The Sublime Line
001
By Connor Addison
8 July 2026
8 July 2026
In the Novel Narcissus and Goldmund we find two protagonists inhabiting very different modalities of life . Narcissus the cloistered intellectual and teacher of Goldmund, who realises Goldmund’s true nature is not monastic but artistic and sensual. in turn, Goldmund is sent out into the world to discover it first hand, he roams through a medieval landscape, discovers love, sex, pleasure, danger, and suffering. He becomes a sculptor, trying to capture beauty, especially the feminine and maternal, in tangible form. But this immediacy of living, without intellectual reflection, causes a questionable life of drifting, affairs, artistic work and peril. Only when arrested and sentenced to death is he saved during confession by his old friend Narcissus. Both returning to the monastery these two protagonists discover they have much to learn from the other’s modality of being. And while separate characters they are really two half’s of the same soul, the dichotomy of how we derive knowledge and action, the tension of reason versus emotion, spirit versus body, science versus art, and contemplation versus direct experience.
In this way finding knowledge, representational or otherwise often comes from two sources: one, top-down, finding truth through empiricism, science and academics, looking down on the world and analysing it. The second source of knowledge is bottom up, reality is derived within, from instinct, spirit and direct experience. Its source mired in inaccessible mystery, the subconscious soul, the overwhelm of chaos, yet like the top down intellectual pursuit, it is willing to cough up meaning and observation for our waking lives to observe.
Painting often comes from the latter of these two sources, bottom up, form emerges from instinctual impulses and from the subconscious. This has always been the well of knowledge from which artists pull up the bucket. Indeed it is part of their mystique, this instinct and intuition for what lies unseen in the soul is honed by the artist so that spirit may emanate. Something as of yet untapped may be opened up for self and society to see, ponder and interpret.
This artist’s connection to within is not just deeply personal, as it risks making a cryptic personal language, unintelligible to others. The source within is also a connection to an unconscious field of universal experience, indeed as Neumann stated, ‘In every culture and every age we find without exception that its cultural canon is determined by unconscious images, symbols and archetypes’ Such forms of representational knowledge therein being the key to the intelligibility of the artists work to others. There exists a shared primordial system of symbols and meaning that transcends cultural nuance, the foundational bedrock of a common psyche. When others analyse art with their contemporaries they are sharing this commonality, the world of archetypes or the human condition and its particular flavour in this era.
Diagram in Erich Neumann's ‘The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype’ (1955)
When Art meets the world it is often confronted by the top-down type of thinking of others, that is, the quest for explanation. This is where the urge to act (create) meets the urge to know (analyse).
This confrontation however is often tumultuous, the artist finds the critic or psychoanalyst loudly knocking at the door of her creative act demanding to inspect its interior, to see if its heart beats and legs work. Like a dead body on the cutting block of a university medical theatre, it is dissected, with different parts pointed at as sources of life, and yet to show this, ironically, the body is dead. It is a sort of sacrilege to which the artist states, ‘If you want drama in this so called medical “theatre” put down your tools of analysis, sew up that corpse and look to your peers, to their flesh and blood…the life in their eyes. there is the drama, there is life, there is the mystery. Don’t answer it, simply see it..feel it!”
‘The Agnew Clinic’ Thomas Eakins, 1886
It is for this reason artists have often snubbed commentary, Francis bacon for example disliking all analysis, stating that "The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery." [2] Why limit art with answers when we can feel the sensation of its mystery and origin in raw emotion, instinct and accident, unexplained by the regulatory power of semantics.
In the book *The Archetypal World of Henry Moore* by psychoanalysts and student of Jung by Erich Neumann, we find a dissection of Moore’s work as coming from his connection to the ‘Primordial Feminine’ and the ‘Great Mother’ expressed through his undulating feminine forms. This places Moore as pulling water from the well of the Mother archetype when he breathes life into his sculpture. Again we find an artist spooked by the confrontation of top down analysis when Moore stated of Neumann’s book:
“After the first chapter I thought I’d better stop because it explained too much about what my motives were and what things were about. I thought it might stop me from ticking over if I went on and knew it all ... If I was psychoanalysed I might stop being a sculptor”. [3]
But this fear of analysis is misplaced.
It is the job of the artist to extract something unconscious and hidden from the self and society and pull it into being, to find its contours and forms and pass this primordial impression onto society. As beautiful (or ugly) bookmarks of our time, artworks point to specific pages of the soul and being.
Through art we can literally see into a sub-verbal world of what is below and hidden, and in doing so, talk about it and translate it into understanding, structure and ideology. The Bauhaus for example extracted design from an unexpressed zeitgeist and in materialising it in objects and art, paved the way for progressive strides in modernist ideology and its egalitarian ideals. In this way Art is the portal between a sub-verbal, undiscovered essentialism of the subconscious and a clearly delineated and rational order of things. It touches first on the creative act and then, when it goes out into the world, Art is material for questioning, ideologies and its outputs.
If Bacon and Moore fear that mystery of art will be exhausted through answers they misplace emphasis. It is important to make the distinction that questioning and answering are very different things, art will always be interpretive and so endlessly questionable and in turn, endlessly unanswerable. To assume that one day everything will be resolved and answered is not generous to Art’s possibilities, questioning is whats important, it is what spurs us into an infinite myriad of interpretive paths.
In this light, as an artist i am fascinated by both processes, top down (empirical) and bottom up (creative) thinking. For the painting “Touched by The Breath of a Primeval World” the seed, or spark of imagery comes from somewhere hidden to me, but once the painting is finished, i find, amazingly, that what I have had to say bears a striking adherence to psychological structures in myth and psychoanalysis. There is an instinctual pull to something that I do not know but at the same time know, it is not explicable in words, but though the medium of paint, knowledge may emerge.
