Solution

Waters Moods Alchemy Art

This piece is about Solution, both in that I am writing through / with the chapter on this stage of the alchemical process in Eliza Swann’s new book, and in reflecting that I’ve been going through this stage in my own life.

To riff on the word: a solution can mean both a combination of solute and solvent, one dissolved in the other, and the answer to a question or a problem. Dissolved, a substance loses distinction, to my mind a terrifying though necessary prospect. If I dissolve and become diffuse, will I lose my resolve? Will I forget my question, and wound that generates it?

A few days ago I arrived home from School of the Alternative, a residency / ephemeral school / prefigurative utopian experiment held annually in Black Mountain, NC (at one of the old Black Mountain College campuses, now a YMCA lodge).

I’ve been attending for the last few years, but last year’s session and this year’s session feel like they have book-ended a year of grief and joy and relentless transformation in my life. In this period of time after SotA, I’ve been checking in with fellow attendees, engaging in the emergent process of solidifying connections, wondering what will stick.

There is the collective portal, that we all, to an extent, moved through, catalyzed by things like a collective ritual that came together over the course of the week. There are also the personal portals people have gone through, and the middle range of small groups, like some of those of us who got haircuts from a friend dropping our shorn locks over a footbridge into the creek by the lodge where we stayed.

Water is such a feature of portals and transformation. One of the first things I did when Miriam arrived in Western Mass last summer was participate in an impromptu mikveh behind the Book Mill. The current tried to pull me away. “You can’t have her,” I heard them say. How good to feel so insisted upon. I banged my shin and climbed out new.

Mid-week at SotA, many of the participants went to a swim spot. I splashed around and perched on the rocks watching a river snake swim through a gap and then slither up the bank. After a while, I saw people congregating slightly upstream and taking their tops off. I had one pouty second of wishing I was invited, but then I realized that they all invited themselves, so I did, too.

Eliza Swann (all quotes to follow are from their The Alchemical Imagination):

Personal experiences of solution can often be found in communal activities such as dancing, falling in love, participating in group rituals, or choral singing—anything that connects you to a greater sense of wholeness and blurs the boundaries between self and not self. However my most profound experiences of solution have occurred in moments of solitude away from other humans when I felt completely at ease and able to let go.

I only took one big solo walk while I was there this year, through tunnels of colossal rhododendrons. I gathered a pinecone, mountain laurel flowers on a sycamore leaf for an altar on my dresser. I noticed what I perceived to be gouges in the land, where Helene’s waters had moved mud and toppled trees. Seeing scars makes it hard not to apply that gaze to myself. In the aftermath of major loss and change, how has the landscape of my bodymind been reshaped?

At the river, a couple of people started taking pictures, laying in the creek or recessed among the hanging vines. I wanted to participate. I have this ongoing problem that has generated an ongoing project. The problem is that, when I am in my dark moods, I only don’t think I have a line to the Divine anymore, except through a you that is both specific and general (“the other”). “There’s a light / a certain kind of light / that’s never shone on me,” Nina Simone is singing, and I am singing with her.

Another way of saying this is that I have a story that I am unrequitedly in love with the world, so the project is to remember that it’s not true. One of the students in my Pile of Poems to Manuscript class at Looky Here wrote something to this effect, that the natural world misses us. I was moved to hear it, and I believed them. Daniel Johnston is singing, “True love is looking, too,” and with him I want to “Step out into the light, the light,” so that it can recognize me. What memory of my own can I use to anchor this belief?

Something like Swann’s childhood memory:

One humid afternoon when I was around ten years old, the air was thick with the smell of impending rain and the sound of buzzing insects. I found myself alone in the forest behind my aunt’s house. A wave of inspiration compelled me to run down the trails through the trees as fast as I could, shedding my clothes along the way. After racing through the forest until it became a green blur, I eventually stopped to catch my breath. My heart was pounding, and I felt a surge of explosive joy. In that moment, I was one with the forest, naked, alive, and exhilarated by our union. The sensation of my sweating skin against the scaly bark of the trees, the cool, slick moss underfoot, the shimmering emerald shells of beetles, the rhythmic pounding of my blood, and the melodies of the birds combined to create a singular being.

I tried to join the photography project and thought I was being rejected, as opposed to what was actually happening, which was that we were posing one at a time. Isn’t it amazing how ready the anxious mind is to twist a welcome into a wall? When it came my turn, I was humbled by the creek when I slipped on mossy stones and sprained my wrist. Rather than attempting to spring up, I let myself be held by the icy current. Whether or not it turned out, that was the shot.

The photographer caught up with me the last morning to use up the last couple of pictures on the roll. I walked us to the same bridge where I would drop my hair, and guided me out of the pose of being a single being, encouraging me to follow my intuitions in collaboration with the leaves and branches around my and to notice the sensations that attended those movements. I was hot with exhaustion and I remember the leaves being cool and wet.

Water is known as the universal solvent because it can dissolve more substances than any other liquid. The process of solution encourages us to let go of the rigid parts of our psyche that prevent us from experiencing the true intimacy needed for alchemical work. A genuine connection with our ideas, a bond with our materials, and a deep affection for the Soul of the World, which is inseparable from our own, are crucial for the success of our creative endeavors.

