member of:Observers of the Interdependence of Domestic Objects and Their Influence on Everyday Life


This group has been active for a long time and has already made some remarkable assertions which render life simpler from the practical point of view. For example, I move a pot of green color five centimeters to the right, I push in the thumbtack beside the comb and if Mr. A (another adherent like me) at this moment puts his volume about bee-keeping beside a pattern for cutting out vests, I am sure to meet on the sidewalk of the avenida Madero a woman who intrigues me and whose origin and address I never could have known...
--Remedios Varo


(Slideshow is of Artwork by Remedios Varo)
By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.
--Franz Kafka

Saturday, September 21, 2013

Papa Legba

Papa Legba Maquette by zoe blue
Papa Legba is sometimes an old man, sometimes a young man, almost always with a top hat and cane. He has one foot in your habitual ways (the "real world"), and one foot in fresh possibility; the border he crosses is the liminal space in which you are offered or forced to accept an alteration in your perspective in order to survive--a wormhole. No voodoo ceremony can begin without him: he is the one who allows the worlds of loa and humans to meet.  This connection between worlds is frequently represented by a special tree, its roots reaching deep into the underworld, its trunk and branches thrusting into our reality and through to the heavens. He is syncretized with St. Peter, who holds the keys to the gates of heaven, waiting for our arrival. Papa Legba's key plants into the ground via his cane, to connect with those spirits underneath: for example, those we have lost, ancestors. The key grows into a support for him, and also a snake (dweller of the worlds below). His scarf, a bird, covers any calls to the over-world spirits, those in the heavens, that we aspire to, that we desire to live through us. The bird-soul transcends the old. Papa Legba changes from old to new, from human to not, from alive to dead and back again. And he’s looking at you.

Papa Legba Maquette by zoe blue
Maquettes in the style taught by Clive Hicks-Jenkins
What is this key? Papa Legba is the language loa, he translates your cry of pain into a question, your inability to express your needs and desires into a new universe, where those needs and desires are so natural, they are easily communicated.  Languages and stories (and symbols) are used in society to tie everyone together into a community, to a consensual reality, to the same (overall) patterns of understanding.  As long as we’re using the shared image-meanings, then we follow the same story of humanity. If we want a different story, what then? What can Legba do? He can give us a key--that is, access to other symbols, or other ways to see your own. He can give new meaning to what is already there before you, unlocking its other possible meanings, translating it, thereby changing the world.





Everyone has personal symbols. Even if we aren’t aware of them, they rear up in our dreams and they modify our behavior (sometimes in ways that directly clash with societal mores); they are there, underneath, as a part of who we are. We all begin as synaesthetes, in fact, combining our understanding of the world across pairings from various senses. Alexandra Horowitz talks about this in her book On Looking, Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes:

“What the infant sees, for instance, is something quite fuzzier and more dazzling than what the normal adult sees: babies are very nearsighted and they lack the clouded filters that take bright light down a notch. Even more critically, the world is not yet organized into discrete objects for these new eyes: It is all light and dark, shadow and brightness. To the newborn infant, there is no ‘crib,’ no ‘mama’ and ‘daddy,’ no floor no wall no window no sky. Much of this can be seen, but none can yet be made sense of. 

Information taken in by the eyes might be processed in any part of the brain--it could be the visual cortex, leading to an inchoate ‘seeing’; but it could also be the motor cortex, leading to a leg kicking; or the auditory cortex, in which case a nearby teddy bear may be experienced as a bang, or a ringing, or a whisper. There is good reason to believe that this kind of synesthesia is the normal experience for infants. Synesthesia--literally ‘joining of sensations’-- is a somewhat rare and highly improbable form of perception in adults[....]

While tasting sounds or smelling letters is viewed as aberrant (if conducive to creativity) among adults, those eminently creative infants may sense the world with crossed wires all the time. Heinz Werner, a German psychologist of the early twentieth century, called this the ‘sensorium commune’: a primordial way of experiencing the world, pre-knowledge and pre-categorization. Researchers have found remnants of this perceptual organization in adults: on being shown drawings of curly lines, adults tend to characterize the lines as ‘happy’; descending lines, ‘sad’; sharp lines, ‘angry.’ To feel a tone, as though one were inside a vibrating bell, is to see glimpses of your vestigial sensorium commune.

But mostly, we ignore that feeling; we do not label lines as being happy or vexed or gloomy. One theory of synesthesia holds that the synapses connecting neurons identifying shapes and those leading to the experience of taste get snipped sometime in the first few years of life. This may be the simple result of our lack of attention to the connection.”

Lack of attention. That’s precisely it. The important objects, experiences, and details--that is, the ones clearly marked by our parents, extended family, teachers, priests, politicians, etc as important--are granted our attention and they develop. But the other connections, the other details, are still there in your brain. They still exist as a part of you. And in some other universe, you are living according to those connections. If you can find them, from here, you can go there

If synesthesia is conducive, as Horowitz suggests, to creativity, why not seek out such connections? In fact, isn’t that exactly the Art of Memory, the Ars Memoria? Recall that the process is to break an idea down into images, sounds, smells--some kind of symbols--which help you to hold together the disparate parts of the idea. A woodchuck holding a crumbling, tart apple tart, enters the cafe and tries to find a friend. His crumbling tart, the couch where Freud sits, the woman in the red dress all come together in a way particular to you, meaningful to you, and this process of knitting together the symbols not only helps your recall of the information, but guides you to realize, accidentally, other previously unseen connections between things, which leads directly to creativity and invention. This is, I believe, the magic that the practitioners of Ars Memoria were suspected of: by shifting around seemingly symbolic objects in their minds--Varo’s pot of green paint, her stencil for cutting out vests--, they affected the outside world. 








