OCEAN

OCEAN: the whole body of salt water on earth; the vast amount or expanse of something

Water is trickling from the Tivoli Fountain into the mouth of La Parca. The bride is thirsty. Thirsty for love. Thirsty for recognition. She brings water to the desert. She does. La Parca, which means fate in Spanish, got attacked in the desert. Or actually it was you, the scribe taking her picture that got attacked. Sometimes it is difficult to separate the lost and ravaged bride from yourself. How could it not be difficult when your journey was the same for both? And now, water is reanimating your millennial passage as you sit in the purple tub reflecting on where you have been, where you are and where you are headed. The stream is flowing in front of you and behind you. To capture a memory from your millennial passage you only have to look at the wall. There is the Virgin in the park in the Mexican village where you took refuge. There is the well that you threw yourself into – rather the well where La Parca threw herself, leaving you to capture her on camera. Our body is what…75 percent water. Water has no color. It takes on the hue of what is projected. Think about what it means to go on an ocean journey where all you know about yourself is what is projected onto your surface…like a mirror. Your skin is so transparent that everyone who looks at you cannot only see into you but they can also see through you. They never fail to find themselves in you, don’t they? But no one ever really knows you! Maybe you need to have a Pisces Moon in the 12th house to really understand what it is like to be drowning in the vastness of the ocean, what Jung called the collective unconscious and seeking islands to land on. Someone is writing me a note that he is holding up to the window. You shout throw the window: I can’t read it! Now he has a magic marker. It has a website address. www.ff000.com. Earlier, there was a man transfixed by your performance. Performance! Were you even performing then, or simply standing in the gallery? Oh, but what is this experience teaching you about the artificial boundaries between life and performance? Life is a performance! He just stood outside the window and laughed like he was having the greatest time…”I’ll take you to the best restaurant in town!” He shouted through the window. This is very different from FIRE where they smelled the scent of the kundalini and backed off for fear of getting singed. But fire is a masculine element. A woman on fire frightens people away. What did they used to do with such a woman? Lock her up! Could you have imagined when you and La Parca went on your journey through ancient sites -- through pagan Rome and the sites of the Italian Renaissance -- that you would find refuge in the center of the capitalistic world? The Roger Smith Hotel has created a safe space for the bride to greet the public who can only recognize her when they see her -- a home for what had been lost. Here you are feeling so safe and secure making this statement on public/private in a purple bathtub with golden feet in the Lab Gallery of the Roger Smith Hotel. Day One of your performance of water and you entered the gallery at 2 pm in your bright green coat, a Colette original purchased at her exhibition at the ApARTment on Thursday and said: “I’m into Earth now.” Clearly, this was not so. Your entrance into the gallery meant that WATER had begun. And now that the light of day is fading (it is 5:15 PM and your performance is over at 8 pm), the water is trickling around, through La Parca and releases the memories. Emotional memories strewn around you in the garments that do indeed, among these projections of water, seem to be floating like lilly pads. Memories of water? Yesterday, you laid out a trail of dresses leading from the altar with FEDERICO’s crucible and down to the tub surrounded by a chamber of silver mylar. No wonder why you were so attracted to Mylar – not because it was the material used to recreate the silver factory for the Andy Warhol Memorial Week in the Gershwin Hotel but because it represents the element of mercury that transforms the sulfur, the stinking masculine element of the alchemical transformation. Sulfur is the byproduct of the exploded volcano, the gysers, the gaseous elements from the earth. Sulfur is associated with the masculine in the alchemical transformation. Salt is the purifying element of the feminine that cleanses the male spirit in order that the sacred marriage can take place. So, an alchemical chamber of mylar, something like the Organe Box that enthralled you as a child. FEDERICO helped you create an alchemical chamber out of Mylar to surround the bathtub but today Matt it took down. He who created the space for the goddess in his gallery must understand about timing. Water is always in flux, never fixed, and the earthy byproduct of such dissemination of energy cannot be fixed until the Earth phase. Water is the rusting of the metal. Water is the Solutio phase of alchemy where the metals dissolve. The process requires surrender of ego. Surrender to your fate. The dream foretold about the bathtub acting as the alchemical alembic for creation of the new feminine form. But this, as is everything, is a process. A process that had to proceed step by step, as always, through the unconscious to arrive in a conscious act, a purposeful movement to bring us closer to the truth. Oh the pozo is being projected! The well was named desire and La Parca nearly threw herself down it when you captured her photo. Was this before or after you got attacked? The order gets confused but the right brain is never ordered. The projection on the wall behind you brings it all back. Deseo is what propelled your journey and now there is only the