The Magic of Making a World


Alma Tetto
For JANE, issue ten (2021)


Untitled by Louise Bourgeois, 2005
Fabric, 30.5cm x 42.5cm © The Easton Foundation/ars. Copyright Agency, 2021



Every artist passes through a time, perhaps many times, in which they wonder whether their art is worth the effort. In the winter of 1954, an unnamed writer examining the impulse to create reached out to the French-Cuban-American diarist Anaïs Nin. We find in one of her volumes of diaries Nin’s response to that fundamental question: why does one write?

‘Why one writes is a question I can answer easily, having so often asked it of myself. I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me: the world of my parents, the world of Henry Miller, the world of Gonzalo, or the world of wars. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and re-create myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art. The artist is the only one who knows the world is a subjective creation, that there is a choice to be made, a selection of elements. It is a materialization, an incarnation of [their] inner world. Then [they] hope to attract others into it, [they] hope to impose this particular vision and share it with others. When the second stage is not reached, the brave artist continues nevertheless. The few moments of communion with the world are worth the pain, for it is a world for others, an inheritance for others, in the end. When you make a world tolerable for yourself you make a world tolerable for others.’

Nin’s words are fruitful not just for the writer but for all of us who find ourselves caught in the timeless cycle of life, held in the crossroads between what we once knew and the revelation that our old worldview can no longer hold. If the reason for art is to remake both artist and world in the form of something that can withstand, survive—even reign—among the surrounding wreckage, then the artist is a magician who holds a hidden power to transform the ruins from the inside out. Any of us who realise this creative power can participate in the magic.

The creation myth of the Indigenous North American Hopi tells the story of Spider Woman, who along with a sun god, ruled the universe. Spider Woman births the material world with song. The sound of her song carries its wave over inanimate shapes and, like a spell cast, animates all that it touches. It is song that weaves the web of life, song from which the entire world of form emerges into being.

We find a thread between the powerful song of the Hopi and the sound of word in emergence stories across time and sphere. In the Hindu Vedas, Brahman is the figure who is seen as the creative principle, and he is one with Vāc, or the word. In Egypt, it is Thoth who speaks the world into life; in the act of naming each object, he brings it to life. In the Hebrew Bible, the word is one with creative source: ‘In the beginning was the Word.’

These stories are poetic ways to describe our conscious making of the world, which is another way to say that they are fictions crafted to make sense of our psychic experience. These are not stories that coincide with the factual, literal history of our physiological emergence, but they do reveal something very profound: that the way we name the world defines it. Our definitions of the world around us become the lens through which we sense and experience life.

This world-making power is fraught with risk, and each era has its own coming to terms with its precariousness. Life is enigmatic, alive, always changing. Our world contains unfathomable dimension and inner depth; it is always revealing more of itself, eluding definition, and thus no definition or worldview can ever hold forever. And so each era comes and goes. The ideas that define an era that are just that: finite.

In the wake of global pandemic and the parallel collapse of the charms of colonialism, we’ve become intimate with this realisation that entire worlds are built on certain ideas and assumptions. We felt, and surely continue to sense, the underpinnings of our lives crack beneath the immense weight of the moment. The foundation of our worldview, our psychic structure, our landscapes both inner and outer, are crumbling. We are left without a home, which is to say without a sustainable worldview within which to rest.

And so we are here: between eras, between worlds. Our projections have been revealed as smokescreens, a phantasm between source and shadow. If we are utterly exhausted, it is surely for the sheer processing power necessary to ground within the still shifting smoke, ash, and rubble.

We are tasked with the rebuilding and remaking of our world. We can stand by, calling upon those we see in power and authority to do the work for us, entrusting them to carve and shape the mould that will contain our transformation and organise our new way of being. Or we can realise that the power to create our world lies within. Like Spider Woman of the Hopi, we can offer our voice, breathe life into shapes with our song; like the Egyptian Thoth, we can offer names to that which has not been named, give shape to the shapeless. Slowly, our songs and stories and ideas will begin to fill the void of our rupture. In time, these new songs and new ideas will begin to materialise as a foundation to support the emergence of a new era.

To craft a new world, Nin points to a secret that the artist holds: ‘the world is a subjective creation.’ This knowing holds its own sort of power, a freedom that allows one to gather elements to be transformed into something new. In our imagining and remaking of our world, as in alchemy, the goal is to refine—to take the raw materials of our life and transmute them into something more valuable. The pieces that are selected become our prima materia, the primal matter that is delicately worked over and evolved.

