How to Create Prophetic Art: Allen Ginsberg’s 3-Word Advice
When asked how to become a prophet, Allen Ginsberg gave a three-word answer that you can apply to your work.
In this article, I’ll relay his advice and explain why it works so you can unlock vast swathes of undiscovered creative potential.
First, let’s define what I mean by prophecy in this context.
What is prophecy?
Prophecy is a revelation of the plenitude and complexity that lie outside of the mundane: 'pointing to the divine expanses beyond the routines of everyday life', as Lewis Hyde puts it in Trickster Makes This World.
Put simply, a prophet disrupts the mundane to reveal the eternal. For Ginsberg, the key to doing this and creating prophetic art was simple.
“Tell your secrets”
When asked how to become a prophet, Ginsberg replied, “Tell your secrets.”
All structures work by exclusion, and prophecy is about revealing this excluded plenitude.
Such revelations are apocalyptic for the given structure, as they subject its order to an attack from its excluded complexities: a catalyst for change.
Secrets sit outside a given structure, and speaking them allows articulation to enter where silence had ruled.
At the level of the psyche, Ginsberg’s advice is a technique for loosening the boundaries of the self and opening up the ego, making for a more porous and flexible structure to live in.
It’s why evolution through Jungian individuation requires working with one’s shadow elements – the buried or underdeveloped contents of one’s psyche that the conscious ego represses – to expand one’s ego and grow psychologically.
Ginsberg acknowledges the shame of his homosexuality and his mother’s schizophrenia in his early poems; as long as they remained secrets to the rest of the world, he remained a prisoner to them.
But Ginsberg was a poet with knowledge of his inner life – two factors central to his ability to create prophetic art.
‘If mind is shapely, art will be shapely’
The person willing to work with those things that structures exclude, to articulate the silences, will open up vast spaces to explore.
This unlocks a wealth of materials, and is key to prolific art.
However, these revelations alone don’t constitute art.
Anyone can pour out their soul onto a page or canvas; such outpourings are only art if they're performed by an artist.
One of Ginsberg’s aphorisms was ‘if mind is shapely, art will be shapely’.
For Ginsberg, an understanding of one's inner world, as developed through self-awareness practices in Jung's teachings, is essential in ensuring the quality of one’s creative output.
It’s only through inner work that you can understand what lies beyond the structure of the ego, so knowing oneself is a precursor to prophetic art.
Summary
To summarise Ginsberg’s methods: know yourself, tell your secrets, create.
Read my articles on Jungian individuation and creativity, as well as Hyde’s book mentioned, to learn more.