What does the well hold?
Why do I write? Who am I as a writer? Either is difficult to answer. All questions of human identity are.
I could answer, “Well, I’m driven to do it.” That’s partially true. I’m driven by something not fully conscious. I’ll make a value judgment: The best art comes from something within artists that they found within themselves.
Spending my life in discovery excites me. What if, when I leave this domain, I’m still asking questions — still searching, like a private Magellan of an inner world? What a thrilling life to live, exploring to the end, stepping off the cliff, like the Fool in the Tarot deck, his playful dog nipping at his heel, urging him onward!
Sometimes I think writing must be some kind of psychosis. The National Institute of Mental Health describes psychosis as “a collection of symptoms that affect the mind, where there has been some loss of contact with reality.” This describes my experience with writing. When I’m writing, I gradually experience a different reality. I lose myself in the setting, the time, the character(s), the moment — i.e., I am, to a greater or lesser extent there, not here. And the more immersed I am in there, the better the writing. After I return from the dream to this world, editing can begin. That’s what I’m doing now, as I finish this. But even when I’m in “the editing world”, I may make brief excursions back into that other world. I’m just more capable of conscious judgments about the writing that occurred there — sort of like a negotiation between the two worlds.
The unconscious mind is a well that yields its abundance. The conscious mind tastes what the well yields for its quality and refreshment.
But then NIMH goes on to say this: “During an episode of psychosis, a person's thoughts and perceptions are disrupted and they may have difficulty recognizing what is real and what is not.” Well, that’s not my experience! I always know I’m in a dream world. I have little difficulty telling real from illusion or returning to this reality (other than perhaps irritation that I must leave it for now). Overall I return with a better ability to see the reality I live in more clearly.
Carl Jung once said, “Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”
Ever the explorer of the inner well of dreams, Carl Jung, believed that exploring the inner world is a way of awakening to a great sense of the world. It’s a paradox.
Carl Gustav Jung
Writing is my way of discovering what I don’t yet know, of evoking what wishes to express itself through me. Writing draws from the ever-giving well.
I’m currently writing about the worst human I can imagine — like a Hitler or a Stalin. I’m hardly a horrible person like my character. But we’re all human. Each of us harbors some darkness within — or at least its potential. And because we share that, if we dare look deeply into ourselves, we can access what any of us might feel and think to understand how they became that way — just by looking within ourselves. If we’re honest with ourselves, we all know anger, hate, and prejudice.
What separates us from one another? I believe that conditions, choices, and events accumulate within us like layers of membranes. I do not have to peel back the membranes within myself very far to find the darkness and the light that lives there. Then I see the layers I harbor that separate me from you.
“But why would you explore your darkness at all?” you might ask. “Why that well?”
Well, I want to expand my compassion. Knowing that we all share (at least some) darkness within allows me to increase my compassion for people not like me. And I can look at an evil presence in this world and say, “Ah! There but for the grace of God go I.” Behind all the masks we wear and those layers we accumulate, we are one.