As Lao Tzu says in the Tao Te Ching: “Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. Yet water can wear away rock, which is rigid and unyielding. Generally, what is fluid, soft, and yielding will ultimately overcome what is rigid and hard. This presents another paradox: what is soft is strong” (Lao Tzu 1988, 78). It is through this process of softening and the willingness to flow that true strength is revealed.

Caro said they’ve been hearing a lot of talk about portals lately. Miriam just taught Access Artistry Portal at SotA based on Hook&Loop’s Access Artistry Manifesto. Part of the work of the class seemed to be welcoming people into the awareness that they have care needs, an awareness that I’ve been coming to more in the past year.

I’ve been celebrating getting a job and grieving returning to full-time in-office work. Not this job, which is lovely as jobs go, but any job. I think one of my problems in life is that the little kid who wanted to be left alone to read is still very strong in me. The grownup who knows how much art and friendship and communion with the world is out there. The burned out, tired, sore-limbed person who needs to rest.

One hallmark of my usual SotA experience is that there is usually one book from among the several I bring that ends up being the one I needed. Past examples include Frances Yates’s The Art of Memory and Joanne M. Harris’s Honeycomb. This year the book was Eliza Swann’s The Alchemical Imagination.

I wasn’t at SotA to teach this year, so this book ended up feeling like the shadow textbook for a class I might’ve taught. But I was there to be a student, something I always am, something I usually love to be. The caveat being that when I’m afraid of not being included or having low self-esteem, it can be comforting to have a role. Not to be in charge, I don’t like to be in charge so much as being a dedicated holder of the space, but to be intelligible; seen, wanted, and held by a community.

In life, being unintelligible (in one’s presentation, goals, lifestyle, etc.) often means being being excluded and under-resourced. And while being unintelligible among the unintelligible is a delight, but the fear of being unintelligible to the unintelligible can rise up strong in me: what if the other weirdos don’t recognize me as one of them? What if they don’t want what I have to give (myself)?

The answer to this, I suspect, is also the answer to the desire to recognize myself as loved by the (beyond-human) world, which is to go into it, and spend time with trees and flowers, grapevines slowing clenching around a ramshackle shed. Another answer is an old one for me, which is to go to a book (even though in my foul moods I either fear that books, like flowers, want nothing to do with me or that these are somehow second-class companions compared to the humans I wish I were with).

But when my mind is right, a book feels like a companion, and The Alchemical Imagination had a very companionate energy. The book is broken into thoughtful commentary on the history of alchemy and the alchemical tradition, sections on artists whose work exemplifies a stage of alchemy (e.g. Milford Graves for Conjunction or Agnes Martin for Separation), and a generous but not intrusive amount of Swann’s life as an artist and alchemist.

I don’t know exactly what I mean by intrusive. I guess what I’m saying is that it’s not a memoir. There are zones of intimacy and also moments of silence, hermetic and otherwise. I respect this sort of purposefully partial disclosure. It doesn’t feel withholding because we readers are not entitled to it.

But among what is included, sections like the first part of “Solution” really moved me. The pathos, not the Catholic imagery, which is incidental to the book (although I think Swann was also raised Catholic, but don’t quote me on it):

Medieval alchemists believed that the salt in tears was the residue of crystallized thoughts and prescribed crying for a wide range of psychic ailments. A few years ago, I was dealing with trying and failing to conceive. Month after month, pregnancy tests came back negative, and I felt helpless. One afternoon, after receiving another negative test result, I clenched my jaw and decided to run errands, trying to steel myself against my sorrow and pretend that nothing was wrong. I spent a miserable afternoon walking the city streets, weighed down by shopping bags and a sense of disappointment I didn’t want to face. i walked by St. Thomas Church in Manhattan and decided to step inside to rest for a while. As I walked in, I nodded ruefully toward a wooden statue of the Virgin Mary with a plaque beneath it that read, “Our Lady of Fifth Avenue.”

Then I caught her gaze. In her eyes, I saw the grief of all beings who experience loss. There she sat, cradling her baby, who would soon be crucified. Images of Mary cradling Christ’s lifeless body flooded my memory. Overcome, I sat down in front of her, lowered my head, and began to sob. I cried until my grief expanded beyond my own losses and flowed into the grief of other beings experiencing despair. The pain of my own loss brought me closer to the sea of sorrow that has the power to break a heart wide open. I sat there weeping for the rest of the afternoon, not just for myself but for people suffering everywhere. When I finally left the church, I felt as light as the wind and as tender as an infant. I was full of love.

Where Swann lands is in the psychological necessity of individuation and the equal necessity for the self to extend beyond itself. The process of moving between these is not a singular process but a portal we keep going through.

I wrestle so hard with being a soul, sweating, aching, moving through agonies and ecstasies I couldn’t begin to know how to recount (nor, probably, should I) when people ask me how I am or what I’ve been up to, although I know that many of them are struggling, too. The trace of this is, sometimes, a poem.