In the early springtime of 1994 I was
soon to graduate from design school, this time hopefully with some practical
skills that I could build a livelihood out of. The use of computers in design
was something fairly new, even then, so up until that time, our instruction had
focused on tradition means of drafting, cut-and-paste, and other mechanical and
manual means. I’d found that my heretofore immature sense of the aesthetic had
suddenly opened up – the use of these materials, the juxtaposition of shapes,
shades, textures, the activity of such elements within a frame had come
naturally, I think as a result of being for some time free of the more
destructive forms of behavior I’d struggled with. I’d felt, when younger, that
these things should be natural to me,
but I’d struggled ineptly. But now as I worked I felt often a sense of
something trying to express itself through me, an otherness that ran at odd
angles to the world as I understood it, or failed to understand it, or the
world as it seemed to be regarded consensually. I was once again outside of it.
At moments I would be frozen by some chance arrangement that, though perhaps
lacking in beauty, held for me some profound sense of this different
perspective. Toward the end of my schooling, with the introduction of this
technology and the use of software, the practice of design became a different
game entirely. I could think and work much faster. It was in the midst of
starting to work with page layouts and arranging texts that something started
to happen, that I had something like a “download” of information from somewhere
else. I began to see arrangements of overlaid texts quite vividly in my
imagination, and this was wildly exciting to me. I don’t know that these texts
themselves held any particular meaning – they were not literal texts, just
vague blocks of copy in my mind’s eye – but in their layering and positioning
against one another, somehow in the spaces in between and their dynamic
relation there seemed something huge, an intelligence so vast and alien that any
contact with it was enough to burn my
smaller, more limited mind and change me, derange me, maybe both to open up and
damage me. I was, in a way, activated. It had come not in the midst of any
actual work but just as I was leaving school on one particular afternoon, walking
through the parking lot to my rusty old Volkswagen Beetle.
I’ve often since then felt that my best
work has had something to do with the transmission of an alien perspective,
that perhaps this was partly the meaning of my fourteen-year-old’s vision of
the very flat, very graphic glyph over the mountains. My perspective and the
alien one are often similar, if we’re not the same thing. But we are also very different,
and that is why I find its perspective so fascinating.
It is important to make note of the fact
that my pursuit of this particular muse has almost never brought me any success
commercially. On occasion, in certain fine art contexts, it has inspired some
critical acclaim. But in my career as a graphic designer, it has almost never
brought me, beyond the deep personal satisfaction and the excitation of trying
to experience and communicate this thing, into anything but conflict with those
that I am working for, with their worldly agendas and expectations. Perhaps
that is my childish inability to see beyond my own goals toward my paying
clients’ or employers’ needs, toward what I have actually been employed for.
Perhaps what I call this muse of the alien perspective is really something far
less exotic and much more commonly neurotic. Certainly that would be my
ex-wife’s way of seeing things. But despite the possibility of an overly-rich
fantasy life, there may be something more complex at work. Whatever it is, it does
not seem much concerned with my adaptation to the conditions of societal norms.
NOTE: In his essay
by “The Path of the Numinous – Living and Working with the Creative Muse” Jonathan
Zap very precisely articulates this same dynamic within the creative
personality, both in terms of its (the internal Muse’s) essential otherness and need for expression
through the medium of the artist, and for the sense of disregard if not
outright antagonism it has for the requirements of the quotidian. I couldn’t
say for sure now if I’d heard this essay previous to my writing the above
entry, but probably I had. What I describe in this implied context of the alien
or UFO experience is a well-worn path of the mind relating to itself, although
this invalidates the approach to the alien only insofar as the alien is
considered as entirely and only
literally. But I think that anyone who has experienced it, in whatever form,
knows there is more to it than that. In my relation to what I experience as the
alien, which is largely a relationship of creative imagination, the alien may
very well be literal, but it is also certainly an intrapsychic phenomenon. It
is my current thread of narrative exploration (or ‘hermeneutic’ as Jeffrey
Kripal expresses it) that the wholly other, which the alien by definition is,
is something existing holographically within myself, the dark side of the
psyche, as well as the light in the sky, the color surface, the ephemeral
movement, the sense of being watched, the derangement of the real. It is
potentially both/and – myself while at the same time itself, whatever either of
these ‘things’ are.