In his book, Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla, Mark Seifer describes a moment of such odd connections in which Tesla went from nearly killing himself (through physical and mental exhaustion) in an effort to solve a problem to its sudden, clearly laid-out solution, via a gorgeous sunset and a Goethe poem. He was struggling to design a way to harness AC power without any ‘cumbersome’ intermediaries, and the struggle took every minute of his time, and he drove himself so hard that he suffered a nervous collapse, which took on the aspect of a severe attention to detail:

“I could hear the ticking of a watch…three rooms [away]. A fly alighting on a table…would cause a dull thud in my ear. A carriage passing at a distance…fairly shook my whole body…I had to support my bed on rubber cushions to get any rest at all…The sun’s rays, when periodically intercepted, would cause blows of such force on my brain that they would stun me…In the dark I had the sense of a bat and could detect the presence of an object…by a peculiar creepy sensation on the forehead.” A respected doctor “pronounced [his] malady unique and incurable.” Desperately clinging to life, Tesla was not expected to recover.”


His friend Szigeti took him out to the park to try to get him moving around. They went at sunset, and suddenly, the beauty of the scenery caused Tesla to burst into spontaneous recitation: 

‘See how the setting sun, with ruddy glow, 
The green-embosomed hamlet fires.
He sinks and fades, the day is lived and gone. 
He hastens forth new scenes of life to waken. 
O for a wing to lift and bear me on, 
And on to where his last rays beckon.’
(From Goethe’s Faust

“As I uttered these inspiring words,” Tesla declared, “the truth was (suddenly) revealed. I drew with a stick on the sand the diagrams shown six years later in my address before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers…Pygmalion seeing his statue come to life could not have been more deeply moved.”



The association between sunset, Faust, and successfully harnessing AC power is still lost on me, but the world has been changed as a result of his connection of those things: power floods our homes, lights our nights, keeps the stereo on and the clothes clean and me instantly connected to friends across the world. All of these things were once unimaginable. Impossible. 


Yet, here we are.

**Update: please follow the link in Niklas' comment, the essay is fantastic!!

18 comments:

  1. en regardent les images en toute vitesse... les uns après les autres...c'est formidablement animé..le personnage danse!!!! bises

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  2. Papa Legba shifts dimensions so beautifully in the drawings... am I looking at a young man, an old man? Who knows? The words, ahh, the words are so profound, particularly the story about Tesla. His connection connected globally ultimately.

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    1. ah, i am very happy you like the words, too. tesla i find immensely inspiring. his way of thinking was fascinating, and he was a miracle-worker!

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  3. I read this post the other day, but had to run off before I could comment, and now, coming back to it I am really struck by what ELFI says about scrolling down the page making this maquette seem to dance. I hadn't noticed it at first, but it is lovely and eerie and magical! I can't wait to see where this maquette turns up!

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    1. the odd thing is, suddenly, for some reason, google sent me a moving photo of all of them--i have no idea why, or...why? it just dropped into my gmail from google. magic, i guess.
      thinking about it makes my day, actually :D

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  4. How deadly and beautiful! Looking at us with crossed optical nerves like one-eyed Odin and reading our thoughts like Hermes! So alive and full of trickster integrity!

    Makes me associate to this essay by Kleist on puppetry:

    http://www.southerncrossreview.org/9/kleist.htm

    The new research on synaesthesia is truly baffling. Seems to have some philosophical implications too, and now I´ll be sure to look further into this research -- thanks!

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    1. oh my god! that article is immense! the way he comes about to the end, to the point that the first eating from the tree brings us farther from grace, but to return and eat from it again brings us back--infinite consciousness--wow! and there you have papa legba in his entirety, i see.
      i mean, the end of it just floored me, but the tale of the boy who lost his affinity with Paris, and the tale of the bear--what a wonderful article, all the way around, thank you!!

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  5. oh, but you know what else that article makes me think of, niklas, is that wallace suggests "jumps" as lucidity checks, stating that gravity doesn't really function as well in the dreaming--just like the marionettes, then, you have lightness of being, but in this case, as if you had returned to the tree of knowledge, you also have an intimate knowledge of your surroundings and how to maneuver not only yourself but them!

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    1. my grin is eating my face, clive :) thank you for your kind words and your generous post :)

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  7. This is fantastic Zoe, so much to digest. Must read several times to better comprehend but the language and search for personal symbology is a passion of my own-as you may know. My interest in mysticism is being fueled by Varo, Carington and now...Zoe.
    Papa Legba, as you inform , seems a fascinating archetype, one I would like to explore as well.
    So once again, thank you for sharing your passions.
    xoLg

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    1. ah, i am very glad if the post interests you in him, i am following him down the rabbit hole, it is an excellent place...
      after talking with you at clive's place :D, i went back and re-read the hearing trumpet and at aberth's book, and i felt carrington to be very much at home in papa legba's realm... and there's a show on right now in dublin it's killing me to miss!

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  8. Wonderful post, a great maquette, and I learnt loads, this isn't a tradition I know anything about. I can feel how this post is going to colour my da today and stay with me for a while

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    1. thank you for visiting :) may he open exciting doors for you!

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