Submerged

 

Image: Wye River Store in July, refuge of the emerging

 and the submerged artist, amongst others.

The emerging artists programs win big funding. The submerged artists programs, meanwhile, are difficult to find. This is because they don’t exist. There is no application form. Submerged artists are not visible. They are to be found beneath several layers of finished and unfinished manuscripts. These sifting manuscripts are, in a sense, application forms. A submerged artist has spent sometimes months years completing such an application form, uncertain as to whether the title is ‘Acceptance’ or ‘Rejection’. Years of submersion renders the titles interchangeable. One way to find clarity is to move aside these layers of manuscripts before they become a sverdrup, in order mainly to compose fresh manuscripts, that may or may never be application forms. A submerged artist is into total immersion, unlike an emerging artist, who will know only by dipping the toe if they are now falling in at the deep end. Total immersion is how the submerged artist hears the eras of sound in their life, where even the silences bubble in the mainstream of their improvisation. Their music sends repeated notes, some of them reaching the surface. For all anyone knows, they are playing in an octopus’s garden, or their titanic struggle is just the tip of the iceberg, or they’ve ceased waving in favour of drowning. Whatever the sounds, the submerged artist requires total submission, even as they’re sweep away, or float their boat on its singular track. The self-interview is a submerged artist’s tidal chart. Here they complain that what others call whimsical is for them life or death. The traction put into a particularly dense passage is thought interesting by someone, if ‘someone’ noticed its density at all. Interesting might only ever be subjective, but then how to make that interest objective. Submersion, nevertheless, is more than a state of mind. A serious artist must monitor the patterns of their own emotional currents. It can get them down, being a submerged artist, especially when the only place they can go to express these down feelings is in the unfinished symphony of their latest production. So many people have been here before, asking questions for which they appear to have the answer, already. Fiction of arduous length, sometimes oceanic, reminds the submerged artist of future choice; their music yearns to be everything, and nothing at the same time. Others have no taste for self-interview, or patience for that matter. They stand like the masters of old, and mistresses, determined that this canvas is the big one, even though it looks like sail remnants of a sunken tea-clipper. They persist in their hermitage of late submersions, swimming against the trend, unknown to anyone, or going with the flow that may conclude in a submarine signature.