The Alchemy of Love in Five Elements

THE ALCHEMY OF LOVE: IN FIVE ELEMENTS

2008-06-27T01:18:00.000-07:00

"For the observers of the Future,
the greatest event will be
the sudden appearance of a
collective humane conscience
and a human work to make."
Pierre Teilhard Chardin:

FIRE (CALCINATIO)

January 20, 2007

Ever since you can remember
They have been telling you
SURRENDER

Just let go!
You are holding an egg…well drop it!
Come on now! COME!

SUR-REN-DER
Three syllables shouted across a battlefield
That is your name
White flags held high above human wreckage
Your flag is red, stained with blood

SURRENDER! Pluto bellowed
Squelching Persephone’s last gasp
Before the chasm

SUR – REN – DER
Three vicious yelps in her ear
Poised to the Great Below
As she swooned before the Narcissus
Her slip of a skirt ---it was the height of summer—
inching up her milky white bottom

Intoxicated with the scent of passion
Cold hand of fate crucifying virgin flesh
With the rasping SURRENDER!

You could never surrender
Not in the open picture you painted
Tool of your erotic trade held high
Persephone’s spiraling Song of Sovereignty
Snake spiraling through the spinal chord
From obscurity to celebritY

Her greatest desire is to meet her match
Says MP, the Seer re-visioning her from the depths
Light in Dark and Shadowed in Light
A man that can keep her guessing.

Six pomegranate seeds
Six for the Lovers
Six months underground
Rising at the Winter Solstice
Bursting into seed at the Spring Equinox
When days and nights are in perfect balance
You meet your equal

Hail Persephone!
Visionary Wanderer
Queen of Night and Princess of Day
You ride the dimensional shift,
Says your seer/daughter

Underworld Queen giving birth
To the Aquarian Goddess
Who waves the Freedom Flag
White banner stained red by memory
Of desire

WATER (SOLUTIO)
May 6, 2007

Last night
Instead of counting your sheep
Under a lunar eclipse
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 '
And the fountain of desire

Traipsing around the globe
In my champagne wedding dress
Draping the tattered satin over the Coliseum wall
Bearing the stench of sacrificial blood

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

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

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

EARTH (COAGULATIO)
June 17, 2007

Blackbirds descend
Skins discarded
Batteries dead
Cell phone run down
MAC in revolt
Entropy

Gassing as a derivative art
Dreams of Assia
Her tragic life/death/life cycle
Under your skin

Like you
Her Jew-German Selves divided
Lilith the child killer
Crushed by the mirror
Child gassed by Hades
Double Pisces, vaporized
By the stars
Mother denying her own

When the artist dies
What becomes of her sky children?
Scattered like the blackbirds
Over the memory

Summer Solstice near
Spring lovers nearly cooked
Sulphur purified by Salt
The child caressed
Beneath the skeletons
Between green sips of mojito

Coagulatio beckons
Body entering the cocoon
Seaweed rubbed by Bulgarian fingers
Corpse exhausted, limp
Lilith flies away
Green Goddess embraces
Her own

Your natal horoscope
A natural body clock
Dead and reborn at the cardinal points
Tropic of Capricorn/Tropic of Cancer
Solstices/Equinoxes
The Earth lives in the body

The Eternal Return
Rises
In the limbs
Completing the cycle
Life, death, decay, renewal

The Hieros Gamos
Crying out to be
Born

AIR (SUBLIMATIO)
August 29, 2007

Alchemical texts
Typically
Forged into stone by men
What did they know?

Old tapes unravel
Eros denied
The transformation takes place
In the body
Of the woman!

Mercurious
Curious fellow
So many characters
Runneth from his broken chalice

Perceval, the Grail Seeker
Dumuzi, the auto-erotic lover
Dionysius, the “homegrown” pothead
Orion, the Hunter on the perpetual make
And now, Priapus
The Prick!

Swallowed up
By Gaia
Grotesque Priapus
With his pruning knife
Aimed at multi horned you

You got balls!
Razor sharp bite
Slicing the chord
Forever
One can get used to rejection

Chalice broken
Wedding canceled
You got balls, he stormed
Twisting the black chord
Around your neck
Reap what you sow,
Priapus!

Death is the logical end
Of Earth
Gaia swallowing
The Underworld Characters
Born of the Nigredo
Whom no longer serve
The corpus
That is all

Death the ultimate
Grounding
Body decaying into Soil
Touching roots
Of our eternal being

Tentacles extending into the underground
Fountain bursting into form
The Aquarian Age Goddess
Created from Salt
Acting on Sulfur
Phew!

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How he stinks
Of herb
Nicotine
Mercury poisoning
Sulfurous Priapus!
Woooolf!

But lo!
The purifying breath of Psyche
Cycling the corpus, Arising
Sophia, Goddess of Wisdom
In your throat: "Here I am!"
To your Third Eye: "There you are!"

Seeing all too clearly
Characters born of the Nigredo
Consumed by Earth
Devouring Goddess
Preparing the ground for the New

Death the ultimate
Embodiment
Flesh & bones fertilizing soil
Womb of the Great Mother

Calling forth
Your guiding symbol
Aquarian Age
Water Bearer

SIlver chalice beckoning on Lexington Ave
You wear it
Over your throat of Lapis Luzuli
Spinning the revival of the tale
Returned Bride resurrecting the Groom

The Grail
Carrying the Bloodline
The Conjunctio
Of God and Goddess
Jesus & Mary Magdeline
Inanna & Dumuzi
Pregnant with form
Absorbed in the body

Chalice Bearer
Whose cup you fill
With your Aquarian spirit
A vision of your bicycle
Airborne With wings

Fueled by your own power
Your self-created structure
The blessing of the Earth Goddess
Offering to Venus
Emerged
From underground
Lapis Star

Flesh dies
But structure is eternal
The proof discovered yesterday
News of the hexagram cloud
Hovering over the North Pole
Of Saturn foretold
THe old goat

What better sign
Could cross your path
Of the transformation
From Earth to Air

Saturn, ruler of structure
Projecting the Hieros Gamos
Into Heaven!!!

Grab a ring of the planet
Transmuting fate into destiny
Surrendered to Earth
Ready
To Fly!

HIEROS GAMOS
January 20, 2008

Your journey brought you
From the sky surrounding the Hollywood sign
To the intertwined roots of your
Heritage of opposites

The grounding of Luna and Sol
Merging in a Solar Eclipse
Conjunct your ruler, Uranus
In Mutual Reception

Mysterium Coniunctionis
From which you can at last
BE THE STAR
Foretold on your solar return
January 23, 1997
Finally eclipsed

You like to tie loose ends up
Into neat little circles
Some might call it art

You were told about your karma
It being your last lifetime, and all
You have a lot of karma to complete
White Buffalo Woman interpreting
St. Michael in great gobs of AIR

Every day
Every breath
Feels like your last gasp
The end of a cycle

You have arrived
At that unnamed state
Imaged by your father
In his modestly titled book
“God Speaks”

“The author in bliss”
Reads the caption
And so, this is the legacy
Of having a father as
Kundalini pioneer
A breaking of paternal attachment
Replaced by an image of bliss

You are living out a myth
Said the astrologer
Reading the asteroids
On the cliff above
The Oregon coast

You were only beginning then
With your Persephone tale
Contained in boxes
You gave her a copy
In exchange for her book
On the dark goddesses

Arising at last
From the underground
You bring the mythical
Journey to a close
in great form

The conclusion of The Alchemy of Love
Told in images
Hieros Gamos arising Out of Eros
The Siberian Tiger's passion for collaboration
Under a full moon in her sign of Aquarius
Opposites merging into a new path
The “in between” place
Writes the scholar of images

The middle path between Heaven & Earth
Envisioned as the World Tree
By the Mayans
Envisioned as the Body
By the Cabala
The human heart at the center
Earth & Sky united
The cycle of the opposites
Is completed

When will I be a success?
You asked the yogi
Palm thrust under his focused gaze
"When you get into your body."
You pressed him to the wall
A book? A film? A TV show?
“You are the Star,” he said
The form doesn't matter.

“Follow your bliss" was the mantra
As you came of age
And so you did

PSYCHE & COSMOS

2008-06-19T07:38:00.000-07:00

January 23, 1997 a six-pointed star,
known as the Seal of Solomon
links the heavenly cosmology with
the earth's eastern horizon

The cosmology of the Hieros Gamos, the 21st century icon
predicted by C.G. Jung and Wolfgang Pauli;
Delivered into contemporary thought by
Richard Tarnas, author of "Cosmos and Psyche,"
excerpted below:

"Humanity's 'progress of knowledge' and the 'evolution of consciousness' have too often been characterized as if our task were simply to ascend a very tall cognitive ladder with graded hierarchical steps that represent successive developmental stages in which we solve increasingly challenging mental riddles, like advanced problems in a graduate exam in biochemistry or logic. But to understand life and the cosmos better, perhaps we are required to transform not only our minds but our hearts. for our whole being, body and soul, mind and spirit, is profoundly affected by the degree to which all our facilities -- intellectual, imaginative, aesthetic, moral, emotional, somatic, spiritual, relational -- enter the process of our knowing. How we approach 'the other,' and how we approach each other, will shape everything, including our own evolving self and the cosmos in which we participate. Not only our personal lives but the very nature of the universe may demand of us now a new capacity for self-transcendence, both intellectual and moral, so that we may experience a new dimension of beauty and intelligence in the world -- not a PROJECTION of our desire for beauty and intellectual mastery but an ENCOUNTER with the actual unpredictably unfolding beauty and intelligence of the whole. I believe that our intellectual quest for truth can never be separated from the cultivation of our moral and aesthetic imagination.

As Goethe recognized, it is often the case that the very faculties we require for our knowledge can be developed only through our receptive engagement with what we wish to comprehend, which transforms us in the very process of our inquiry. Thus, the study of archetypal forms opens the archetypal eye. And thus, the open encounter with the potential reality of an ANIMA MUNDI makes possible its actual discernment. In this view, only by opening ourselves to being changed and expanded by that which we seek to understand will we be able to understand at all. Such a shift involves gradually opening our awareness to a dimension of reality that, thought potentially of deep significance, may at first seem scarcely perceptible, the subtle 'patterns which connect' --patterns of meaning within and without, the delicate and elusive, the repressed and denied, that which is obscured by our certainties, that which suggest and intimates rather than commands and proves. Such a transformation in our approach to life requires, as Jung says, a new openness to our OWN 'other,' our interior other: our unconscious, in all its plenitude of forms. For here, perhaps, we begin to encounter the interior mystery of the cosmos itself."

Richard Tarnas
"Cosmos and Psyche"

MAY 28 PROGRAM NOTES

2008-06-12T10:16:00.000-07:00

John Knowles projection of "Solutio" onto James Knowles "Urban Crystals"

THE ALCHEMY OF LOVE:
In Five Elements

By

Lisa Paul Streitfeld

Thank you all for coming. This evening here in the Penthouse is a celebration for me and those of you who have participated in this multimedia experiment over the past 18 months that took place in the storefront Lab gallery below us. I want to thank my partners in this enterprise: first of all, the hotel owners James and Sue2 Knowles for hosting the event and providing much needed support and guidance for this vision. Matthew Semler, the director of the Lab Gallery, was a creative collaborator who always overcame challenges with me and setting up limitations when I needed them, even when I subsequently ignored them (like no nudity!). And most of all, I want to thank John Knowles, who has traveled with me on this transformational journey every step, the results showing in the videos he made that will be screened in sequence tonight.

I am grateful to the friends who contributed to the exhibitions with their art: Holly Crawford’s paintings and Yuliya Lanina’s three dimensional characters in FIRE; Daniel Rothbart with his vessels and striker in AIR; and Tatyana Stepanova and Michael Manning, whose paintings contributed to the HIEROS GAMOS while the musician Lutz Rath collaborated with the live performance. Gae Savannah and Richard Humann entered the space to exchange fruitful dialogue. I am particularly grateful to Selma Karaca for her kundalini couture which gave me the structure to undergo repeated transformations and James Knowles who’s Urban Crystals are bringing a new medium, sculpture, into this multimedia presentation tonight.

