Essay

My Artistic

Global Iconography



Looking Glass Self—When the Why Dies

By Gregory Steven Edwards



Presenting a first mixed media introduction with three out of about fifty plus works of art to choose from is my pleasure. My unknown collection Looking Glass Self is a journey into the archetypal world where the circular and the linear merge and swimming perspectives captivate the mind so that it can ideally be transcended. But one must embrace and dissipate the unresolved first. Viewer interaction is often stretched by way of preconscious symbolism rooted in the dawn of history. Psychological projections come in many forms and on many levels through these ambiguous windows. Various views of life are interesting to me because they are often altered and my curiosity cannot contain the entire “why” pool of answers in the endless soup of hominid rationalizations.



Accepting life as portrayed through the mass media is being largely wrapped up in the often sharp and jagged illusions and realities of our global village. We are called to now process our rising beyond the bondage of coming and the going, of dreaming and waking… “Everything changes, yet nothing changes.” I seek expression as if some mind-map-maze gave voice through orchestrated lines somehow connecting the dots in spaces, through the dancing mystery of our defining minds. I wish you a visual journey based on a common longing wired in every creature. I also find it relevant to not only speak from my experience, but to speak for the experience beyond my tangents, in the name of something more than me alone. As one coming out from under the spell of psychiatric medications, I now realize what the extremities of chaos, pain, and isolation can do. I hope my envisioning helps open many doors to subjective visual experiences creating a synergy across our globe.



I cannot not know that our global ambiance is suffering from a toxic moral “void.”



Is this void a divergence from nature or a following of the fall? With intuitive and emotional freedom as my endowment, and with lifted eyes I glance toward the heavens in first hand awe. Strangely, It was and sometimes continues to be initialized behind my failures, shames, regrets, and disenheartenments that shift my mode of soul above the webbings of the toxic enmeshment…likened to a calm keystone catalyst turning and ever-creating the current of insight, ever responding to the wonders beheld, by faith alone, “alone with the alone,” yet in the midst, in the center, where perfect transcendence and comfort exists…filling the silent vacuum of our pains, ever diligently, ever-comfortably and without hesitation…the invocation of the void, filled by the nature of the universal constants.



Fitting into a notch in the social macro-organism is upheld in the highest of my virtues. Let us be set free from variance with our other brother otherness. The “written letter of word” holds rabidly to the stench of an “us and them” mentality that may be seen as always falling short, as an ever-falling Babylon, as a dividing station, as an invalid delusion to accepting being less than our best. Ultimately, I wish to find voice in the primordial archetypes, the breath of life, the touchstone, the faith factor, the pointing finger, the raft of deliverance, and my opening heart. This voice says I can now now be, and that is enough, yet already is, open fully…coming forth…yet again and again, now after now, moment merged into moment, the here of now, now here… And as one inspiring seer wrote, ever-so-helpful in my experience, while embracing the pain of my son’s death, a quote in unknown names: “In my darkest of nights the heavenly lights are revealed.”



Gentle people, authors of unique fates in and for our global destiny: Reborn is our great planet, now, ever-newly made manifest, if only for a moment, yet every moment! The toxic media portrays dismal enmeshment, in a mode of thrusts and lusts and apocalyptic probabilities…self against self, nation against nation. What a haunting scheme of illusion…yet very real and all so tangible.



We are all global members of immeasurable stature as the “why” dies and resonant answers to the how and what make clear perfect paths to where we have always been: from the image of the image as! It is no jot or tiddle to go from me to we where every man is availed a common faith. How can we not not be? To me that is impossibility. I will continue to be after the shell of this embodiment turns once again back to the dust…perhaps reemerging, in the name of the collective need for expansion in paradoxical micro macro play through the one original breath, as the one becomes many, the many One.



Gentle people, the most common elementary component of what I call self, in my perspective and experience, is what true Self represents. To walk upright fully is the golden endowment to escape loneliness through seeking connectivity with appreciable otherness. This potential inertia wishes on high to respond to our every conductivity via every virtue of honor, voice, and passion, in every availed path of least resistance…the veil has been rent, the seals broken. The Logos, in natural curious play expresses our most needed esteem by reciprocating that image unto us through otherness, through nature itself. Yet truth has its other side, likened to a double-edged sword representative of a skewed esteem deflected back upon itself...again and again.



Implications are endless because our minds are ever so uniquely wired to attempt to make sense out of the world, to find meaning in our experience—even the sense of nonsense…of which, I myself, know well. Yet I know this! Is not any sense better than nonsense? Ah! Not a question of Why! What is nonsense? Is it not an act of not being able to see around the contagions of eye specks and boulders of which we have constricted and grasped in the name of vanity, fear and lack? What is one to do to stretch the comfort zones, and ultimately embrace the highest envisioning and interest? Was it not near forgotten save beauty, inspiration and healing through sharing our aesthetic and humanitarian values? These are our rightly endowed gifts to utilize in awakening all that is, was, and shall ever be. I cannot not not be, therefore I am. To be or not to be is a Why problem.



