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There’s a curious phenomenon that occurs when an artist gives free reign to the phantom figures animating the psyche and allows them to speak.
Freud has famously said that “Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious.” If that is so, then Art is a winding and convoluted path from it.
The phantoms that I have committed to the page as fantasy have come to life for me more than once. Sometimes the crossover from fiction to fact has taken years, sometimes decades, but it has happened often enough that it is a truism for me that my life imitates my art, or rather, my art prefigures, unconsciously, my future life.
One could explain this in psychological terms as wish-fulfilment: the written word acts as a sort of map leading me toward the conjuring of my deepest desires. A sort of vision board. Or one could understand it as the divine act of artists: literally calling into being that which previously never existed.
However you characterize it, it is something that I believe is not unique to me, but probably a common experience of artists.
As I recall, years ago, before her coup de grâce, Frankie Shaw had posted on Twitter or Instagram a photo of her on the set of SMILF with a whiteboard sketching her greatest fear. It was a chart of sorts, tracking her increasing success and then, in the future, it suddenly takes…