WATER: EPILOGUE

Crescent Moon obscured by
Cumulonimbus clouds
This week, you taught the children
The water cycle
Evaporation, condensation, precipitation

Separation, distillation, purification
Saturation of Sulfur with Salt
Solutio complete

Moon and Venus dance
Fifth Gate, the throat
Self-expression flowing
You read patterns tailored by karma
Longing for thread

Beside the Crap Table
In the gilded Music Room
Of a Mediterranean home
Rooms transported from European castles

Scarlet velvet drapes fraying with age
Framing you in the faded elegance
Of the Italian Renaissance

Casino Night
Try your luck.
One chip for craps
Two chips for a fortune

Know your stars?
Step right up
Take a chance

Tonight thought meets action
You are observer and participant
Artist and audience
The door opens
You enter
Into a new world

You remember the dream
Forewarning of this change
Relaxing on a deck over water
Looking to your right
Into a tailor’s workshop below

The ordered universe
Of patterns and weaves
You see the design from above
Pull apart the drapes to enter

And so it happens
Between velvet drapes
You read the dance at the Fifth Gate
Cancer is the sign
Opposing your Mercury
In the Fourth House
Past lives converging into present patterns

Your fortune told
By the convergence of the dream
And the stars
But what is the form?

The Beloved appears
Fierce, furious, Furio
All passion and beauty
The Renaissance Man at home
In the 15th Century marvels

You framed by the fiery red faded drapes
Reading the pattern while inside the pattern
Channeling the cosmology
The Aquarian Age goddess descending
In the taut body of a crusading lawyer
With a television show

You read her husband, the consort
And he sends her over
Your view on your computer screen
A brave new world
Woman crusading for truth
Raising the Balance of Justice

The pattern so clear
You view your place in it
The divine embrace with the Beloved
Setting the world right

You will meet someone tonight
FEDERICO tells you as you dress
Your lapis lazuli satin skirt
And Garden of Eden top
Radiant with fertility
Hand-embroidered by Tehuanas
Radiant, abundant and free

The form doesn’t matter!
The astrologer told you
When you began the journey
In the wilds of Malibu
Worshipping the goddess on stony cliff

And so the body bursts
Through the forms of your wardrobe
Relics of the journey purified in the Iron Maiden
Leaving only the spiraling beehive
Structured to ebb and flow to the water
Made by your genius fashion designer
From the land Anadolu
Goddess worshippers

Your lapis lazuli gypsy skirt
Busted
In the Music Room
The base of your spine
Vulnerable
As in your La Parca promenade

The Beloved
In the gilded mirror
The setting magnificent
From a past life
Or two

He is cordial
But oblivious
What is he going through?
Oh, my…
You have his astrological chart!

The room empties during dinner
You peak into the pattern
Like the dream you see
The door flung open
To this world
Of hermetic magic
At fated encounter in Cross River
Paths converging
Three years ago

You channeled The Alchemy of Love
In this very location
November last
Stars congregating in Scorpio
Sign of magic
Bats flying in patterns

You spoke of ruptured love affairs
Amour fou
The stars that brought you
To his message
Laid out on his canvases
The return of the Renaissance Man
This time bringing the Aquarian Age
Tsunami

Your shifting personas
Scribe
And lover
Dumuzi returned to the planet
As your consort
Surely this was the outcome
The only outcome?
Of your mysterious encounter

At the Phoenix you received
The call to transformation
Into the icon
You read it accurately

Donning the cloak of lover
The artist opening the door
With his message
And you passing through
With your mythmaking

Alas, the woman in you
Wanted it all
Oblivious in love
Fool that lover’s be!

Horrified, you watched
As you passed through the door
Opened by the artist
And the Man
Who stood, trembling no doubt
On the threshold

Was it fear?
Fate won out over destiny
And now,
Fated again to connect
In a cosmic web
Spun by Venus, his ruler
You simply smile
And return to your reading

You, the High Priestess
Bids farewell to the Lover
The game of chance is over there
Not here within the fraying drapes
Nothing left to chance

Such openings to the convergence
Past, present and future
Once in a lifetime opportunities
Separating Fate from Destiny
As Sulfur is purified by Salt

Your body holds the power
Of this knowledge
A friendly hello
Then a friendly farewell
To the Beloved
Under the Crescent Moon
Obscured

A mere man
Not Fame
He lingered
The unconscious circling
Reunion
You know the water cycle
He lacks water in his chart
(you would tell him if he asked you for a reading)
And therefore knows nothing

The water cycle you taught the children
Evaporation, Condensation, Precipitation
Separation, Distillation
Solutio complete

Your journey to the Renaissance, past and present
The house where Ficino practiced
Hermetic magic
And the house transported to the wilds of Katonah
Where you derived The Alchemy of Love

Your Renaissance journey
Complete
The Reunion
Passing you from above where you see patterns
To below, where you participate in patterns

As above, so below
Say the alchemists
And now you know
With body and soul

The Alchemy of Love
Water cycle
Ocean, Dew, Vapor, Fountain
Tsunami wave of Aquarius

Your body bursting
With this wave
Prepared for Coagulatio
Earthly embodiment
At one time sought
In the Shepherd

The power of containment
The secret held intact
Between magicians
From one Renaissance to the next

He stood beside your table
Staring at the ceiling
Carved in patterns
Seeking without a map
the starry connection
Bringing him full circle
With the Scribe
The Lover
The High Priestess

Too powerful to be contained
In the alchemical fountain
Where King and Queen join
In Holy Matrimony

And so, back into the Ocean
The cycle begins again
Unknown waters pouring in the Known
In the eternal cycle
And you
Unchained from your own karmic pattern
The labyrinth of the Uroboros-Serpent
Chasing the shepherd
From one millennium
To the Next