I welcome all of you who are new participants and hope that you will be engaged enough to ask questions during the course of the evening. This journey originates in my personal discovery of alchemy and a two decade development of incorporating this ancient art into my experimental autobiographical fiction. Yet, like all alchemical works, it is open to new interpretations while continually undergoing a process of greater refinement. So I welcome all your feedback. Let’s make this a truly interactive experience!

Tonight brings me to a crucial convergence point. The mythical narrative has been brought to a conclusion posted earlier in May, followed by an Appendix revealing the scientific hypothesis guiding the year long experiment. Yet, what remains is delivering this new form of storytelling to the public. As a critic, I have been searching for new art forms to embrace an emerging 21st century icon, the Hieros Gamos. After putting together works of fine art for ICONS OF THE 21st CENTURY in January 2006 at the Lab, I embarked on a long cherished dream – to do a gallery performance/installation devoted to my unique form of literature originating in the mind of Pierre Teilhard Chardin: "For the observers of the Future, the greatest event will be the sudden appearance of a collective humane conscience and a human work to make."

In both form and substance, THE ALCHEMY OF LOVE, manifests the icon to which it is devoted - the Hieros Gamos - by making a personal journey on earth, the art gallery, universal through the Internet. With this unity, the blogel (a term coined by literary critic Jeffrey Wright) was born.

NOTES ON ALCHEMY

The ancient art of alchemy was the practice of transmuting lead into gold, the metal of royalty. When Carl Jung examined the alchemical texts in the 20th century he discovered the alchemists were performing these rites as a cover for personal transformation through the four elements – FIRE, WATER, EARTH and AIR in order to reach the exalted state symbolized as the marriage of Sol and Luna during an eclipse.

This process of injecting spirit into matter was to be achieved in the goal of creating the Philosopher’s Stone which emanated the quintessential element known as the Hieros Gamos or sacred marriage of the opposites. This cosmic consciousness can be achieved through the path of the serpent power through the body.

The serpent power is known in yoga as the kundalini, which means coiled. This energy rests as the base of the spine. When it is awakened, it is transformed through the seven chakras to the top of the head where the sacred marriage between god and goddess takes place. Formal systems of alchemy have seven levels – one for each chakra.

All the occult systems were devoted to the rebirth of this energy, which was the feminine face of the divine repressed by western religions. How many of you have read the Da Vinci Code? Well, the secret society to which Sophie’s grandfather belonged was devoted to the honoring of this female power and worshiping the icon of the Hieros Gamos through sacred rituals.

Now this occult journey was always shrouded in mystery. This was so not only because it was considered a path of magic and therefore condemned as heresy by the Church. It was also because the initiate who attempted to raise this energy through the spinal column was tempting madness when this energy burned out of control. Today there is less danger of this because of all the products and procedures devoted to purification and containment of this energy.

The simplified system that I am presenting tonight was developed over a period of years while I was living in East Hollywood, supporting myself as a script analyst and devoting myself to metaphysical study. My father, a devotee of Muktanada, was a pioneer in Kundalini research. I experienced a kundalini opening at his funeral in 1983. This made my life unstable over the following decade but I managed to stay sane through three practices: healing, alchemy and writing. I went to a healer who balanced my chakras and literally channeled energy into my feet so I would stay grounded. I subsequently met an alchemist who gave me a medallion of alchemical mercury that focused my energy on my chakra of choice. And finally, I began feverishly writing as an outlet for all the cosmic energy streaming through my body. Because I always wrote about my personal journey, the alchemical path of transformation established the natural structure for my story telling.

The structure I created simplifies the alchemical transformation to the five elements in the following order: FIRE, WATER, EARTH, AIR & HIEROS GAMOS. Because this energy of my awakening manifested as erotic attraction while living below the Hollywood sign, I was always attracting characters right out of Central Casting that seemed to view an interaction with my pursuit of the Hieros Gamos as an audition for New Age comical love dramas. So, my alchemical structure quickly began to reflect in my literature the stages of falling in love combined with an intense inquiry into whether a love predicated on a 21st century icon, the Hieros Gamos, could be Real. I developed THE ALCHMEY OF LOVE as a PowerPoint presentation in 2006 as a talk on Single’s Night at Caramoor. This led to my proposing the multimedia exhibition to Matt Semler at the Lab Gallery. The result was truly a revelation: a new form of reality writing instantaneously disseminated globally causing the magical effects of my subliminal form of literature to manifest nearly simultaneously, and oftentimes beforehand.

This is what I want to share with you tonight. How diving deeply into the personal results in the universal. Magic happens as thought precedes form. Self-publishing through the Internet is the quickest and cheapest path to self-determination that exists. The commitment of owning a thought and injecting it into Cyberspace makes it instantaneously Real with practice. The hard part of this practice, of course, is ownership. Thoughts need to be attached to a firm identity for Self-Realization to occur.

Tonight, I will be reading the prologue to each Element which set the stage for the exhibition interpreted through video. Afterwards I will relate the outcome of the experiment which recorded in the blogel.

What I hope to convey is the magic that happens to an individual embarks on the path of self-determined individuation which reverberates in the immediate environment. The alchemists were forever repeating experiments as a path to perfection. The fire might be too hot, the chemical composition off, the planets might not be in the right alignment. So many things could go wrong, but they sacrificed everything to keep trying again and again to achieve the perfection of their art.

In developing my unique form of alchemical literature, I was held underground for two decades, without any offers of publication or requests for reading, so I might have the refinement emanated through this experiment. Ignited by an erotic attraction which deposited me directly into FIRE, the passage through each element initially took years, then months. But after 20 years of conscious practice in alchemy, I got it down to the five day exhibition. Even then, I needed to fully process events daily in order to keep devoted to my rules of posting every night. One breakthrough resulted in an insight that led to another until they piled up in the text as a multidimensional language interlocking images with words through symbols charged with erotic power.

So, please join me as I attempt to re-create this experience of falling in love – with a new form of literature worthy of the 21st century!

THE ALCHEMY OF LOVE: IN FIVE ELEMENTS

2008-05-26T07:40:00.000-07:00

You are invited to experience…

THE ALCHEMY OF LOVE:
In five elements

By

Lisa Paul Streitfeld

May 28, 2008
Live performance starts at 7:30 PM
ROGER SMITH HOTEL Penthouse
501 Lexington Avenue (47th Street)
New York, NY

Complete five chapters presented in two-channel video and live readings.

RSVP: lisapaul1000@aol.com

THE ALCHEMY OF LOVE: APPENDIX A

2008-05-14T07:57:00.000-07:00

"In the dream I drew an oscillation process beneath the window – actually two oscillations, one beneath the other. By turning to the right from the curves, I try to see the time on the clock. But the clock is too high, so that doesn’t work. Then the dream continues. The ‘dark unknown woman’ appears. She is crying because she wants to write a book but cannot find a publisher for it. In this book there is apparently a great deal of material on time symbolism – e.g., how a period of time is constituted when certain symbols appear in it. And at the end of one page of the book, there are the following words, read aloud by the ‘voice’: ‘The definite hours have to be paid for with the definite life, the indefinite hours have to be paid for with the indefinite life.’”

On January 23, 1938, Wolfgang Pauli, the father of modern science, had the above dream. I located it in the appendix of the book, Atom and Psyche, as I was preparing an art exhibition entitled Icons of the 21st Century.

The dream describes where we stand today as we enter the chaos preceding the resurrection of the psyche signified by the December 21, 2012 Winter Solstice alignment of the sun with the Galactic Center. The double oscillation is the symbol for Aquarius and the unseen clock represents the timing of the manifestation in the collective view represented by the window.

Like Pauli in his dream, we can no longer see time because time is no longer moving in a linear fashion. The voice alludes to the difficult passage to Jean Gebser’s “ever present origin,” the abyss at the center of the Milky Way, envisioned by the Mayans as the World Tree, a symbol for the creation and ordering of the universe. The axis of Earth/Sky at the Galactic Center is where the cosmos was divided into four quarters, each oriented to one of the cardinal points representing the “beginning of time.” This geometry marks the time and place where definite and indefinite time will converge.

Like the woman in Pauli’s dream, I was struggling to determine a “period of time constituted when certain symbols appear” through 20 years of compulsive writing from the collective unconscious. The journey that began with a kundalini awakening propelled me into a career as an art critic intent on finding symbols for “the beginning of time” in millennial art. It was a personal quest with a universal aim: to determine what was this myth I was destined to live by the circumstances of my birth and relate it to a new vision of art in the 21st century.

Kundalni Awakening

My father, Neo-Reichian clinical psychologist, was at the forefront of the Human Potential Movement in the 1960’s. After a decade of experimentation, he exhausted the western approaches to consciousness and gave up his worldly possessions to become a disciple of Swami Muktananda. By the end of the 1970’s, he left the Oakland ashram to research the kundalini. Co-founding the Kundalini Clinic in San Francisco, he healed individuals whose psyches were torn asunder by eruptions of the force known as the “serpent power.” He was about to bring this knowledge into the collective consciousness when he had a fated encounter with a group of women on a mountaintop in India who transmitted enlightenment through trance. These were devotees of Raja yoga, the highest form of this discipline that attempts to bring the body and psyche into spiritual union.

When my father died of a heart attack in 1983, I was working as a financial reporter in Mexico City. It seemed that his hand had reached out through his coffin because it was at his funeral that my kundalini was awakened by one of his spiritual sisters who had such elevated energy she seemed to walk on air. Cupping her hands over the crown of my head, she opened my crown chakra. I have always been an open channel but my body was unprepared for this influx of spiritual energy.

For years afterwards the only constant in my life was instability. I bounced between the opposites of love and hate, an imbalance arising from the paradox of the archetypal “wounded healer” who learns to heal by attending to one’s own psyche. The only person who could have helped my condition was dead. I traveled between various cities and the fourth dimension with frequent out of body visions. I appealed to astrologers and psychics only to be told: “You are living out a collective myth.” None of them could tell me what it was. There didn’t seem to be any precedent for a father whose earthly departure ignited his daughter’s occult powers.

Finally, I landed in Los Angeles where even during the height of the New Age movement I was looked at with alarm when I uttered the dreaded word: kundalini. As my path unfolded, however, I came to understand my father’s role in bringing this unseen energy into consciousness. I met Anodea George, the author of a seminal book on the charkas (The Wheels of Life) and discovered an acknowledgement to my father for his “pioneering kundalini research.” I befriended a beautiful Sikh woman, a publicist for gurus, who introduced me to Yogi Bijan, who brought the technology of kundalini yoga to America. And so I learned to control the desire that Christianity had associated with the feminine and taught to repress through the myth of St. Michel slaying the dragon. Ironically, the myth I needed for my healing was imbedded on the walls of temples in my adopted home of Mexico. Under the Great Eclipse of 1999, I discovered the serpent wall in the ancient Toltec city of Tula as the journey of Venus from Morning to Evening Star through my Mexican guide’s interpretation. This ancient myth resurrects the Sacred Marriage for a new age, thereby delivering the full expression of the divine feminine, her light and dark phases, into consciousness.

The Myth of Quetzalcoatl

Last summer, the celebrity obsessed media offered multiple images of the “dark unknown woman” archetype reoccurring in Pauli’s dreams. The so-called “wild women” -- Britney Spears, Lindsey Lohan and Paris Hilton – let loose their kundalini energy in public while thumbing their noses at the corporate controlled mainstream media that continues to demean the female spirit. Their antics gave a face to the dark matter in space now being acknowledged by scientists. The genie is out of the bottle and my discoveries in the Aztec ruins of Mexico provided the wisdom of how to get it back in.

