EB: When you were talking about an artist not destroying themselves but instead destroying the world – I wanted to ask what you mean. Are you talking about people selling stuff, creating products and selling them? I think of influencers, people selling makeup on Instagram – that kind of thing … Were you talking about that, or a different kind, like a movie star?

AR: I’m thinking more of the Hitler archetype. I’m sort of sanguine about influencers – I weirdly don’t mind them. There’s something calming about it. I find all the supplement and makeup ads very soothing… but I know they’re probably wasteful or vapid in a lot of ways.

I’m more thinking about the archetype of the failed artist or the showman. My president – in my country – is a showman. There’s an artistic element to his personality. He’s creative with reality in that he is willing to break it. We pretend on the left to hate it and a lot of it is disgusting and immoral, but I think the reason he’s in power is he’s willing to stridently reshape things in his own image. I’d prefer it if he were still just a reality TV personality. Instead, he’s ruling a lot of reality.

I’m also thinking about Haiti. Everything that happens in Haiti is going to happen in America, because Haiti is like the avant-garde of the world. Their president, Sweet Micky – Michel Martelly – was an artist, a kompas star, and also something of a tyrant.

We don’t talk enough about how sometimes the priest, the politician, and the poet are related archetypes – Baudelaire wrote about that.

So yes, I don’t want artists to be self-destructive, but I also don’t want artists in their narcissistic delusions to destroy the world. Hitler is the archetype of that. He’s the dark inverse of self-destruction.
We should learn to exist…

To me, the ideal artist archetype is kind of relaxed and groovy as a person. That’s not to say there aren’t amazing artists who aren’t relaxed, but I think the practice of artmaking should make the artist more tolerant of reality. It should make them less trapped in a state of passionate loathing or frustration, less dangerous to themselves or others.
The act of making art should allow some integration. Think about the great actors of the mid-20th century – someone like Marlon Brando. He probably would have been a criminal if he hadn’t been an artist. Art gave him a place to channel his intensity. He was still messed up, but less so than he might have been.

Now I sound like an art therapist, which I’m not… (laughter)

EB: Well, yeah – I wanted to ask about that too. There’s psychoanalysis, but there are also other healing arts, and you practice astrology and do one-on-one sessions with people. Is that, in a way, a way to cultivate this idea of aiding in the self-love of artists, or helping with less self-destructive artmaking?

AR: Yeah. I have a deep belief in healing, and I’m fascinated by its mechanisms. I’m really interested in it – quantum healing, all of it. I have a deep commitment to the sacredness of life. I believe life has meaning, but part of life is the adventure of finding that meaning.

I believe every single human being, including those who seem not to have a soul or who seem robotic, either have been turned into robots of their own pain or their parents’ pain, or have become host bodies for societal conditioning – which many people are. We are being zombified all the time by mechanisms that exist to zombify us, and periodically – hopefully daily – also waking up and coming back to life from that deadness. It can happen many times a day.

I’m committed to the study of life and living, because I emerged into a completely necro-oriented culture. So yes, I have a healing practice because it fascinates me, because it’s creatively exciting, and because I have a deep faith and curiosity about extreme healing – the idea that anything can be transmuted, alchemized, recovered from; that every form of lead can be turned into gold. That’s my theology.

But having a healing practice and assisting others in their soul work doesn’t mean I have a rubric for how art should behave, or that I believe art has any kind of duty to be ‘healing’. Art sometimes needs to be shocking or disjunctive. And I don’t think just wanting a creation to bring healing guarantees that it will. There’s some kind of mysterious intersection between art and healing – they overlap, but they don’t occupy identical spaces.

EB: Did anyone else have questions for Ariana before we let her go?

MSL Student: I was just wondering what kind of meditation you do, and how you ask for a concrete direction. [Student is referring to something Ariana said during the reading, about the period immediately following her mother’s death].

AR: I practice Kundalini yoga, which has been totally maligned – probably rightly so – but it works. I started doing it about ten years ago, after almost a year of horrific PTSD. This was when I was writing A Sand Book. I was trying anything and everything to feel better. After some disturbing experiences I had terrible insomnia, developed debilitating stage fright, my hair was falling out, I couldn’t handle intimacy, and I’d lost faith in my writing. Then I found an app for Kundalini yoga and I did one sequence in a random YMCA in rural Pennsylvania and it was the first time I’d felt better in over a year.

So after my mom died, I was more disoriented than even grieving, at first. I was so disoriented that I was numb, and I just had no idea what I was supposed to do. Nothing made any sense. This one night, after seeing some standup comedy and finally feeling slightly alive, I couldn’t take being numb anymore and I basically started yelling at god and all my ancestors. I was like, ‘I don’t want any of this woo woo shit anymore. NO MORE MYSTICISM. I need concrete instructions. You have to help me. You have to tell me what to do, who with, where, and when. Because I have no fucking idea. You have to tell me.’

I just kept yelling until I was tired. I yelled for a couple of hours. The next morning, in meditation, I got my first instructions. And I followed them.

EB: Amazing. I also wanted to ask about those instructions – when they moved away from A Sand Book and became more lucid or something – but we probably should wrap up now.

Thank you so much for giving us so much – advice for how to be an artist, but also for how to live and be alive today.

AR: Thank you. Thanks for having me. Bye everybody.