Dream Detective, Part I

photo by Jon Fife

By the time the kid comes to me, she’s already half-broken. But she wears broken like a pit bull; she’s a mouthful of glass shards and seven leashes worth of lunging. She’s only spit three words before I’m glad she’s got no weight to her.
“A dream detective,” she spits.
This is how they all come to me: certain I’m a con or a lunatic, but too desperate not to try. And this one is not accustomed to the feeling of desperation.
“Sit,” I offer, ever the gentleman. She ignores me. I shut the door and head to my own seat behind the desk. At the last minute, I decide to keep standing, too. I don’t want this dame towering over me.
“How did you hear about my services?” I try again, my ego taking the lead.
“Dr. Saromi.” Her eyes smirk, ever so slightly.
“Dr. Saromi,” I repeat, checking my fingernails. “I was not aware,” I say, finally, “that she found my methods--”
“She doesn’t. That’s why I came.”
“Ah,” I answer.
“What exactly are your methods?” she says, in that same tone of voice. “Of detection,” she adds, just to get that last shard out.
This is actually the part I like. The explanation drives the whole thing right over the edge. Either she leaves in a huff, which is fine, or this is really her last resort, and she gives up, which leaves me to do my work. It’s just a hunch, but I’m betting this one’s at the end of her rope. Though once I start talking, I can feel her trying to stretch it just a little further.
She fails.
“Tea,” she says, finally going expressionless. “You’re going to detect using tea.”
She’s not bad, this kid. These anxiety-ridden types, they have a certain sinuous quality. It’s either very frail or very muscular. And that aggressive flavor, if you can keep your hands close enough to reign it in when necessary, that can be a very nice flavor. I let my eyes rest a beat too long, and I feel her begin to re-coil.
“Tea,” I confirm, hastily. “This is an ancient process. From Asia.”
“From Asia,” she sneers.
“We drink the tea together,” I continue. “Here, in the office. And then when you sleep--”
“Lavender panties,” she says, almost automatically. She closes her eyes.
I pause.
It takes a minute, but she opens them. “Ok,” she says.
“What is that?” I ask. After all, it could be important.
 She continues to stare straight past me at the wall.
“What is that?” I repeat. “Lavender panties.”
“Anger management,” she says.
I wait.
“A visualization. Kind of meditation.” Her lip curls: “Like in Asia.”
I tuck the lavender panties away for later thought. “Ok,” I concede. “So: no drugs, no sleeping aids, coffee’s ok in moderation--”
“I’m sleeping at home.”
“Yes, you just drink the tea here,” I reenter smoothly. With the girls, this question is always the first one. They’re afraid they might not be able to control themselves. I get up and head to the liquor cabinet by the window. I drum on the top, letting the sun burn some sting into my eyes. Probably I shouldn’t have a shot with her in the room. But it’s also true that I probably shouldn’t continue the conversation without one.
“What exactly led Dr. Saromi to mention me?” I ask, still drumming.
She doesn’t answer. The air in the room promises bad times to come.
“Is the tea in there,” she asks, “or does your end require sleeping aids?”
I drum my fingers. Bad, bad, bad.
“It has to be the same time every day,” I answer. “If this is a good time for you, then we’ll go ahead.”
And I wait.


Fiction by Zoe Jordan, Photo by Jon Fife.

The Big Picture, Part 3

My new painting of Rita, the patron saint of abused women, lost causes, and impossible dreams, blogged here and here.

The Big Picture, Part II

"Self Portrait," by Matthew Buchinger

"For Hair Strokes to the Eye they pass,
And yet they're Letters thro' a glass
Thus he with double Art can write
At once to please and cheat the Sight."
--quoted in Angelique Tachen's Magic

Under a magnifying glass, each curl of the hair in the above self-portrait reveals itself as not lines but words--there are seven psalms in all, making up the whole of the wig. The technique is called micrography, but it's not actually the most amazing thing about this self-portrait.

