Dawn of the Guiding Light

2010_10-12 The Dawn of a Guiding Light

One night in May of 1972 I was depressed over the fact my drawings seemed so impenetrable, both to me and others. I asked myself, is it possible I am barking up the wrong tree? When I looked at what I have done since 1969, when I left my ‘Horror Period’ behind, one minute I see the promise of things to come and maybe even some great talent preparing to break loose; but 5 minutes later when I looked again the stuff looked ridiculous and empty, a shot in the dark, hardly worth the effort. Things just weren’t coming together as I had hoped they would when we arrived in Tucson the year before. I had been flailing about for a few years trying to find new footing. The new work looked experimental, tentative, the result of a search that wasn’t paying off yet. I was still without a clear road to take. I was still juggling possibilities, toying with bits and pieces of ideas that could tease my imagination but couldn’t stand alone yet.

On that night in question I was reading THE BANQUET YEARS by Roger Shattuck. I felt an intense identification with Eric Satie who was one of the artists discussed in the book. I loved Satie’s comic sense and how he could make nonsense have a metaphysical aura. That sort of thing had a lot of appeal to me. Satie was also, like me, very idiosyncratic. Here is what Shattuck said about him. “Irony, spite, and fantasy combine into a fairy tale about a nonsense world not less but MORE ordered than ours. Satie’s entire career represents an effort to confound, to provoke laughter, to give pause, and then to disappear—and least of all to entertain or edify.” I had long ago embraced the refusal to be ordinary, or simply an entertainer, bandwagon artist, or a decorator. Others could happily go that route but not me. Shattuck went on to say that Satie’s talents were best revealed in “sudden visitations,” or epiphanies-- eruptive moments of visionary experience. I knew something about those kinds of experiences. Indeed, when I was drawing I would try to get locked into the memory of those experiences, using them as, so to speak, a platform to perform on—they were the GROUND of my creativity. If I failed to get really centered that’s when the results looked ridiculous and empty, like a jumble of lines and shapes that didn’t add up to anything. But if I am locked in and intensely focused I can deliver an authentic “hieroglyphic” image that reflects a numinous experience-- about being in a context of radiant and expansive harmony. So I look on creating as a, if you will, yoga, a way to meditate and achieve unity of purpose and being. There is also something of prayer in my approach, communing with a higher power that comes down and flows through me. Drawing provides the elevation I crave. Exalted vision is where it’s at for me. The material image represents the marriage between that which is visible and that which is invisible, what is accurately described as a SYMBOL—something unknown made manifest.

These thoughts got me thinking about the spatial character of Munch’s work and how space, and the way he uses it, reveals psychological and metaphysical depths. For example, let’s take a look at “The Dance of Life.” It is one of his most famous works as well as one that best represents his style of expressionist painting. All the figures in the foreground are specters profiled against a vast enigmatic (and horizontal) background composed of earth, air, water, and sky and secondary dancers. The whole scene seems cursed by an odd but striking full moon whose reflection touches the shoreline behind all the dancers. Aside from the four main figures up front the other dancers reflect and express a ghoulish anonymity—mere specters awash in a sea of crackling nerves and uncertainty. One man whose face is visible leers at his dancing partner with lust on his mind. But it is three women and the one man in the frontal plane that carry the main thrust of the narrative and the effect is achieved by formal means. The three females are in dresses of different colors, white, red and black; this is no accident either. The colors were carefully chosen to represent different stages of life for women. White indicates virginity, naiveté, purity, inexperience: innocence. The woman dancing with the somnolent man with his eyes closed is dressed in red, and oddly but significantly, one loop of red paint outlines his body, like a lasso holding him in place and giving him definition. The male dancer had his eyes closed, moving in robotic fashion, as if mesmerized by the opposite sex, not a good outcome for someone like Munch who had great anxiety about the opposite sex and deeply feared what he thought of as the devouring tendencies of the female. In short, the male of the species is her captive and the red dress represents her sex and passion, aspects of life that rule after innocence is gone, especially when man and wife have entered the middle stage of life. (By the way, Munch never married—he was afraid to.) Finally, there is the woman in black, she of sorrowful mien, her hands held clenched in front of her. She of course is a representation of the late stage of life, old age accompanied by unhappiness and despair. The symbolic flavor of the entire scenario is clear and unmistakable. Munch cannily conjured his three stages of a woman’s life, innocence, lust, and old age, in simple but concrete form, with color as a dramatic accent on meaning.

I learned an awful lot by scrutinizing Munch’s methods of expression, especially when it came to the depiction of the relationship between men and women. My book EROS AND PSYCHE is quite indebted to him.

A few days later I was playing around with another Munch painting and some other paintings. They were pictures that I had cut out of magazines and were rearranging on my desk, as if I was looking for something. Suddenly I flashed on a relationship between Munch’s “The Scream” and two other pictures on my desk, Ingres’s painting “’M. Louis-Francois Bertin,” painted in 1832, and a painting by Morris Graves of a snake coupled with a moon image painted in the late 1930s. I saw the three images as a perfect illustration of my tripartite ideograph on the nature of Being, that is, Persona/ Psyche/Pneuma, concepts I borrowed from Gnosticism. The Ingres was a painting of the archetypal bourgeois gentleman, a perfect example of “Hylic” man, man the gross materialist devoted to the senses, money and success. HYLE represents the lowest level of consciousness, a human being whose spirituality is nil or undiscovered. Hylic man has no interior life; it is closed off to him, like a large boulder covering a cave entrance. On the other hand “The Scream” describes a man whose outer shell has been broken and broken is the first step in being open—the boulder has been removed and the inside of the cave is now visible. Emotionally it is at the opposite pole from “M. Bertin,” who is pictured as an arrogant, overconfident man who thinks he is better than the “small people.” The man in “The Scream “is experiencing the beginning of a deeper awareness, one of the interior life, of the need for soul-making. The image was and is an excellent reflection of the Psyche, humanity in distress, quite appropriate for the modern age. It is an image that brings into focus the daemonic intermediate level of Being, with the bridge to the depths being the linkage between the unconscious and consciousness.

