Below you will find a lightly edited art manifesto I’ve written in 2008, a decade and a half ago. It was written at the dawn of social media, right before the global economic crash. There was a tide rising, a dark storm brewing. As it turns out, time has been extremely kind to what I wrote then. Just like water, the words took on new forms, but their structure remained the same.
Throughout my life I was stubbornly struggling for my dreams to come true. One day I had an epiphany on what this fight was really about. I had been, all that time, valiantly defending the precious core of inner vision from the stranglehold of my expansive fantasies. That was a turning point. Still engaged on occasion in a furious battle of desires, I am now slowly learning how to breathe, while redefining what dreaming is.
To cite Hubert Selby Jr. – “dreams we should crush in us first, before they are crushed, inevitably, by the world”. However, to give up on our inner voice, the link to the world soul, is to betray our own soul.
Most of what we call dreams are ephemeral fantasies, built on our fear of mortality, and our Dionysian need to be egoless in order to overcome that fear. In contradiction to their effervescent, fleeting purpose – if these fancies survive their ecstatic moment and overreach their impact, they thrive on excess emotion and hubris, and are viciously deconstructed by the world. Root imagery born in the process of contemplation, or the actual state of dreaming, endures any kind of brutal attack from the world or from within – for these are messages that our spirits bring into this life from the Beyond.
You will find plenty of people that will give you a helping hand and encourage you to dream. Not many out there nurture true vision. Visions are sombre, and very often, unpopular. They are both poetic and prophetic, not that easily decipherable. Their unique code is unlocked at a time that requires their potency. The indulgence in fantasy, one we became to understand as dreaming, eventually lulls us into complacency, a state of illusion. Visions, on the other hand, must be humble in their essence, as they serve the Earth. That is the purpose of prophecy.
Prophets reveal to us uncomfortable truths, they make us question our beliefs, they touch on our vulnerability by unmasking theirs, making us fragile in our humanity, and humble (or irritate) us by their determination. Illusions inflate our egos, rotating us in closed circles, always ending where we have begun. Visions ride circularly on a spiral without end, confirming cycles, and building on them. The difference between a spiral and a circle is movement. This entwined ride is the DNA of Mother Earth and of our species.
In our world addicted to glory and the prettiness of artifice, the Wildesque beauty of truth, and the truth in beauty, has been presented as a professionally designed, perfectly palatable image. A construct. The overt belief of our postmodern societies that there is no actual truth, only the interpretation of it. A competition of storylines, a clash of ideologies — the constant shaping of the world according to personal desires. Following this logic, if there is no truth, there are no lies.
Or, perhaps, if there is a truth, all narratives are lies.
Thus, this weaving of the Maya is building a parallel, illusory universe, founded on a billion little lies. And one day we might all collectively cross into that world, unaware that we are losing our connection to Earth and the one thing that links us to other humans – our capacity for empathy. For to empathise truly with the other, we must be aware of the truth in our lives, as well as the truth in theirs.
Removed from our intuition, our own bodies, and sensations, our inherited dream time — as upheld by the indigenous peoples of Australia, for millennia — we are now voraciously cluttering our mental and emotional personal space, unrooting ourselves from our individual complex systems, in relationship to the Earth, and through it — the Stars. Ungrounded, and hungry for meaning, we seemingly have no other option than to plug ourselves straight into our favoured narratives — simplified to entertain, or weaponised to coerce.
Performed awareness strives for achievement, it is a status marker, a fashion statement, not our state of soul. We become mere headline readers, in all matters of life, distracted or even unable to turn the other page, dig deeper, question the soundbite devised to form us, and polarise societies — not to inform us, and educate humanity. And yet, we are taking it in like sugar, it gives us a high of invincibility, this stream of ceaseless around-the-clock information. Until, inevitably, we come crashing down.
Because, our soul intuition and our bodily wisdom, i.e. our instinct, the true keys to unlocking the capacity for hearing our inner voice, are persistently blocked. The mind is too much of a show-off to ever be trusted fully, while emotions are easily led astray by individual desire. You will know that you are grounded when you are inspired, yet focused. Clear. When you feel that you are loved and accepted, as you are, and are willing to meet others, as such.
This planet has known all manner of savagery. There is nothing new that is done by man to man (or animal, or soil) that is in any way different to any other era. Except one thing: never has in the known history of mankind the greed of the few, supported by indolence of the many, brought the planet to an actual verge of physical destruction.
If we are connected to the Earth, through our inner voice, we instinctively understand this, as we do the inevitable consequences. One cannot, really, remain jaded, or cynical, or indifferent to the state of our planet, and still be fully alive. And it’s good to be alive.
My only ambition is to be a little pebble in the stirring of the collective mind. One of the myriad little pebbles falling into the Great Ocean of the collective unconscious right this minute. It will have achieved its purpose just by you taking a moment to ponder on what I have written. If it jolts you closer to your own potentials, and is a little maverick helper in your own heroic fight against the gangsters of illusion – we’ve hit the bulls-eye.
With love,
Milana
Image: Bay of Bones, Ohrid, North Macedonia (2022)
Poets, Mavericks & Prophets 