The kundalini power is key to the mystery surrounding 2012. We need only look at a star map to see the 13th constellation straddling the Galactic Center personified as a human figure riding a serpent. Linked to Quetzalcoatl, this figure reflects the human mastery of the dark feminine that has been repressed by western religion for several millennia. A conscious surrender to this power means resurrecting the anima mundi that Pauli expected to uncover beneath the collapsing quantum wave.

The raising of the kundalini was key to the mystery traditions that held the divine feminine in high esteem as Sophia, goddess of wisdom. The feminine power is unseen but can be made conscious through behavior. As Venus disappeared from the horizon last summer, the antics of the tabloid queens in our celebrity-obsessed culture competed for attention. After rising in Leo, the sign ruling celebrity, and continuing in her active Morning Star phase, the mystifying death of Heath Ledger captured the headlines. Allegedly named after the dark brooding Heathcliff, Ledger was propelled into fame after creating a character propelled by a kundalini attraction that, in the history of cinema, had never been so boldly presented on screen. The serpent power propelled this actor into a contemporary myth off-screen as well: the real life sacred marriage partner to his on-screen wife. Yet the difficulty in holding the public face of this emerging archetype flung this talented artist down the spiral into the dark face of Venus. His marriage broke up and he became the drug- addicted consort to the wild woman archetype.

We get daily doses of the myth of descent with Britney Spears psychotic breakdown, a drastic fall from power that gives a contemporary identity to the legions of unknown women imprisoned, hospitalized or condemned witches after this energy erupted in their bodies. The spiritual feminine arises most visible with her dark face so we acknowledge the potential of this energy pulsating through the body to wake us up and make us whole.

The Geometry of Wholeness

What does wholeness look like?

In a lengthy correspondence with Carl Jung (www.psychovision.com), Pauli expressed his belief that the hexagram is the configuration for the icon of the 21st century.

On January 23, 1997 a hexagram appeared in the heavens under a spectacular Jupiter/Uranus/Neptune alignment in Aquarius. Astrologers and metaphysicians declared this configuration as the gateway to the Age of Aquarius (gaiamind.com). Predating the Jewish religion, the hexagram, known as the Star of David or Seal of Solomon, symbolizes the unity of masculine and feminine into the sacred marriage of opposites.

I was alerted to this configuration because it took place during my solar return. Three weeks later, I attended a historic San Francisco conference that brought astrologers and scientists together for the first time. The event was planned for the Jupiter/Uranus conjunction by the organizer, Richard Tarnas (author of Passion of the Western Mind and Cosmos & Psyche), who declared the Hieros Gamos as the icon of the 21st century. In September of 2000, I attended another historic conference organized by the New York Open Center on Hermeticism in the Italian Renaissance. There I learned of the practice of Marsilio Ficino whose hermetic practice of bringing heaven down to earth inspired numerous Renaissance works of art.

Bringing the Hieros Gamos into Form

I was so inspired by Ficino’s model and the manner that he ignited the west with a new humanistic vision with his small group of like=minded individuals attuned to the motions of the planets, that I decided to do the same in the art world.

With the ambition of bringing the Hieros Gamos archetype into form in accordance with celestial timing and the “sacred space” of the art gallery, I embarked on a series of actions reciproques timed for the January 23 anniversary. The place I selected was the Lab Gallery of the Roger Smith Hotel on Lexington Avenue. A few blocks from Warhol’s original factory, this was the ideal “middle realm” situated on the clearly defined geometrical grid of Manhattan to bring heaven down to earth through hermetic acts aimed at bringing the emerging archetype into form. The premiere year, 2005, was a dinner/spoken word performance with the legendary avant-garde critic/artist Richard Kostelanetz as guest of honor. Through spontaneous performance, three outstanding New York poets -- Valery Oisteanu, Max Blagg and Edwin Torres -- narrated the trajectory of 20th century Spoken Word to create a new language for the Hieros Gamos, reflecting the integration of right/left brain.

In 2006, I launched an exhibition investigating the iconography of the Hieros Gamos in contemporary art. Icons of the 21st Century opened on January 20 with 23 works and a window performance by Laurel Jay Carpenter, Red Woman, which created a spiral through a train of 100 red dresses that snaked into the gallery. As postulated by Pauli, this signature piece demonstrated the resurrection of Eros as fundamental to the emerging archetype. On January 23, I hosted a dinner with the gallery director Matt Semler in which I constituted Pauli’s dream in the window by marking the symbols. The rectangle was the dinner table whose participants listened to my gallery talk triggered by the unseen cosmological time clock – the astrology chart. Thus the public marking of symbol constituted the passage of the dream images into consciousness.

I continued to identify with the “dark unseen woman” in Pauli’s dream who cried because she couldn’t get published. For my next January 23 project, I decided to launch a vehicle for immediate global publication. I invented a new form, the blogel, (www.thealchemyoflove.blogspot.com) enabling me to publish as I write. This goal was to be achieved by the public transformation of the kundalini in the body evidenced by an integrated style of writing. The intent was to create a visual language reflecting the passage of the serpent through the chakras that approximated the seven stages of alchemy. For practical purposes, I followed the system I created in my experimental fiction and reduced the stages to five elements evoked in five chapters collectively entitled The Alchemy of Love. The performance in the storefront gallery was to be a public manifestation of Pauli’s dream in which he “drew a double oscillation beneath a window”. The double wave of the Aquarian symbol is reflected in the integration of conscious/unconscious in a holistic style of writing utilizing both sides of the brain.

The alchemical experiment was initiated with a ritual ceremony in the gallery. Under the Moon/Venus conjunction in Aquarius at 12:18 PM, January 20, a priestess established a sacred space to birth the Aquarian Age icon. The second day of the writing performance was January 23. The entry Flame: Page Six presented the emerging icon of the Hieros Gamos in the context of the celebrity obsessed media dominated culture as the starting point for the alchemical journey. I spent the night on the bed in the center of the gallery and published the entry at the moment of my solar return shortly after dawn on January 24 when there was a line-up of Aquarian planets (Sun, Mercury, Venus and Neptune) on the horizon. In hermetic fashion, I was realizing my astrological imprint for the year that required delivering the face of the feminine to the collective consciousness.

The performance was to demonstrate how synchronicities regulate consciousness into time and space. I embarked on the first stage of the performance with a narrative arising from Pluto’s recent demotion from planet to asteroid. The intent was to remake the myth of Persephone’s “disappearance” as empowerment rather than victim. This reflected my disappearance into the collective unconscious (currently summed up in the media by Britney Spears’ descent into psychosis) resulting from my kundalini awakening during my father’s funeral.

During the year of performances, I plunged into the life/death cycle required by the successive stages of alchemy. While launched into AIR on September 24 I had forgotten all about Persephone when a gentleman from Liberia appeared at the window marveling that I had created an African shrine with my 19 unpublished manuscripts arranged in the form of a pentacle. “I see us dancing together,” he said and declared that he wanted to take me to Liberia as his wife. Persephone had imposed herself into the experiment through the arrival of a suitor from a country named for the liberation of the ex-slaves who founded it. Liber is the stem of Libra, the sign of Venus which rules the opposites that Persephone straddled in her dual role as underworld bride of Pluto and daughter of Ceres surfacing in spring to celebrate new life.

This synchronicity infused me with the consciousness identity that subsequently released me from the control of the Persephone myth and freed me to experience the Aquarian icon of equal partnership. The new myth began to enter the collective conscious under a Pluto/Jupiter line up on the Galactic Center on Dec 11, 2007 prior to the birth of the Sun at the Winter Solstice. During a meditation on that date, I met Jonathan Phillips, who subsequently invited me to help organize Evolver: Wake Up and Dream.

The final segment of the Lab experiment took place on January 23, 2008. The centerpiece of the exhibition was Eclipse, a chalkboard in the form of a black sphere under Tatyana Stepanova’s Waterfall sculpture representing the Aquarian cycle of eclipses bringing the third and final wave ushering the planet into the Age of Aquarius. Heaven was brought down to earth through an initial performance drawing the astrology chart for sunset on January 23.

This final stage of the birth of the Hieros Gamos was commemorated through a collaborative performance in which the Full Moon in Leo made a direct opposition to the Neptune/Mercury conjunction in Aquarius. I began by drawing the astrology chart of the performance on Eclipse and writing Pauli’s dream on the empty wall beside the projected narrative of the revival of the Lost Bride uniting with the Resurrected Groom through a video interweaving recent series by allegorical painters Tatyana Stepanova (Russia) and Michael Manning (U.S.). Stepanova painted the upcoming solar eclipse in Aquarius/Leo while I entered the light projected by the paintings to integrate Pauli’s dream symbols with the astrological symbolism of 2012 while Lutz Rath (Germany) synchronized my movements to his playing the violincello. My last act, which closed the performance, was painting the double oscillation image from Pauli’s dream in the window as the sign of Aquarius. In keeping with the final stage of alchemy, the experience was blissful.

The New Paradigm Leap

Pauli’s January 23, 1938 dream took place five days after the opening of the International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris. Saturn, the timer, was at Zero degrees Aries, the exact degree rising at noon on the Winter Solstice 2012. This exhibition introduced the public to the collective unconscious, which Pauli was exploring with Carl Jung through an intense collaboration regarding the emergence of the Aquarian Age archetype uniting personal and universal through the dream.

In keeping with the goal of the five-chapter installation/performance, my personal emergence into the Aquarian Age archetype took place in a January 25 performance through the submergence into the light projections refracted by Waterfall. The performance, Infinity, was projected onto a mannequin wearing a Selma Karaca Kundalini Couture creation entitled Waterfall which transformed the innovated the corset into a Mobius Strip. This ingenious work represented not only fashion and art coming together, but the ultimate liberation of women to express holistically. The hallway projection of my Waterfall performance at the Lab onto the Waterfall garment worn by the mannequin during Evolver: Wake Up and Dream provided the visual synchronicity by which the Hieros Gamos archetype passed into the collective unconscious.

A tarot reader declared afterwards that the cards she kept turning up during the event indicated a heart opening. This was my experience during a 1:00 AM chakra balancing session as well. Just as Waterfall was at the center of Eclipse in the Lab, the heart was at the center of the Mobius Strip of the Waterfall. Both of these works were made by Aquarian artists and the synchronicity of the matching titles of their seminal works were magical manifestations of the Aquarian symbol of the Waterbearer surfacing under the shadow of an eclipse cycle integrating mind (Aquarius) with heart (Leo). This delivery of image back to its source as magic (www.brooklynrail.org/2006/07/film/magic-and-images), as postulated by art critic David Levi Strauss, brought 20 years of alchemical experiments to a crescendo realized by my synchronous performance with the avant-garde magician of sound, Lutz Rath.

The immediate publication of symbols uniting Pauli’s dream (indefinite time) with live performance (definite time) on the anniversary of his January 23 dream reflect a new era in which mythical content of the collective unconscious is instantaneously made conscious through the World Wide Web. This inquiry into consciousness in time and space moved me from the role of critic/observer to performer/participant. Immediately prior to the performance, my sister contacted me with a dream.

In this dream, the timekeeper was no longer the old man with an hourglass imaged in western time but a crone. This could indicate a return to lunar time as postulated by Daniel Pinchbeck in his book, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl. My sister, a Capricorn, was on one side of the timekeeper while I, an Aquarius, was on the other. The dream represented the timely integration of the two planets ruling Aquarius that bring heaven (Uranus) down to earth (Saturn). In this personal exchange with my sister, the filmmaker of Female Perversions, I was given a message regarding the resolution to the dilemma of the unpublished woman in Pauli’s dream who has written “a great deal of material on time symbolism – e.g. how a period of time is constituted when certain symbols appear in it.” Having this essay published on Reality Sandwich is a realization of the dreams that tie the father of modern science to the present dilemma of the long repressed divine feminine in giving voice to the experience of its emergence.

