Redon and Symbolism

2010_9_ 11 Redon and Symbolism
On Oct. 12, 1972 I wrote in my journal about the drawing I now regard as my signature image. I refer to “God’s Athlete in the Abyss,” which appears in PRIMUS ROTA. At the time I was sitting back and enjoying my handiwork after a few previous attempts of the idea. I had found an image of a guy hanging in that position in one of my wife’s Dance magazines; interestingly, from a dance called “Pain.” The final effort was good, in focus, and clean, simple, complete and immaculate. It expressed what I meant it to: In a single image it revealed the essence of my INFERNO experience. Now when I contemplate the image the INFERNO experience flares before my mind’s eye, bringing it all back home to me again. It allows me to relive my visionary death and rebirth.

At the time the image reminded me of a Tarot card; it still does. It has a vertical format, a similar proportion, and a single figure like so many of the traditional cards. The darkness included in the image brings in an occult element, and a feeling of dread evoked by the serpent, the fact the figure has no head, and the raging waters below. The figure struggles to hold his legs up, to keep them dry and out of the water. (I believe it was Heraclitus who said, “The dry soul is the wisest.”) The image also has an atmosphere of mystery about it. Enigma rules.

Actually I was trying to encapsulate the Kundalini experience which was what the INFERNO was all about. It was inadvertent, accidental, if you will, but it happened to me nonetheless. But I didn’t want it to be schematic, and I think I succeeded. Experiencing Kundalini is not what you would call a rational experience. It is calling forth out of the depths of the subtle body within all of us what the yogis of India call Shakti or divine creative energy, a force that can awaken at any time or one can learn to coax out into the open by spiritual discipline and practice. It happened to me the first time after a particularly trying year in Las Vegas. I experienced what others have termed a “Dark Night of the Soul,” and my hanging man is meant to suggest the fright that was part of the trip. In a sense I did not have adequate preparation for what was happening to me, no guide, no guru to tell me not to worry. According to the Kabbalah the Abyss can be found on the Tree of Life, in the upper branches; it is where Divine contact is possible. Only ‘‘God’s Athlete” can psychologically survive the Abyss and turn it to the SELF’s benefit.

I deliberately made my athlete less muscle-bound and a softer looking male because that was more fitting for my physique; and then I added bloodied bandages on his legs and arms to connote wounds and struggle, which are also the attributes of a warrior. The head of a lone fish was visible out of the ‘chaos of waters’ down below. The fish can dive into the unconscious; it can also be understood as the nascent Self. I also put the fish in close proximity to a whirlwind on the border of the image and as well close to what I then called “the black ball,” my premier symbol through hundreds of drawings over 30 years.

When I first showed the image to friends and acquaintances they, rather predictably, found the image too sinister and too scary. No doubt in 1972 the influence of the malignant drawings I did in the late sixties was still in me and it would take some time to be transcended. But given what I was dealing with in creating the drawing aspects of the ‘Dark Night of the Soul’ had to be part and parcel of the final image. I wasn’t describing a picnic on the grass with the sun shining. After all, I did hang in Cosmic Night while “Serpent Power” climbed up my spinal tree to overwhelm my rational self, which was a scary experience—but only because it was the unknown. The second time it happened, in Eugene in 1969, I was ready for it and the rush, although powerful, became a very positive thing. To make a comparison: having a second baby by home birth was a lot easier for Sue and me after the first one at home. The second was a walk in the park compared to the first.

Following on the INFERNO and a few years later the invention of THE HIEROGLYPHIC THEATER, I became interested in some artists I hadn’t gotten into before, for example, Odilon Redon. He once said,” We must remember that we have other things than the eyes to satisfy, that we carry in ourselves (such_ troubles, joys, or pains which the great artist know how to address.” In his book PURPOSES OF ART the author, Albert Elsen compares Redon’s lithograph, “Light of Day,” with a conventional painting of the same subject matter, a scene of looking out the window, by a contemporary academic painter by the name of Caillbotte. It was a revealing comparison. Although similar in theme, they were worlds apart; one is the result of vision or “second sight,” the other is nothing but the facts. “Light of Day” depicted a dark interior room, a window and a tree outside the window. Simple enough. Caillbotte’s painting was a descriptive scene of a man looking out the window—period, no more, no less. What you see is all there was. Elsen wrote the following about “Light of Day.”