Freed at last
From the sacrifice
Your dream identity
Persephone with pumpkin mask
Removed in your dream

Into and out of the underworld
The cycle of Venus
Divinely symmetrical
Damned to the eternal cycle
Removed

You roam freely in the world
With the true face
The authentic face
Of female born anew

In the Music Room
Hermetic magic
Transported to the woods of Katonah
Your dual role
Liberated and liberator
Guide to the cosmology
Of the Sacred marriage

Victim no more
Of Venus
Fierce, Furious, Furio
In her pursuit of Dumuzi
In his narcissistic self-embrace

Your authentic face
Sparkling Venus with lapis luzuli lids
And violet rimmed eyes
Sacrificing no more

To the Man
Self-important Dumuzi
Taunting you to follow
To the Great Below

Hello, goodnight
Communication sealed
By greeting and farewell

Liberated
To the Coagulatio
Distillation of experience
The Water Cycle contained
In a poem, this poem
Epic of a New Order

Goddess freed from the bind
With her Son lover
To embrace the Beloved
Universal Connection
Tsunami Aquarian Wave
Bursting out of your gypsy skirt
Naked spine wired for freedom

Tsunami

Tsunami: A large destructive ocean wave caused by an underwater earthquake or some other movement of the earth’s surface.

Tsunami: A large destructive ocean wave caused by an underwater earthquake or some other movement of the earth’s surface.

Day Five, the last of your fasting in the Iron Maiden. Your toes full of salt, you are joyfully contemplating having come full circle to the completion of your journey with La Parca. The Solutio has come to a triumphant conclusion. You know this because your spirit is soaring. It seems like eons have passed since the day last week you arrived at the gallery to discuss the installation with Matt and ran into John on the street who invited you to lunch. After telling you about what went down at the hotel over the fervor of My Sweet Lord, you launched into a conversation about The Passion, he told you that he wanted you to perform your passion. What is The Passion? It is the death and resurrection of Jesus to the Catholics, he replies, but what is it to you? And so, through the process of surrendering to the Iron Maiden, The Passion began to unfold. Day Five. Your last day of fasting in the Iron Maiden and your spirit is soaring. The King and Queen have had their intercourse and their souls have arisen to engage in the cycle of vapor, dew, fountain and now the Tsunami as the hieros gamos spreads from the Lab gallery to the world! Let us recount the steps that brought us to the successful completion of the Solutio. It can be written as a Sumerian epic of symbol writing, like Michael Manning’s Contradictions series of paintings that are complete unto themselves, yet interconnected with the whole. But that residue of the Great Work is left to the Coagulatio! For now, have your brother’s wedding to go to and your train leaves in a little over an hour. So, you will take your Selma Karaca melon “go anywhere do anything dress” off the wall with the silk slip dress for underneath and brush the salt off the golden slippers with the hot pink neon tie and bury your Mercury in the purified Sulfur under the Salt of the Iron Maiden and your off with your carpet bag to a Vietnamese night before the wedding Tea Party where the bride wears Red! Some looking from outside the window would say this exhibition is solely about dresses and that is OK. No matter where we go or what we do…we always need something to wear!

The Coagulatio will take place from June 17 – 23.

FOUNTAIN

Fountain: The alchemical fountain of Fountains is a symbol of the Uroboros. Three fountains represent the three principles of Sulfur, Mercury and Salt. The King and Queen sitting in the fountain represent the bath or water operations of Dissolution and Distillation.

