Myth is the poet…

It is the figurative voice of an unseen.

We came from the sea and from other mountains. We chose the color of the hills and the fields, and the gleams in the rivers, and the glints in the upward-glancing eyes. When the wild beasts caught sight of us, they cowered deep in their caves and crimped their necks, lifting their snouts to catch the scent of damp earth approaching.

(When I Sing, Mountains Dance by Irene Sola)

It is found in the dreams of our wildest happening, which expresses only, ourself to ourselves.

Those of us, who dare to cognise this language, understand our freest form in actuality. This impression is hearkened in the melodies of Surrealism, whereby the human experience is revolutionised, thought peels away routine into the elaborate wonders of our resting mind.

I unearth importance, emphasising, although myth and surrealism seemingly intersect, they are singular.

Myth is the cultural account of natural phenomena; the beginnings of people and how civilisations developed.

Surrealism offers an interpretation of one’s reality, distorted for the provocation on emotional responses.

Representations of otherness have grown in prevalence throughout the contemporary collective. The sublime is being reversed. Rebelling a beauty being experienced only through the classically formulated; order, balance and proportion. Instead, provoking people to look at myth as an emblem of their being in the world, their being in relationship to a thing or an other.

Mythos, story of the people. Logos, word, or speech. Mythology as the spoken story of the people.

In western nineteenth-century literature, we witness the insufficiency for language to express pain. The language of the time, repressed the communication of intense feelings, which is seen in Woolf’s disparity amongst fictional and nonfictional depictions of pain. Elaine Scarry echoes Woolf’s rhetoric, “whatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language.”

It is to be said, artists have long expressed the retraction on this notion of unsharability with their interventions. Imagery is used by surrealists to formulate conscious and unconscious depictions through bonding realms, so wholly, the world of dream is joined with the rational, absolute reality. Void of a literal impression and difficult to categorise within existing infrastructures. This is to suggest, the beginnings of surrealism, empowered a platform of manifestation for unspeakable dialect. It embraced seekers, whom life experienced on the physical plane acquired resonate within an innermost being and reality, to truly feel the rapture of being alive.

Mythos, observed in non-western depictions of pain, brought forth, Guyanese artist, Aubrey Williams, founder of The Caribbean Artists Movement in 1966. Williams was recurrently measured as an abstract expressionist, yet he was enthused by a host of influences, with the foremost narrative eluding to fluctuating ontological symbol; crossing into, over, between the animal and human relation.

'A strange, very tense, slightly violent shape that has haunted me all my life... a subconscious thing coming out'.

To doubt, means not to refuse but to leave in suspense, not bracketing the world, instead, creating ellipsis.

The landscape resists a stagnant rhetoric. I feel no singular node of power which would endeavour to threshold a subject to the position of a thing, form, machine, or idea which propagates the cultural deprivation of double dehumanization: art reduced to a thing and audience reduced to a stereotype.

Instead, myth is autonomous, free of void.

I witness an unceasingly vast expansion of living. Impossible to moderate in magic. It is neither reduced nor expanded and/or transcended. The existence and process of creation become very centre of sole significance.

The history of Caribbean folklore communicates a reflection of complex physical landscape. The islands are vastly mountainous, with dense rainforests that are perplexing to entrée without intimate knowing. It is amongst this punitive terrain, living tropical creatures; one’s known, one’s Mythos, whom both dwell in the creation of story.

Story for their people, of their people.

This is the living escape, felt in myth.

The people, artists, such as Williams, dedicate a life to understanding the incomprehensible. He understood a marvel that no other could see, so choose to reject. His devotion to observation, endures the impossible growing of heart.