In states overlooking the human dilemma, if only for a moment, I know in my heart, that which has been stirred into activity, secondary to voices within this platform, this resonance. What is important is what rings true in each of us, through our own constructs, through our own special touchstones. Ideally, we can reestablish and maintain that sacredness through the process of seeing the sacred in all contexts...the on-high place for all eyes. There is no need of Why. Why is the wind of the written letter ever-falling short of the perfect nonverbal language in the eternal center from which we are all made manifest. Herein lies in the most sacred center of Beingness: the “I am.”



My spiritual and creative ventures have led me to believe that portals are availed through imagination, like stepping into perfect justice, into such a wonderland, that upon looking back through whatever may be residually unresolved, choices are made to try and try again. Purpose and meaning, only then seen clearly, prompts our next venture. What loss of self is the universe expressing through life, the rose the thorn, the smile the tear, the crest the trough, the ebb the flow, the left and the right? In this, I see the paradoxical rhythms that give birth to the curious mysterious embodiments here, on our fragile planet, ever-beckoning us “to love, learn, and remember.”



Ultimately, I have realized through the creative process that we are divinely endowed within, to each their own with a schema for wholeness. And thus we normally seek out fulfillment in opposites, like male and female, birth and death. Herein lies the source of inspirations, the fruits of experience, the gifts of our spirits and the remembrance that accompanies the next day dawning—of which many agents comprise.



I have been so touched through the drama and passion of life that I am thankful to realize my heartstrings in resonance as many things come to pass. Our perfect reflection is all that we are, all that we do, and all that we touch. All things are ever-already added, but do we have eyes to see? Can anything really be given or taken away? I think not. Only illusion has the ploys of giving and taking away, the roots of stigma and want, of wishing and waiting, of loving and hating, of healing and killing, of vanity and selflessness… likened to a concept of absolute ignorance being divine wisdom. In paradoxical potential, do we really need to forget in order to remember? What is said to foster remembrance? How was it said to manifest? I can see no “why” within carnal enmeshment. “It” just is.



For me, within the ebb and flow of my analytical and creative counterparts, the left-brain analytical hindrance needs to be occupied or tricked, so to speak, thus allowing the right brain free reign while knowing not the left hand. The door begins to open once again, more fully, evermore invoked…coming, the collective calm, calling coming forth…now in unprecedented mass. There is no lack, there is no want, there is no pain, there is no nothing but our predisposition to escape the loneliness of our pseudo separation, spawned in the darkness of the micro-man-dreaming, yet awake.



Tangents in the mind perhaps are best caressed by a perfect circle, as the all-embracing, the God force source…singing to and through all creation. There is no why. Why is the backbone of illusion, the root of delusion, and the rationale of mass murder. All that we experience, whether consciously manifested or unconsciously manifested is in direct accordance with our consciousness. I am a believer in what I accept as universal law: “As above, so below…on earth as it is in Heaven.” As the waters overflow, the beckoning light delivers us to our sacred center, back in the garden, where we have truly always been, where we could not not be…we had only forgotten.



Clinging to or rejecting creates repeated reaping episodes until the process is embraced and resolved. Then freedom from fruitless reoccurrence, through the many guises and masks, breaks the final seal of this grand illusion, this drama, as we know it. Problems with this release are likened to what various writers have puzzled over in an “original journey to the greener side of the river while fruitlessly clinging to the raft, or worshiping the pointing finger” and missing where it is pointing—that is the fall. Shifting into an enriched mode is to not resist change, to not constrict comfort zones, and to not not allow the sharing of our common self through the “looking glass self” enigma…as the cosmic eons reflect a wonderful journey...ever-in-the-making. To me, this is the art of a grand journey to self-discovery and brotherhood.



In conclusion, creating in a voice of unknown names, yet universal tongues, I do not know how I of myself come across. When the Why dies, I do not question my inner dialogue, I just process it the best I can at any given point in time. When the why dies, I find plow shears of a straighter path. In plowing, I do sincerely wish the best for our planet and our children who will be at the mercy of our choices today. How I come across, whether raw and fragmented, or profound and effective, I do not know…so I trust in the universe and let go even deeper. In this artistic platform for global healing I give my venture, it is yours.



I want to thank you each for reading this, and I would like to ask anyone for critiques. I may be too close to see what may be unclear and what may be redundant. For now, sharing in such a keynote is my unadulterated muse…the coin flips for us all, so creative and inspiring, so great and terrible. Besides, being stuck between a delusion and a hard place, I like the synaptic shock waves as they go tickling my fingertips when opening unto the spontaneous and into creation where I envision a we, united and beyond all stigma. What can we do during this Biennale to help comfort our global village? How do you envision what is being expressed? …The pen over the sword, the voice over the pen, the brush over the canvas… This opportunity to voice in an artistic mode is one I wish not to avoid. What I hope to help usher in, beside many fellow agents, is the orchestration of awareness opening…as flashpoints merge into all hearts, setting multitudes free, free to be the person we came here to be.