“You open doors that you don’t know you open,” says John on the way back from St. Patrick’s Cathedral. “You are aware of patterns that you don’t consciously now.” When you had lunch with him a week earlier, he invited you to enact your interpretation of The Passion. So, you set up a chart for high noon today, Thursday. The ritual was to filled the copper vessel from the altar with salt surrounding the Moonstone and create a trail from the Lab Gallery to the steps of the cathedral. Your timing was explicit -- the clock was striking high noon just as you passed Saks Fifth Avenue. But you had no idea the Cardinal was giving a noon Mass. And there was an electrical energy that unnerved you, unsettling to your second chakra despite the tincture of tranquility you ingested for breakfast. One by one, the cameras arrived until three networks -- CBS, CNN and ABC -- were present. Your empowered space of the Iron Maiden granted you complete freedom of timing – John declared that the process must organically unfold and he will shoot whenever you are ready. Yes, but didn’t you know this? Didn’t you realize that you would encounter the news media on the day that La Parca was reanimated? How could you possibly know? Is the alchemist in you that much more aware of patterns and currents than the woman in you? Speaking of the woman in you…the reporter you encountered on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral is Marcia Kramer, a family friend. And speaking of charisma – she flashes that electronic smile at you and you feel yourself beaming. Marcia, you look great, you tell her as you stand there, suddenly removed from reverie. "Are you getting married?" she asks. "No, but my brother is." And, of course she knows this already. Did you break your oath of silence? La Parca means fate and it was your fate to encounter a reporter, a family friend, on the steps of the Cathedral. Oh, the Beloved! Yes, the Beloved! The Cathedral where the Cardinal was speaking about the love of the father (never a mention of the mother who gives birth to the father) was no place for La Parca. She was fated to continue her wandering. In the church. Out of the church. Around the church. What was driving her was the conduits of the Beloved – the electronic media. You tried to give a rose to the news reporter from NBC. He refused. Marcia also refuses it with her kilowat smile. You catch up on personal news. What are you doing these days, she asks. You can’t recall your life at all beyond the Solutio. Funny, how fate happens. It begins as a vision of seizing your destiny and ends up as fate. Just a reminder during this surrender -- your ego is not in control. The Lost Bride of the gospels on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Ravaged by her journey of attempting to penetrate one patriarchal institution after another and there is the news media on the scene and they have no interest in capturing her image at all. They certainly have not arrived to record La Parca! In fact, it isn’t even clear what they are doing here. The cameraman from CBS is taking photos of the steeples, not of you! What is the meaning of this -- a cosmic joke? To prepare for the sacred marriage with the Beloved and…well, yes...it surely is a cosmic joke. Marcia has the Goddess energy; beyond her talents as a reporter, what makes her a star is her charisma, and this reminds you of the encounter on Monday with the author of the book on charisma. The encounter with the media star with La Parca on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral…well this is the union with the Beloved (known as Fame in the Age of Aquarius), isn’t it? Not the encounter you expected but an encounter all the same. You ask Marcia if people frequently come up to her on the street and she says a lot do but not so much around the Cathedral because it is mostly tourists. And you can feel your kundalini penetrating your spine as you write this. People think that fame puts you in the center of the cyclone but that is because people have limited perceptions; they think fame is dynamic because that is all they can see. They don’t see the patterns and currents moving under the surface that impact our lives at the most minute level: fame, the energy of flashbulbs popping, is all they can see. So to be the person that is there first, the person who sets the course of something in motion, that is much more empowering, but this is what people never see. This has been the role of the High Priestesses through history and nothing kills the energy of the High Priestess better than fame. Priestess wear black on account of a history of hiding in the dark; making their presence known could easily result in bodily death. Here you are in the Lab where you performed a ritual with the High Priestess to deliver the Aquarian Age goddess through the alchemical experiment. She advised you to endure the fire. She was right about the fire, but not about you. The flames never even got close to your body when the firestorm arrived. In fact, the story broke on the very night that you failed to show up at the Lab for Yuliya’s collaborative dance performance with butterflies. Butterflies! You spilled your secrets in your Blog novel and no one even noticed but afterwards the Lab Gallery plunges into fire! The protest of the gallery director's intention to show My Sweet Lord, otherwise known as Chocolate Christ, caused such a fervor that the show was cancelled. Matt, in fact, resigned from his job. So much, you thought, for the continuation of the experiment! Destroyed by The Passion, as John refers to the Easter Week fervor launched by firebombs in the form of hate mail and death threats. The Alchemy of Love was to be no more! Destroyed by fire! These Sacred Places cannot be simply happened upon in the modern world. They have to be cultivated. On Palm Sunday you were in funk even before receiving the phone call about the controversy from a friend who transmits the ridiculous notion that the public would be participants in the performance of the Chocolate Jesus by licking it! Oh, how tasteless, you declare, a kneejerk reaction because you knew better: Matt never allows anyone in the gallery during a performance. Your first instinct was to protect Matt. You leave him a message and focused on sending him light. When he calls, you repeat the journalist’s adage: “As long as they spell your name right.” This makes him laugh. He says he doesn't know if he should keep working. Afterwards, you take the time on Palm Sunday to reflect on how important Easter Week has been in your fated, fated life. Your father having a psychotic breakdown on Easter, declaring he was Jesus and locked up in the very same mental ward where he treated his patients. And your friend Iyaba, a painter and spoken word poet, who got arrested on Good Friday and thrown in jail after inhabiting the persona of Jesus during a performance of the Loft Artists, so inflated that he couldn’t get off the stage. So this death and resurrection of My Sweet Lord is just an extension of the journey, isn’t it? The Leo’s innocence when he describes how he was attracted to the work. It is a gesture from the heart. Why on Easter Week? He so innocently replies: when else? In the gallery he tells me that he got 700 e-mails and many that he read thanked him for prompting an awareness of what Easter is really about; not chocolate bunnies and dyed eggs but death and resurrection. And of course, the Christians appropriated the holiday from the pagans who worshipped Oestara as the goddess of renewal. Isn’t it time for the return of the Goddess? Is that why you encountered Marcia Kramer, the CBS reporter in front of the Cathedral? Marcia is asking what else you are doing, besides standing in front of St. Patrick’s in a ragged champagne satin wedding gown, that is! The spell is broken. You are no longer La Parca animated -- you were identified with a personal history. So, what is this fated encounter about? A memory? Or perhaps a mirror? Running right smack up against fame in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral jolting you out of your reverie and suddenly remember you have a pang of self-consciousness and realize you are not the lost bride but an artist giving a performance. You aren’t even Christian. You grew up believing that Christ was a very special man, but not the Son of God! That would take away his humanity! So, whom do you meet when you return from taking La Parca through Mexico during the change in millennium but Andres Serrano, the very artist who created an American icon in his struggle to make Jesus real. Being around Andres taught you something about fame – the power of holding energy, particularly in the face of controversy. So you transmitted that information