Levels of Illusion
Interview
Taken from "The Onion Girl" by Charles de Lint
Extract from an interview with Jilly Coppercorn, conducted by Torrane Dunbar-Burns for the Crowsea Arts Review, at her Yoors Street studio on Wednesday, April 17, 1991.
What do you think it is that makes you different from other artists? That makes you so welcome among so many disparate disciplines, untouched by maliciousness or gossip?
[laughs] Well, I think there's plenty of gossip.
But it's not mean-spirited. Whenever I hear you talked about, it's as though you're a mischievous little sister -- even to artists many years your junior.
I don't know. Maybe it's because I don't want to rule or serve, only to be allowed to go my own way.
Isn't that the ambition of all artists? To make their own mark?
Is it? It seems to me that people make art for all sorts of different reasons. I'm not interested in leaving a body of work behind. But I am interested in promoting communication between everybody -- and not only through the arts. And I'm determined to show through my art that there are alternatives to the way the world is these days.
You mean by showing us that there are faerie and magic?
The magical beings in my paintings aren't the point. The point is that we're not alone. That we're surrounded by spirit and spirits. I truly believe that if we do our best to live a good life, to treat each other with kindness and respect, we can make the world a better place. The faerie are a representation of that betterness -- is that even a word?
It is now, if you want it to be.
The Faerie represent the beauty we don't see, or even choose to ignore. That's why I'll paint them in junkyards, or fluttering around a sleeping wino. No place or person is immune to spirit. Look hard enough, and everything has a story. Everybody is important.
"Death makes equal the high and low.
What's that from?
John Heywood, I believe.
Too bad we have to wait for death to make a balance.
Isn't that the truth. But to get back to the faerie and the other magical beings in your paintings ...
They're just how I tell the story.
So the faerie aren't real?
[Smiles.] I never said that.
Chicago
The Movie Musical
Not the city, which is all too real.
What a wonderful mixture of illusion and reality.
The story is told in a series of parables, mostly overwhelmingly lavish and loud. We are shown just enough of the real world to keep from getting lost. First our heroine is unfaithful to her husband. Then she kills her lover. When hubby won't take the rap, our heroine gets hauled off to jail. Eventually she obtains a lawyer. Between them they begin creating elaborate new fantasies.
Our heroine's life depends on the fantasy she creates for the press. This fantasy is what will pay for her legal services. But it is heady. It becomes habit forming. She constantly needs a fix of publicity in order to feel good about herself. Other murders, other murderers, must not be allowed to dominate the news or to attract attention away from her situation, even if it requires inventing a baby.
But the very practice of law, we learn, is fantasy, illusion. The best illusionist wins. It isn't the interpretation of words in dusty books of law by dusty lawyers in front of a nearly sleeping judge, with the final decision to be made by the twelve people so uninspired they were unable to concoct a sufficient excuse for not serving on a jury. It's a three-ring circus, opposing clowns performing before the small audience they both try so hard to confuse and distract.
The verdict comes in and reality with it. Fantasy dries up.
The life-sustaining attention our heroine enjoyed is gone.
Or is it?
The Real World
The world is full of illusion. Mostly we ignore it.
Politics is almost completely illusery. Whatever they say or do, that isn't what's really happening. Read your local newspaper, watch news on television, read news magazines ... you're being trapped in a web of illusion. Oh, they show many of the basic facts, but they leave out a lot and they put in a lot of spin on what they do show.
And if politics is fantasy, what about entertainment? Take the music industry as a particularly bad example. They create music groups or take individuals, not necessarily especially talented, promote the hell out of them, sell their recordings and shows at great profit while sharing as little as possible with the artists, then scream bloody murder when somebody either shares their music without paying or, more recently, makes use of technology that could be used to duplicate their works without paying for having the ability to make copies, whether used or not. And the sports industry has gone in a slightly different direction but are just as unreal as other aspects of entertainment.
Then there's physics. Quantum foam, superstrings, worm holes, black holes -- all the modern playthings of today's physicist are fantastic.
But only humans are aware of the possibility of illusion. Only the human mind can conceive that we might be fooled, that there might be more than we can feel and sense through the sensory capabilities we share with other animals. And, aware of the illusion, only we can choose to ignore it, either temporarily or permanently.
Relax and enjoy it.
Comments (5)
New book added to my "must read" list. Thanks for the heads-up.
Mostly we ignore anything we don't like. Ignor-ant.
Interesting. Reality is kind of an individualized experience, don't you think?
When I took my class on the Irish Diaspora, our text was a wonderful little book on storytelling, "Remembering Ahanagran" by Richard White. White, a historian, included tales of the fairies, then explained this inclusion in what was a history as follows:
"There is no causal connection between emigration and fairies, of course. But there are connections. Both existed in the same place at the same time; both sprang from a common past. And each, in its own way, represented the forked alternatives of Irish country life. A person who left Ireland left behind the Tuatha Dé.
"Because the fairies came from the people who had inhabited the country before the Gaels, the fairies of Ballylongford and its surrounding townlonds had lived there longer than the Irish. The fairies were embodiments of the past and the place itself."
White makes a very good argument that reality is also a community effort. He was able to show that, at least in Ireland, certain tales became commonly agreed upon despite differing greatly from recorded history, other tales differing from both history and community tales. Which do you choose to select as the correct and proper "reality"?
I'll add to the confusion. What is reality at time a concerning an event that happened at time x may be different from the reality at time b concerning that same event. Reality changes with the passage of time ... which we mostly deny (or ignore, or spin).
None of it is dishonesty. That's how it really happened. Today, tomorrow and forever, until further notice.
For some reason I'm reminded of George Berkely. Anyhow, you didn't say if you actually liked Chicago. Did Mom?
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