desire to bring the journey to a conclusion. La Parca resurrected. Now the eclipse and this brings you right back to the origin of La Parca – the fate that she led you into when you entered the Mexican desert under the lunar eclipse. The door that opened began the journey that now comes to completion in the Lab Gallery in midtown Manhattan the very center of the capitalistic world that doesn’t realize what they want so clearly is love, the love of the Goddess who unites heaven and earth with her charisma. Or is the journey to come to culmination as you sit in the bathtub and write your epic passage water in a manner that you couldn’t possibly have imagined at the time that you lived it…the passage into the collective unconscious. All these years of writing and rejection, writing and rejection, and finally there is the embrace of the alchemist and the surrender into the bathtub, painted violet – the very color of your destination – and the instantaneous publication through the blog. The new media gives us the freedom to evolve in our own time. The freedom for the kundalini to pass through the seven levels of the body and arrive at the crown, the place of the sacred marriage…When will you know that you are there? When you see Violet, the color of the seventh chakra. Violet for the sacred marriage. Violet for the Tsunami Wave of the Age of Aquarius. You caught the energy of this wave today in – of all places – the Metropolitan Museum where you were having a last meal of raspberry tarts among classical statues representing EARTH, AIR, FIRE and, yes, WATER. Here were the homage to the gods of the elements around you as you made a connection with a woman who wrote the book on charisma. Charisma! You cried. Why, that is the kundalini! The kundalini is the serpent power. Literally it means the coiled serpent. The kundalini energy so long repressed in the west, the energy that became conscious with the arrival of gurus from the east. And don’t you know, for it was your father who learned the secrets of the kundalini from his guru, Muktananda and went on to open a kundalini clinic to heal people suffering from sudden awakenings. There are many that struggle for lifetimes to access this power. You always had it, didn’t you? Holly entered just as Matt was telling you his idea of snaking the garments around the bathtub and you were thinking, but that will hide the golden feet, and then a miracle happened. Holly entered and she saved the day with her vision of the installation. Here celebrating the return of the lost bride after spending the morning at a press preview of the designer who freed women from the corset. All because he couldn’t sew! Ahhhhh. How much genius in the world came about as an invention by those who couldn’t conform to expectations -- a clothing designer who couldn’t tailor! Imagine that! So he developed his art through construction. He liberated the female body by draping material over and around it! And here was Holly draping the garments that propelled you through one projection after another. Like Lilly Pads, she said. Yes. Lilly pads in the ocean. Tangible personal memories among the collective memory of the Lost Bride. Two little boys. Tow headed twins with their mouths hanging open holding the hands of their mother, who is laughing. Strange how this unconscious material penetrates even when the conscious mind swats it away. Lilly pads surrounding the tub, the violet boat that will ride you through the Tsunami Wave. Yes, it feels really secure here in this boat as life in Manhattan passes around you. You are still. You are deep in the meditative zone that your writing takes you into. You are wearing the garment you have titled La Parca Resurrected. A Selma Karaca original. La Parca who was so well traveled that her champagne colored gown was in tatters. You put on the dress for the first time in about 10 years before getting in the bathtub where FEDERICO, the alchemist was to film you, and you…whew! A rapping on the window makes you jump! That injection of testosterone when you are merged with La Parca never fails to give you a fright. It is like the bride brings out the WOMAN in you and WOMAN brings out the MAN in a man. What is it about the Alchemy of Love? When woman enters WOMAN than Man enters MAN. So, the return of the bride is essential. All the better that she is tattered. Like Psyche on the mountain ravaged by the beast who was to be her husband – the bride who has been through the cycle of water. Ocean. Vapor. Dew. Fountain. Wave. The alchemical process follows the natural cycle of water. And this alchemical process travels the cycle of La Parca through the collective unconscious over the turn of the millennium. You first encountered her in November of 1999. She was on sale. Half price! The thrift shop of the Stamford Historical Society. You were riding home from the old Henri Bendel estate, now the Stamford Museum & Nature Center and you immediately fell in love with her. Ahhh. The saleswomen all gathered around for a collective sigh. Exquisite, isn’t she? You knew she was much more than a champagne satin wedding dress, decorated with petals shaped like hearts. She was a character in your life narrative. You thought you were ahead of the experiment, didn’t you? You thought you would escape the emotion of water – the butterflies in the stomach – by going Green, didn’t you? You would skip right over the Lilly Pads that Holly so carefully laid out and jump right into the grass. Ahhh, how difficult it was to depart from the park to return to water, the Solutio, and all the emotions it dregs up from the past. And here you are, instead of projecting the image of the icon through the mylar, you are the intermediary between the projection, the icon (the