from one Leo to another; you reminded Matt not to capitulate. You reminded him of the power of holding energy. And so, you cheered that everything at the Lab was back to normal when you got the notice for the next show. You went to view it at night and it inspired you to do a video installation. Matt put statements in the window and people are truly reading and responding. What a thrill to put this notion to the public, the lost bride of the gospels resurrected in a hotel in midtown Manhattan! Not just any hotel but a sacred space infused with ancient goddess symbols and figures! What you feel great about right now is that the performance ritual is coming to an end. This is Day Four of your fast. Day Four of sitting in the chaos of the relics of the journey. A dream come true it is, but you will be happy to put them in order again. You have drunk your tranquility tea this morning and now you must take stock. Time to recount the definition of the Solutio (definitions that follow are direct quotations from www.alchemylab.com). Chemically, it is the dissolving of the ashes from Calcination in water. In the Arcanum Experiment, Dissolution is represented by iron oxide or rust, which is illustrated by the potentially corrosive powers of water on even the hardest of metals. Psychologically, this represents a further breakdown of the artificial structures of the psyche by total immersion in the unconscious, non-rational, or feminine or rejected part of our minds. It is, for the most part, an unconscious process in which our conscious mind lets go of control in order to allow the surfacing of buried material. It is the opening of the floodgates and generating new energy from waters held back. Dissolution can be experienced as “the flow”, the bliss of being well used and actively engaged in creative acts without traditional prejudices, personal hang-ups or established hierarchy getting in the way. Psychologically: Dissolution is the continuation of the kundalini experience, the opening up of energy channels in the body to recharge and elevate every cell. Dissolutio takes place in the genitals (tin chakra) and involves the lungs and spleen. Aha! The surfacing of buried material. La Parca had been buried for nearly seven years. Solutio brought her out. The bliss of being “well used” and "actively engaged in creative acts" without the ego getting in the way! Once again, she steers you into the unconscious. What more could you possibly find there? Every time you hit bottom, you realize how much further there is to go. The darkness of empty space has no limits! Even after you penetrate the energies of this galaxy, there are other worlds to explore. This morning you took a ritual bath in salt and the essence of Persephone and prayed that the Goddess be with you. There was no time for the ritual you planned, creating a snake with the dresses in the order that they appeared on your journey. The stone faced NBC reporter asked if you were doing a performance and you said you were performing the Lost Bride of the gospels. He smiled. Perhaps he got the cosmic joke. More likely, he didn’t think that the return of the Lost Bride is news. Perhaps he is right. The return of the Lost Bride is old news -- the Da Vinci Code phenomenon that reached a. peak last summer with the release of the film. And to think La Parca was an outgrowth of your passionate dialogue with the woman, Margaret Starbird, who inspired Dan Brown to write his blockbuster book. But you are always ahead of the collective – you are an avant-garde leader. This long time project that you have been holding in secret, visually it fit right into the Solutio. The timing had to have been right for you. There were too many synchronicities – like the gift of your great grandmother’s lace the night before you resurrected La Parca. This recent addition to the gown imbues your task with personal significance – the injection of The Passion into the Aquarian line of Germanic women in your family, the line of icy independent women that ends with your birth. You have made peace with these women through La Parca. La Parca was the receptacle of your passions. She is your icon of The Passion, the mourning she suffers for her departed consort. Heide appeared at the window last night just as you finished writing your blog entry. I have never seen anything like this, she said of the installation. You walked down the street to a cafe. You chose a table outdoors and she shows you her new work. Flowers, how lovely, you are growing things in your garden! You are very happy she has found grounding in earth. No, she says. These flowers are made with duck tongues. Duck tongues! This is very disturbing. You cannot figure out the symbolism of the duck but can only think about how many ducks gave their lives so she could make a representation of a flower! No, she says, these are tongues that no one wants, tongues to be thrown away. You count the petals. This is also unsettling. There are seven petals, not six for the hieros gamos, the rosette at the center of the labyrinth, or eight for Inanna, but seven. And then she shows you another picture that makes your stomach churn. It is a female figure in a red shirt with huge bulging eyes and a hideous mask that could only be made with pigskin, for that is her medium. You quickly turn it over. You tell her it is hideous and assure her that it doesn’t mean it is bad art but you haven’t eaten three days and you are very sensitive to such ugliness. She tells me that it makes her extremely happy to make these creatures; she will have a dozen to be interpreted by 12 writers. What about your interpretation? You launch into a discussion about the difficulties of making art infused with personal meaning. Most of what is out there is just junk, but you assure her that her art is a personal journey. You are concerned she is putting it out too soon -- the pitfall in the market driven art world, particularly for a woman on an authentic journey. You persuade her to develop a conscious interpretation of her work; otherwise she will be vulnerable to falling into unconscious projections, as is the fate of women who dare to go public with the personal. The water flows. The opening releases a voice of conviction that says her series is reaching completion and she must take the time to reflect before releasing the work into the world. She has reanimated the sacred companions of the Goddess, the pigs that her father, the pig farmer, raised for meat, pigs that were sent over a cliff for the mystery rites. She is resurrecting dead pigs as female icons. Now, as Sulfur is cleansed by Salt and transmuted by Mercury in the Iron Maiden, you realize that she is a mirror of your own work of reanimation of your personal history of The Passion with La Parca. A healing has taken place in the cafe. Then the darkness emerges. He is standing right before you, a scoundrel yelling for attention, hurling insults at no one in particular. You tell Heide this is a sign of the edge you are traveling on, the edge of consciousness where the archetypal forces reign over human capacity for judgement. In the cafe you don't know what this means -- a visit to the Iron Maiden will surely reveal the truth -- only that the meeting has ended. The scoundrel won’t budge and you angrily tell him to move away and he shoots the energy right back at you and tells you to leave. So, you heed the warning. You exchange a hurried hug with your companion in the street and you returned to the gallery to process what had taken place. You stand in the middle of two dresses – the black linen Claude Montana and the girly pink chiffon party dress. And with this juxtaposition of innocence and sex, you pick up a page from the dictionary on the floor and your eye immediately fixes on a single word: divine. And now, sitting in the Iron Maiden, you realize that you were imparting your wisdom of the sacred marriage to an artist's personal process; the joining of King (consciousness) and Queen (unconscious) in the alchemical bath. Solutio has embodied this revelation in your genitals, your second chakra; dissolution and distillation is an integral part of your process. This public Solutio, coming on top of many private Solutios, is a confirmation of your journey through the labyrinth, the cannabilizing of self to arrive at the rosette in the center of the labyrinth, the symbolic representation of the hieros gamos. And with this revelation you are prepared to bring the Solutio to conclusion, to order the chaos on the floor and place the contents of your dark closet into the alchemical fountain for purifying bath and then you will create a spiral that will take you out of the Iron Maiden and through the door of the gallery for a good night’s sleep.

