#18 - Breaking 4th & th Walls

So the journey has come to this - the Imaginary Country. My Imaginary Country - Specifically.

I didn't mean to go here, exactly, I didn't mean to make this so personal - I meant to make this whole thing kind of iconic. As Iconic as I can. On the other hand - #18 is supposed to be the Moon, and the moon is supposed to represent something, or some idea that is... idiomatic. The Moon - and the Star that preceded it - they're too broad and encompassing to efficiently carry a single meaning. I know context is everything, I know the medium is the message. What is the subtext of this though? I'm posting my paintings - on the internet, and these paintings are interpretations of ancient symbols of divination. It's pretty crazy that something like this - that such a project could even come about.


The Unreal. You know - writing/painting/creating a new interpretation of the Tarot on the internet for later consumption... If I read this in William Gibson 20 years ago I think it would have been... Alienating, confusingly idiosyncratic, it would have broken the suspension of disbelief. And instead - in the actual cyberpunk future - I'm doing just this thing. Unreal. Unreality.

So How do you come to the unreal? In the progress of the cards - and you know - I'm going to do a summation of them all, I'm going to do a post, summing it up, but for the moment we have The Unreal coming from out of Inspiration, itself coming from out of ruin. Previously I've mentioned that inspiration is of unknowable provenance, and from it we are driven to create. So I have here- my creation. The Moon, the moon of the Tarot is supposed to suggest illusions, misguided or not, unreality. And unreality is MY SPECIALTY. So I painted my weird unreal solace, my conspicuous place of retreat and my inspired realm of personal power. Is it childish? Sometimes. Sometimes, maybe, maybe indulgent. Maybe. But shame on the person who has no solace in the unreal, who has no dream of untrue places, of where you go when you die, or what you dreamed last night, or what you might hope that can never ever be. It's a shame to have no inner life, no world to dream of, an artisinal world made to order. Tailored to your specifications. This is complicated. It's possible, you know - to be terrible at this, to have Mary Sue characters, a perfect, unassailable utopia. My imaginary country is no such place, my characters suffer needlessly, are grotesque and failed. So why? Why have conflicts in your handmade world?


Because it isn't wish fulfillment, it isn't crass indulgence. It's pure and creative. It is the departure from the material world, fleeing ruin, joining inspiration, translating oneself into the new world, by imagination.

But Verisimilitude.
What good is a world if it lacks believable hooks to hold on to. It's beliefs, the ideas about the Reality that we attach ourselves to after all - the ideas, the entertainments, the dreams - so all of the imaginary dreams we have, the artifice - we attach to it, are hooked by it. So verisimilitude. You adopt things, change them. Devise language, writing, syntax.


And you commit yourself to being amphibious. Between worlds, the outward world of effects and the inner world of designs.