The ego is not the whole self but the filter through which we see the world. It sometimes takes a bashing, but we need that ego; we need that semblance of consistency or we’d not be able to function. It’s all part of the framework we’ve built from human perception.
I think the ego is the part of us that craves narrative. It is in love with time and likes there to be not only a beginning, middle and end but also an official line of truth and meaning. It also wants to be liked, or at least to be considered smart, so that it might get ahead in the framework.
Ego is a divider: me as distinct from you. It is a chooser: this rather than that. It is a contraction, not an expansion, of all the things there are.
In writing, the ego is required in order to make a story. It asks if it makes sense, if it’s true to the writer’s intention, if people will like it. It puts events in a logical sequence and checks they are fully explained. It prepares the work for other egos. Sometimes it gets in the way of the artistic side of the writer.
The artistic side of the writer dowses in the unconscious for the hidden. The unconscious I use here to term ‘all the things there are’, and the artist reports them as they first appear without placing judgement or boundaries thereon.
We need the artist and the ego to work together.
By telling a story, we are focusing on a somewhat arbitrary thread in order to make a recognisable pattern, and in doing so we are omitting all other possibilities; we cannot see from all angles at once. If it makes sense, its not the whole story.
The painting in the header is my own.
C.R. Dudley 