DEW

Dew: Symbolic of the divine incarnation or manifestation from above. Alchemists believed natural dew contained the divine salt that caused it to transform the sulfur and Mercury of the First Matter.

Dew as the divine incarnation. Dew happens in the experiment when the icy blue Goddess dress becomes animated by the projection of water from FEDERICO's video and communicates with La Parca's misery over her aloneness. This morning you were immersed in dew for minutes or was it hours? You lost track of time. You were one of the first people to stand before Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, as it was unveiled to the public in a Museum of Modern Art 100th anniversary celebration exhibition. And now you are in the Iron Maiden, marveling how the masterpiece that changed the course of 20th century art is still current for the 21st century. You were discussing the symbols at the bottom of the painting – the apple, the pear, the grapes and the melon in the shape of the crescent moon with Anna, the curator. You asked if she thought the artist was conscious of what he was painting. She laughed. “Picasso was definitely conscious about sex. He was thinking about it all the time.” She points the androgyny of his figures. “You can’t tell if they are male or female.” We agreed that Picasso, with his multi-dimensional perspective, is still current for the 21st century. But something else you realized, as you lost time before the painting, the extreme white pigment of the female bodies had the texture of salt.



The salt is the purifying element of the Great Work and this purifying element of the feminine essential to the theme of the composition: the integration of heaven and earth. The chunky brown lines on the viewer’s left represented the feminine element, the soil of the earth and the blue on the right, the masculine, is the sky. Anna tells you how the painting was 17 years in his studio and pointed out a photograph where they were placed at a height looking down, as if guiding and protecting his transition into Cubism. To do this, he had to create a drama that incorporated the forms of ancient art: the Egyptian profiles, the Greek geometry of the female body with its lower triangle representing the womb, the bulky forms of the Cycladic statues and the primitive energies emanating from African masks. So it seems as if this painting is an altar to the feminine power that guided his brush – the taking the female form beyond the traditional two-dimensional depiction and laying the archetypes that guide human passions. So, this is the dew falling on you as they ripples of water project onto the walls before you, reminders that water takes on the color of its surroundings. The cycle of water – from the ocean to form clouds as vapor to the dew containing the divine salt of the ocean that purifies the sulfur. Where the surface planes are cut like ice. An explosion of the way we view reality. The symbols of the Yod and the masculine left hand, possibly that of the artist. A fellow critic comments the entire composition is like a left hand. The left hand of the artist guides us into the resurrection of the feminine. How else can we unite the opposites that threaten the destruction of humanity? So here we find the one Goddess, Queen of Heave and Earth, arising from the five women forming the left hand. The pedestrian shadows on the walls create their own art form. The public passing by as you face their shadow. The eternal motion of the city pulsating outside the window and in the gallery you are secure in the Iron Maiden as you surrender to the Solutio. FEDERICO is the perfect mirror. This morning, FEDERICO told you this morning that his life purpose is to deliver the Goddess. He says that is what he incarnated to do and if he dies after doing so, then that is fine. You feel the same. He says you have been writing a Carlos Castenada epic journey. You realize this is true: for so long you have keep the details of the passage hidden but they came out yesterday when you were recounting the threads of your journey. You are so tired that your eyes are closing. More traffic today as Matt has put out your statement for people to read about the resurrection of the lost bride of the gospels. Mythos and reality meet in an artwork, Selma Karaca’s La Parca Resurrected. There are no accidents in your life. Yesterday in the mail you received an invitation to an exhibition entitled 101 dresses, the first time you have ever bore witness to an exhibition about a dress, besides your own, of course. Why shouldn’t a dress be in a museum, not simply because of its style but because of the memories it contains? The memories of making art become the art. But this is all right brain thinking, the belief that we are all interconnected and that the objects around us take on energies that may be either positive or negative and it is our choice to transmute the negative into the positive. It is the path of the Self to encounter the roadblocks of tradition and figure out a way around them. Instead of doing things the way they have always been done, you decide to do it differently. In your time they may call you a kook; only later they will recognize you as a genius. They warned you, the psychics, the astrologers, the card readers you befriended in Los Angeles during the high-flying New Age eighties. They warned you to go and get grounded. Become ordinary, Heyo told you. Become an extraordinary ordinary person. And so you heeded the call to action. You returned to your mother’s house in Stamford and after three years of getting settled in a new life, you were ready to enter the Labyrinth. Anna told you this morning how Picasso kept the painting as a mysterious secret. The word was out in the avant-garde; you were initiated into the mystery once you gained access to see the painting. And this is how much has changed in a hundred years! Your path has been to scrape up remnants of the 20th century avant-garde and simplify the message you found there. This is simple. Sitting in the iron maiden with La Parca draped over the side is simple. Your computer screen representative of Mercury in the alchemical triangle with Sulfur and Salt. Your writing transforms the Sulfur, the toxic experience of contemporary culture, into Salt! This is the process that brought you to the center of the Labyrinth. And what is at the center but the six-petal rosette, the symbol of the sacred marriage! In the window is a manuscript you wrote about the Labyrinth. You were seeking the artist, the Picasso of your time, who would point the way to a new era. There were many contenders for the position but they proved themselves to be ignorant of what the role required: devotion to the Goddess. How can anyone be devoted to the Goddess when they are only devoted to themselves? You forget how it transpired. The manuscript is the record of the journey. You go to the window and bring it into the bathtub. You begin to read it, enthralled because the writing doesn’t seem to be your own and the epic form it takes transmuted the characters into divine figures