pentagram hanging over your head) and the public. This is how it should be. Yes. They all have a smile on their face and it makes you happy to see them so happy, smiling into the window. Do they understand what makes them so happy? Are they aware of what it means that La Parca, whose name, don’t forget, means Fate, found a resting place? A place where she can feel safe in the commercial center of the universe! This is surely a miracle. And tomorrow you will step onto the lilly pads in your golden slippers with the hot pink neon ties which match the hot pink figure of Cupid on your bright yellow T-shirt. This means that the energy is automatically moving between the second and third chakra, the second chakra (orange) and the third chakra (yellow), which means that the emotions are passing onto the page in the form of thoughts. This is a personal evolution, from feeling lost in the collective consciousness. Yes, here now La Parca is at the ocean and the water looks like strings and she is washed up on the beach, sand in her hair, and she is at one with the ocean. Wow. The water is reflecting off the ocean where two mediums meet. Video and photography with the icon and the icy blue silk dress that you called you Goddess dress with the Yod containing the heart. You wore this dress.Only with FEDERICO, the alchemist who knows metals and their alchemical components better than you ever will, do you really experience this effect of WOMAN on MAN. He is guided by Hermes, the patron of alchemy, and demonstrates the magical blending of masculine and feminine with every movement. He explains, with his knowledge of metals, why you feel so secure in the antique iron bathtub, stamped with the year of its conception, 1929. Matt is calling from his office and asks for a blurb describing what is happening, so he can paste it in the window tomorrow. Perhaps you, dear reader, are wondering what is transpiring here. If you had managed to wade through this narrative without drowning! Here is the blurb. During five afternoon performances running from May 7 - 11, Lisa Paul Streitfeld interacts with the remnants of her millennial journey to recover the lost bride of Christianity, a notion investigated by the author Margaret Starbird (Woman with the Alabaster Jar) and popularized by The Da Vinci Code. The process weaves together symbol with personal memories embedded in the garments worn on a seven-year passage to recover the sacred feminine. Writing her blog-novel in a bathtub positioned between the projection of La Parca’s water journey on the gallery wall and the pedestrians outside the window, she reveals the crucial role of the artist as interpreter of the collective unconscious, where a new cosmology of the hieros gamos is being formed. So there it is. Wouldn’t it be safer, and far less tedious, to simply say that you are participating in the Great Work of alchemy, a mystery that can only explained in symbols? Wouldn’t it be easier to simply hide behind the symbols without saying a thing? That is for tomorrow. Vapor. Today it is your task to rise above the ocean of the collective unconscious that has guided you into the iron tub with a clear vision of who you are, where you have been and where you are going. And now you know from this blurb, you are not only merging the critic and the artist – it takes to complete this monstrously ambitious task – but rewriting the task of the artist for the Age of the Internet. The artist must take on the role of the priest to write the epic of a new era – the Aquarian Age myth. But haven’t you had help at last. First this, safe space in the center of the midtown, then the New Man in the form of FEDERICO, your collaborator in the new medium of video, the gallery director, Matt, and John Knowles, the son of the hotel owner, who won the respect of the High Priestess, MP, when he knew not to step over the line of the sacred circle she created to initiate THE ALCHEMY OF LOVE with FIRE. Matt appears to announce that he is putting the spotlight on you. So La Parca receives her recognition at last! No more is she wandering in the desert thirsty. So thirsty! Wasn’t it your intention to hide behind the silver mylar in a chamber separating you from the past rather than integrating your past, present and future as you originally imagined the space. And here it is working. You have retreated from the oceanic, the past pattern of tossing yourself in the unconscious and then forever seeking safe islands to land on. Here you have an island on Lexington Avenue and 47th street. There are no coincidences in your life. You end up on the very street that Andy Warhol created his silver lined Factory that gave birth to the superstars of the sixties! The superstars that just reconvened for a banquet that you attended at the Gershwin Hotel to celebrate the 20 year anniversary of Warhol’s death. And today, while sitting among the material renditions of the four elements in the classical wing of the Metropolitan Museum taking delicate bites of raspberry tarts, you meet an author who has written a book on charisma and what does she tell you but her book encountered a lot of opposition when it came out. “Opposition is good!” you declare and she tells you that the members of the media didn’t like her telling people that everyone has this power because they believed it was only them that had it! Funny! But haven’t we come a long way? You marked by birth with the hole at the base of your spine where the energy flows into your body nonstop and now have come full circle where you have learned to contain this power enough to say: this power is also in you! You gave first talk on the kundalini in a private salon in a magnificent house in North Salem horse country, built by a woman and that