"See gallants, wonder and behold/This German of imperfect Mold,
No Feet, no Leggs, no Thighs, no Hands,
Yet all that Art can do commands.
First Thing he does, he makes a Pen,
Is that a Wonder! Well what then?
Why then he writes, and strikes a Letter,
No Elziverian Type is better.
Fix'd in his Stumps, directs the Quill
With wondrous Gravity and Skill."
--quoted in The Telephone Book, by Avital Ronell

A little bit about the artist, from The Dublin Penny Journal, Volume 1, Number 44, April 27, 1833:

"The following memoir of an individual, comparatively speaking obscure, whom Nature, in a freakish moment, sent into the world scarce half made up, is, we think, of value, as affording a striking instance of the triumphs which may be achieved by mental energy and perseverance over defects apparently the most insuperable, and further, as an interesting example of the power of mental worth in attracting the friendship and regard of the good and estimable portion of mankind, in defiance of the greatest repulsiveness of appearance, and even bodily deformity. It presents strong evidence, also, that, even under the most adverse circumstances, much real enjoyment of life is within the reach of every human being; while thousands, nevertheless, in every class of society, to whom Nature has been profuse of her gifts, even to prodigality, eke out, from day to day, a useless, joyless existence, and finally quit life without having obtained as much respect from their fellow-men, or possibly as large a share of true happiness as fell to the lot of the lowly subject of this notice."

Matthew Buchinger was born in 1674 in Germany, without hands, feet, or thighs. He sat 2 1/2 inches high. He grew up to be a master engraver and artist as well as a famous magician, especially skilled at "balls and cups" and card games. He created and played several instruments of his own, and also performed publicly on the trumpet, dulcimer, bagpipe, hautboy, and flute. He made a good living with his drawing and performing abilities, thus avoiding having to support himself and his 14 plus children (through 4 wives and--perhaps--seventy mistresses) by way of self-exhibition as a sideshow draw.
Unfortunately, the self-portrait is the only drawing of his I've been able to gain access to.

The Big Picture

(more on St. Rita of Cascia, patron saint of impossible dreams)

This is the biggest drawing I have made, 18 inches by 24. I am working also on a color version, but I'm not happy with it yet :)

There are many details that make the fig tree a good companion for a saint. First of all, that it will grow out of rock, like an orchid, only gigantic; that it could even grow out of the "ruins" of our civilization.

It is now believed that fig trees were the first plant species to be bred for food, some 11,000 years ago in the Middle East--several hundred years before wheat cultivation began. Because its wood is terribly difficult to chop down and provides nothing of interest to our markets, its existence in places like Queensland's national and state parks has saved those areas, and their other trees, from logging. The roses shown here are Alain Blanchard, from the species "Rosa gallica," which, according to Wikipedia, is one of the earliest cultivated species of roses.

As you might recall from my last post on St. Rita, one of her miraculous aspects was her ability to acquire a fig and a rose from a favorite garden in the dead of winter simply by wishing it so. Here, her presence has caused both to bloom from the same fig tree. After all, many things come from a fig tree: according to legend, underneath it, Buddha found enlightenment, and from between its roots sprung the Sarasvati* river; according to a NASA clean air study, the weeping fig also produces clean air, processing out our nasty pollutants--bringing us back full circle in this post and in the world, with new life forming from our ruins--by way of the fig tree.

You can see if you zoom in that as she sits in the curve of the tree trunk, it's as if she's pushing the bark outwards in waves--that is how I imagine it looks when reality "shifts" to allow an impossibility new space in the world. Being a saint, she lets the bird take the fig.


*note: The Sarasvati River was originally personified in the Hindu religion as Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of knowledge, though through time, she developed into a separate entity. It is a very special river in ancient Hindu texts.

It's not the Words, It's the Intent: A Purifying Quest Versus Blood-Sucking Bats from Hell

Photo by Aizar Raldes,
La Paz, Bolivia 2006

This post began with the discovery in In the Labyrinth of an Aymara tradition, stemming from the introduction of the Aymara people to Christianity by Jesuit missionaries following the invasion of South America by Spain. The tradition is called "La Diablada."



Photo by DrCarlosAMG on Flickr

La Diablada combined the ancient Andean ceremonies and the medieval Spanish Auto Sacramental dances, which can be "defined as a dramatic representation of the mystery of the Eucharist," (Wikipedia) or a theatrical re-telling and explanation of the Last Supper, in which the bread and wine offered changed into the body and blood of Christ at his word, and were consumed. "La Diablada" tells a different part of the Christian story, in which St. Michael conquers evil by overcoming a multitude of devils. The story is also an "allegory of the indigenous population's conversion to Christianity" (source).