This bold new direction that art takes in the 21st century returns us to our ancient roots in shamanism revived by Ficino, the influential humanist philosopher of the Italian Renaissance. Hermetic practice revisions creative acts in time and space as mediations between heaven and earth. My real time creative manifestation of Pauli’s dream established a literal middle path on the gallery floor between definite time (the astrological chart of the performance) and indefinite time (the dream). By forging the path of the “in between” through the tension of the opposites, the artist guides a new cosmology into the culture as was done in ancient times when the priests determined the timing of sacred ceremonies through their knowledge of planetary relationships. Thus we have a return to the model of the Italian Renaissance, when Marsellio Ficino inspired artists to revision humanism with his hermetic infusion of astrology into everyday life through practices such as the revival of orphic hymns paying homage to the planetary gods.

To bring the knowledge of 2012 into the body through everyday rituals establishes a process of an evolutionary consciousness in our bodies. Daily acts of consciousness in time and space is how we can travel the middle bath that brings the icon of the Hieros Gamos in our psyches. And here we have a tradeoff for surrendering our obsession with consumption that is driving our planet into ecological ruin – to fill ourselves with the spirit of holism contained in this new archetype. It may seem like a minor accomplishment in the face of such grave challenges, yet multiply one raised consciousness by the potential of millions hooked into the Internet and you have a collective leap into a New Paradigm of an interconnected universe.

CONCLUSION: AS ABOVE, SO BELOW

2008-04-18T09:05:00.000-07:00

Bow Bridge Reflected

I.

One, two, three
Four, five
Six

Six seeds
Of the pomegranate
Ingested by Persephone
In the Underworld

Six seeds
For the six months of abstinence
Six seeds
To summon the Lovers
Surrender, her body said

And so she did
Six seeds prompting
Six visitations underground
Six pairs of twins
With their promise
Of transcendence

Thrice Great Hermes
The patron of alchemy
Winged god
Extending high
To Olympus
And low
To the underworld

Only Mercurius
Promised release
From the eternal cycle
Life, death, rebirth
Hermes the agent of alchemy
Alighting in his chariot
To carry you
Through the Seventh Gate
Venus and the Moon
On a crescent boat

And so it happens
Precisely
Six months after Pluto
Appeared from Liberia
At the Lab window
Proclaiming you as his wife
And insisting you bleach
Your hair blonde
For the underground journey

The seventh pair of twins
Balancing male and female
Light and darkness
With precision timing
Of the clock maker
On the Vernal Equinox
To the penthouse
Above the Laboratory
With the Sun in his pocket

Six sets of twins
#1. The fossilized art historian
Reducing you to tears
#2. The limping metallurgist
Aligned with underworld power
#3. The globetrotting midget
Divided by his finite game
#4. The Greek high priest with his
Spirit chorus of thousands
#5. The Maypole dancer swallowed
By his Shadow
#6. The hallucinogenic storyteller
Bearing the cross of the wounded male

And then
Seven appears
The number of mystical completion
In his button down male elegance
The gardener
With his six seeds
And tools for cultivation
The pen to till the fertile soil
Of the resurrected Goddess

He lets you guide him through
The Classical portals to
Origin of the World
Saturn’s scythe to clear the ground
Jupiter’s bow and arrow to point the direction
Uranus’s Tower to electrify the growth
And Sun for warmth!

In the penthouse
Of the urban temple
For the ancient goddess
Persephone at a banquet
In her pink spiral dress
The first blush of spring
Celebrating one cycle closing
And a new one opening in

The resting place
Of the ancient goddess
Who gave birth
To the Aquarian Age goddess
Her corset engaging the heart
In an infinite game
Uniting heaven & earth

And so, he invites you
Thrice Great Hermes
Into his mansion
With its many rooms
Lined with books
Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, German
He is fluent in all languages of man
And the gods who speak in symbols

He greets you
On his love seat
With kisses
On your hand
Then your mouth
Lifts you on his winged chariot
Fueled by desire

“I want you natural,” he says
Stroking the arch of your foot
Worshipping your body
As a temple
Brimming with Aquarian spirit

Placing you in a constellation
All your own, where
The stars and earth dance
In rapturous wonder
And the lover’s caress
Carries a command:
Lover, come plow my field!
And gods and mortals are intertwined
In desire’s heavenly breath

One, two, three
Four, five
Six seeds consumed
By the Lovers
And pleasure is born
Under Jupiter’s Bow

Crossing the bridge
You confront your future
The nuptials decreed
By Trice Great Hermes
Pointing the direction
Through the chakras
Of Central Park

II.

KristInanna's Bow

He lets you guide him
Through the portals
Of visual knowledge
A Zig-Zag trajectory of history
To the Origin of the World
The inner sanctum
The cave where the learned
Are reborn as Sages
Of a New Era in cyclical time

And so
The timers of our beliefs
Explode
From the seismic waves
Seizing the body
Rising you up
From the cosmic waters
Raging under Bow Briddge
Your destiny and his
Forged together

The Libra mirror cracked
In the shape of the Yod
Finger of God
Pointing to a mutual seed
Gemini generated nupiital
Ceremony
Wedding of Opposites
Heaven & Earth

The cracked mirror
Guided by Justice
Broken into a Yod
Shape of destiny
Guiding a mutual surrender
With Saturn’s rise
From Underground

He trades places
Enters the Underworld
As you rise
To luminosity
With Mars in the sign
Of Superstar
Ruling this cycle
Of the Pentagram

Into the most fertile form
Of Completion
The Hexagram
Shaped by our own
Individual paths
Merged from common purpose

A perfect hexagram
Makes for the best possible outcome
Of this Alchemical Experiment
And together you find it
On Beltane Eve
Mercurius guides you

To the Fifth Chakra
The Heart of Central Park
Toth with his golden loincloth
In the temple of the four seasons
On Beltane Eve

In perfect timing
Quetzalcoatl who catalyzed you
On this path
Appears before you
In the flesh

A perfect mirror met
In the Hermaphrodite
Inanna migrating in Persephone
As you rise to the distant arc
The land with no mirrors
But for you Beloved

Who joins you from Underground
To unite in the perfect marriage
Foretold by the Hermaphrodite
Performing the cosmic myth
In the Masked Gallery
As above, so below

Having passed through
Fire, Water, Earth and Air
To reach the Hieros Gamos
The icon sought through your 27-year passage
Of Venus & Luna passage
in the Crescent boat
Rising under Jupiter’s bow
Raised on stage
By Kristi Inanna

Philosopher’s Stone
Polished in the rim
Of the alchemical marriage
Sol & Venus
Marked by birth
Forged into destiny
By Saturn, the timekeeper

The Lovers’ bodies fused
By the Sun
Testimony to the Great Work
Where all opposites are one
In the great mirror of cosmos and psych
As above, so below

EVOLVER: WAKE UP & DREAM

2008-02-07T07:54:00.001-08:00

"Flight of Fancy": C. Eule Dance

"Infinity"
Waterfall Couture: Selma Karaca (www.selmakaraca.com)
Video: John Knowles (www.rogersmithnews.com)

Hoop Dancers

Flight of Fancy: C. Eule Dance (ceuledance.org)

Aero Dancers

The magnificent art of Michael Robinson

Bill Kennedy's Dream Geese

Daniel Pinchbeck

Avante-Garde Critic & Poet Valery Gallery & Ruth

Michael Brownstein reading "World on Fire" in Communion Square Cafe

HIEROS GAMOS: EPILOGUE

2008-02-07T06:53:00.000-08:00

THE AUTHOR IN BLISS

HIEROS GAMOS: DESCENT OF THE GODDESS

2008-01-26T19:23:00.000-08:00

CONSCIOUSNESS IN TIME & SPACE

EVOKING MERCURY-NEPTUNE

INFNITY

ENTERING INFINITY

PASSAGE BETWEEN WORLDS

THE DARK WOMAN ARRIVES

THE HIEROS GAMOS

DESCENT OF THE GODDESS

GROUNDING THE ENERGY

FACE FORWARD

WINGS UNFURLING

FLIGHT

HIEROS GAMOS: FOURTH CHAKRA - PERFECTING MATTER

2008-01-25T13:13:00.000-08:00

Venus in the In Between

Sacred Geometry

Purification

Evocation

Rounding the Sun

Drawing down Luna

Eclipsed on the Edge

The Sacred Marriage Altar: Sunstone and Moonstone

HIEROS GAMOS WRITING THE DREAM

2008-01-24T14:12:00.000-08:00

Wolfgang Pauli's dream: January 23, 1938

In the dream I drew an oscillation process beneath the window – actually two oscillations, one beneath the other.

MIRRORING TIME

By turning to the right from the curves, I try to see the time on the clock.

But the clock is too high, so that doesn’t work.

Then the dream continues.

The ‘dark unknown woman’ appears.

She is crying because she wants to write a book but cannot find a publisher for it.

In this book there is apparently a great deal of material on time symbolism – e.g., how a period of time is constituted when certain symbols appear in it.

And at the end of one page of the book, there are the following words, read aloud by the ‘voice.’ ‘The definite hours have to be paid for with the definite life, the indefinite hours have to be paid for with the indefinite life.’”

Oscillation in the Window

HIEROS GAMOS: THIRD CHAKRA- EMPOWERMENT

2008-01-23T12:10:00.000-08:00

2:30 EST, January 23, 1997
Performance/Installation
January 23, 2008

Curator’s Statement

By

Lisa Paul Streitfeld

The father of modern physics, Wolfgang Pauli, believed the hexagram, known as the Seal of Solomon, to be the configuration for the icon of the 21st century arising from under the collapsed quantum wave.

On January 23, 1997 a six-pointed hexagram appeared in the sky under a rare Jupiter/Uranus/Neptune alignment in Aquarius. Astrologers and metaphysicians declared this configuration as the gateway to the Age of Aquarius (gaiamind.com). Predating the Jewish religion, the hexagram, known as the Seal of Solomon, symbolizes the alchemical conuinctio, or sacred marriage of opposites, the Hieros Gamos.

I recognized this configuration in my January 23, 1997 solar return. Three weeks later, I attended a historic San Francisco Cycles and Symbols conference that brought astrologers and scientists together for the first time and met the scholar Richard Tarnas, who declared the Hieros Gamos as the icon of the 21st century. On Valentine’s Day, I initiated my first public performance piece as an impromptu public confrontation with James Hillman, the father of archetypal psychology, to demand why he referred to Venus as the Greek goddess, Aphrodite. In doing so, I revived the archetype of the Sumerian goddess, Inanna, the self-declared Queen of Heaven and Earth and ancient icon of the Hieros Gamos.

After this breakthrough, I began an intense cross-disciplinary investigation into the Hieros Gamos which resulted in the writing of two books on the subject. As I became driven to investigate the new millennial forms of the Hieros Gamos, my career path transformed from journalist into professional art critic. This journey culminated in a new art theory.

On the January 23 anniversary of the Hieros Gamos I launched a series of exhibitions with “actions reciproques” to access the power of the emerging archetype.

HIEROS GAMOS RETURN 2005

January 23, 2005
THE TRAJECTORY OF THE SPOKEN WORD

I hosted a dinner at the Lab Gallery with a dinner/poetry performance of three outstanding New York poets: Valery Oisteanu, Max Blagg and Edwin Torres. Legendary avant-garde critic/artist Richard Kostelanetz was in attendance. Through spontaneous performance, the three poets narrated the trajectory of 20th century Spoken Word to create a new language for the Hieros Gamos presented to the public at a Roger Smith literary salon that I hosted on February 17.

January 23, 2006
ICONS OF THE 21ST CENTURY

On January 20, I premiered ICONS OF THE 21st CENTURY, an exhibition of 23 artists investigating the iconography of the Hieros Gamos. The show opened with the interactive window performance of Laurel Jay Carpenter’s RED WOMAN depicting Eros as fundamental to the emerging archetype.

