TK: I sort of think that there is this unified consciousness and that’s where, a
holistic world, and that’s where the arts come from. This explains why the world
looks upon the novel as an entertainment and the novelist looks upon it as life and
death. There’s a crucial utterance that he or she has to get out of them or else.
Often the final result is banal but it is, nonetheless, driven by this consciousness of
making an utterance. I am aware of the fact that our souls are thus designed.
The artist has a sense of art being something more than in a corner,
something more than the Australia Council, something pervasive and important.
And the other people who recognize that are dictators but in your normal pluralist
liberal democracy, the arts tended to get to be deprived of their magic and put in
the corner along with religion and so on.
But I feel that the tree of knowledge occurred, that we ate of the tree when
we became sedentary people, when we began to produce crops and departed
probably from the way of life of animist hunter gatherers which suited this holistic
view of the world, of the importance of the utterance, of the importance of the
painting, of the importance of the dance. Because in aboriginal society, of course,
the Dance was more than dance it was a remaking of the earth, the painting was
more than a painting it was a land title and a means of connection with the Deity or
the ancestors. I t was... and everyone was a priest as well as everyone being a
poet, a singer, a dancer ... they were dancers because the arts were a remaking of
the earth.
Now when you write I think you’ve got a sense that you’re potentially
remaking the earth, you hardly ever do, but I think that’s the weight, that’s the sort
of obsessiveness which gets books written and I think it’s the obsessiveness that
drives the writer, painter, whatever and which makes their activity so dangerous, so
solitary and so dangerous to them and ultimately, so dangerous to the way people
perceive themselves.
I also believe very strongly that the process of writing a novel or painting or
anything like that, is to release the part of the brain where all the Jungian
archetypes exist and where everyone is a painter and a dancer, and everyone is
Christ, and Odysseus and Sisyphus and all the rest of it ... I don’t trust the
doctrinaire view ... that a man can’t write from a woman’s point of view or vice
versa. There are cultural problems involved in cross over but they’re not as great
because it’s the universal and unified mind which is brought into play by writing.
ron
(Ron)
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