Rebirth

On creative practice rooted in chaos


Alma Tetto
For JANE, issue six (2019)





‘Beyond, outside of me, in the green and gold thicket, among the tremulous branches, sings the unknown. It calls to me. But the unknown is familiar and therefore we do know, with a knowledge of memory, where the poetic voice comes from and where it goes. I was here before.’
— Octavio Paz, The Bow and the Lyre


When Persephone was taken into the underworld by Hades, she was wandering fields of narcissi along the banks of Lago di Pergusa at Sicily’s navel. Aimless and naïve, she was swept into another realm, a place of darkness, shadow, death. When Demeter, her mother, who held a strong foothold on Mount Olympus as goddess of fertility, finally discovered where her daughter was hidden, the young maiden was granted a chance to return home. Alas, just before seeing her mother, Persephone consumed six pomegranate seeds, fruit of the underworld. This small act secured her fate: she would assume a new role as goddess of the underworld, spending half the year in the dark lower realm in union with Hades, the other half in the upper, earthbound world. Thus, Persephone became the perennial goddess of rebirth.

Persephone was one of many symbols of rebirth that appeared in my orbit after the sudden death of my husband last year. We had just packed up our lives to move with our infant daughter from Los Angeles to Mexico when, days after our arrival, a typical case of food poisoning stirred a dormant and previously undiscovered intestinal illness in my husband, taking his life. I was 32, abruptly a widow. Like the maiden, I had been floating along in existence until this fierce encounter with the dark face of life: death. I was broken and ravished by the loss, yet at the same time, I was struck by a deep and wild liberation, a strange ecstasy. It was as if my old self, grasping at life, died along with my beloved. I sensed a deepening of experience within me and a profound shift in understanding that light and dark, life and death, make up two sides of a whole. Just as Persephone experienced an initiation into the underworld, I was initiated into a personal descent.

During this time, I experienced an eruption of archetypal energy. I dreamt of a volcano. In the dream, I was in a small white house in Sicily with terraces that looked out over a bright blue sea. I watched the sun slowly lower over the water, casting a warm reddish glow before the sky and the sea fell to darkness. In the black night, I witnessed mysterious explosions in the distance.

I would soon realise the content of my dream through synchronicity—the phenomenon, as coined by the Swiss psychologist C.G. Jung, of meaningful coincidence. I had been planning a trip to Sicily in the coming months to spend time with my daughter to grieve and process our loss. In my search for accommodation, I was led to a house with a white façade and terraces overlooking the sea. I scanned the images with a particular feeling of recognition. I was here before. It was situated on the island of Stromboli, an active volcano and the symbolic crux of my dream.

Jung insisted that archetypes have a specific energy that can be perceived; they attract a peculiar fascination, like a spell. Jolande Jacobi, a contemporary and close collaborator of Jung, suggested that dreams of a purely archetypal nature are fairly rare; they occur under special circumstances and impress deeply upon the psyche with poetic power and beauty. These ‘“big dreams,”’ she explains, ‘embody the contents of the collective unconscious, the “objective psyche” and its suprapersonal representations, which give expression to universally human or, in rare cases, cosmic problems and ideas.’ Dreams of this character are difficult to ignore; rather, their poetic power beckons the dreamer to delve deeper, to penetrate the mystery. In the symbolic dream-image of the volcano, as it manifested from the unconscious, along with the synchronicity of encountering the volcano in my outer life, was a dynamic and vital energy—the image seemed to have a life of its own. It seemed to be calling to be worked with, amplified, and understood. The living image of the volcano, like the dream itself, became a portal into unmediated cosmos, into chaos longing to find form.

In the symbology of a volcano, we experience a paradox. The volcano possesses both the phallic form, protruding from the earth, and a womb in its caldera, holding powerful creative forces within. It embodies both the masculine, active trait and the feminine receptive. It is both destructive and generative in explosion. The literary critic Randy Fertel claims that the tension of being both/and, rather than either/or, characterises the metagenre of improvisation as well. He suggests that improvisation, as a gesture of spontaneity, invites us to dwell within two modes of being and seeing at once. This experience of opposing tension requires immediacy, the here-and-now that Fertel describes as freedom from mediation.

My dream of Stromboli was the tip of an iceberg within the sea of chaos, and before long, I was guided to the symbolic figures of Persephone and the Black Madonna, those dark goddesses who share lineage in inhabiting two modes of being as well as ties to Sicily. Persephone’s paradox lies in her equal dwelling in the underworld and the upper world. The Black Madonna, too, inhabits two realms at once: the heavenly sphere as virgin mother, and the earthly, human domain characterised by suffering and loss. The archetypal theme of rebirth emerged as I connected the mythic and symbolic aspects of these figures with those of the volcano. This correspondence unleashed a stream of images within me.

Naturally, improvisation became the method by which I would explore and amplify the forms—a project to later manifest as a short film shot in Sicily with friend and artist Jessa Carter, and also as an ongoing arts-based research. The symbols had emerged in spontaneity; it seemed only practical to respond in kind. In Fertel’s words, ‘Improvisation scorns mastery. It explores instead the value of submission to things larger than or beyond the rational self.’ To enter the inherent paradox of the images required the kind of immediacy the spontaneous gesture of improvisation implores. Yet Fertel admits this kind of immediacy of unmediated experience is paradoxically impossible to achieve. Here, the Greek god Hermes comes into play.