On January 23, gallery director, Matt Selmer and I hosted a dinner for artists, curators, dealers and critics. As a performance piece, I wrote Pauli’s dream of January 23, 1938 in the window with his symbols: a rectangle and circle located above a double wave (the glyph of Aquarius). At the conclusion of my curator’s talk, I read the contents of the dream (from Atom & Archetype).

In the dream I drew an oscillation process beneath the window – actually two oscillations, one beneath the other. By turning to the right from the curves, I try to see the time on the clock. But the clock is too high, so that doesn’t work. Then the dream continues. The ‘dark unknown woman’ appears. She is crying because she wants to write a book but cannot find a publisher for it. In this book there is apparently a great deal of material on time symbolism – e.g., how a period of time is constituted when certain symbols appear in it. And at the end of one page of the book, there are the following words, read aloud by the ‘voice.’ ‘The definite hours have to be paid for with the definite life, the indefinite hours have to be paid for with the indefinite life.’”

January 23, 2007
THE ALCHEMY OF LOVE: FIRE

My search for an innovative literary form enabling me to write and publish instantaneously comes to a conclusion. I launched the five-chapter reality blogel (blog-novel) installation/performance, THE ALCHEMY OF LOVE, with the first stage of a year-long alchemical transformation: FIRE.

The alchemical experiment was initiated with a ritual ceremony performed under the Moon/Venus conjunction in Aquarius at 12:18 PM, January 20. A priestess consecrated the gallery as a sacred space to give birth to the Aquarian Age icon.

January 23 was the second day of the installation/performance. As the starting point for the journey, my blogel entry FLAME: PAGE SIX presented the emerging icon of the Hieros Gamos in the context of the celebrity obsessed media dominated culture.

THE ALCHEMY OF LOVE: FIRE is followed by: WATER (SOLUTIO), MAY 7 - 11; EARTH (COAGULATIO), JUNE 18 – 22; AIR (SUBLIMATIO), SEPT 24-28.

HIEROS GAMOS SOLAR RETURN 2008
January 23, 2008

THE ALCHEMY OF LOVE: HIEROS GAMOS

Action Reciproque
Video Mural: Tatyana Stepanova & Michael Manning
Action Painters: Lisa Paul Streitfeld & Tatyana Stepanova
Musician: Lutz Rath
Wearable Art: Selma Karaca

Eleven years after the initiation of the cosmology by the hexagram among planets in the sky, there is a full moon on the historic date. A performance timed for sunset is intended to honor the cosmology by making it visible and thereby propel the Hieros Gamos into the collective consciousness,

I collaborate with Tatyana Stepanova in an action painting integrating words and image into a symbolic language to violoncello music by Lutz Rath to celebrate the initiation of the Aquarian cycle of Eclipses.

The performance begins at sunset, 5:30 PM, EST when I paint the Mayan World Tree symbolizing the Gallactic Center (the Mayan symbol of ending/beginning of time) and the text of Pauli’s dream on the wall opposing the gallery entrance. Stepanova will bring in the Sun and Moon converging with the Earth into an eclipse and the luminaries will interact with the central sculpture, the mirrored Psyche, and the projections of interweaving Stepanova’s allegorical painting with that of Michael Manning.

January 24, 2008 1:30 PM

INFINITY

For my final performance of the year long series, I will evoke the Aquarian Age goddess by creating the s Hieros Gamos in time and space. Sitting in the window in a man's night shirt, she will concoct a magical potion mixing Gold (Sol), Silver (Luna) and Copper (Venus) in Jupiter Oil, adding Solomon's Seal and Pomegranite Seeds. I will enter the eclipse where she will anoint herself and the icon of the Goddess and her child. Then, I will evoke Mercurius as guide for the alchemical transformation before invoking the Hieros Gamos by creating a Seal of Solomon around the winged Psyche.

This multimedia installation/performance will be disseminated over the Internet through the blogel (www.thealchemyoflove.blogspot.com) and the curatorial website (www.alchemyalive.com) as well as rogersmithnews.com and a YOUTUBE video.

HIEROS GAMOS: WATER -- SECOND CHAKRA

2008-01-22T18:25:00.001-08:00

Sunrise on the dawn of the Full Moon in Aquarius/Leo

The Water Bearer has

HIEROS GAMOS: ECLIPSE -- FIRST CHAKRA

2008-01-21T18:30:00.000-08:00

The Aquarian Solar Eclipse will be full
Sun, Moon, Earth lined up
Blocking the Solar light
Humanity descends into darkness

Will the First Chakra instinct
Ignite our passion
So we may protect all
Life on the planet?

Psyche is unfurling her wings
Ready to fly!

Your Capricorn sister writes about death
Your writing on Tatyana, she said
Reminds her of the Siberian tiger
Whose murder sent her to bed

Tatyana is from Siberia!
An Aquarian fierce in her passion for art
A tigress exiled from Russia
Traveled the world
With a Black Belt

Today we ground ourselves
Tomorrow we release our passion
Second Chakra is Water
The Aquarian brings the Waterfall

Every day an instruction on the
Chalkboard
About the Chakras
This is your new role
Teaching Chakra alignment
For the 21st century

In the Hieros Gamos
Every Chakra
a marriage
Of masculine and feminine
Spinning the Wheels of Life
We become whole

You see a film
About Death
And walk into the opening of an
Exhibition
About Death
We have to die
So we can be reborn

The writer must die
So the Symbolist may live
The Symbolists led the way
To the Russian avant-garde

And so the Russian brings the Waterfall
With the son of Gala, the ballerina
World famous in her exile
Leap into the Sacred Marriage

The Waterfall is the symbol
Of the Aquarian Water Bearer
Pouring forth knowledge
Of the underground spring
To Humanity

And so, the writer dies
To be reborn as symbolist
Taking image to its source
Magic!

Every day in this installation
There will be a new imago
On the Chalkboard
To enliven the body with
The Alchemy of Love
Spinning each Wheel
In the evolution of Psyche
into the Hieros Gamos

Today is a void
Root Chakra
Which only Psyche can fill
With her violet wings
Unfurling

Happy Aquarian Full Moon!

HIEROS GAMOS: PROLOGUE

2008-01-20T10:59:00.000-08:00

THE HIEROS GAMOS ACTION PAINTING PERFORMANCE
PAINTERS: MICHAEL MANNING & TATYANA STEPANOVA
SOUND: LUTZ RATH ON VIOLONCELLO
JANUARY 23, 2008
5:30 PM EST

You like to tie loose ends up
Into neat little packages
Some might call it art

You were told about your karma
It being your last lifetime, and all
You have a lot of karma to complete
Said White Buffalo Woman

Every day
Every breath
Feels like your last gasp
The end of a cycle

You have arrived
At that unnamed state
Imaged by your father
In his modestly titled book
“God Speaks”

“The author in bliss”
Reads the caption
And so, this is the legacy
Of having a father as
Kundalini pioneer
A breaking of paternal attachment
Replaced by an image of bliss

You are living out a myth
Said the astrologer, Demetra George
On the cliff above
The Oregon coast

You were only beginning then
With your Persephone tale
Contained in boxes
You gave her a copy
In exchange for her book
On the dark goddesses

Arising at last
From the underground
You bring the mythical
Journey to a close

Your manuscripts replaced by
Anodea Judith’s “Wheels of Life”
The end of a trail beginning
At the 1989 Book Expo
When you discovered the book
Acknowledging your father
As a pioneer of kundalini research

Over 100,000 sold
Proclaims the cover of the revised edition
So you live the legacy
Inscribed in an image
Pouring your father’s knowledge
Of the mysterious serpent power
By utilizing the power of images
To instruct on the chakras

Fire, Water, Earth and Air
The passage through the Chakras
Over the course of a year
The Sun entering Aquarius
Your karmic passage completed

With the sacred geometry on in your solar return
The infinity sign manifested by
Tatyana’s “Waterfall” over
Selma Karaca’s kundalini couture
Named what else but …”Waterfall!”

Psyche passing through the Saturn grid
To the other side
The place of the dream

And so, you meet
The Dreamers of a new order
Prepared now for the new cycle
Aquarian eclipses
Triggering Neptune
The planet of dreams
In Aquarius

The Harmonic Convergence in 1987
Ushered in the last Aquarian eclipse cycle
You were running around L.A.
Seeking enlightenment
When you began your inner journey
With a series of colonics

You
With your nails yellow and brittle
Had to look at the evidence
The pioneer of a new order
Lies within

And so you embarked
On the healing
Two decades ago
That now bears fruit
With the Coniunctio
Under the Full Moon on Jan 23
At the Lab Gallery

Lutz Rath on violoncello
Lending his beatific spirit
To an allegorical painting
Weaving the symbolism
Of the Hieros Gamos
Linking the Aquarian eclipses
To 2012
And Quetzalcoatl

Tatyana Stepanova
Of the Russian avant-garde
And Michael Manning
American action painter
Black Belts
Filtering the sunset
Of January 23
The eleventh anniversary
Of the Seal of Solomon
Uniting Heaven and Earth

And now you seek out
The Icon Maker
And ask him to be in your movie
Not a dream transformed into a novel
This time
But a real movie
“The Passion”
Inspired by the uproar over
“My Sweet Lord”

It has been the passion
Guiding your journey
To make your dreams real
To awake in your bed
Confounded
Not knowing if you are awake
Or dreaming
And what is more
Not caring
Either way
It is bliss

This unity fills you with joy
Standing in Union Square
In the Communion Square Café
Where dreams will be exchanged
In the ascent of the full Solar eclipse

You wrote your tale
Of Quetzalcoatl
And deposited it at the door
A floor below
Where it was rejected
As too spiritual

It comes back to you
Hopping off the bus to be the first
On the Pyramid of the Sun
At sunrise
Descending to the crone
With her basket of crystals
“For your Passion,” she says
As you choose the aquamarine

Thus armed
You ascend the Temple of Quetzalcoatl
Alternating faces
The plumed serpent
With his evil dog twin

Surrendering to the spirit
Your attack in the desert
Leading to the human incarnation
The artist who humanized Christ
Surrendered under his temple sky
To receive your Magdalene spirit
Infused into his body by crystal
On plush red velvet
The Sacred Marriage instilled
For a New Age

Nearly eight years later
The mythos is complete
You meet the spirit carrier
Electric Jesus
At the Jupiter/Pluto meditation
A week later, you are at
Caravan of Dreams
Sitting across from Daniel Pinchbeck
Author of “2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl”
You tell them of the eclipses
The convergence between the personal and the collective
And so, you begin the manifestation
WAKE UP & DREAM

But first
You give 2012 to Michael Manning
The allegorical painter of our times
Scorpio Sun at the fated 29 degree
Drawn naturally to serpents
And prepared to bring the sacred marriage
From past to future
Through his narrative on Gilgamesh

And you usher in the Aquarian spirit
At this hour
Centering the moment
Commencing at 5:30 PM
January 23, 2008
When Wolfgang Pauli’s dream
Becomes a reality

On the long wall
The epic journey of the serpent
The short wall
The dream chalked on a blackboard
Converging 2012 with the Hieros Gamos
Pauli’s vision of definite and indefinite time
Related in a dream by your Capricorn sister
In which she reads the timing
“To make sure everyone is on the same page.”

The conclusion of The Alchemy of Love
Told in images
The Hieros Gamos arising
Out of Eros
Tatyana’s passion for collaboration
Under a full moon in her sign of Aquarius
Opposites merging into a new path
The “in between” place
Writes the scholar of images

The middle path between Heaven & Earth
Envisioned as the World Tree
By the Mayans
Envisioned as the Body
By the Cabala
The human heart at the center
Earth & Sky united
The cycle of the opposites
Is completed

When will I be a success?
You asked the yogi
Palm thrust under his focused gaze
"When you get into your body."
You pressed him further
A book? A film? A TV show?
You are the Star, he said
The form doesn't matter.