The Morris Graves painting is called “Snake and Moon” and it was done when Graves was under the sway of Oriental Philosophy and deliberately sought to instill echoes of mysticism in his evocative and poetic paintings of animals. “Snake and Moon” represents the nonhuman element in nature and the Pneuma, the breath of Spirit. We are in new space now, where Light and Dark commingle, where Kundalini abides like silent thunder and lightning; we are now at the GROUND OF BEING, where an infinite power sometimes crosses over to ignite spiritual energy in the Psyche. The presence of the full moon links us with where we started, with “The Dance of Life,” human beings swaying under the magic of the full moon, something of special importance to me ever since my “lunacy” episode during THE INFERNO.

So where did this playing around with images and ideas take me, especially the idea of tripartite division of PERSONA/PSYCHE/PNUEMA, the so-called “Threefold Cord of Alchemy.” I was just following my intuition. In the winter of 1971, when I was living in Eugene I had done a drawing while I was stumbling around in the dark looking for a new direction after my ‘Horror Period’ in Las Vegas; that was the first I ever tried with the idea of three levels. It was called “The Eternal Return.” The lower level was occupied by water and a large tapir—I was thinking about their presence in “2001: A Space Odyssey”—while the middle section—and there was a clear demarcation between levels—was a self-portrait, and the uppermost level had an angel fertilizing an egg on the borderline between the second and third levels. This was my first and rather rough interpretation of the Threefold Cord of Alchemy. The eventual name I gave to these images based on three vertical registers and accompanying symbols was “The Hieroglyphic Theater.”

Now, how did I come by these ideas? Around the same time, while I was teaching part-time at Oregon State up in Corvallis, I had read HIDDEN SYMBOLISM OF ALCHEMY AND THE OCCULT ARTS by an early Freudian named Herbert Sillberer. It had been published in 1917 and was something of a breakthrough book and much praised by the likes of Carl Jung who went on to investigate Alchemy at greater length. Sillberer wrote that his purpose was to “give consideration to the chemical viewpoint of alchemy and also of hermetic philosophy and its hieroglyphic educational methods.” In other words, he saw their potential for raising consciousness, as we would say today. Alchemy wasn’t the “black mud of the Occult” as Freud had told Jung in 1909. He went on to pose this important question: Do you follow the lead of Psychoanalysis or do you opt for “the hermetic, hieroglyphic solution?” In Post-Inferno times I had to opt for the latter. It was clear to me what had to be my preference. I had become someone anchored in esoteric, obscure, dream-like, and super-personal imagery, a treasure trove of empirical experience that I had garnered between the years 1968 and 1973. Communication wasn’t a high priority for me. Doing it was an end in itself. Squeezing the juice out of the sponge was the important thing. That was the Hermetic side to the activity. The hieroglyphic side had to do with the “psychology of symbol-making,” the externalizing of difficult material from one’s inner life.

This is where a second book came in. And it is funny how you find the right book at the right time to direct you in the right direction. It was Frances Yates book, BRUNO AND THE HERMETIC TRADITION, the Vintage edition which had been published in 1969. Yates was a Renaissance scholar who specialized in the period’s esoterica. In the BRUNO book she discussed the influence of Egyptian hieroglyphics on the development of “emblem poetry,” which was in vogue at the time among the Humanists. Hieroglyphics were understood to have “a hidden moral and religious meaning.” It could be understood to be a kind of disguise that only the cognoscenti would be hip to. It was also a gesture of respect towards Hermes Trismegistus, the “Thrice-Greatest Hermes” who was thought to be a combination of the Greek God Hermes and the Egyptian God Thoth, the God of wisdom. He was the legendary inventor of hieroglyphs. Marsllio Ficino said hieroglyphs were”a way of stating hidden truths” and for me subjectivity is the truth.

In 1972 I sat in on a Egyptian Art History class at the University of Arizona taught by a Professor Stein. One day while talking about Old Kingdom Temples he showed a slide of a stela found on many Temples of the period. They were like, if you will, ‘Holy Cards,’ visual encapsulations or abbreviations of spiritual truth for a Pharaoh whose name was often associated with the Temple. The stela was a vertical format divided into two main sections, with the lower section having two parts. Inside a rectangle that took up basically the lower half of the format was a rendering of a Pillared Hall and above the hall was a snake, said to be a cobra. On top of the ‘box’ was a huge falcon, a reference to the God Horus who it is said had the sun and moon for eyes. I say ‘huge’ not only in the sense of physical size but also in symbolic importance. That was about all Stein had to say about it. I forgot all about the Serehk Motif, which is the common name for the cartouche, until about two years later when I ran across it again in another book on Egyptian Culture, THE DICTIONARY OF ANCIENT EGYPT by Margaret Bunson. It then dawned on me I was looking at the prime historical model for my three-decker universe which by then I was already referring to as THE HIREOGLYPHIC THEATER. How dense I had been in Professor Stein’s course. I had been blind to the connection. The pillared Hall which you can see into was, symbolically speaking, the world of space and time, the physical realm, and the Kingdom of Masks not souls. The middle realm was ruled by a snake, by Kundalinli’s bite which can open the psyche—the soul-- to its depths and destiny. Then surmounting the body and soul was the spirit, Horus the Falcon whose wings could help it soar to the heights of self-knowledge. I had found the archetype of the three-fold cord, The Serekh Motif.