The Painting “Primeval World” explores The Mother’s dual nature, birth, death, renewal and the feminine. All of this significance extracted from pondering on the psychological meaning of the Tree. Images and forms arrive from the bottom up without knowing what i am saying but knowing it is significant. A significance that will be revealed to me in language at a later paint, when the painting is complete.
When an artwork is complete it is a corpse, the bottom up investigation, the pulling of a bucket from the well of the unconscious is over and, as an artist, in inertia, it serves no creative purpose. The painting is condemned to completion. A body on the cutting block for eyes to pierce. But for an artist not to look into the fruit of his creation is a failure. What may hold him back is that he is not able to forget himself, the artist. He must take on the role of the public, critic or psychoanalyst to bridge the gap from the top, to understand the mess he has made.
In “Primeval World” It was only at the end that, without consciously knowing, i was looking to depict the concept of the mother’s dual nature. only with subsequent reading and writing, after the works completion, i found written much information about the dual mother, both as creator and destroyer. The latter being the Devouring Mother, who is the narcissistic, selfish antithesis to the divine, nurturing “Mother image.”
The Devouring Mother
What I find amazing when looking deeper is I find that these two poles of the mother exist across all cultures, as archetypes found in the positive, such as Isis, the Madonna and the Three Muses, and archetypes of the negative: the Hindu God Kali, witches, and Hecate, the Greek queen of death.
The specific meaning of “Primeval World” is secondary to the point i want to make. What matters here is that opening up to this world of creative intuition, an instinct to say something without fully knowing what it means, is made all the more significant when we find it out this instinctual something to paint is out there, written about, commented on by others. It validates a feeling, makes clear a universal undercurrent of the soul, signals to the artist that the well from which you draw holds clear water. Through the mysterious instinct of the painted image I find myself embraced by explanation, an awareness emerges that i am not alone and isolated in existential questions.
The specific meaning of “Primeval World” is secondary to the point i want to make. What matters here is that opening up to this world of creative intuition, an instinct to say something without fully knowing what it means, is made all the more significant when we find it out this instinctual something to paint is out there, written about, commented on by others. It validates a feeling, makes clear a universal undercurrent of the soul, signals to the artist that the well from which you draw holds clear water. Through the mysterious instinct of the painted image I find myself embraced by explanation, an awareness emerges that i am not alone and isolated in existential questions.
The Sublime Line
That is not to say top down thinking, empiricism, science, psychoanalysis, anthropology are superior approaches that art merely validates at times however. Through rationality we may discover how to build bridges, split the atom and dissect human behaviour but it does not give sense to the spirit of the time or the very nature of being.
Bottom up thinking however for all its mystery and romance also offers no sufficient answer, art can push forward new moral aesthetics and offer solace in the shared human condition but it does not offer medicine when gravely ill or distributive networks of basic goods needed for life.
Because these two worlds are filled with opposites in conceptual approach and desired outputs it is tempting to see the paradox in their union and, unable to resolve this paradox, only inhabit one camp or the other.
But really there is a sublime line, strung out like a tightrope over two skyscrapers, that gives a wider perspective of the world in all of its material-spiritual, rational-irrational, creating-classifying, conscious-unconscious glory. To walk this line is a balancing act, one that risks regression to the simplicity of inhabiting a single camp. To only witness one side of the coin of life.
Speaking to Moore and Bacon, the artist is not worse off for meeting the top down thinker. Through analysis the artist can see that interpretive questions only open other doors, that there are turtles all the way down. Is it not much more generous to life to believe this? and in return the artist sees that she can breathe humanity into the rational mind.
Bottom up thinking however for all its mystery and romance also offers no sufficient answer, art can push forward new moral aesthetics and offer solace in the shared human condition but it does not offer medicine when gravely ill or distributive networks of basic goods needed for life.
Because these two worlds are filled with opposites in conceptual approach and desired outputs it is tempting to see the paradox in their union and, unable to resolve this paradox, only inhabit one camp or the other.
But really there is a sublime line, strung out like a tightrope over two skyscrapers, that gives a wider perspective of the world in all of its material-spiritual, rational-irrational, creating-classifying, conscious-unconscious glory. To walk this line is a balancing act, one that risks regression to the simplicity of inhabiting a single camp. To only witness one side of the coin of life.
Speaking to Moore and Bacon, the artist is not worse off for meeting the top down thinker. Through analysis the artist can see that interpretive questions only open other doors, that there are turtles all the way down. Is it not much more generous to life to believe this? and in return the artist sees that she can breathe humanity into the rational mind.
The scientist is not loosing out for meeting the world of instinct and mystery, it grounds all this scientific knowledge in our humanity, turns chemistry into magic and a scientific sublime to be revered.
To stand on this tightrope and peer beyond one’s natural home, bear the paradox and synthesise a dual source of knowledge does not threaten creativity, It confirms it. It does not threaten empirical fact, it gives it personal significance. This offers a sublime line of being from which all can be seen, that pushes past the limits of what the self can comfortably hold — it is simultaneously ecstatic and threatening.
[1] Erich Neumann, The Archetypal World of Henry Moore, London 1959, p.2.
[2] Sunday Telegraph (London, 1964)
[3] Philip James (ed.), Henry Moore on Sculpture: A Collection of the Sculptor’s Writings and Spoken Words, London 1966, p.50.