Warning: Occult Muds

When Freud suspected that his student Jung may not pick up the torch of psych-sexual theory right where Freud left it, he warned his acolyte: 'Beware of the black slime mud of occultism.'

This is a fair metaphor, I'm so into it, and it didn't hear it until very recently, already deep into my current mud fixation. So a little piece I wrote: 

I am fascinated by retrocausality, or backwards causation, and the role it may have in my own creative process. I have long worked with the trope of the trickster, and have a mask of Elegua, the Yoruba god of crossroads and trickery, on my wall. I have also had a growing admiration for mud. I recently found myself compelled to create some works with mud. I covered myself in mud, in order to chanel its essence, to let it speak through me as a fleshy vessel. I collected mud, and smoothed it into the corners of buildings, to create a smooth transition the ground and the wall, creating a primal betwixt and between moment in an industrial landscape. I also felt called to cover some bright yellow traffic pillars in mud, this impulse being the least rational. Doing research for this paper, however, I learned that the symbol for Elegua is the mud pillar. Perhaps it was a coincidence, perhaps the mask called me to do it in a language that bypassed my conscious mind, perhaps the me that sits and writes this now reached back and time and made the suggestion that I cover these pillars in mud. I can’t speak to the explanation, I can only appreciate the synchronicity. It’s these synchronicities that are the gold of an alchemical process in the studio, my raw material being consciousness and experience.