Noah Alexander Isaac Stein

From Jung to the Abzu of ancient Sumerian myth, the watery depths are a constantly reemergent symbol for the buried psyche. A place of great danger as well as shinning treasure, it is only through a clear perception of the unconscious that the soul can break free of conditioned response and experience the ecstatic unity that is sometimes termed the divine.    

What is hidden remains inexorably part of the self, and to deny it is to close in the concept of self, building barriers until the fiery light that permeates all existence becomes a tiny candle surrounded by a sea of darkness. No matter how tightly this blanket of darkness is wrapped however, nothing exists in isolation. Rather than protect the fragile ego, the severing of undesired aspects from the concept of self creates a sea of monsters; no longer part of a complete whole, the mind perceive in its own shadows independence.

In contrast, to accept hidden aspects of self is to transform the very darkness that is feared into the essence of light, which is knowledge. Once the self has achieved this wholeness, the process of incorporation may be continued, extending equally into the external world, of which the individual is an invisible a part as the unconscious is of the self. Although the individual mind is the seat of this experience, this does not contain the boundless expanse of existence inside the ego. In the light of totality, the illusion of ego is finally extinguished, and reality is at last perceived in undifferentiated glory beyond the mere human.

It is a strange paradox that out of the collective can emerge a singular intent of direction that is against each individual constituent will. Emergent behavior like a shadowy behemoth, takes its dim form at the peripheries of our consciousness, even as its winding intricacies form an inescapable center.  This paradox is at the heart of the Anthropocene. The leviathan of human progress carries us onward to an uncertain light, and we are the helpless links of its great sinews. 

The title of this piece is taken from the opening lines of a W.B. Yeats poem; describing in apocalyptic terms the spiraling out of order into chaos, I was reminded of the pacific trash gyre and the kaleidoscopic patterns of current. While the imagery of this painting presents a tangible environmental anchor to the dream of entropic undoing, I see in these symbols an equal connection to the realms of spirit and metaphor. The endangered marine life depicted in the piece is both a literal representation of an ecosystem caught in a spiral of extinction, and also ourselves, caught in ever remoter turnings of collective action. Swept into great movements of which we are both fisher and quarry, the animals are the titanic ghosts of our collective unconsciousness, rushing towards an unknowable end. There is beauty here too however, as even in the moment of the onrush, we are left as observers of an ineffable beauty that extends into, and transcends, the gyre.