Hermes is psychopompos, guide of souls to the underworld. As such, he is god of thresholds, borders, and boundaries. In Latin, he is Mercurius, the alchemical figure who, for Jung, is the prima materia and primeval chaos. Fertel proclaims Hermes the patron god of literary improvisation, for he possesses ‘irreverent vitality and effortless creativity; embracing the fortuitous, the unconscious, and life’s nonlinear vitality and amoral profusion.’ Hermes lends the necessary qualities of effortlessness and absolute presence within marginal space to the art of improvisation. He demands that we move outside the boundary of the rational and invite chaos into the work. One must embrace the formless to discover form. This collaboration with chaos demands a certain playfulness. Play requires deep imagination, an openness to outcome, fluidity, and total absorption in experience. We witness this kind of immediacy to the here-and-now in the child at play, the artist, even the scientist—wherever one is deeply engaged in process. Spontaneity occurs in such moments of unselfconscious, effortless enjoyment.

To penetrate deeper into the stream of images and symbols that constellated, my approach required that I befriend Hermes, that liminal, shapeshifting trickster and bringer of accidents who asks that we go with life’s flow. To improvise, it was essential to develop an openness, a loosening of structure and strategy, and the immediacy and effortlessness of play. The Taoist concept of wu-wei best describes this elusive art of action through non-action, of letting things happen. Yet reaching this state of complete spontaneity and unselfconsciousness is not possible by trying. Herein lies the paradox of wu-wei, the tension between spontaneity and craft.

Edward Slingerland, a scholar of ancient Chinese thought, points to trust and sincerity as central to achieving wu-wei and de, the “virtue” or “charismatic power” possessed by people in wu-wei. In his book Trying Not to Try, Slingerland suggests that while there are many strategies for working with the paradox of wu-wei—he offers perspectives from four schools of Chinese thought—different situations and phases of life call for different techniques. The defining quality throughout all approaches is of genuine absorption in the moment, an endeavor that relies upon trust. ‘The key is not to focus and cultivate but to let the world take you where it will.’

Any successful collaboration requires trust. Trust in chaos requires courage, and the kind of courage essential to undertaking a creative collaboration with chaos comes more effortlessly when one realises that creativity is by nature generative. In the creative process, something new—an idea, concept, performance, or material form—is brought into being from non-being, pulled from the ether, or the unconscious, into the realm of consciousness. In the process of creation, the artist is granted an opportunity to bring about a reconciliation, a reunion of subject and object—the ultimate dichotomy of human consciousness. To express this tension, the artist reaches into the depths to find form within the formless, life contained by death, light out of darkness. The creative process becomes a way to know and embody a fuller humanity, to consciously participate in a rebirth.

A creative practice rooted in chaos can become a service by which we give ourselves to something greater—that divine energetic source that moves through all of life. Our connection with that source through our individual creative output taps into its main stream, while at the same time allowing it room to branch, expand, and transform into new streams. It is endlessly prolific. The creative act reveals—by its very participation in—the infinitely repeating motion of the cosmos, that of destruction and creation. This practice dissolves and revisions our perspective, beliefs, senses—including our sense of ourselves—even our very being.

Creative practice carves out a deeper path along which the waters of psyche, or soul, can flow. This stream lives deep within us; its waters join into the anima mundi—the animating source of the world, or the world soul—connecting us to the outer world and to each other. As we deepen the stream by returning day after day or week after week to our practice, our guidance in chaos and being becomes clearer, our nourishment richer. Here, again, we encounter the adage of “getting into flow.”

When we find flow, we repair soul; that is, we re-pair self with the anima mundi. Often, to tap into this stream, we must find the portal that allows us to glimpse, even for a moment, the continuum of which we are a part. Our suffering is most often that portal. It’s the darkest night, the great abyss, a descent into hell and its most destructive fires that burn us to the core only to reveal the deep connecting thread between us and the rest of humanity—even the cosmos. Seen this way, our personal suffering becomes a journey by which we descend, deconstruct, reconstruct, and re-emerge. The phase of reconstruction is, perhaps, the one that requires the most of us. Where the descent and deconstruction seem to happen to us, reconstruction is the point at which we may participate. This is the creative phase, where we translate suffering into an expression of being.

The very nature of our being is to participate in the creation of ourselves. We affirm life when we face the abyss and make something of it. The Mexican poet Octavio Paz wrote: ‘When the poet feels cut off from the world and everything, even language itself, flees from him and scatters, he himself flees and is annihilated. And at the second moment, when he decides to face the silence or the noisy and deafening chaos, and he stammers and tries to invent a language, he himself is the one who invents himself and takes the mortal leap and is reborn and is another. In order to be himself he must be another.’ When our world dissolves, when we feel ourselves dissolve, we must create a new world, a new self.

Persephone lives in each of us. Eventually, we are all dragged from the innocence of life and from the comforts of consciousness and pulled into the underworld, violated by the perspective of our own mortality. If the experience of death is inevitable, Persephone’s act of eating the pomegranate seeds is a profound act of courage—the moment she acknowledges the paradox of being and chooses to creatively participate in her rebirth. It is as if she makes ritual of her initiation, a sublime nod to the soul that encompasses far more than life and consciousness, including death and the unconscious as well.

When one engages in creative practice, one enters into relationship with soul. With this view, the creative act becomes a divine rite that transforms consciousness into embodied soul—a rebirth. Art-making becomes soul-making, a way to deepen mythopoeic understanding of psyche, self, and world. In the process of making new knowledge, old ways of seeing and knowing fall away, and the flat, single-faced illusion of the world deepens to reveal many faces and endless possibilities. This enactment allows the symbols we encounter and amplify to speak not only for us but to us, revealing new insight. As we open to and embrace the depth of life—change, suffering, even death—through creative participation, we enact our renewal.

∞  

      


Images shot by Jessa Carter in Stromboli, Italy, 2019