How Art Heals: Remembering Wholeness

A Many Voices Conversation with Rosemary Starace

Rosemary Starace and I have embarked on a conversation about the yearning for wholeness and how art might be both an expression of that yearning and a way for us to heal from the pain of experiencing separation from one another, from the earth, and from the ongoing process of creation. This conversation arose out of our preoccupations as aging artists alive in a time of great suffering. It is a vast subject with tentacles reaching into philosophy, psychology, all of the spiritual traditions and art making itself. Clearly, it can’t be covered in one Substack entry.  We envision an ongoing exchange and hope you will join us by commenting on these posts.

Rosemary is a visual artist, poet and essayist. You can enjoy her 2022 contribution to this Substack here Art and Spirituality. Her drawing and collage, Her Earthly Presence, appeared more recently on seventysomething along with her poem, When I Feel Tiny, I Think of Owl, here Owl on My Shoulder. In recent years Rosemary has delved into Jungian ideas and just completed a program in Jungian clinical process at The C.G. Jung Institute of New York.

SK: This material is so far-reaching and so deep that it’s challenging to choose a place to begin. I chose my own childhood. When I was six years old, my much older sister and her boyfriend were home from college for vacation. We were sitting in my mother’s living room with the navy wall-to-wall carpeting and the heavy mahogany furniture. Out of nowhere, I said, “Before we’re born, we know everything. Then when we’re born, we forget everything and spend all our life trying to remember.” Or some childlike version of that. Filled with newly acquired freshman philosophy, the two of them were stunned. 

This is my essential story and speaks to the intuition that I had that there was a time of wholeness that I yearned to return to. Does that resonate for you?

RS: Very much! Your essential story is an astonishing testament to the knowing that comes with us into this life. Though it does seem to get lost or forgotten, it also stays with us as the yearning you mentioned, which guides us forth, mysteriously and unceasingly. My own early story attests to that, as well. When I was four or five, someone “happened" to put some paints in front of me. I picked up a brush and somehow created a world on a sheet of empty paper. I remember filling the space with clouds and stars and dark hills with houses on them. A miracle. I hadn’t known until then that anything like this could be done. And I didn’t know how I did it or where the images came from. The colors and shapes pulled my hand around the page, giving form to a feeling that might have originated inside me, or beyond.

It was like a second birth. The painting itself was probably a blur—but the experience was distinct and life shaping. I had dipped into my own interiority and glimpsed what it held. I knew without words that I wanted access to that. I think that’s the call to Wholeness and the call from Wholeness at the same time! Each person has their own call. In childhood we may be more receptive to it, not yet blocked by the slings and arrows that come our way. I found, as I went through life, that I had to learn again how to cultivate that receptive state. Has this been your experience?

Rosemary Starace, A Moment in Creation, encaustic on masonite, 6” x 8”

SK: Cultivating receptivity for me is a process of subtraction. In order to hear the call from Wholeness so that I become closer to the music of the call to Wholeness, I have to screen out all the conventions of language, the accretion of words like geological layers that just pile up on top of each other. I don’t feel under assault by the slings and arrows that you mention so much as I do by grammar itself. The essays I write are the product of a high degree of cultivation of a different kind. They seem to be a lifetime away from the “blur” that you describe. I’m very aware of the reality of the Wholeness but more often than not, I feel like I’m writing about it rather than being immersed in it like a little girl with her hands in the mud. 

This reminds me of another childhood story; this one from my son. When he was three, his daycare teacher overheard him talking to himself. She wrote down his murmurings and gave me the scrap of paper which said, “When I get big, I’m going to be just like my daddy. When I get bigger, I’m going to be just like my mommy. But when I get biggest, I’m going to be just plain Isaac again.” So, I ask the question, what are the games of self-discovery that I might play? Is it possible for language—my breath, my blood—to lead me to a pre-verbal awareness? 

RS: Your son’s insight was astounding. He described the arc of becoming whole! Our longing to become our own version of “just plain Isaac” propels us through our whole lives—the simplest and most difficult undertaking, don’t you think? I see writing and art as servants to that task, servants to longing, to our memories of original wholeness. To put that longing into form gives wholeness a place to manifest. 

You question whether writing can overcome being merely “about” something and do the same primal work as an image in art. That you call language “my breath, my blood” reveals just how primal and essential words are—for you and in general. In the same vein, another writer friend, when I asked if her practice “heals” her, replied that writing “is in her nature,” and she “feels damaged” if she doesn’t write. Perhaps a devoted writing practice is wholeness enacting itself.

And no matter the subject, writing, like art, can’t help but make connections. Through metaphor, simile, correspondences, juxtapositions, it puts things that were separate back together, creating more wholeness in the world. Jungian writer Robert Johnson* says, “to make any well-formed sentence is to make unity out of duality” (Owning Your Own Shadow, pp. 105 and following). He talks about “the healing power of strong verbs.” I love that! And there’s that sense of connection within oneself when the right word or phrase or line appears—seemingly out of nowhere and without effort. It’s only a brief moment of being back playing in the mud, but one that we can experience over and over. How does all this strike you?

SK: Like a bolt of lightening. I can feel the pull of the yearning outward towards Wholeness and the flow that comes into us and further stimulates our desire. It’s as if the artist is playing catch with the whole of Creation. I’m especially taken by your description of writing and art as servants sensitive to this process of longing and creating forms that allow it to manifest. It’s wonderful to set out on this exploration with you, getting lost, not knowing where it will lead but filled with electricity and curiosity.  

Readers…Please join us as we meander together making art in the wilderness. 

How did you experience Wholeness as a child? What brings the memory of that Wholeness back to you now? Is making art connected to that memory?

We hope you, our readers, will comment and participate in this exchange and help us to expand our inquiry.

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Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.