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.