is what everyone responded to most – when you said they all have this power. This is the power projected by movie stars on the silver screen, sought by yogis through extreme conditions of deprivation, pursued by alchemists as they passed through the psychological effects of transmutation and is labeled as dark energy by scientists in the 21st century. This is the kundalini, the charisma of the lost bride, the female priestess of the love goddess who anointed her Beloved as partner in the sacred marriage. This is the energy that has to be consciously acknowledged in order that the planet is restored to balance and the color be maintained green like the heart chakra. So here you are in the violet bathtub evolving towards this place of balance in the manner that the artist must pioneer forward into the collective unconscious for all of humanity. So, here we bringing the journey of this wandering spirit, Psyche snaking up the Pyramid del Sol seeking her Beloved. Psyche wandering through the Acropolis in Rome as you, the scribe, followed, wondering where it all went so wrong. How did it happen that the Kundalini, the energy that passes so freely through your body, got snuffed out rather than revered, worshipped and celebrated? It took Andy Warhol with his underground Superstars born in the silver Factory to bring the underground into the mainstream! So, here we are on East 47th Street, just steps away from the original factory and La Parca makes her premiere in the center of the capitalist Mecca – where the worlds of publishing, finance, advertising, fashion and art meet – and she does it as a warrior secure in her iron tank painted violet – the color of the Aquarian tsunami! And you have surrendered to La Parca, haven’t you? She is no longer your fate but your destiny. You let her guide you over the ancient sites of Mexico, down the Spanish Steps, through the Acropolis, over the ledge of the Coliseum, and around the Piazza del San Marco in Venice. And now she is guiding you to your destiny. And you know you will go gladly because it is written in your stars that you will be the scribe. This much you knew from the six-pointed star that appeared on your solar return in 1997. Like the priestesses of the ancients, you allowed the stars to guide you and that fateful day of the lunar eclipse proceeding your birthday in 2000, you let La Parca lead you to your fate in the desert where you propped her against a cactus and -- here the narrative goes dark – yes, it was the eclipse that launched the series of events that brought you to the lap of the iron maiden… the earth creating the shadow on Luna as it united with Sol, the union of heaven and earth known to alchemists as the conjunctio. And this brings us to the beach, the ocean where you are drowned in the collective unconscious. From there you go to Florence, where you attend a conference on the hermetic influence on the renaissance that introduced you to the magician Marselio Ficino, who learned of alchemy by translating Greek texts. Like him, you would defy the authorities and use magic to bring change to your environment. From that point on, your path was clear – to enter the New York art world and deliver the saga of the lost bride to human consciousness so the earth could be healed of its imbalance and the desert would bloom again! The flower that blooms in the desert -- that is what Margaret Starbird wrote as a dedication in her book on Mary Magdalene whom she believed was a sacred marriage partner of Jesus. The flower that blooms in the desert – not just in Mexico, or Saudi Arabia, but Manhattan is also a desert where the feminine is manufactured and bought and sold but never revered in its raw, primitive form! You thought you were so clever as to defeat water by entering earth. Instead of focusing on WATER last week, you were busy acting as press agent for a Green Festival. It got a front-page story in the local paper. The Green Sunday festival in the Unitarian Universalist Church that unites the religions of the world with flags in their sanctuaries. But today when the coordinator called to thank you, you asked her how it was that she was quoted on WATER when the fair was about EARTH specific issue you thought but she said water is becoming a big local issue and cited upcoming legislation as evidence. Yes, water is local and global, personal and public. Water is an element we take for granted but fresh water is limited on the planet and we are running out. The Native Americans know to treasure water because they were shoved onto desert where it was a precious commodity. So you learned to pray over water when you lived with the Indians. And now you are immersed in water, your body resonating to the passage you traveled through the collective unconscious now contained by the immersion of your computer in the iron tub. Water is an element to honor and here you are paying homage and inviting others to do the same. Water is one of the four elements we need to live. Water is a precious resource. Let us not waste it. Let us honor the water in our bodies and the water on the planet. Together we will water the desert with our thirst and the flowers will bloom and bloom and bloom and bloom! Here is to you, Mr. Bloomberg! Tomorrow you take your performance to the streets and offer the very symbol of eros, the Rose, from the bride to your city. This calls for a celebration. At last La Parca has found her safe haven among the ancient symbols inscribed in the Roger Smith Hotel in midtown Manhattan! And tomorrow she will create a spiral leading her out of the iron maiden and into the world and as her devoted servant, you will surrender to your fate, inhabiting her spiritual presence to restore the face of the feminine to the public body.