Cantanker Magazine, Issue 8: Anxiety

CRYPTOME, 22"x22"

29 Aug-19 Sep, Cantanker magazine and Pump Project will be featuring artwork that relates to personal, social, political, or economic anxiety. Selected works will address alienation, disaster, chaos, abandon, distraction or frivolity. Pump Project Art Complex, 702 Shady Lane, Austin, TX, 78702

I first ran across the word "cryptome" in the early 1980's in a book called "The Secret Teachings of All Ages" by Manly Hall. If one were to track down the word's origins and the variety of meanings it has assumed over the centuries, he or she might suddenly find they have become lost in a philological maze.

As a result, it is the perfect word to use for any arcane purpose. A riddle wrapped in an enigma as it were. For me, it encapsulates the motive behind what I would consider to be one of the first great mythological "sins": not the eating of the fruit from the tree of knowledge, but the earlier spark of doubt which arose between the first man and woman living in an immaculate world—at a time and in a place in which there should have been no causes for concern of any kind.

The reality, of course, is that we are born to chance, disorder, and confusion and always have been, and, while most of us will spend our lives intent on keeping suffering at bay, in the end, the historical record reminds us that we simply did not evolve to live in equilibrium, no matter how much we might yearn for it. The metaphysical distance between one mind and another, and between the complexities of our intentions and the simplicity of our actions, is just too large a gap to bridge.

This, then, is the riddle of our existence: Why are we constructed to survive, instinctively, in a way that runs counter to our highest philosophical and spiritual inclinations? We confront this paradox in some fashion each and every day of our lives, and yet, in the end, only death will resolve the conflict. It is from the contemplation of such notions that we become afflicted by the existential anxieties so unique to our species. In this we can only be grateful that, sometimes, during the course of exploring the depths of our neuroses, we are moved beyond our focus on the self to become the creators of art.