Markandeya

“Each person is a pilgrim in the dream of god and each slips in predictable and surprising ways. How else could it be? We ride on the breath of god and usually fail to know it until we fall from grace.”

In his book The World Behind the World, Michael Meade tells the story of Markandeya, the first pilgrim, who wandered in the very beginning, as the world was being created. He slipped off the path, fell out of creation and into the void. Despite this inauspicious beginning, all turns out well for Markandeya; where he might have drowned in nothingness, he is scooped up and swallowed by Vishnu, and thus returns to creation. But no one can be the same after a face to face encounter with the void. From there on out, Markandeya lives with the knowledge of it, knowing what it feels like to swim in such uncertainty and blankness. 

The Sunday school teachers most of us grew up with would make a morality tale out of this – Don’t go for a walk or you might fall of the face of the Earth. Stay home where it’s safe. But the old stories tell it a bit differently. The whole point is to go for a walk and fall off the face of the Earth. As Michael Meade would say, the point is to get into the right kind of trouble.

Until recently, I would have said that the thing I enjoyed most about my neighborhood was that I felt safe going for walks by myself. There are always lots of people out, the streets are well lit, and it’s a good neighborhood, all in all. I’ve been walking here for over 8 years, and it wasn’t until recently that I fell off the face of the Earth a bit, getting robbed just a few blocks from home by some kids with a gun. There isn’t a lesson to be taken from this. It isn’t about not going for walks, or not doing so by myself, or not in this neighborhood. In any neighborhood, in any company, one can fall out of the familiar world and into a frightening void where kids have guns and know how to point them at people with confidence. It isn’t much of a trick to stop walking. It is a much better trick to live with knowledge of the void without leaving a piece of oneself drowning in it. 

Recently I spoke with  friend in the military who told me about how it felt when he had to point a loaded gun at another person, wondering if he would be required to shoot. He had stumbled into the same void I had, albeit from the opposite end of the gun barrel. I recognized his description of it all too well. I recognized too the symptoms of perhaps a bit of ongoing drowning on my part, a feeling of less than full awareness, a certain powerlessness or tiredness that creeps in all too easily.

In Michael Meade’s telling of the story, Markandeya walks differently after his fall. Knowledge of the thin veil that  separates creation from the void carries with it the possibility of a great and powerful awareness, but it also opens the door on emptiness and despair. For now, I’m still learning to walk with this new knowledge, this new balance.

Coniunctio

All shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

from “The Four Quartets” by T.S. Eliot

Coniunctio is the alchemical process of combining elements that were previously separated. It is often conceptualized as union of opposites to form a third, sometimes symbolized by marriage, but Coniunctio can also involve more than two elements.

It was odd to work with my friends on Coniunctio images this week because it was the last of these gatherings. No sooner had we explored a process of coming together than we went our separate ways, home or otherwise, though people were reluctant to leave and lingered almost a full hour past the time we’d agreed to end.

With all three of the alchemical processes we experienced through the process of image making, there was a definite diversity of interpretations within the group. But nowhere was this truer than with Coniunctio. One friend centered her image on a union of natural and man made materials. Another focused on color and wove black and white materials together. A third focused on a quote from Jung about how “…life calls not for perfection but for completeness….”

In each of these processes I have found that certain materials speak to me strongly, demanding to be used. For Coniunctio, the loudest voice from the material table belonged to the magnets. I knew I had to use them and feature them prominently in my image. I wanted the piece to have a certain attractive quality, a certain gravity to it, as though it pulled everything around it toward the Coniunctio taking place at its center.

We are, by nature, drawn into Coniunctio. We form communities, relationships, families,  corporations — groups of all kinds, like this gathering of friends. We speak of these things as though they are discrete events, but a marriage, for instance, begins but does not end with the act of getting married. Relationship, Coniunctio, is a process that converts its original elements into something new, such that, even at the next Separatio or Mortificatio, the elements that enter these processes are not the same as the elements that entered the Coniunctio process. We are drawn to this transformation over and over again, always in flux, and always changing and being changed by one another.

Psychologists and philosophers have heated debates about this: Is there truly such a thing as an essential self? Or are we just the sum of the influences of culture, friends, and family? Ultimately, to me, this question is rather uninteresting, an I tend to think of if, perhaps a bit more lightheartedly, as the wave/particle dualism of the self. We are at once discrete and continuous.

Working with Coniunctio, I felt my continuous aspect was a bit more at the forefront of consciousness, and I am grateful to friends, both within this alchemical group and in other aspects of my life, for the ways in which they influence my world, for the continual Coniunctio we are all engaged in together.

Separatio

Separatio is the alchemical process that involves, as its name suggests,  the  separation of elements. Sometimes this is represented in a gentle way, like  sorting and organization. Sometimes it’s violent, like cutting. 

When I met my friends in the art therapist’s garage again this week, I already felt rather separated from myself. A few days before, I’d been robbed at gunpoint. The perpetrators did not get much in the material sense, but my sense of safety, my peace of mind, and my confidence were definitely wounded. It was a violent Separatio.

So I approached the alchemy and image making process with a mind that was rather divided already. Chaos fought order in the piece I put together. I had in mind to create something neat and simple, but my materials seemed to want to burst out of their containers. A variety of inner voices vied for attention, and somewhere along the way, my mother’s voice became very insistent, because there were seashells on the material table, and my mother, having grown up near the ocean, knows that anything that comes from the beach has a healing power to it. 

My final Separatio image centered around a small set of dirt-filled, divided containers in which lavender and rosemary seeds were planted. Looking at it, I remembered that my Mortificatio project had also incorporated dirt, in a pile at the center of what looked like (I shudder to think about it now) the aftermath of a crime scene. But the dirt in the Separatio project was divided, contained, promising that hopefully, eventually, something will grow.

Mortificatio

…And then there was only
this story.
It followed me home
and entered my house –
a difficult guest
with a single tune

from “Night and the River” by Mary Oliver

In alchemy, mortificatio is the process of death, destruction and decomposition. In Michael Meade’s words, it’s the point in the creative process when everything is going great, and then suddenly it all turns to shit again.

Last night, I gathered with some friends in an art therapist’s garage to explore the process of mortificatio through image making with the materials she had assembled there. Some were natural items – dead plants, rocks that resembled bones. Some were man made – rusted metal, shredded paper. Some things seemed to have long decayed while others had just recently died.

The gathering was part of a three week group aimed at exploring alchemical processes through images. Mortificatio proved a difficult place to begin. The art therapist asked each of us to consider what was currently dying in our lives, and the imagery that surfaced was violent, uncomfortable.  My piece incorporated some crushed violets, heartbreakingly purple still, though they were wilted and bruised. Some drops of red food coloring proved startlingly and unintentionally reminiscent of blood. Where usually in image making I’m drawn to creating something with a permanent structure, something I can put in a corner of my apartment and revisit from time to time, I found myself unable to do much with a mortificatio image until I gave myself permission to make it impermanent, scattered. I wanted to remember it, but not to take it home with me. Other group members seemed to feel the same and thought it would be fun to toss all the images in a bonfire, or set them out on the water in a burning boat like a viking funeral.

Mortificatio did feel like the right place to begin, uncomfortable though it was. It felt very akin being lost, another uncomfortable place in which death and terror are possible, and yet, I know from experience, possibly the best place for a new adventure to start. Today, though I dismantled last night’s work as soon as it was done, it’s those crushed violets I remember, and the dark, loamy looking pile of dirt beneath them.