“Follow your bliss,” said Joseph Campbell
As you came of age
And so you did
Your journey brought you
From the sky surrounding the Hollywood sign
To the roots of your German/Jewish heritage

The grounding of Luna and Sol
Meeting in a Solar Eclipse
Conjunct your ruler, Uranus
In Mutual Reception

The Mysterium Conjunctious
From which you can at last
BE A STAR
To convince America and the world
WAKE UP AND START DREAMING!

THE ALCHEMY OF LOVE: HIEROS GAMOS

2007-12-17T11:05:00.000-08:00

The Alchemy of Love: Hieros Gamos

Action Reciproque: 5:30 PM, January 23, 2008

Lisa Paul Streitfeld conducts a multimedia action reciproque during a five-day writing performance/installation. Michael Manning (USA) and Tatyana Stepanova (Russia) execute an action painting to improvisational music by the violoncello artist, Lutz Rath (Germany).

The Alchemy of Love: Hieros Gamos concludes the blogel (www.thealchemyoflove.blogspot.com) inspired by four successive multimedia installation/performances, painstakingly scheduled to occur during specific astrological moments throughout the year. Under a full moon activating the gateway January 23, 1997 cosmological configuration of the Hieros Gamos, the series culminates with the quintessential element binding heaven and earth.

THE LAB (for installation + performance art) is a New York based, converted storefront turned fishbowl producing 30+ fast paced performance art and installation exhibitions annually. Aimed at furious midtown foot traffic, THE LAB’s programming is designed to confront modern relationships between art and audience and seeks to force interaction between high energy, “outropsective” exhibitions and nearly 25,000 daily passersby. It is THE LAB’s goal to reach out through the glass and capture, fascinate, amuse, bemuse, soothe, shake and satisfy any and all who pass within eye or ear shot of the corner of 470th and Lex. For more information, call 212-339-2092, or email rogersmitharts@rogersmith.com.

THE GALLERY IS LOCATED ON THE CORNER OF 47TH STREET AND LEXINGTON AVENUE
ALL EXHBITIONS ARE ON VIEW 24/7.

AIR: EPILOGUE

2007-10-21T07:21:00.000-07:00

HAIL SKY GODDESS!

They kept telling you
Surrender

1,2,3,4,5,
Sex
Here are the seeds
Now swallow them
And become hole

Swallow
And Submerge

SUR – REN – DER!

How is Woman
Unique in the history of women
Taken up the sword
In the name of
Balance

The Rubedo

The Liberty queen
Crafted in her own
Cosmic vision
Icon of
As above, so below

How is she to settle for half
A donut
Glazed with the white poison
Hyperglycemic fantasy

SUR-REN-DER!
1,2,3,4,5,
Six seeds

The days grow darker
East Village beckons
The snake door
Opens

Let me in!
She cries at the gate
Revolving to confront
The illusion
Of the past

A full circle achieved
The alchemy of love
Brings you back
To the beginning

Prologue
At Bar on A
Many celebrities here!
Declared the party thrower
Looking straight at you
The gatecrasher

Pen poised to rewrite this
Epilogue
As you live it

And here we are again
Sparks
Igniting
Your kundalini fire
Plunged underground

Dream pronouncement
Flight to Spain awaiting
The fifth hour
Mirrored pentacle
Reflecting
Generic label
Astaraisborn

You left her in the gallery
Venus pregnant
With her spirit children
Brandishing her rod
Alight with feathers

Persephone
Seeking her underworld partner
Here we arrive back
At the beginning

Sparks fly
Sparks burst into flames
The East Village is on fire
With desire

The mouth of the serpent
Is open

And so it goes
The flame of love
Burning the edge of
Manhattan
Flame shooting
To the glittering lights
Guiding

To what?
Freedom?
The ultimate surrender?
To the Mylar mirror kiss
Now on Screensaver

Fame & flame
So alike
Except for one letter
L for love
L for Lisa

Commotion
Dishes crashing
As you enter a restaurant
In your dream
Excitement
Your trademark

Flight
An image of departure
The search for a matching sock
Your Pisces Mate

A lover is like a sock
The right match
Makes a pair

Master of the Universe driving you
But you mustn’t enter together
The lone reporter
On this dream voyage

Your role
To observe
Star alignments
As they appear

Your Mercurial flashlight
Above on Olympus
and below in Hades
Into how stars are made

Which brings us back to
Surrender
1,2,3,4,5,
Six

Seeds of the pomegranate
Juicy & whole
You are!

SUR-REN-DER!
All your life
Men telling you to surrender

What does it mean?
You understand now

The white flag
Raised and lowered
Just as you uttered the words
White flag
On New Year’s Day
At the Poetry Club

White, like salt
Preparation
Purity
Chastity

You have gone somewhere
That no reporter has gone
Before
You have reported a life
As it is lived
The consciousness
Of your actions
Evolving your next step
In an upward spiral

And so now
You understand
You have surrendered
All along
To your fate
Of not surrendering to a man

One breakthrough
After another
Until the structure is completed
Under the bridge of freedom

Tim Fey taking a bow
Yes!
You have crossed the threshold!
One seed
At a time

1,2,3,4,5
Sex!

Yes,
Five + One equals sex
The Mystery Man
A lover who never abandons

You have taken him out of the closet
Where you found him
On Spring Street
And made him
A public figure
Who lives, breathes, creates
In your pentacle reflection

And yes,
He surrenders!

AIR: FLIGHT

2007-10-03T12:26:00.000-07:00

Mystery Man arrived
Just in time
For the dance
Of Sublimatio

Winged Being
Carries me
To the clouds
And Beyond

Star of Tomorrow
Embracing the One
Cosmic abstraction
And flesh
Together at last
Conjunctio complete

BOLD FACED Lover
Extending wedding band
Diamond studded
Golden Chalice
Pouring forth
For thirsty men

Silver Moon glow
Copper Venus
Blue breath
Liberating Earth

Finger of God
Adorned
With three metals
Marking the Journey

Bejeweled
Body Marked
For Success

Icon & human
Heaven & earth
Past & future
Converging with present
Opposites in balance

Aquarian Goddess
Armored by personal projection
Pentagram over the throat
Reflecting the five points

Saturn & Pluto
Force & Evolution
Blasting
Star into orbit

Winged Venus
Molding personal signature
Into cosmic being
Neptune and Venus wed
Into Universal Love

Circle opens
Venus Emerges
Golden Rod & Feathered Crown
Morning Star ascends
The reign of Leo
Amazon Warrior

Arrives at the Doorway
With blue snake pumps
Marking the Door
Opening

The ever present origin
In the Golden Chalice
Finger of God
Past (Luna) & Future (Venus)
Converge at the Apex
Path Unknown

The Great Watcher
The Leopard
Guarding the passage
Bravery, swiftness, ferocity
Beckoning Dionysos
Creator & Destroyer

We embrace
Winged Venus in earthly form
And myself
Love shining in her mirror
Poised for flight

The five-fold passage
To Aquarian Age Icon
Formed by the manuscripts
Organizing her synodic cycle
Into five archetypes
Aries, Scorpio, Gemini, Capricon
& Leo, the Star
Liberated by flight

The Great Work is done
Alchemy of Love
Has just Begun!

AIR: GOLD

2007-09-28T14:37:00.000-07:00

On the night of the FULL MOON you went to a celebration where the gold is stored. GOLD, the destination of THE GREAT WORK. There you meet Happy Rockefeller, a name that symbolizes the pursuit of gold in matter. She is friendly, with a Mercurial mischievous in her smile. “The hedge funds have ruined the culture,” she tells you. You went over to Charlie Rose and commended him for upholding what little culture still exists in America.

At your peak, you were writing on the culture for five newspapers. Now you cannot get an assignment. In fact, at a dinner last year in this very hotel the former arts editor of a Philadelphia daily advised you to find something else to do. The gatekeepers of Old Media are crashing down and what a surprise to realize you are one of them.

The LAB has offered you the opportunity to experiment; your identity has now shifted from critic to curator to performer. The transition begun with FLAME in June of 2006 is complete nine months later with the simultaneous publication of your name attached to a new identity in two newspapers the day you worked through the GEMINI pile in the SE section of the sacred circle.

Yesterday, as you walked the streets of Manhattan, a magazine cover caught your eye. It was a Revenge Surgery. Boobs inflated to get back at the boys who teased her.” This is truly shocking. The media’s obsession with female breasts may be juvenile but it also reflects the squelching of emotion in the culture. As a punishment for sexualizing a body part meant for nurturing, we get masses of fake boobs in return. Even worse, women have lost their shape because they are not at all in touch with what is to be woman. You probably wouldn’t either if it hadn’t been for the shaman who lured you on the path many moons ago in Los Angeles and took you to the Native American sweat lodge for the first time.

Entering the sweat lodge is like entering the womb. This was the image that spawned SUBLIMATIO. The many, many layers stars arising out of your expression had a very logical origin – the perfectly symmetrical synodic cycle of VENUS. To consciously follow the cycle as you have since you first read the writing of shamanic astrologer Daniel Giamario

The young urban woman’s millennial struggle with the authentic feminine energy may be defined by this cycle: ARIES, the warrior (Monday), followed by SCORPIO, the priestess (Tuesday), followed by GEMINI, the mercurial agent which brings the unexpected into the EXPERIMENT (Wednesday), followed by CAPRICORN yesterday which had you placing excerpts from WOLF IN THE BOTTLE, LABYRINTH and ICON into the window. This was an extremely important cycle because it served to firmly ground the alchemical expression in EARTH. This cycle forced you to accept your role as channel because it combined the energies of your Aquarius birth sign ruling your expression and your Capricorn mind dedicated to order.

And today, having honored and reflected overnight on the CAPRICORN cycle, your writing moves you to make an assertion just an hour before you need to define your work for the camera. A woman who follows this cycle may give birth to her personal expression of the universal archetype of the post-patriarchal VENUS.

The body of work mirrors the work that was done on the body in releasing toxins and opening to the spirit. The objective was to connect with and contain this female spirit. Many times in your journey you doubted that you would make the passage. Your feet were so off the ground in the eighties (ASTARA IS BORN) that you sought out a healer who channeled energy into your feet. She told you that if you hadn’t written your first novel, CHAMPAGNE TANGO, you would have gone mad. And indeed, that is what the book was about – a woman running away from her fear of insanity.

What have you learned from this LAB installation/performance? You have learned how incredibly radical your vision has become through this journey. You are proposing that the new expression of culture comes out of a woman’s body. It was Heyo, the shaman, who pointed out that nearly all expression comes through the head. Male or female, the head is not the organic origin of art. Whether in the art world or literary world, emotion is repressed. Emotions guide images. Without deep emotion, the expression is flat. There is no meaning. This is a truth reflected on the wall. The manuscripts come out of PSYCHE, the form being the satin bridal gown worn in WATER (SOLUTIO). The gown is the womb spilling out the naked expression of the female.

So, when the Daily News reported yesterday that you were naked in the gallery, it was accurate, but not in the literal sense that they delivered it. Your soul was naked. You are presenting your visual language to the public for the first time. Images are parts of you, originated in your very emotions. And the timing you choose made the leap from private to public happens to be so dramatic because of your uncle’s connection with the GOLD and an unexpected invitation to hold the GOLD that you have sought for so long as an internal process.

So, the immediate reward of SUBLIMATIO is your newfound ability to sum up your journey to the size of a fortune in a cookie. The alchemical passage to the personal roots is elevated to the collective. You are in a place where you can make conscious choices. You choose now to follow your ancestry of establishing value in a culture that has no standard for value beyond those gold bricks stored below the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

You had taken the huge leap of attempting to pass through the SUBLIMATIO without isolating yourself, without fasting and maintaining your customary focus. You fasted for four days before the opening ceremony. Then there were meals to attend. So fasting during the day and eating grand meals in the evening plunged you into the opposites.

