaringly, pathologically hypocritical, then our natural passions might have a chance to be life-affirmative and creative. Which they are, when not trapped in self- contradiction. Elemental is the way nature is, naturally.

A Native American saying: ‘It doesn’t take many words to speak the truth.’ So, for those with a short attention span, think of elemental as meaning, earthly, natural, worthy of reverence, and not to be messed with.

Muse: 1. ‘In Greek mythology, one of nine Goddesses, each of whom inspired an art or science.’ 2. ‘Force that inspires a creative artist.’ Also means, to ponder quietly.

As mentioned previously, the dictionary doesn’t have the last word on anything. It’s a self-defining, closed circuit system of circular logic, and circles don’t have ends, let alone a last word. Though it helps sometimes to understand at least the title, in this case Elemental Muse.

Not that the force of inspiration is something distinct from the artist, or from nature as a whole. That’s unthinkable, unless you think the words are the reality.

How can there be inspiration without a one who’s inspired, by something that’s inspiring? So don’t imagine that, in exploring creativity to its full, life-affirming potential, there’s any risk of going mad, being plagued by demons, and becoming famous mainly for slicing your earlobe and shooting yourself in a wheat field.

Unless your passions are such that you think natural means crude, and elemental is merely mental, or anything basic is something to either conquer or be enslaved by. In which case you’d be well advised to dabble with watercolours till you’ve sorted it out. Besides, inspiration is receptive and to muse also means to ponder quietly.

Neither do you want to become a passionless politically correct robot, cybernetically entrained to invisibly intrusive synthetic nanoparticles, dictating your every soulless predictable reaction.

If that sounds frivolously improbable, then you’d be urgently well advised to imminently immerse totally in nature, and disengage undue dependence on artificiality lest your trinary synaptic flux be transfixed by binary pixels.

‘Rocks and Roots’, is the title of this most recent painting, which speaks for itself without words. Inspired by an actual moment in nature, though a moment is not a point in time. How do you pinpoint what’s omnipresent except perhaps in paint?

ELEMENTAL MUSE.

Dive in deep, richness of layered leaf mulch settled by seasons’ rains.

Footfall crack and crunch of scattered brittle sticks.

Soft spongey moist and mounded moss to touch, cloaking all. Cladding twists of root and fertile fungal growth in deep druidic green.

Stark stillness of boulders embedded, quartz clusters lichen encrusted, stray leaf-fall glistens.

Voluminous rooted trunks twist criss-cross overlapping, branching out in dark uplifted limbs against the light.

Barely a small bird chirp as silent ooze, trickles down between rocks and roots, vegetal, mineral, organic elemental muse.

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Martin Rainbowmaker.