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| Neptune Man CC Jean Stimmell 5/22/13 |
The following dialogue is with a mask I made (shown above), just as he emerges from the warm kiln, fully formed, newly born. I recognize him at first sight: He is Neptune Man.
Neptune
speaking to me in his transcendent voice
I cradle my mask still warm from the kiln,
laying him down on the stonewall
I had built when I was young
now shrouded by vines.
I had built when I was young
now shrouded by vines.
Peering down at his
face,
I exclaim in
amazement…
“How old you’ve
gotten!”
“Indeed it's true,” my mask replies,
“I'm not what I used to be,
beached here like a piece of faded driftwood,
stranded after the tide went out.
But it has its own rewards.”
“Far from the
bombast and clamor of the sea,
I find it a relief to just sit here and be.”
Neptune
speaking in his descendent voice
I cradle my mask still warm from the kiln,
laying him down on the stonewall
I had built when I was young
now shrouded by vines.
I had built when I was young
now shrouded by vines.
Peering down at his face,
I exclaim in amazement…
“How old you’ve gotten!”
“What did you expect,”
my mask spits back
at me,
“you meditation master
son-of-a-bitch!
Dragging me from the depths
like a fisherman of old
hauling up a cod
to be filleted, salted,
and left to sun dry
on the rack.”
“You are killing me!
Return me to my rightful place
with the mermaids and sirens
in the depths of the swirling sea:
Ecstatic, irrational, imaginal
The Realm of Dionysus
Where the only rule is:
No Buddhas are allowed!”
One interpretation: Neptune is
speaking to two, very different sides of me.
Stanza #1 represents my transcendent, upward journey toward the sun, my dry, masculine side, my yearning to merge with the eternal and the absolute. Stanza
#2 represents my descendent journey, what Thomas Berry calls “inscendence,” a damp, downward journey toward my subconscious
depths, my feminine side: a journey that deepens me by opening up my emotions,
passion, and creativity.
According
to Bill Plotkin, there is no conflict between transcendence and inscendence.
“Each supports and enhances the other. Like Rilke, we discover we can have
both:” [1]
“You see, I want a lot
Maybe I want it all;
The darkness of each
endless fall,
[1]
Plotkin, Bill (2008-09-30). Soulcraft (Kindle Locations 840-842). New
World Library. Kindle Edition.
[2] Rilke, from Rilke's Book of
Hours, p. 61. Plotkin, Bill (2008-09-30). Soulcraft (Kindle Location 5300).
* Note: This mask has a long history.* As I wrote in my blog on 12/14/12, this project started when I contacted my friend and mentor, Peter Baldwin, expressing my desire to better understand Carl Jung’s work, particularly his meditative technique called “active imagination.” I expected Peter to recommend a book to read but should have known better. He told me to build masks and dialogue with them. And so I did. The dialogue, including poetry, continues in Part II of my blog. All that happened six months ago when my mask was just raw clay. Then the project languished as I moved on to other things. By the time I finally glazed and re-fired the mask last week, so much time had elapsed that my mask was like brand-new, a blank slate, something I had never seen before.
* Note: This mask has a long history.* As I wrote in my blog on 12/14/12, this project started when I contacted my friend and mentor, Peter Baldwin, expressing my desire to better understand Carl Jung’s work, particularly his meditative technique called “active imagination.” I expected Peter to recommend a book to read but should have known better. He told me to build masks and dialogue with them. And so I did. The dialogue, including poetry, continues in Part II of my blog. All that happened six months ago when my mask was just raw clay. Then the project languished as I moved on to other things. By the time I finally glazed and re-fired the mask last week, so much time had elapsed that my mask was like brand-new, a blank slate, something I had never seen before.
5 comments:
Actually I can imagine many stanzas... rarely are things two sided.
Long ago you created the Neptune mask... it is old now, representing your dreams and ambitions when you were younger. You molded it in the image of the sea, the oceans, but left it in a garden.
You look at it now and it has aged. You imagine it has experienced peace left existing in the garden. Yet you also feel somehow it was meant to be in the sea, that that is where it was meant to be, and you imagine it is angry that you did not cast it into the sea...
This represents the futility of life, that one can't be two places, that choices must be made or choices are somehow made for us. When we're older we rationalize the choices made.
Occasionally we have hard examples of our past - relics of our past that gaze back at us and speak to us.
Stanza 3: The mask looks up at you and speaks. My how you have grown older. Do you remember me? Your dreams when you created me? You left me here and that's okay, though you could have thrown me into the ocean, where I might have felt more at home... however in all the time that has passed, did you accomplish your goals and achieve your dreams present when you created me?
You look at the mask and your answer is?
Nothing is etched in stone... while you were here basking in the sun life happened. It may have been good, maybe not so good. Maybe I was the master of my future, or my future was corrupted by others and I was made to deviate from my plans. Either way I am today what you see.
But you are what I created long ago, unchanged except by your time in the sun. You are eternal, while I will fade away someday and have been moving on ever since the day I created you. It is not you who can question me, but I who questions you. I who asks what difference for you whether here in the garden or in the sea?
You will forever be, while I have endured much change, much I desired and much I was forced to endure. And while I fade away, you will continue to exist almost the same as the day I created you. And I have to ask, why was I forced to move on? Why could I not stay with you here in the garden that was special to me, where I left you to bask in the sun? Why do my dreams endure, while I must move on?
The mask looks back at me and says, you created me, God created you. Ask your god, not me.
Life is but a dream... from which one day we will awaken; while the mask is but a shell, left by a living creature - all shall pass, but something is always left behind.
Those are very insightful insights, Bob. Kieregaard illuminates to me, the central paradox of life: “Human beings are caught, he said, between two modes or ‘spheres’ of existence. The ‘aesthetic’ is the world of immediacy, of here and now. The ‘ethical’ is the transcendent, eternal world. We can’t live in both, but neither fulfills all our needs since ‘the self is composed of infinitude and finitude’, a perhaps hyperbolic way of saying that we exist across time, in the past and future, but we are also inescapably trapped in the present moment." http://www.aeonmagazine.com/world-views/julian-baggini-i-love-kierkegaard/
I may have confused you with the timeline of the mask. You might want to read my new introduction.Thanks Jean
Yes, that does change things, provides an understandable and tangible framework about you and your mask. I appreciate that you clarified your relationship with the mask.
I used to be pretty deep into the esoteric stuff (I believe that is a correctly phrased statement). It all got away from me and was walled off from me.
Perhaps my original comment is no longer valid, but it serves to show that reality is fluid based upon the facts as presented.
You worked with clay, I with wax...
Your Neptune was never meant to live in the sea. I wonder how you must feel about that?
So true that reality is fluid, changing, evolving, a continuing conversation between ourselves, our bodies, nature, and the universe.
Time marches on leaving no one behind. Even the laws of the universe are included; they, too, are not static but evolving.
Perhaps, my neptune mask will never make it to the sea but that part of me that dreamed him up, metaphorically speaking, yearns to swim again with the mermaids in the depth of the sea.
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