with little regard to their human personalities. With distance providing perspective, you realize that they only existed as screens for your projection. You were seeking the Beloved and here on the wall is one of many projections of the Beloved you encountered on your journey, the romancer of La Parca on the balcony of Marquis de Ville. Yes, it began with the artist with the magnificent bone structure. His beauty and youth made him the contender for the throne. Besides, his name was Alexander. You ended up in his bed during that historic New Year’s Eve in 1997 when Venus and Mars were lined up with Jupiter in Aquarius and you danced around the aquamarine spiral fountain, the icon of the Age of Aquarius -- an icon so powerful that its maker committed suicide a few months after making it. The death of the icon maker represented the sacrifice required of the artist so a new myth can be born out of the decay of the old. And you were tracking that myth through your knowledge of the stars. These long repressed memories are surfacing now with the dew falling into the Iron Maiden. How could the dew not penetrate the Lab experiment when you started the day with The Great Work that resurrected the authentic feminine -- along with her symbols: the crescent moon and the reviled apple of Eve and the grapes of Dionysius to restore the passion. The Iron Maiden is the receptacle of the dew, the divine incarnation from above. She is the warrior goddess and mother goddess rolled into one. She is giving birth to the new form of the feminine, a divine incarnation of your dream in which the new form is molded in the tub. So here you are in the center of the labyrinth feeling quite triumphant because you were so well guided all along; even when you believed that everything was lost, you managed to find the light in darkness and follow it to the source. And so, after passing through the false contenders; the alcoholic wedded to the destructive image of the suffering genius and the Alexander fallen into Alexandrism, you have announced to the world your discovery of the 21st century visionary who brings forth the myth, in an epic of painting, of death and resurrection for our time, the myth of the sacred marriage of opposites for the Age of Aquarius. His name is Michael Manning and you discovered him painting his Gilgamesh epic in the labyrinth where you began your journey in your hometown of Stamford, Connecticut. And not only this, but astrology confirms the connection between the epic traveler in the collective consciousness guided by the Seal of Solomon appearing on your birthday and the interpreter/shaman who delivers a new mythology painted images. Words do not suffice for this journey. Images speak legions and the symbols reveal the exchange that gives you the faith to surrender. His Jupiter on your Sun, meaning his benevolent Jupiter in Aquarius as the bountiful recipient of the hieros gamos cosmology formed on your 1997 solar return. And how did the painter arrive at the new myth? The answer to this is simple! He passed through the old, the moment in history when the Love Goddess was sacrificed to the patriarchy so the heroic myth could be written for the Aries Age of Iron. So there is a pattern in the universe after all. Clean up your room! a guy yelled as he passed by earlier. The floor is deceptive because it looks like chaos, but you of all people know of the order that exists in chaos. The pages of the dictionary that form a linear tradition of words and their definitions all to be made into confetti tomorrow among the dresses on the floor, the remnants of the past that will be purified by salt. Tomorrow FEDERICO will arrive for a ceremony recreation of the labyrinth, the labyrinth through the emotions of the second Chakra is now to be confirmed as an act of faith. What a paradox to declare the labyrinthian journey as an act of faith when it was precisely faith that you were seeking all along! You will confirm the linear path by placing the dresses in a snakelike line. Making order out of chaos, the remnants will be swept away so that the spiral can be formed, the spiral as ancient symbol of rebirth, symbol of life, and that will be done in salt that will cleanse the gallery from the past memories and make way for the incarnation of the goddess. This is the goal of the Solutio, to dissolve the artificial structures of the psyche by a total immersion in the water. The goal is to tear apart the mental structures that confine us to a limited existence. The Solutio is the opening of the floodgates so the new myth can be born in the collective consciousness. Whatever has been holding you back now is washed away in the flow. On the last day of the performance you will sit in the tub in the dress that you will wear to your brother’s wedding – the Selma Karaca melon dress that represents the goddess in a new changeable form. This is the dress that you have been seeking -- the dress that mutates with the environment -- the dress that is structured for the goddess to expand and contract. This dress, born from the feminine for the feminine, will define your passage. And you will leave the gallery wondering if this entire performance will be able choosing something to wear to the wedding, the sacred wedding. A loud rapping at the door: Not the window but the door. FEDERICO. He hands you fifty dollars twice. “An offering to the Goddess!” He cries as he delivers a kiss and runs out to his truck just as the cop places pen to paper to write a ticket. Heide Hatry calls you and leaves a message that she wants to come and see you. You return the call and tell her about your brother’s wedding to a woman from Vietnam. The groom’s family is supposed to bring a pig and Heide, who works with pigs, insists she will get you a pig. And you think, this is taking you back to Persephone and Fire, the awakening of the kundalini. It is good for a moment in the falling dew, to think about where you came from and how Persephone has been transformed by the Solutio to be a facet of the Aquarian Age goddess. The underworld goddess is free in springtime to frolic among the new growth. Meanwhile, another goddess takes charge, a goddess who loves the limelight. Dark and light must co-exist for you can’t have one without the other. The paradox of the quest is this: in seeking unity we must honor duality. In quest of this balance, Picasso placed masks on only two of his female figures in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. He who plunges into the unknown learns that the dark face of the feminine is a container for the light. Heide, who has plunged into the underworld with her Persephone driven art formed from pigskin, knows this. Today she arrives to celebrate the marriage of dark and light in the Lab Gallery of the Roger Smith Hotel. Fittingly, she is due to arrive at sunset. But before greeting her, you must wash this Sulfur out of my hands.

VAPOR

Vapor

1. moisture or some other matter visible in the air as mist, clouds, fumes or smoke; 2. (archaic) without material existence or permanence; 3. a fanciful idea.


