  Deep Imagination: In Search of the Wild Metaphor Each of us is living many stories. We're aware of the realistic events of our day-to-day world, of course. But as writers and artists we can also learn to listen for the drama that goes on in the many "parallel universes" of the unconscious. The "unconscious"? The unconscious is that part of our thoughts and feelings of which we are not aware. Our brains and bodies are busy all the time, even when we sleep. Part of their activity fills a sort of grand reservoir of feelings and ideas and experiences which by day we forget, and over which we have no real control. That reservoir is the unconscious. Because it is more broadly aware than our prejudiced conscious minds, and because it employs intuition rather than logic, the unconscious detects the oceanic flow of life around us, and keeps us flowing with it. And the unconscious talks to us in stories. Why in stories? As you know, we humans live in the world by
using many languages, and not just the languages of words. We
use body language; we use picture language and alphabets and
computer codes; we use signs, symbols, and signals of all kinds.
Even music and mathematics are languages--that is, they aren't
reality itself, but ways by which we represent reality. It's
as though our brains can't grasp the world directly, but must
always use a symbol system, a language, to grasp it with. Our many different kinds of languages are all attempts to describe the same thing: how it is to be alive here on this amazing, frightening, exciting earth. A term you'll hear used to describe all those various symbol languages is metaphor. A metaphor is one thing used to stand for another thing, in order to describe it. If I tell you "the moon's a balloon tonight," then you know, without my saying it, that the moon is full and round and seems to float in the sky. We say:
All metaphors. And stories are living metaphors. They're inviting us to come with them and get the feel of what's going on in the vast sea-surge of the universe; they're just doing that in their own language. The unconscious expresses itself in metaphor. Metaphor is its language. We didn't design this setup; we're, uh, hardwired for it. Take our dreams, for example: It's as though we're trying to understand the world even in our sleep. Because we can grasp the flowing world only through a symbol/metaphor system, our sleeping minds rummage through the cluttered closets of our brains for images to dress the world that we intuit, but can't put into words (or prefer to deny) when we're awake. "I dreamed I was in this kind of museum place, you know, old stuff in glass cases, but the door was open and there was this big fiesta going on outside, so I stepped out into the crowd . . . " Dreamlike metaphors come to us even when we're wide awake. I love to tell a story about my mother, who, when she was almost ninety, sometimes seemed "crazy." But if you listened to her metaphors, you realized she was perfectly sane; she was just using a different set of symbols. A few days before her death, she told me happily, "I'm waiting for the train to Wales!" "To Wales, Mom?" "Yes! Dad's gone on ahead, and we're going to meet up there. But I don't have my ticket yet." She could intuit that she would be going where Dad had gone, but not quite yet. Her mind, as it began to unmake itself, had mislaid the "logical explanation"--itself a metaphor--of her situation: i.e., "I'm dying." So it groped around and found another, quite creative metaphor, a train trip, to express the same thing. A fantasy writer deliberately asks the unknowable universe to present itself as the living being it is, on condition that the writer will not try to stuff it into the prison of "logical explanation." Rather, the writer hopes the universe will dress itself from the marvelous dress-up box of metaphor, and thus, made elusively visible, take the writer with it on a journey of discovery. This practice is wonderful, terrifying, and humbling.  Click on Image to Enlarge A mistake commonly made is to confuse metaphor with allegory. Both use symbols, to be sure. The difference lies in the degree of conscious control. Allegory, most often used as a tool to teach dogma, is a pre-set equation: A stands for B. Allegory is tame; it takes place in the conscious mind. Metaphor, on the other hand, roots in the unconscious, and never leaves it. Metaphor is a wild creature, an emissary from the universe in which we are, and always have been, wild creatures ourselves: a horse that may grow wings and then, in mid-flight, turn into a condor. Both allegory and metaphor are symbolic, and the unconscious is where all symbols spring from if you follow them to their roots. You can kidnap an allegory from the jungles of the unconscious, keep it in your petting zoo, and charge admission. But a metaphor can't be removed from its original habitat. To experience a metaphor you have to stay in the jungle. And in the jungle you will find that you are very small; that your servants have deserted you