The spirit [in you] searches all things, even the deep things of God….

No one knows better than the artist (poet, painter, dancer, etc.) the voiceless urges of the deep places, the nameless ache or even call; that deep calls to deep.  They feel within the tension of the progressing cycle that is their practice, that there must be a congruence with what they make and who they are, even if that knowledge is something only intuited and not able to be expounded upon with clarity or concision.  The surface of their work is quick to betray any furtive slickness or gimmick. 

There is no hiding behind the curtain of the shallow.  And this prerequisite of integrity (wholeness) is full of grace.  Even with the demand this puts on us, we really wouldn’t have it any other way.  Deep doesn’t call to shallow, deep calls to deep.

In many circles geared with a spiritual bent, an emphasis is put upon the adherent losing themselves in the depths of the practice: the ritual, the writings, the admonitions, and the deity.  That in the deep the practitioner’s identity is to be subsumed.  What is striking to me about the demand of Jesus and revealed by those ardently pursuing his path thereafter, is that over time it is revealed that if the individual is obliterated the practice becomes toxic.  That the dangerous ditch on both sides of the narrow road are, on one side, self-centeredness, and–surprisingly–on the other, a centering of the deity, or spiritual action.  The only solution or sure footing, the very dirt of this narrow road cannot be singular but must be relational, and that any toxicity that encroaches is precisely a pulling away from the tension or harmony or dissonance of more than one thing being tugged on by another.

The Psalm that gives us the phrase deep calls to deep–we are told in the preface of Psalm 42–is a maskil.  A maskil is understood to be a similar musical trope to the call-and-response technique that is peppered throughout various culture’s musical traditions but always involves, at least, two voices or phrasings, one which calls and the other which responds.  It is within the framework of a maskil, a call and response, that we are given this phrase deep calls to deep.  From the musician, the poet, the lyricist; from the form of their practice and dedication to the overflow of heart comes the elucidated call. 

In talking about the creative life, Ernest Hemingway famously invoked the iceberg saying that the output of the artist, the work or what comes to a social light, should be informed by and undergirded by a massive wealth of what is hidden under the surface and that only then will the twenty percent seen have any substance whatsoever.  If this is true then a call for artists to plunge the depths of themselves as any sort of theme is to call for the obvious or what artists are already inclined to do.  So it would seem.

It is an unfortunate thing that now, the platform for creative work which holds no grip on the depths of the individual has been given a far greater prominence than possibly any generation past, in part because of the wide exposure of our digital age.  This isn’t just possible but praised and in some ways necessitated.  We are called upon to make decisions about which side of the line we stand on with no justification tied to the depths, no tried and tested conviction, no galvanization and no commitment to mystery. We are satiated with easy praise.  But not just this.  If we are inclined to depth, more often than not we look for the opportunity within the safety of the group and when reliance is placed on the group the first thing to go is unity.  What I mean is real unity is alive and can only thrive with the necessary ebb and flow that takes place within the depth of the individual, but the groups demand on sameness and the modification of the individual to fall in line, has become one of the greatest detriments to creative life within groups.   

Because of this societal difficulty, the artist must once again be called to themselves.  Called down into the depths of their core.  To do what artists have done for centuries, respond to the mysterious call within the chthonic deep, the blue-black black of root systems and identity formation, places where easy light is choked out at the onset of descent, which gives way to collaborative radiance where the divine drones a low roar and a melody is leached from our bones.

Artists in this second installment of Revelations of The Artist [will be] chosen because their work recognizably holds the remnants of them having emerged from somewhere, where some other light has informed their creative movement, where the work itself has been beckoned as some partnering tune.  Redundantly, perhaps, they’ve been asked to do what artists have always done: recognize, follow, and join in the maskil where the Divine and created inform and bless one another in the intermingling of deep places.

~ Corey Frey