The alchemists risked everything in their search for gold. If they were authentic seekers, they discovered the gold to be an inner quality, the kundalini energy connecting the genitals with the heart through the Solar Plexus, the place of personal power. In your nightly rituals, you mixed the pigment – gold (the sun), silver (moon) and copper. You made a mark with your right forefinger on the pages of your writings hung in the windows. This process of hanging for the passerby and, in doing so, blocking you from their view, is a transformational act of rebirth.

Tonight you will call in the spirit of LEO, the superstar energy ruling the synodic cycle of VENUS begun two days before the eclipse when you picked up the magical stones on the beach of Cape May where your uncle was born. Your uncle, with all his clarity of vision and integrity, was born in an energy elevated by quartz crystals honored as sacred stones by the Native Americans who lived among them. And now these stones are the gift of EARTH, a reminder that the tools for healing can be found in everyday life.

So your sunset ritual during the last few days consisted of reviving old work and making it entirely new with a birthmark. In the gallery arriving at the SUBLIMATIO, soaring above the karma that has kept you mired in past life patterns. You getting ready to appear in public and an invitation comes to hold the gold stored under the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Being immersed in gold, the real stuff, was not the intention at all, but certainly makes a nice conclusion to the story!

The African shaman sent a message. He said you were marked for success. He knew about the hole at the base of the spine where the kundalini passes through. This mark makes your body a vehicle for the human passion repressed by our celebrity-obsessed media dominated culture. It is the same passion with which the fundamentalists refute the body in their religious tradition. John is making a film entitled THE PASSION.

The work on view in the gallery is 23 years of conscious expression to obtain the knowledge that your father pioneered as a psychotherapist.

Matt poked his head into the space yesterday and asked what you doing when you journey through the sacred circle. You answer by instinct: ”shamanism.” To explain: you call up the elementals of alchemy and mold the energy into form. The result is the magical occurrences that have taken place this week.

Selections from your own slush pile were burnt at your altar prior to the start of SUBLIMATIO. The covers, with different spellings of your name signifying your search for a unique identity apart from your family were burnt during last Sunday’s Fall Equinox ceremony.

Not real gold for the spiritual seeker but the gold before celebrating your Experiment arriving at the GOLD, you on top of the GOLD and the invitation from the nice gentlemen to hold it. Amazing! Could holding the gold reserves of the nation be a reflection of the gold that you compiled in an old form – the slightly dilapidated manuscript box? The struggle to ground the Self was represented by gold and the golden scepter of the King was the instrument in which the divine energy was brought down from heaven to provide the wisdom to rule. This is how you treated your writing instrument, as the instrument to channel divine into human expression. Even as you write this, the copper pigment on your fingertips is making a permanent impression of VENUS on the keyboard.

The journey into the Self is fraught with danger but you made it through. The biggest challenge came this week when Pluto, Lord of the Underworld, was smacked by Saturn, Lord of Karma, in your horoscope. Astrologers always look to what is Saturn is doing in a chart for timing and in this case, the timing was unmistakable. Just last week, an indication of what was to come through your new trainer at the gym. He was a big, muscular guy and when you failed to do lunges, instructed you on practicing balance. Defeated by a simple lunge, you had to face the truth: the body was resisting the plunge into the unknown. Your mind knew you had to make the leap but the body was resisting Saturn, the old timekeeper. How many times had you witnessed people walking away from their own meeting with fate, giving them the opportunity to make fate into destiny. How much ink had you devoted to it?

So, you came to the LAB understanding the challenge and the forces of evolution vs. resistance. You were forced to embrace the opposites not simply in ritual but in life. From the heights of the executive offices of the Federal Reserve, you were flung to a hotel on the Lower East Side that brought you right back to reality.

So, instead of falling to the fate of women in public humiliated by the most obvious superficial expression of vulnerability and exposure – the taking off the clothes – you have come up with a new headline. BARED WOMAN CLOTHED BY HER CONCLUSION OF THE GREAT WORK. That woman’s name is VENUS. And today you made her a crown and bought her a dozen violet roses in preparation for your closing ritual.

THE ALCHEMY OF LOVE incorporates 19 manuscripts and a multitude of images derived from the pure emotional expression of a woman who could not find a publisher. More than one gatekeeper mistakenly classified your writing with romance novels. It was a harbinger of the category they now refer to as Chic Lit. But what made it radically different from both genres is that the protagonist never gets the guy, and in fact, is on a journey to seek within the qualities she once externally sought in a man.

Tonight, the closing ritual accepts this pioneering path as triumph, despite those left behind, foes disguised as lovers, who pull out their arsenal to attempt you from making your fate (aloneness) into destiny. A self-realized woman is a revolutionary, for she refuses to live in the projection of a man.

The amazing synchronicities that happen is the manner that the universe cheers on the seeker to a solitary state of bliss. Here in the gallery is chronicled the TRIUMPH, which you celebrate tonight in the performance that closes your ascent. On the other side is the media that incessantly chronicles the starlets who fail to make this dream of becoming an original expression of the five -point synodic cycle of VENUS conscious.

Men must let go of projecting their buried emotions on women and instead view women as co-creators on a path of human evolution. But how does a man, or even a woman, get in touch with emotions? To your delight, John Knowles, the filmmaker who taped the ritual of FIRE and is coming to interview you in this highly charged space, and Matt Semler, the gallery owner, showed you not only is it possible but the everyday miracles that result. They are the New Men who walk with the New Women.

When you returned to the gallery this afternoon, you shared a consciousness of EARTH with John, ruled by the owl. that you don’t view the rejections personally. They are rejecting the expression of the authentic feminine, the rise of this power to consciousness. You have been diligent for years to find it and can safely report there is no well published expression of this deep yearning, this burning of the feminine to be free of patriarchal projections and the patterns that keep them women and men mired in self-defeating behavior.

Surrounding you and projected on the floor through the shadow of the sun is the expression of the authentic feminine crying out for recognition. Naked she is. And even now, a man stands but four feet from you. How the love surges through you to know her cry is being read, literally by the Man on the Street!

You tell John this just over an hour ago when he called to set up a time for the interview. He replies. “I just sat down to lunch with a woman who loves your expression.”

“Really,” you reply. “Is she an agent?”

“No, she is a publisher.”

Really?

Listen.

Birds are singing!! The SOLUTIO is nearly complete.

AIR: WIND

2007-09-27T15:41:00.000-07:00

Wednesday’s performance was early, to celebrate the FULL MOON, exact at 3:45. You manifested the magic before the ceremony took GEMINI off the floor and onto the gallery windows. You covered the third window covered with manuscripts chronicling the struggle to reach the conjunctio –to raise the kundalini power through the body to the third eye of knowledge and insight. Gemini is ruled by Mercury, patron of alchemy. This is the unknown ingredient in alchemy which causes us to lose our minds so we may open them to an entirely new manner of seeing. AIR rules the Sixth Chakra, the Third Eye of
enlightenment.

The Gemini phase of the Venus cycle originated the transformation of desire into a literary art form. The book that started the cycle was EROS YOU BURN ME! Eros does burn. Indeed. It is the kundalini energy. In EROS, initiated with the Venus rising of June 20, 1988, you organized the alchemy of love into elements: FIRE, WATER, EARTH and AIR.

For the next cycle, in an attempt to alchemize your talent into gold, you developed a new form, the mystical romance novel. Here you made the leap into commercial fiction, dividing your personality into three characters: Alex, Cybele and Ana, short for Inanna. You got a call from an agent named NETI, the name of the gatekeeper on Inanna’s journey to and from the Underworld. This made you so overjoyed you could hardly speak from excitement. But perhaps she picked up on your eagerness and viewed it as unprofessional and pulled back. So you remained intrigued by the synchronicity of her name and took it as a sign that it wasn’t yet time to go public with THE EXPERIMENT.

In the last cycle, begun June 14, 2004, you invented yet another new form: the seven layered journey of the kundalini in the body. You distilled your love affairs into transformation agents, allowing Mercury to accompany the Goddess through the body as you absorbed the meaning behind each connection. It began with your early experience of the HIEROS GAMOS, your suitor from the capitol city nearest to the clouds and ended with the East Village icon, which brought you full circle to the origin of the ARIES fire generated by your first novel, CHAMPAGNE TANGO, described as overheated by more than one editor!

Before yesterday’s ceremony, however, you went into LILLY’s, the hotel restaurant named for the purest of flowers, and met a journalist who asked for an interview. She was from the Boston Globe, doing a report on the New York reaction to the Iranian leader. Ahhhh, you say. He is a media creation. The tabloids made him a bull’s eye and he is relishing his role as scapegoat. He is playing the role of the shadow that we refuse to face in ourselves, the U.S. that is guzzling the world’s precious resources to maintain ever-expanding appetite for material wealth. This polarization between the opposites goes back to the cowboys and Indians and it is keeping us from being whole. She says, you know more than most Americans.

He is a performance artist, you say. Brilliant. Maybe not consciously so,but relishing his role on the world stage. And you know because YOU are a performance artist…

…this week!

Last week, or so, you wrote the review of Thomas McEvilly's THE TRIUMPH OF ANTI-ART: Conceptual and Performance Art in the Formation of Post-Modernism,which interpreted the parallel trajectory of Performance and Conceptual art through the late 20th century. In your view, the parallel converged with a dastardly stunt by trickster Mark Kostabi, self-made media creation to undermine the critical mechanism while luring them into the culture's celebrity obsession. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_This

And so, you have set out in a bold new direction. You bare your soul on the pages of the manuscripts that sat for years in your mother’s attic. You now bare them in the window in the form of a spiral. In the center you place the rejection slips. Despite this suited gentleman standing about four feet from you reading a rejection, feeling ever more protected as you progressively cover the gallery walls with the transparency of your struggle. It takes great innocence and great skill to write in a manner that guides the course of your life. Aquavit, the Water of Life flowing onto the page in the form of a chalice spilling your words.

Long before the invention of the Internet and digital media, you envisioned your journey with multi-layered images and the Lab has made this dream come true. You have stripped yourself NAKED in order to bring your vision into fruition in the most 21st century manner, the union of Heaven & Earth!!!

The FULL MOON is dancing with delight across your AXIS!

And today you celebrate the reflection of this lunation as your course through the SUBLIMATIO builds steam. You get the word from Ampu this morning that his spiritual father, the African shaman who healed Bill Clinton from his clumsy attempt to bring the CONJUNCTIO into the Oval Office, has been alerted to your experiment and is sending positive virations into the gallery space. So here you have a real life CONJUNCTIO reflected from the writing into AIR in your dance with WIND! You can feel that energy in you now. It feels like it is building a molten layer to your solar plexus, the masculine Chakra that delivers you to a place of power in the world. The preparation for tonight’s ceremony celebrating GOLD!!!

AIR: CURRENTS

2007-09-27T11:09:00.000-07:00

NAKED WOMAN BARING ALL. The celebrity obsessed culture is ruled by a media obsessed with the baring of flesh. How much more significant is the baring of the soul! And what is soul but emotion responding to images. And what are images but dreams taking us further into the current of life? To embrace this paradox is to overcome the duality of life and death.

At this second point of the pentacle, SCORPIO, where you struggle with a language for desire to make your images real, you write about the serpent power, the kundalini, as a means of embodiment. Your body of work contains the path to awakening which brings you to this place of self-exposure.

What is so rewarding about this phase of the experiment is that your molded words, the extraction of your experience, is being acknowledged and read! It allows you to test your detachment from the emotional struggles of your past. The preparation for this extraction of the alchemical gold took months. In early July, you began to create a system in which your body of work would be organized in accordance with the Experiment. And here it is at the border of the sacred circle surrounding VENUS. Who now has a face!

Your manuscripts ordered into stacks, creating a shrine to a lost delivery system in publishing the actual tactile words rather than the digital disk. After the organization came the paper works in which you fulfilled a dream of finishing them in encaustic. You fast for four days, enter the conjunctio in an Autumn Equinox performance of Daniel Rothbart’s VENUS: MEDITATION MEDIATION timed with the sunset across 47th street, and connect with the son of a god-man from Africa you name Anu in reverence to the ever-present origin, the Sumerian pantheon.