Wikipedia describes the event:

"At the start of the krewe are Lucifer and Satan with several China Supay, or devil women. They are followed by the personified seven deadly sins of pride, greed, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, and sloth. Afterwards, a troop of devils come out. They are all led by Saint Michael, with a blouse, short skirt, sword, and shield."

photo by Giorgio del Lago on Flickr of the Peruvian La Diablada




Photo by Dado Galdieri
Oruro 2005

Archangel Michael
The Archangel Michael is, interestingly, the patron saint both of battle (as in these presentations) and of healing, and guards over not only warriors and the police, but paramedics and other emergency workers. He is described as "the prince of light, leading the forces of God against the darkness of evil," (Wikipedia) a warrior, the warrior on God's side, expected in the end to lead the final battle against evil at the apocalypse.
We see that battle played out in generations of iconography as St. Michael and his sword facing down the devil:





"Saint Michael of the Apocalypse"
photo by Zenosaurus on Flickr, listed as an icon by Fr. Theodore Jurewicz.



"Archangel Michael Slaying the Dragon"
Raphael





HOWEVER


(Dracula)

As far away from politics as I wish to stay, I find one aspect of the effect of Archangel Michael's legends fascinating in its seemingly perfect (perfectly horrific) expression of the dangers of confusing a metaphor, that is, an external representation of an internal battle for true balance between dark and light with the actual, physical necessity for the bloody gore of battle itself. The example I would like to use here is that of Romanian Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, who, after hearing the voice of God call to him from an icon of the Archangel, interpreted the symbolism of the icon in a very physical sense, and went off to form the Iron Guard, an act which would lead to what the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia calls "one of the most brutal pogroms in history--" a comment written after the end of World War II.
In Balkan Ghosts, Robert D. Kaplan describes the founding of the Iron Guard--the Legion of the Archangel Michael-- in terms that immediately call to mind the legends of Dracula, which stemmed from the same dark Carpathian landscape:

"He organized the Legion around cuibs ("nests") of thirteen members each. To join a cuib, an initiate had to suck the blood from self-imposed slashes in the arm of every other member of the nest, and then write an oath in his own blood, vowing to commit murder whenever ordered to do so. Before setting out to kill, each man had to let an ounce of his blood flow into a common goblet, out of which all would drink, thus uniting the entire nest in death. Members were also obliged to wear crosses and packets of Romanian soil around their necks...
Tall and handsome, Codreanu had riveting eyes and the chiseled features of a Roman statue. His followers call him Capitanul ("the Captain"). He liked to dress completely in white and ride a white horse through the Carpathian villages. There, he was worshipped as a peasant-god--the Archangel Michael's envoy on earth. When Codreanu married, 90,000 people formed a bridal procession.
King Carol II saw Codreanu as a dangerous rival, especially after Hitler told Carol to his face, during a 1938 meeting in Berchtesgarten, that he preferred Codreanu to be the 'dictator of Romania.' Carol, perhaps because of his overweaning arrogance, was no coward. He answered the Fuhrer by having Codreanu and thirteen other Legionnaires strangled to death in November 1938...
Many peasants claimed that they had seen 'the Captian' riding his white horse through the forests at night, in the weeks and months following his supposed execution. Later, the Romanian Orthodox Church proclaimed Codreanu a 'national saint.'"

Carol was forced out, and a General known as "Red Dog" took power, appointing several Legionnaires as cabinet members. This was not enough to appease the Legion members, and after a terrible earthquake was determined to have occurred in order to castigate the people for not avenging the death of their martyrs, an awful massacre began which included stripping 200 Jews naked and putting them on the slaughterhouse conveyor belt. The descriptions of the incident are unbearable.

Rethinking the Archangel:

It is here that his healing qualities become important to remember, because they point out that all this sword-wielding was for the protection of the souls of mankind--from a non-human darkness.