Alchemy serves as a functional model for the work of transformation and re-creation. On the surface, alchemy appears to be simply a metallurgical art—more specifically, the transforming of base metals into gold, a seemingly impossible labour. But the work of alchemy held much deeper, symbolic meaning. More profoundly, it was a psychological art, or an art of the soul. The work of transmuting base metals such as lead into gold was an act of self-inquiry. While the precise work of the alchemist was slow, exacting, and subjective, the alchemist understood their prima materia was rooted within the unconscious. Those base materials represented aspects of the unconscious, and through their various alchemical operations, the alchemist came to see more of psyche, more of the wider matrix within which their self-definitions originated. Their methods attuned the alchemist to a more nuanced and essential view of the self and its interplay with the matter of life. Alchemy, then, was a method of self-realisation.

Alchemy’s magnum opus wasn’t merely the pursuit of making gold but rather the search for the philosopher’s stone. In his Zarathustra seminars, the psychologist C.G. Jung spoke of the relation between the stone and the self. He said, ‘The self is a fact of nature and always appears as such in immediate experiences, in dreams and visions, and so on; it is the spirit in the stone, the great secret which has to be worked out, to be extracted from nature, because it is buried in nature herself.’ The refinement of baser materials into more noble form was a working over of the self, an uncovering of one’s true nature.

As the projects of imperialism and colonialism show, aims of refinement can be fatal and repressive. Deluded ideas of perfection exploded into fascism that made—and still makes—indelible marks of horror on our human history. Where alchemy differs is in its use of the unconscious. Rather than using reason and the known to control its processes and outcomes, alchemy relies on its materials to reveal the way forward. Certainty is replaced with the understanding that knowledge is limited and subjective, and what one knows cannot be forced upon the world to produce any new outcome. Alchemy knows that to uncover something truly noble, knowledge and reason must be permeable to the unknown, the hidden, and unseen.

If the horrors of colonialism being unearthed now are to be listened to, we must hear the voices that have been silenced and smothered. Ghosts are rising from the dust in multitudes, and they come bearing mes- sages. In just the past month of this writing, over a thousand small bodies of Indigenous children have been discovered in unmarked graves across my home continent of North America—burial sites for children who were forcibly taken from their families and communities to be “assimilated” within federal and church-run boarding schools. The surface has only been scratched. Assimilation may as well be synonymous with death—if not of the body, then of the culture and of the spirit. We see this same erasure played out—and playing out—in various forms and to fatal extent across the globe.

The voices of ghosts and those of their living ancestors are calling out to be heard. These stories, long refused as formal histories, hold traumas that will continue to haunt and poison us from beyond our walls of collective reason if not integrated. We must make permeable the walls that have defined the view of who we are so that we may see and hear that which we have denied. If we listen closely, we hear the voices first as whisper and then as urgent and resounding. We must attune our ears and hearts to forgotten figures of the past to forge the way forward.

As Nietzsche observed, ‘Immediate self-observation is not enough, by a long way, to enable us to learn to know ourselves. We need history, for the past continues to flow through us in a hundred channels.’ History, we know, has shaped itself of voices with the most social authority and resonance—voices that were amplified and deemed reasonable enough to receive collective attention, ensuring that marginalised voices remained within the fringe. The history that flows through us in a hundred channels is not formal history of the books but those histories that dwell within the collective unconscious.

Nietzsche follows a long Western metaphysical tradition towards self-knowledge. ‘Know thyself’ is the first of three maxims inscribed on the entrance of the temple of Apollo at Delphi, oracular words attributed to the god of poetry, music, healing, and truth. A century or so later, Socrates would affirm in Memorabilia that the lack of self-knowledge is the beginning of delusion. The fundamental wisdom of self-inquiry trails through Western modernity: Montaigne, Shakespeare, Goethe, Jung.

Our methods for excavating the self have varied in form, and yet the impulse remains: our aim for self-knowledge arises from a vital urge for meaning. It is to discover our profound entanglement with life and, through the intricacy and nuance, a guiding sense of purpose. Self-knowledge comes not just from looking within but, as alchemy shows, within the images and matter of our lives. ‘As within, so without,’ states a major tenet of alchemy. The alchemists’ work of freeing the spirit trapped within matter reflected a nature of infinitely subjective depth: a web, a world, a self.

