in the mine pt. 2

grab your pickaxe (aka your camera aka a mirror)

---

Note: this piece is fairly masturbatory, if I get jizz on your face I’m sorry, I was aiming for my stomach. I’m exploring some of the ideas herein in a longer, more structured piece but I started getting ideas to write this on my morning walk and if I don’t run with ‘em I’ll lose ‘em. Thank you for your consideration.

---

I admire David Lynch and I respect his “figure it out yourself” attitude regarding his art. Having said that, I will offer you some analysis of my piece in the mine: it’s about narcissism and God and love. The Last Psychiatrist has written extensively on narcissism; it’s arguably the defining psychological pathology of the age in which we live.¹² TLP doesn’t define narcissism in the same way as the DSM, in fact, he argues that you use the DSM definition of Narcissitic Personality Disorder as a defense against recognizing your own narcissism. In fact, almost all of your introspective conclusions are a defense against the truth: this is sort of a foundational “truth” of psychoanalysis—your unconscious erects psychological defenses to protect your ego. Your dreams contain manifest content, the stuff you actually see and consciously experience, and that stuff is a defense against the latent content, what it actually means. And maybe here you recognize an implication of this post-modern³ psychological theory: if psychoanalysis is true, then why isn’t the analysis of the latent content another defense? In analyzing something, haven’t you actually revealed something about your own unconscious? And so the Russian doll grows.⁴

TLP elaborates on his conception of narcissism by saying that you⁵ keep a psychological ledger in your mind and you always need to be ahead in your ledger. You do this primarily by depriving others of satisfaction. No I don’t do that, you say. To which TLP would respond: that is a defense against recognizing how much you love depriving others. The key to overcoming the ledger would be to love. In fact loving would entail willingly entering into debt in the psychological ledger, or, better yet, not keeping a ledger at all. But you can’t do that because that would require action and you can’t act. Because in order to act without being unconsciously motivated by coming out ahead in your internal ledger you would first need to fantasize. And you can’t even fantasize because you can’t even desire. Because you were raised inside a media-dream where everything constantly trains and reinforces WHAT to desire (and so were your parents). Porn world: you found your fantasy (produced by someone else), aren’t you lucky. Now you don’t need to fantasize, at all (in fact, you can’t), isn’t that nice! So you desire things you have been SHOWN, and, actually, we have a term for someone who desires and fantasizes and acts: psychopath. :)

More fundamentally, the narcissist is obsessed with how he is perceived by others. He must project a certain identity and others must nod in agreement. Sound familiar, social media users AKA everyone using the internet these days?

ANALYZING ART

I’ve made paintings and drawings for pretty much my entire life. Artists have different techniques, methods, goals when they create something. When I set out to make a painting, I don’t really think about “what it means” consciously. I began reading Carl Jung in my early twenties and that’s when I was introduced to the idea of the unconscious communicating through symbols which can sometimes point toward archetypes. Suddenly, art that I made without much conscious consideration became fraught with meaning. Here’s one in particular:

It’s a statue of Artemis, my favorite Greek goddess, split in half, with a spider hunting a fly, because I like spiders, with a square and a triangle to balance the composition. Legitimately, the conscious consideration that went into this piece was: I like Artemis and spiders so I will make this. I looked at it with my fresh, new Carl Jung glasses and suddenly: Artemis represents the archetype of the “Wild Woman” or The Divine Feminine and she is split in half, unbalanced, in front of a square which symbolizes balance and wholeness, the four cardinal directions or elements, individuation, above a triangle, a symbol of transformation, the integration of opposites, behind a spider hunting a fly, which could symbolize the triumph of creative feminine energy over base instinct, or integration of the shadow to balance a lopsided psyche. I had a similar experience with many other paintings I made, they were actually communicating something and honestly it freaked me out. The night when I saw all these things in my paintings I had a powerful dream and I woke up believing in God.⁶

IDENTITY, GOD, AND LOVE

Ok, so back to narcissism and my piece in the mine: you don’t really get to control how others perceive you. Sure, you can to some extent, you can take a shower and wear certain clothes and make certain internet posts, but at the end of the day, others are individuals too and they’ve got an entire world going on just like you and the totality of how they perceive you is outside of your control. And if that enrages you and you’re obsessed with how your identity is perceived, then it’s probably pathological, you’re a narcissist, you’re sick. But also, others having more of you, others being able to think of you any way they want outside of your control, that’s literally true, that’s part of being. Your identity requires others. And willingly giving that up, offering more of you than you have and not caring, that’s loving. The cure to narcissism is loving others, they’re around you all the time just waiting. And that’s what existence itself is. It is God’s love. It is God offering more than He is, it requires the participation of others; it’s there around you all the time.

