Michael Harding: The artist as terrorist is a dying species

I suppose it would take a therapist a few years to figure out my dreams, but mostly I find them healthy enough. Recently I dreamed of a bird nursing on the breast of a small elf. Both creatures were the same size and both seemed to be enjoying themselves, and I woke content that in my sleep I had reached far enough into the unconscious to discover animals and mythic creatures. Me and the bird and the elf were sitting on a rock in the middle of the ocean and that too seemed okay.

When I woke up I was looking out my window in the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig, staring at a lake as still as glass, where four swans drifted across the smooth surface with their arses stuck up in the air and their necks down under looking for stuff in the mud. No wonder I was dreaming of mythic creatures. I had been in the centre for almost a week and its exquisite serenity is a fierce catalyst to the imagination.

Nowadays artists tend to be private, reserved creatures. In the old days at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre the creative inmates engaged more intensely with each other. Everyone was unconscious, in Jungian terms, and they all argued at the evening meal, often in antagonistic rage, projecting their unconscious “stuff” at someone else across the table and flinging barbed insults at one another. Artists argued with writers, feminists wrestled with arrogant young poets and old novelists argued with everyone.

Refined places

But that day is gone. Artist retreats are now refined places, where tamed minds shelter in their rooms, working on their craft, and do dinner with the smallest of fuss and great dollops of civility. Sometimes you’d think they weren’t artists at all, or that perhaps art had become so mannered and conscious that it was nothing more than a kind of supplement to the educational system or a method of propagating fashionable ideas.

The idea of an art object as a real presence, a symbol of some deeper reality beyond the surface of our own little world, has long gone. The idea of a poem or image being lobbed into our world like a message from some metaphysical realm has vanished in the more clinically conscious pursuit of pleasing society; or at least pleasing publishers and curators with an aesthetic that matches the public taste. The artist as terrorist is a dying species. Even Banksy for the most part merely illustrates ideas that are common currency on the Facebook pages of socially aware westerners.

Not afraid of poetry

And I’m not afraid of poetry any more, the way I used to be when I would open the pages of something by Sylvia Plath, John Berryman or Hart Crane. I’m never fearful of being taken into the unknown where my sense of self could be undone. I’m never anxious that I will be slapped in the face with some image that seems to open up a deeper presence in the world I normally inhabit. The poetry I read nowadays usually assures me that the world is just as I suspected, with a taste of irony, like salad dressing.

There is an empiricism that muffles the western world, and instead of wonder and awe we are offered the surreal and fake intelligence of streetwise truth, and a multitude of morally correct positions that can be amplified at any dinner party.

I suppose that is why I still pray sometimes, and gaze at images of Buddha or Jesus for long periods, because in those icons I still find some kind of explosion that can shatter the world as I know it.

I was travelling to Limerick recently, and I noted, as I always do, the sign for Glenstal because there is an icon in Glenstal Abbey that I often think about even though I have never ventured in to see it. I know it’s there, every time I pass.

It is an image of Christ, flung from the deep unconscious soul of eastern Europe, and I know it is there in the icon chapel, waiting for me, if I ever choose to call. Waiting to read me and unhinge me from my familiar universe.

Some people say an icon is a kind of intensity in the world, like a beacon in the dark or a lighthouse on the ocean. But for me it’s more like a pool of water in the bog, a hidden presence, like the mythic creatures that inhabit my dreams. I dream a lot, but I have never taken the turn-off at junction 28 for the monastery. Not yet.