Because I fell this post is important the latest entry to the journals has been moved here so this one can be maintained.
It has been stated I am a mystic and I have found places on the land and in the water where I was given visions. Those visions inspired paintings and drawings. I call them “dreaming places”. The name is unimportant. You can call them whatever you want although if you can find them, like me, you will not ever tell anyone where they are.
With the new post-modernist urge to blame white men for everything and cut everybody off from cultural boxes not judged to be their own I feel very threatened. Some of my work in the future was planned with Chinese script and loose reference to Chinese mythology. I studied some of this and practiced the martial arts and practiced the mythological concepts as well. Somewhere up ahead will be a fight to get the work hung. I am too ill to explain my history to every fanatic who wants to strip me of my experience. I will not have my creative power stolen nor will I be boxed into some prejudicial world of political tropes and paradigms. I have works with cave painting themes and one with my own translation of x-ray painting.
Most of my work is about mystical things and complex understandings of images and symbols. I am Australian and my experience. MY CULTURE includes the indigenous images which cascade over my mind all the time. My inspiration is from this land and I extend my studies of Western beliefs to the Chinese, the African (and more) and then to the local dreaming places I have found.
None of these things were stolen from their owners. I do not recognize owners for local sites I have discovered. They are living things existing beyond our ownership and certainly unknown to recent Indigenous populations. It is possible and likely they were never known by more than one or two vision seers including myself. Not across all time.
I do not apologize. Once some of the symbolic sources may have been limited to the culture which made them but now I am in the new wave of world educated minds. It is the background where this is all shared culture because even before the internet we had a global community. Not globalism of the neo-cons or the parasitic globalism of the wandering investors but a globalism where modest and re-affirming nationality did not attract desperate attempts to pull down everything or become mired in outraged sulking. It needs to be said I do not claim images by other people. I am inspired by them and I borrow symbols and emotional channels to speak and create the overall vision
I have to go a little further on this vein despite this being a long post already.
When I was young learning western mysticism, then Chinese mysticism, European and North American I wondered about the geological and cultural contexts of what I was reading or learning. Some people say we created God in our own image. I didn’t see that. What I saw is how we wrought our understanding of our interaction and contract with our Gods to appear as we would have it. What ever we found when those people sensitive to sacred things found them, we imposed our need and will on afterwards. They became bloated and corrupted and hidden within volumes of priestly politics created so the people not able to reach sacred planes could still use reference to them for their personal and institutional authority
I realized I was in not in Jerusalem, Ireland or Manitoba or Shanghai. I was here in Australia and the practice or observance of things from those lands, while not wasted, did not recognize any local sacred influence or respond to this land’s individual patterns of power. Lore might be a better term.
I had been sensitive to some visions when my mind was open and I was in those places. I am not well trained so it was not much.
They were here once. The people who understood the sacred in the land were rare but they had left their shades here and there. The land itself also had sacred things beyond human. These things existed without reference to us. In many places Christians and Moslems have destroyed those sacred things simply because they could never stand the competition of real sacred places tested against a priesthood that had nothing but the desire to continue its clutch on entire civilizations.
What they did, and still do, was the equivalent of finding angels and murdering them so you don’t lose the pretence of the Church holding the authority of God. It is like finding the last colony of lions on Earth and killing them so the spot in David Attenborough’s documentary, where he declares them irredeemable and extinct, is not proven wrong and thus an embarrassment. It is that cruel and as much of a catastrophe to the planet.
I asked living Indigenous people and apart from a few friends who had been stripped of any sacred depth by their time in lost generations I was treated with ridicule and racism. It appeared the people who survived had forgotten, if they ever knew. In their urge to wrap themselves in the cloak of their genetic geological presence they had fooled themselves into thinking the spiritual land was only open to them. This was a surprise to me on several levels but most succinctly when they expressed not even a hint of any actual sacred vision. They would deem it their racial preserve despite actually being unable to connect in any way or even believing it was real! They have been too totally brutalized by their mission orphanages and this consumer culture. Have I repeated myself? It is not a rant is it?
I have to cover this ground. Whatever you may think of me, or life, this complex ideology was becoming real to me before I hit puberty
We are learning more about what this land was really like and how they really lived. I am almost sickened to find how much our understanding of the people here was dumbed down. When I was finally removed from scripture at high school and a non Christian class was established I had been loudly lamenting the corrosion of the sacred holdings of the Indigenous people and their cultural genocide in the orphanages and missions. I would not hear that the church represents the God of love.
What I will not do now is blind myself to the visions and sacred things I found at my own effort and which throng to speak through me, broken and crazed vehicle that I am!
The post-modernist leaning to indulge the fantasies of the outraged and make these delusions of cultural boxes into claims of “appropriation” cripples many political careers and corrupts the pathways for many artists. I will not give up the visions and sacred threads I have studied hard to connect.