Laking a Twine for a Bock (version 20)

I thought I made up the word “bock“, which is included in the title for this piece. But then I searched for the word upon a suspicion that it might be an obscure word not commonly used. Sure enough, it is an actual word. It’s a dark lager beer with a high alcohol content, which is made in the Fall and drunk in the Spring. This just added more interesting character to the story behind the title I used. 

It looks like a murky, smokey phenomenon, for the center of interest in this image, in an underground cavern on an alien moon. The smokey or gray parts look like halos, adding a mysterious spooky quality to them. Like they are the ectoplasm from supernatural activity. 

It’s titled Laking a Twine for a Bock. I changed some letters and words in the expression Paul Klee used “taking a line for a walk” when he summarized what he did when he made art. As I mentioned, this piece looks like its an abstract scape of an underground cavern, so there is what looks like a pool of molten lava in the foreground to me. The pool of molten lava associates with the word in the title “lake.” This image was derived from a physical drawing I made with pens, markers, and paint that had almost nothing to do with this current digital incarnation. That’s why this one is “version 20.” I made 19 prior versions. 

Twine associates with the word “line” and both of these things can be used to wind up in loops or other shapes. The fact that the illustration has a dark theme to it associates with the word “bock”, which means dark beer. I made the drawing neither in the Spring nor the Fall, but I feel it still can be visually consumed for those who have a taste for this form of edification. 

I remember seeing a science fiction novel laying around the house when I was a kid about some kind of intelligent lifeforms that live on the surface of a star. I couldn’t remember the name of that novel, nor who the author was. Neither could my dad when I asked him about it. So I decided to put ye olde SEO to work on Google to see what popped up. After a few rewordings, I found a novel called Dragon’s Egg, by Robert L. Forward. I realized that this is the novel that I remember from childhood because it’s about intelligent creatures the size of sesame seeds who live life at a pace of a million times faster than humans on a neutron star with a gravity of 67 billion times more than Earth. Humorously, the creatures are called “cheela.” Cheelas on Earth are Indian pancakes. 

I mention that novel because it’s always been an inspiration lingering in the back of my head of intelligent lifeforms that don’t necessarily take the humanoid form, but still possess consciously intelligent organizing powers and abilities. That’s what I think of when I look at this artwork. I also think of Paul Klee’s puppets and dolls. 

In this image, I’m trying to visualize characterized organizing functions of intelligences other than human, which is rather difficult to do because most people have little to no interest in anything nonhuman. So I’m trying to make them human related in the form of art so as to establish connections with the imagination and unconscious mind more than the daily drag of basic survivalism. This segues into Carl Jung‘s idea of the unconscious mind, and Richard Schwartz‘s concept of parts in psychology to me because the parts Schwartz describes composing the human psyche are sometimes “mute” or they don’t communicate by words, but they are still there.

Opening up this doorway leads to shamanism I’ve found, which starts with Jung’s concept of the Active Imagination, which actually is a book about the topic that he wrote. Other ideas come to mind, such as The Trickster, as described by Joseph Campbell, and his research into ancient myths.