“As we focus on our side of the window we see this is no ordinary room, and that vague, softly luminous shapes hover in the darkness. It is as if Redon were metaphorically showing us the mysterious dark world that exists behind the human eye. What we see through the window we can describe but what lies in front has been only suggested, not defined, and this is the goal of poetic thought…Like music, they transport us into the ambiguous world of the undetermined. Redon’s modernity thus lies in his cultivation of his own experience, the creation of a private, undecipherable, but lonely world; he was an artist stimulated by the creative process whose intent was not to criticize or reform his public. His interest was to involve the spectator ‘By means of a sudden attraction, in all the allure of the uncertain.’”

Redon was both a psychic adventurer and an “introspective voyager” (Wallace Stevens), an explorer into the dark realms of the mind; he would then returned to articulated what he discovered there with wispy chimeras and vague shadows that populate the hinterlands of our deeper mind, like echoes from an unknown world. In “Light of Day” he gives us a darken room, with bubble-lie floating shapes, an ordinary window, and outside a tree. The image thus presents an interface between ordinary and non-ordinary reality, between time and eternity, between light and dark, and between Self and Archetypal Psyche. The darken room is our subjectivity, the obscurities with our interior world, the personal unconscious. The window is what Jesus called a “true door,” a threshold, a looking glass into the Other Side, where a glimpse of eternity can be had. As for the tree I see it as THE TREE OF LIFE, the “axis Mundi,” that which connects us to an Unknown God. When I meditate “Light of Day” as a species of poetic reality I see myself during THE INFERNO, looking through thick walls and seeing a inner landscape of wondrous beauty and I see myself climbing the TREE OF LIFE. These are the journeys that Art like Redon can provide.

Interestingly, Redon was drawing the “intimate echoes” of his soul when Courbet and naturalism were at their height in France and the Impressionists were about to burst on the scene in Paris. He was born the same year as Monet but he seems of another generation, not the type of artist who would join a movement, and always preferring to go his own way, dreaming his own dream. From the start he was more interested in imagination and viewed Nature, as William Blake did, as experience that had to be transformed. (Blake was more the Gnostic than Redon. He once said external reality was “dust on my heels.”) Redon felt that true artists recognized the reality that could be felt. Fantasy was the “messenger of the unconscious.” The title of his first album of Lithographs was “In a Dream.” With the emergence of Symbolism in Literature in the 1880s, his work gained more recognition and appreciation. I feel we both belong to the same Brotherhood of the Spirit and that we share, as Max Beckmann said of his patrons and admirers, the same metaphysical code.

This brings me to another term for that code. I had run across it in the mid-seventies when I stumbled on J.E. Cirlot’s DICTIONARY OF SYMBOLS, a book I have referred to often over the years. Cirlot was a Spanish poet, art critic, mythologist, musician and good Jungian. He was an avant guardist but maintained a hermetic perspective as a creative person. His DICTIONARY, which he published in 1963, was quickly translated into English but so far none of poetry has. Lots of bells rang for me when I read the entry in the DICTIONARY called “Imago Ignota,” which of course means” Unknown Images.” This is what he had to say about them.

“From about the middle of the last century, the tendency of poetry and the visual arts has been toward a mode of expression whose antecedents go back through the ages—but which received a particular impetus, around the year 1800, from the works of William Blake—and which might, with justification, be termed hermetic. This movement was characterized by the quest for the obscure as a self-sufficient goal, and representations of ‘harmonious wholes’ whose function lies in their remoteness….It is this type of unfamiliar pattern that constitutes the ‘unknown image’—a pattern of words, shapes or colors that has no correspondence with the normal, human feelings….These ’unknown images’ create their own kind of reality and expressed the spiritual need of particular individuals to live within this created reality.”

Besides Blake and Redon I think of Max Beckmann’s seven triptychs and many other works of his as examples of IMAGO IGNOTA. Peter Fischer, a German Scholar who wrote a book on Beckmann, used the word ‘Hieroglyphic,’ virtually in the same sense as Unknown Images to describe Beckmann’s work.

“His hieroglyphic compositions…represent an endeavor to reduce an intricate complex of delicate relationships to a formula whose basic content remains a mystery.”

This is a circle of initiates that I, too, belong with, what I might call those who have found the Hieroglyphic, hermetic solution to their Art.