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The great analytical psychologist Carl Jung believed that the process by which the absolute unknown, chaos, was transformed into order was not precisely cognitive and linguistic, not articulated, in its first stages. Instead, the domain of fully articulated and comprehended territory was surrounded by a shadowy domain of nascent knowledge. It was in that domain that inchoate emotion helped to structure what was not yet understood, and that creative art and imagination began to structure emotion, and that myth was derived from art.
The artist lives on the border between chaos and order. The artist chooses to live farther into chaos than the good citizen, and tames that chaos, by dreaming, so that the good citizen can start to feel comfortable there, in the bright daylight hours.
This process occurs in a microcosmic manner when the artists and the galleries and the coffee shops move into chaotic urban areas, and transform them, and render them habitable, through their creative and ill-paid work. What the artist does in decades in the city, art does over the millennia for civilization.
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