and taken the cell phone; and that some denizens of the jungle would very much like to eat you for lunch. You use an allegory. You ride a metaphor, if you can, to experience this living world. And never in all the time in the universe will a metaphor submit to your hand. So you might say that a fantasy writer issues an invitation to that mysterious jungle creature, the winged horse of metaphor. She asks it for a ride. If she is wise she will go humbly, in a state of holy terror. Besides honesty, which is not a windproof garment, there are no leathers and no crash helmets for the riders of metaphor. What makes metaphor so frightening to us mortals is that it carries us, inevitably, straight into the best and the worst of who we are. And, believe me, we are as afraid of our best as of our worst, because both are passionate. Busy tamers of allegory, we want our horses to stay horses, for how would we explain a condor to the neighborhood association?  Click on Image to Enlarge
The Morning Series When I began painting the images which would become the Morning Series, I did not know I was walking into the wilderness terrain of wild metaphors. But I did know I wasn't in Disneyland. I could feel that the stories I had written as a teenager were full of passions, angers, and loves of which my parents and my society would not approve. Otherwise why had I hidden them, torn them up, and set them aside so completely in order to "grow up and be sensible"? I suspected that when I tossed aside those stories I had also tossed aside ideas, intensities, and tasks that were embedded in them. That those lost poignancies might be as important for me as an adult as they had been when I was a teen. Besides, they were stories. I love stories. So I set out to explore them. Ignorance is bliss. This translates as, If we weren't dumb we'd never risk anything. Dumb, and stressed; at a time when life had me backed into a corner, I finally got reckless enough to go looking for the stories that as a teen I had hidden in a tin box under the bed, torn up, and thrown away. I became willing to scramble onto the back of a wild metaphor, never dreaming it would take off at a gallop, and then fly. I began to re-imagine the stories, taking them up where I had left off almost two decades before. In the meantime I had grown into a professional illustrator, so I decided to tell the stories in pictures. I had a job in the afternoons and evenings, and early morning was the only time I had to paint, so I called the story-pictures the Morning Series.
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"To tell the stories in pictures." I was not far into the project before the stories were telling me--telling me how to tell them, that is. This wasn't my first experience of the willing obedience that artists live for, but it was an intense one. I found I was following only two rules:
I painted and painted. The tales and images did indeed hold the energy, danger, and excitement of my teenage stories--so much energy, in fact, that I painted almost every morning for two years. Three hundred and fifteen paintings. At last I came to a stopping place. Not to an end; the universe is a big place, it has more in it than anybody could explore in a trillion trillion lifetimes, and each lifetime has that vastness to wander in. (A Spanish proverb says, "Life is short, but wide.") Rather, it was as though I had collected so many stories that some of them itched to ooze out of paintings and into writing. Finally, to be let out of that tin box under the bed. They became the beginnings of THE SEEKER CHRONICLES: Long Night Dance, Dark Heart, and Listening at the Gate. The complete Morning Series does not belong on a website; it is too long, too varied, too personal, although I sometimes present it in full to creativity seminars, art therapists, and groups interested in deep artistic process. But it is interesting to look at some of the metaphors, or themes, that make up its dreamlike visual narrative. These themes, sometimes called archetypes, appear in many guises in the art and stories of all human beings. (To learn about the "collective unconscious," read the works of the psychologist Carl Jung; a good place to begin is his book Man and His Symbols.) Among the themes of the paintings in the Morning Series are some that grew into the fantasy novels of THE SEEKER CHRONICLES. There you will find wild metaphor, awake and ready to leap into the adventure of story: Earth and Sea
Bereavement
Leaving Home
Entering the unknown
Journeying
The confusing dance of relationship
Confronting the beast (and what, do you suppose, is the beast?)
Initiation
Coming home
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Finally and most importantly, you will find the theme of "growing up." Growing up into an adulthood that does not hide or throw away the passion, terror, and vitality of being young, but owns it and shares it: adulthood as a mature artist, the teller and painter of stories.
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