“She is sitting in a bathtub with a laptop and a lot of messy clothes around.” You are hearing this loud comment through the door as you sit in the tub with your laptop intent on bringing the significance of the messy clothes to your computer screen. You cannot see this male figure. He is behind you. You are not facing the street but the wall where water is being projected as strings of light. On the other wall is the labyrinth with the Virgin at the center and now we are on the beach where the strings appear over the horizon. It is just after six and this is the perfect time because the light is fading outside the gallery, which makes the projections more, pronounced on the wall before you. You can feel the kundalini at the base of your spine, perhaps it is the Iron Maiden igniting it, for iron is the element of the first chakra, the fire element and how grand to be firmly rooted as the images of water come and go before your eyes, like vapor. Yesterday the clothes were like lily pads. Today they are messy, reflecting the progression of the Solutio, the disintegration of the ego into the narrative. And this is what took place this afternoon when John Knowles came with his camera to discuss the installation. You began by talking about alchemy and he stopped you and said: “I wasn’t looking for a lecture but your interaction with the materials.” So, you took him on the journey through the clothing, picking up whatever caught your eye. You change your outfit. Off comes the Selma Karaca original painted spiral skirt with the Cupid Couture T-shirt and on comes an item you have located after an extensive search: a purple satin slip dress that used to be too big and fits you snugly now that you have the big body necessary to contain the energy of the Goddess. You hold up one dress after another and enter the Solutio to deliver a memory of the passage. You always knew that you would be here one day, in a gallery tying the material of your art to the threads of life. The emerald sea foam gown with the beaded bodice you wore to the real life manifestation of the sacred marriage on a lake in North Salem. The memory returned. You purchased with the black lace gown worn to Le Bal Masque at an estate sale in Cape Cod the summer that you photographed La Parca on the beach at sunrise. And beside the pink chiffon party dress is the Claude Montana dress given to you by your patron in Paris who went into a spontaneous past life regression when you met and told you that you were the woman arising out of the chalice in the desert in her painting and promptly gifted not only the painting but an amethyst ring and clothing to transform you into a stylish Parisian. As Heyo, the shaman that inspired you to join him in the misty City of Light used to say: Paris is the finishing school.” In Paris you would mold a fashionable persona to the female identity that vaporized in the sweat lodge when water was poured on the hot coals. The raw feminine that the Red Road of the Native Americans lead you through was fated to be refined in Paris through gifts of perfume, jewelry and clothing. In Paris, Heyo took you to meet your patron who bought you the Claude Montana linen dress slit up to here and down to there. No mind that it took years to assume the destiny woven the black fabric; fate was encoded in its winged structure. Your eye catches the glimmer of a shiny satin party dress shimmering violet and gold that you wore for the Saturday night dance at the historic 1997 Psyche & Symbols conference in San Francisco that brought scientists and astrologers together for the first time. It was there that you confronted James Hillman about his referring to Venus as Aphrodite, as if the pre-patriarchal Venus, the Sumerian Inanna, Queen of Heaven & Earth, never existed. Ha! The burning in the base of your spine informs you differently. The kundalini is firmly rooting you to the Iron Maiden, the crucible of this experiment to bring the feminine into form. You are well anchored for the immersion into Solutio. You need it. You are on the second day of your fast and Mars, your ruler, is approaching your Moon at 26 degrees Pisces. In yet another extraordinary cosmological line-up that maintains you on your path, Mars and the Moon meet this year on your moon at 26 Pisces, the extremely sensitive point of the solar eclipse on March 18. It was the day after Saint Patrick’s Day and you participated in a ritual where you drew your wishes on shamrocks. You wished for the Beloved, who had been vapor until now. The alchemical experiment integrates the private star with the universal star of the Aquarian Age, the six pointed star that appeared on your solar return in 1997. You have positioned yourself in a dialogue with the public in order to call in the magic that will deliver you to your Beloved, and therefore complete the narrative in which La Parca led you to your destiny. You had long been the homeless wanderer, the bride in search of the Beloved, who appeared and disappeared like vapor, enticing you further along your path but never showing his true face. With La Parca you finally had a companion for the narrative you have formed with your journey into the collective consciousness. For the first time in history a private person has the means to make their story public without having to pass through the gatekeepers. This is because of the Internet. You don’t even need to be an artist. You don’t even have to tell your story in words. You can tell it in images. The Internet allows anyone to communicate through images. You are walking in the midst of torn up pages from Webster’s Dictionary. For this reason you left journalism behind to make art with symbols. The tyranny of the word! You defy the tyranny of conceptualism in the art world with you symbolic art. Art created from images you projected on your journey. And here they are. The Goddess dresses purchased at a West Hollywood boutique called Polka Dots & Moonbeams that you wore with combat boots. The purple velvet mini dress you wore on your first date with the superstar artist who brought you into the art world even as his uncanny instinct guided you more deeply into your myth. So many memories in these threads, all objects of a grail search. Ever since you traveled alone through Europe at the age of 19 without a backpack, you have been in search of the perfect dress that you could wear at any time, for any occasion, the garment that always looked great even if you threw it on the floor or tossed it in a bag. It would have to be a magician’s outfit that could change in accordance with the environment, structured in a manner that sculpts the body. You have finally found this dress in a genius fashion designer from Turkey, who fell in love with La Parca as she resurrected her with her wizardry. You asked your mother if there was any family lace lying around in the home in Connecticut and she went into a closet and withdrew a white box. Inside there was beige colored lace that meshed perfectly with La Parca. Two sleeves of different lengths and covering the shoulders – precisely what you needed to hold the fraying fabric of the dress up! Ahhh, the universe provides, you cried. The universe, she said, it is your mother! Yes, the mother and the universe are one. Selma loves La Parca. You visited her in her studio and she got to work sewing the resurrection. Afterwards, she laid La Parca on the floor and asked she asked if she could have a piece of La Parca. The alchemists believed that spirit was contained in matter. Everything in the universe is alive and affected by our energies. And the intent of the alchemist is to transform energy so the universe may be transformed. You showed John the altar you created with FEDERICO’s crucible with the copper coil and the flat pieces of copper he transforms with fire. You explain how FEDERICO created the image of the Aquarian Goddess by going outside during the conjunction of Venus with the Moon last month and set the copper into the flames and shot the transformation with his camera, depicting the transformation of Venus as she arrived at the Sixth Gate, the heart chakra. which radiates green like the new movement to save the planet. This is the energy of universal love, the Aquarian Age icon of heaven and earth. At the end of the journey you arrived at the outfit that you entered the gallery in, your Selma Karaca spiral skirt made from a painting and the bright yellow T-shirt with the pink symbol and lettering declaring Cupid Couture across your breast. And you put hot pink fishnet socks on your feet and slipped them into your golden slippers with the hot pink neon bow and the green coat from Colette's closet and here you were hit with a fashion statement perfectly in sinc with your art theory – the unity of the figurative with the abstract, the objective with the subjective, the conscious with the unconscious.




