AUKUS Chronicles/Studio Notes: Drypoint print of my ‘imaginary’ meeting with William Blake’s Orc in a Melbourne bar

Conversations with Orc, drypoint print, unique state U/S, 2023. Carl Gopalkrishnan

This is a new drypoint print about my ‘imaginary’ meeting with William Blake’s Orc from his poem America a Prophecy (1793). In my process of painting Australia a Prophecy in 2021, I engaged with William Blake’s poem America a Prophecy and that poem’s main character Orc. The following is a transcript from my 2023 talk to The Blake Society in January 2023. I used the term “imaginary conversation” in a performative way to bring my process alive in that talk and to walk the audience through the concept of a focused imagination as a ‘doorway’ into the visionary processes that allow knowledge and insights into our conscious mind. Artists do this unconsciously I think, but rarely communicate it.

It was very important to be emotionally honest in this talk, and to foreground those emotions in my creative process, rather than to disassociate it for the sake of academic protocols often necessary when writing coherent articles and papers.

It’s rare to have a sympathetic audience that values faith and religious concepts, emotion, art, poetry and the visionary genre all at the same time. There was a lot of Jungian psychoanalysis in my process and references to Joseph Campbell’s departure from Jung in his concept of ‘The Hero’s Journey’ from his 1985 book The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

So below are some extracts from the talk I gave which you can view online: https://youtu.be/2ag3-5wgDp4

Selected transcript text from “America a Prophecy: A talk to the Blake Society”, 25th January 2023

“Orc gave me my insights into the culture of masculine violence in our international relations, our leaders’ search for personal salvation on their Hero’s Journey; and their capacity to distinguish between true and false prophets”.

“So, I was drawn to talk to Orc about the political and military tensions in the Indo-Pacific because, his Hero’s Journey is as bleak as the news feeds on my phone. If he is a God, then he defies box ticking.  He feels closer to Hindu, Chinese and many Indigenous mythologies, where the face of God speaks in many forms”.*

“Part of my thought experiment involved sitting opposite Orc in a chair for hours. You begin to see a Man chained to a version of masculinity that is violent, traumatised and unhealed.  So, Orc became the one person who might tell me if our archetypes of war are inescapable”.

“By this time, Orc and I had settled into a routine of meeting for drinks after work, in a bar on Smith Street, in Melbourne. I showed him articles on my phone, while explaining the history of Sino-Australian relations. Blake’s poem was niggling me to look beyond my phone, as Australian and Chinese relations began to nosedive”.

“PTSD in policy is something we don’t talk about either. As nations, we carry historically traumatic stories. As citizens, we subconsciously absorb those stories.  Men of war and politics seem to instinctively run towards conflict, or towards their ‘Abyss’, in search of their Inner Hero. Since the time of Blake, this archetypal journey has become embedded in many of our institutional cultures, including our military. It’s become a celebrated pathway for both religious and secular men, to express their masculinity. One does not need to finish the journey, but men expect other men to be on the Hero’s journey”.*

© Carl Gopalkrishnan for The Blake Society 2023

* These paragraphs were used from my article for Critical Military Studies. It is a subscriber publication and reproduction needs to cite the publisher: ‘An Artists exploration of the mythic, subconscious and literary constructions of military interventions in the Indo-Pacific’ Carl Gopalkrishnan (15 June,2022) in Critical Military Studies, Currently published online: DOI: 10.1080/23337486.2022.2088082