OTHERS AND THE CORRECT INTERPRETATION

There’s another unconscious symbol in my painting of Artemis which I didn’t see myself but one of my father’s drunk girlfriends blurted out when she saw the painting: “why is there a dick?” Well, to me, it was a spider hunting a fly but she saw a dick and balls. And what’s funny is that that interpretation, the phallus, makes the painting more complete. The creative, transformative symbol of the triangle together with the phallus, rising up toward an unbalanced feminine psyche, to bring about balance and wholeness, the square. And I wouldn’t have seen that, at all, without someone else pointing it out: this experience was a microcosm of the lesson of needing others; a drunk woman can cure your solipsism, I swear.

Now, having said all that, why doesn’t David Lynch tell us why Eraserhead is his most spiritual movie? Why doesn’t he tell us what his art means? I think it’s because David Lynch loves us. The art means X, ok you can stop thinking about it, show’s over, go home. Or maybe Lynch is offering himself to you, and he’s giving you a way to connect with him and others, a conversation you can have with a guy who says the movie sucks, an opportunity to step outside the hall of mirrors. And that wasn’t his conscious intent, he was putting together images and symbols and they communicated something to him and they communicated something to you and they communicated something else to the guy who hated the movie. When the artist tells you what the art means, most people accept this, the art becomes fossilized, the music stops. But maybe he’s wrong. And maybe he didn’t see the dick and balls he drew. And if he told you what he saw then you would be more inclined to agree with him, your ability to see diminished. And maybe he loves you so much that he wants to hear what you have to say.

1. Internet autism is narcissism, mister pornography organizer

2. A narcissist would SO say that, wouldn’t he

3. The philosophical rejection of meta-narratives, the death of God, the relativity of truth: the bottomless pit of psychoanalysis was bound to spawn in such an environment.

4. This is, to some degree, my retarded, bastardized version of one of John Murray Cuddihy’s theses in The Ordeal of Civility: Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, according to Cuddihy, was his way to cope with being an outsider Jew in polite European society. So Cuddihy has debunked psychoanalysis with…psychoanalysis. (He goes deeper than that, I’m being a bit of an ass and this is a footnote in a masturbatory internet essay, but I’m not far off the mark.) But we shouldn’t really be surprised: the death of God opens Pandora’s Box, everything must become “scientific” including psychology (which literally means the study of the soul lol) and you, fundamentally, cannot derive morality scientifically. So you can’t have a framework, at all, of “the good,” if you are being “scientific” in your psychology (you can when you’re a liar, many such cases!), so how can you justify doing anything? You live inside a hall of mirrors, of course. It sure looks infinite. What’s the difference between a solipsist and a narcissist? Nothing. (That’s not a joke.)

5. TLP often writes in second person and sometimes reading his work I’ll think: projecting much! Like maybe TLP is an extremely self-aware narcissist and that’s why his descriptions of narcissism are so scary and accurate. Or maybe my pathology is that I’m borderline, the complement to the narcissist, desperate for an identity and the narcissist is more than happy to oblige: TLP, the narcissist, describes narcissism, and me, the borderline without a clear sense of self, says that is SO me! Or maybe that self-diagnosis is a defense to shield myself from recognizing my own narcissism. (Or maybe we’ll cut the Gordian Knot of Jewish neurotic psychoanalytic perversion AKA cope through love and action, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Jack off or have sex: the choice was never yours.)

6. I don’t really think I’m important enough for God to communicate with me directly, maybe it was an angel, maybe it was some aspect of my own psyche, I don’t really care, I simply believed in God when I woke up.