The revelation of alchemy is that matter possesses life, and as such, refuses to be pinned down. Ideas, tied up in matter and our material world, also tend toward the fluid. Thought flows like a river. The world, like the self, cannot be fully known, for it is in process: dynamic, potent, fertile, and ever-transforming as the known and unknown collide and regenerate. Ideas that harden like shells become impermeable to the unconscious, crystallising into dogma. Dogma is definite, authoritative, and held to be indisputably true. Any strongly grasped conviction that denies challenging, that refuses to yield to new ideas, that doesn’t allow the unknown to penetrate its walls and inform its shape, is an antithesis of life. Ideas are spirited, and the structures that hold our ideas must be permeable to the ways of the spirit and of life, evolving in constant interplay. This permeability and openness to something other to break through and potentially influence form is a quality of spirit.

The view of spirit in all things has long been held by Indigenous tribes and traditions. Before reason took its throne over image and imagination, the world was animate. From the Aboriginal to the Ancient Greek and Egyptian, cosmic forces were imaged as gods, and all things possessed animism, or animate life. Like the song of the Hopi Spider Woman, the spirit of the word is an animating force; forms of spoken word, name, story, and sound knit a world of meaning.

Meaning is made in the collision of one subject with another. The notion of erotic ecology is built upon this contact between things, an idea that bends toward Indigenous cosmologies. ‘Contact forms the scaffolding of reality,’ says Andreas Weber, the biologist and philosopher whose recently published book Matter and Desire revisions ecology into an erotic process of desire, connection, and meaning. As he observed, the shape of a growing plant is an expression of its perception and its reaching toward the sun. It is in the meeting with the outer world that meaning is born, as one senses and translates the perceived into an inner reality. For Weber, ‘Meaning is the result of the translation of a material outer world into a meaningful inner world.’

Meaning does not give answers, but it does become an instrument of life— something that connects us with our erotic pulse for living, our life force. Meaning is a mode of self-discovery in which we discover ourselves in the other and, as such, within the cosmic scheme of life. By making meaning, we knit ourselves within the fabric of our world; we become entangled. To avoid becoming ensnared within the maya, the magic and illusion of our own making, we remember that the world is never as it appears to be. Maya means the world is not what it seems—there is always more than meets the eye, depths beyond the surface. One must not hold too tightly.

The Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler observed this paradox: that we dwell within a realm of meanings, and yet ‘The realm of meanings is the realm of mistakes.’ He said, ‘We do not experience pure circumstances; we always experience circumstances in their significance for [humanity]. Even at its source our experience is qualified by our human purposes.’ Our words for “wood,” “stone,” “mountain,” and “river,” hold meaning only as they relate to us as humans. And yet, Adler cautions against the pursuit of escaping meaning, for it would reduce our actions to meaninglessness. ‘But no human being can escape meanings,’ he said. ‘We experience reality always through the meaning we give it; not in itself, but as something interpreted. It will be natural to suppose, therefore, that this meaning is always more or less unfinished, incomplete; and even that it is never altogether right.’

Contribution is our true meaning, Adler proposed. One of the ways in which we create our world is through the stories we tell, and our stories are told in every medium. The beauty of myth is that it speaks to the soul and the soul-making nature of our lives. It is a poetic interweaving of the inner and outer, the seen and unseen. Myth is non-literal; it doesn’t make claim to absolute truth and objectivism, which makes it a powerful and steadfast form of carrying forth meaning. As the French poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau said, ‘History is truth that becomes an illusion. Mythology is an illusion that becomes reality.’

The world is shaped by our words and stories. Nin’s insight of the artist’s power to recreate the world does not discount the dark and infinite entanglement of heritage, of an inherited reality with its cosmic patterns, memories, and habits of being. And yet, the artist lives to challenge the old patterns to see and live anew. In the diary, Nin lamented, ‘When we totally accept a pattern not made by us, not truly our own, we wither and die.’ In the pursuit of regenerating life, the artist takes all that is given, selecting the pieces to transmute and transform. They pull elements from both their inner and outer landscape, allowing them to merge and dance, burn and distil, until something new emerges: an alchemy, a magic, a gift for the world.

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