According to Wikipedia,

"At the place where he was first venerated, in Phrygia (modern-day Turkey), his prestige as an angelic healer obscured his interposition in military affairs. It was from early times the centre of the true cult of the holy angels, particularly of St Michael. Catholic tradition relates that Saint Michael in the earliest ages caused a medicinal spring to spout at Chairotopa, near Colossae, where all the sick who bathed there, invoking the Blessed Trinity and St Michael, were cured....
At Constantinople likewise, Saint Michael was the great heavenly physician. His principal sanctuary, the "Michaelion", was at Sosthenion, some fifty miles south of Constantinople. He supposedly visited Emperor Constantine the Great at Constantinople, intervened in assorted battles, and appeared, sword in hand, over the mausoleum of Hadrian, in apparent answer to the prayers of Pope St. Gregory I the Great (r. 590-604) that a plague in Rome should cease. In honor of the occasion, the pope took to calling the mausoleum the "Castel Sant'Angelo" (Castle of the Holy Angel), the name by which it is still known. The sick slept in this church at night to wait for a manifestation of St Michael; his feast was kept there June 9."

From there, we come back to the ritual of drinking blood, but in a different light.
The quest for the Holy Grail, the symbolic search for that famed hidden chalice which contains the blood of Christ, a mythical representation of the human quest for redemption famously retold in the King Arthur Legends and the Indiana Jones movies, also stems from the stories of the Archangel Michael:

"Also of legendary fame is the mythical vessel known as the Holy Grail. According to an ancient legend, when Satan rebelled against God, he was wearing on his crest an enormous stone, which is alternately identified as an emerald or a ruby. When the archangel Michael struck down Satan, this jewel fell to earth and was found by some unidentified sea-faring people who shaped it into a magnificent chalice. This was somehow acquired by King Solomon and from him it descended to Jesus, who used it at the Last Supper to institute the Sacrament of Communion. This same chalice was used by Joseph of Arimathea to gather the blood of Jesus while He was still nailed to the cross..."
--The Complete Book of Amulets and Talismans by Migene Gonzalez-Wippler

The search for the holy grail changes the focus of the St. Michael stories, from the battle with Lucifer itself to the recovery of this "jewel" which fell from heaven following that battle. That jewel was reshaped to form the cup which caught the blood of Christ, named the Redeemer of mankind--a very different drinking of blood than that enacted by Dracula or Codreanu. The quest stories are an internal search for what is good, for what will redeem us instead of the internal battle with what is bad. The idea here is to focus on the desire, the dream, the truth we must believe is there if we are ever to see it--as opposed to focusing on the bad that we see so easily in our every day lives, focusing on the difficulties that beset us, on things like violence, poverty, and suffering. The idea is to heal through our actions.

And that ideal brings me back to the art of Remedios Varo, a painter who often made visible magical possibilities, and who has recently been studied by Estella Lauter as a female creator of such a questing myth. She "claims that the fantasy and female-centered art of Remedios Varo reveals the same stages found in traditional quests: the Separation, the Initiation, and the Return." (source)



"Rupture" (The Separation: Leaving the cloister, despite the heavy, disapproving gaze of the Institution)



"The Calling" (The "quester" carries a chemist's flask; an alchemist's mortar hangs from her neck. She receives her charge directly from the heavens, it ignites her, it makes her a light.)



"Exploration of the Sources of the Orinoco River" (Note the waters of life flowing from the chalice hidden inside the tree.)



"Born Again"
Lauter describes the above painting thus:

"The moment of discovery in Varo's rendition of the quest occurs in Born Again. It is the discovery of the grail, which eluded all but three of King Arthur's knights. The naked female breaks through a wall into a sacred space that contains the grail, miraculously full and containing the reflected image of the crescent moon. . . . It is an ecstatic moment, . . . entirely feminine because of the ancient association of the woman with the vessel and the moon, and because of the vaginal imagery presented in the tearing wall. . . . [T]he protagonist has become her own fate."(92)

That final line seems most important, here: "The protagonist has become her own fate." Because the journey, just like the battle in the other versions of this story, is internal. It is a quest for the best of oneself, the quest to make that all that we are.




The Mont St. Michel:

According to Ben Heine, the photographer,:
"UNESCO has classed the Mont Saint-Michel as a world heritage in 1979 and this mecca of tourism welcomes more than three million visitors a year.
The 'Wonder of the Western World' forms a tower in the heart of an immense bay invaded by the highest tides in Europe."

By reaching up. Right?