He pointed the camera to the alchemical triangle you created with the three heavenly substances -- the pile of Sulfur (the masculine), the Salt (the feminine) and Mercury, represented by your writing instrument, the computer notebook which you scribed so much of the journey. Sulfur is represented by passion and will, associated with the fermentation process. Salt is associated with the Stone, the Ourobors, the astral body, representing the action of thought on matter, be it the One Mind acting on the one thing of the universe, or the alchemist meditating in her tub. On top of the Sulfur you placed your sunstone and on top of the Salt you placed your moonstone and there you have it -- the sacred wedding represented in your journey projected on the wall by the lunar eclipse following La Parca’s sojourn into the Mexican desert with the rose, a symbol of Eros, placed on a cactus. You got a single image before you were attacked by the bird of prey that swooped down on your, grabbing at your back. You fought him off with your tripod but your camera was on top of it and by some miracle it managed to take photos of the lunar eclipse because the next day it was broken. Here is red water with yellow centers. Like flowers. Water takes on the color of what is projected onto it and what contains it. Oh now the Mexican flag comes up and you get the significance -- the serpent on the flag as a symbol of transformation -- the winged serpent is the male manifestation of the ancient love goddess of Sumer, the self-declared Queen of Heaven and Earth. You placed La Parca on the steps of Quetzalcoatl as a form of ritual -- an injection of the energy of the sacred marriage into the bride. The Iron Maiden is making you feel so sexual. A booming voice through the window: “How are ya doing??” A group of guys have picked up on the energy outside the door. You are not embodied in La Parca tonight but she is right beside you. It feels right to have your fashion image of abstract/figurative together with the spiritual image of La Parca. You were tempted to take her to the red carpet last night. Up the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and past that most extraordinary bouquet of roses you have ever seen. You were walking the red carpet to the press preview yesterday but La Parca wanted to appear at the gala in the evening. You called the press office to see if you could get access anywhere near the red carpet and learned that you would need a permit, issued long ago. Holly was here in the gallery saying that to appear on the steps of the Met on the evening of the Costume Gala would mean making a fashion statement but you declared that you have no interest in making a fashion statement and the other steps suddenly came to you. You knew what steps had to be walked in order to bring the energy of Quetzacoatl to New York City. You knew where but not when and how and this to be revealed to you by the dew that appears on the ground in the morning and collected by alchemists to complete the Great Work. The Dew leads to the Fountain that completes the Water phase of the experiment. And Vapor, the stuff that dreams are made of, makes it all possible. For without the Beloved luring us towards our fate, how could we embrace our destiny? Without surrendering to the imagination, how could we manifest our dreams? The garments strewn around La Parca once served as new identities on the path, stepping stones to make the fanciful real. Now they serve as pieces of art from which a narrative of the return of the feminine from exile sprouts and takes form.

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.

WATER:PROLOGUE

Tsunami Wave

Last night
Instead of counting your sheep
My shepherd
I examined your golden necklace
For clues to your beauty

Silent you remain
My Beloved
All these years
All this geography!

To Buenos Aires and back
Up the Pyramids of Sol y Luna
To the temple of Athena

Traipsing around the globe
In my champagne wedding dress
Draping the tattered satin over the Coliseum wall

Sweeping the train up ancient Aztec strides
Uniting Heaven and Earth
Scaly face of the winged serpent
The snout of his dog twin

Excavating your beauty
Like an ancient relic
In my body
Awaiting your feverish clinch
To be reborn

The cycle of emotion
Tearing the fabric of my dress
Ocean, Vapor, Dew, Fountain
Lapis Lazuli wave of Aquarius

And there you were last night
After all these years
All this geography!
Oceans to be crossed
Between stanzas
In our epic journey




Clouds vaporizing in my dream
Depicting your innermost thoughts
In a letter
Meant for someone else

The morning dew
Facing the sun at 10 past 8
I celebrated your beauty
In a prayer to Inanna riding swiftly in her crescent boat
The Moon and Venus colliding with your Taurus

Three vessels riding the current
To the alchemical fountain
Lost bride seeking her shepherd
With paper and pen

The Spring Equinox
The third gate of Inanna’s ascent
Genitals to Solar Plexus
Radiating the beauty
Transported through ancient sites
To my body

And now it is noon,
The Sun caressing skin
Through Curley’s front window
As I scribble this sonnet to you
Beloved
Yes, to you

Awaiting our blessed union
Like donkeys mating in spring
Says Elena, the proprietor
Born on May Day

Your beauty
Flowing in me
The contents of your letter
Spilling over the page
Ode to the Beloved
Runneth two eggs over easy

The yellowing
Of yolk
Solar plexus fusion
Rusted iron transmuting into gold
Seed fertilizing the land
Flooded by the Tsunami wave