In stretching towards heaven while your personal language of images is projected ten feet tall in the gallery, magical feats are performed in the ceremonial space. A reservation at Aquavit for six pulled out of AIR resulted in being seated immediately following your performance of BARING YOUR SOUL. Your mother sews a purple star on SUBLIMATIO, covering the spot where you ripped it on the metal door. So, you broke your fast, brazenly, with a three-course meal prepared with the invention and dramatic delivery of your performance art. The courses were delivered on square plates that formed a hexagon, the geometry of the sacred marriage. It was resplendent! The evening had a perfect symmetry to the day. You performed in your aqua dress and dined at Aquavit, which means Water of Life. So, the current of the ritual was matched in the expression of food, each bite with a foretaste, a taste and an aftertaste.

Water of life, poured for thirsty men! Water of Life –you deliver in writing with titles that tell the story of the neglect of the female power by the patriarchy: PLEASURE, GODDESS, WOLF IN THE BOTTLE, ASTARA IS BORN, NON! MYSTICAL MARRIAGE and RED TEARS OF PERSEPHONE. Speaking of Persephone, you were about to give it all up to run off to Africa with your new suitor who sends a lightening bolt rippling through you when he totally got the creation. “I was looking at you,” he said. What is really interesting today is how the people read the words in the window without even noticing you. You are invisible. Synchronistically, Matt tells you that he was just blown away by the film, Being There. The invisible made visible through the act of personal projection. So he is experiencing it too.

BARING THE SOUL. You tell Matt that you would rather have the masses project onto you than the experience of romantic projections that end up in unread piles on the floor of an art gallery. Heaven and Earth uniting as you balance desire with rejection while perched in the window between the words of the gatekeepers and your own 50,000 words contained in boxes stacked in piles on the floor. One pile to each horn of the pentagram made by the Venus synodic cycle.

Today’s pile is Scorpio which gave birth to a growing detachment from the impetuous (AIRES) expression of longing to manifest the kundalini in form: Every day of the five-day performance of weaving rejection slips between your writing in the window, you feel more protected because your body is shielded by the outpourings from your soul. The artistry of the artist shields her from vulnerability, a relic of the shedding of skins. You make this truth self-evident as the windows fill with the unity of desire juxtaposed with the rejection of desire.

This rejection takes place on two levels: the sexual rejection that prompts you to write and the rejection of the gatekeepers of Old Media who, like the cops standing outside the window, keep any new form of dynamic expression from entering the collective mind, particularly a form of expression plunging into the thorny problem of female desire. It is all too evident in the media public wants to know why the Lindsey Lohans, the Britney Spears, and Paris Hiltons of the world can plunge down a spiral of self-destruction. Where are the voices providing the illumination? Murdered at the gate because the exploration of desire was mistaken, quite accurately if it was authentic, for desire itself. The desire to publish, the passion to make visible this energy that drives your every passionate act through the literal binding of your self-expression into a form called a book. The opposites unite to create a border between the personal and public where no border existed in the earlier stages of the Experiment.

So naked you are, there is not much left to reveal. People are entering this place of balance by reading your words and the words of Saturn, the shadow ruling tradition that seeks to crush the evolutionary spirit reflected in the sublimatio, the lead that was transformed through this experiment. They are participating in your experiment by actually reading the rejection letters. Some of them describe your writing as heated, sensuous and lively. This acknowledgement is the manifestation of the Full Moon exposure crossing your chart exact at 3:45 PM today, Wednesday. But this is the dynamism in life that you commit to the page. How exposed you feel under the Full Moon with people reading your rejection letters right outside the window where you write this blog entry! Hearing your name from passerbys is a bit shocking. You aren’t famous even though Venus now wears a mask of protection forged through the alchemical blend of silver (Luna), gold (Sol) and copper (Venus). The mask forged from these metals integrates the Morning and Evening Star aspects of Venus into a unity, which defines the 21st expression of Venus. Your skin feels raw and you wonder if it would be less painful if you had remained in the ethers with your fast. But the dramatic pull between the opposites may have been worth it because there was a process of revelation that arrived with your Lunar Return at dawn. You suddenly got it. The conjunctio or sacred marriage isn’t just about the bliss in the crown chakra. The conjunctio is about the spiral flowing up and down in a continual dynamic motion that is an expression of life.

Yesterday, with the Moon Uranus conjunction triggering the Eclipse point, you were catalyzing the energy to perform what Gloria Steinem calls “ordinary acts of rebellion.” Through the alchemical experiment made evident by the 19 manuscripts stacked in the objective form of a pentagram in the gallery, you have overcome your immature acts of rebellion. You have arrived at an extremely sophisticated act of personal rebellion. How do you know this? It is your female energy versus the energy created by the men in blue creating an atmosphere of fear, anxiety and tension. The smiles and waves from the four cops assigned to the corner outside you window are proof that you have transformed lead into gold.

The date selected for this chapter was the FALL EQUINOX. You had no idea that the U.N. was having its General Assembly just three blocks down the street. An act of rebellion, yes, but a very sophisticated one at that! An act of rebellion involves risk. Risk requires the innocence you spent years cultivating through private rituals that you have now taken public. There is a current in the air that you innocence allows you to hook into through your daily rituals in the sacred circle surrounding VENUS.

Once protected by the broken pieces of mirror on her torso, she now wears your personal symbolism in your natal chart in a T-shirt over her chest. This chart reveals an emotional vulnerability, the attunement to universal symbol through the language of personal symbol and ability to fly on the collective current. On Monday, you gave yourself a new identity ruled by the first “horn” of the pentacle, Aries, as you gave insight by placing excerpts from Champagne Tango Red Tears of Persephone and Aquarian Age 2000 on the window. On Tuesday, you add a new layer to that identity with excerpts from the Scorpio pile: ASTARA IS BORN, PSYCHE ON 79TH STREET and GODDESS.

The color left on the top of the stack was orange, representing the Second Chakra, the genitals. You who began this journey into The Alchemy of Love with a fuchsia tunic in FIRE now are naked within the aqua spiral of SUBLIMATIO. The performance makes visible the act of transcendence of desire. This air of expectancy is captured by your view: the edge between human and technology captured by the barricades lined up on Lexinington Avenue. You breathe life into the Equinox balance between Heaven & Earth through your performances. The passerby doesn’t seem aware of it, but sensitive you are attuned to shifting currents. In your shamanic acts, you guide them to your focused expression.

Last year, on the FALL EQUINOX you led a performance to bring Persephone and Pluto into a relationship of shared power to reach an authentic gender equality. And this year's FALL EQUINOX ritual...What has the circle revealed to you about the relationship between VENUS, your art, and Persephone’s desire to plunge into the underworld of a complete sexual experience? It is 3:09 PM. The FULL MOON is peaking. The mysteries of this eclipse cycle that began a month ago with the lunar eclipse will be revealed during your ceremony, when you welcome the GEMINI energy ruling the media with the ritual of pasting excerpts from the AIR stack of manuscripts on the third window of the gallery. Thought precedes action; even today your writing foretells the future that you create through your proactive spirituality. At this point, you prepare to enter the sacred circle with a focus: to harness the current to create a WIND at your back carrying the spirit of the SUBLIMATIO. You expect a familiarity that will prove boring -- all because you first experienced it first in the fourth dimension, the realm of the angels and struggled like an expectant mother for 20 years to crash it down into every day reality lorded over by the NAKED VENUS all dressed up for a new millennium.

AIR (SUBLIMATIO): LIGHTENING

2007-09-24T19:05:00.000-07:00

You cannot remember when you first became aware of Inanna. It must have been Crystal, your mystical friend in Los Angeles, a Libran ruled by Venus, who sent the initial lightening bolt through your body. She resonated to ancient Sumer and modeled her life on the bold and illustrious goddess who proclaimed herself Queen of Heaven and Earth. You can’t remember the earliest initiation of the universal icon to whom you have dedicated your shrine but you CAN remember, however, when you fell in love with Inanna. It was when you discovered the book of her hymns that you refer to as the red bible. That was in the bookstore of the Louvre where you stood transfixed while reading some of the most erotic poetry ever written, where a woman’s vulva is compared to the land, “Lover come plow my fields!” Heyo had just transported you to her realm when he took you to the most ancient artifacts – the relics of Inanna’s image excavated from ancient Sumer. You found her! An ancient goddess so alive she jumped off the walls of the museum and into your arms. That was the lightening bolt! A return to the ever-present origin! At that moment, you knew the purpose of your life was to bring her into form! When you felt that electrical current (more on that tomorrow) you knew it was Inanna working through you. And so you declared “Hail Inanna!” whenever you called up that energy for a creative venture arising from your own energy source. How many tight spots did you escape from on the road by simply calling her name? How many manuscripts did you create in her image? Eighteen! So, here you are in SUBLIMATO, the name you gave to Selma’s spiral dress made for this performance on the magical evening of the Solar Eclipse! Spirit entering form. The balance of Pisces and Virgo! The sky blue spiral dress with a violet metallic collar in reverence to Inanna while extending blessings for the healing of the earth in the sacred space you created last night during a ritual ceremony. Two old ladies gaze in the window, smile and wave. The marigolds are appearing on the walls, the planting you made as a resurrection following the sinking into Earth, which you believed to be your own death. Now the pink roses, the six pack of pink roses expressing your innocence. The fountain of renewal that guided you on all the other paperworks revealing your language of symbols! All your favorite symbols contained in this magical space where angels have descended! Venus with her mirrored torso wearing your ripped T-shirt with your astrological chart, her star symbol repeatedly projected behind her. Here she has a face! Yes, a mask you created precisely at the Autumn Equinox, the sky blue face of the Sky Goddess woven with copper, the element ruled by Venus. She is carrying her golden rod with its feathers and blue ribbon washed by the tide. At her throat is a mirrored pentagram. The lightening is on her shirt, the symbol of Aquarius. She has arrived! The Sky Goddess! Back in Fire, when the gallery was mistaken for a brothel as you wrote on the black silk sheets your mother gifted you for Christmas, you had such a fervent desire to transcend. The ceremony you did with MP seems…magick is happening! John Knowles raps on the window and you invite him into the sacred space you created in his father’s hotel and he tells me of the molting he just experienced. And you know, the amazing synchronicity of him rapping on the window at the moment you – there are five cops standing right outside the window and lights flashing Secret Service men in black shades, even in nighttime. Barricades across Lexington Avenue. Empty streets. Eerie! The UN conference on global warming taking place. The fourth day of your fast and you are soaring but on Earth! An entirely new sensation! Such a convergence of Heaven & Earth. Saturn, the law, the authority protecting Venus brandishing her feathers, symbol of heaven, the angelic messengers. “That is an African figure you created,” says the African diplomat who called through the window. She emerged during a Fall Equinox celebration of Venus as Morning Star, you tell him. He wants to know more and John gives him the Roger Smith News card. He has many questions and wants to enter the space but the front door cannot be opened. Instantly you know he is a diplomat – he has an elevated diplomatic air about him – but it doesn’t take a psychic to make the association because this area, 47th street, is thick with diplomats. He loves SUBLIMATIO, the collaboration with Selma Karaca. He totally gets it: the snake spiraling up the body and the violet metallic collar over your heart – the universal love detached and liberated at last! You caught SUBLIMATIO on the side door and it ripped. Oh, there goes the perfection of the essence, the spirit in matter! But as you close the door, you have an inspiration – to put a purple star over the hole and when you re-enter the sacred space you place a star on each of the five horns of Venus. And you will place a new star on your dress for every day of the ritual. Eighteen unpublished manuscripts in five piles. Five piles of manuscripts ordered in the shape of a pentacle. Five nights of passing through the five horns of the pentacle and at the end you discover the ultimate – the resurrection of Venus as Lover. Heart and mind united with body. SUBLIMATIO is the extraction, the objective form arising from subjective experience. You know this birth of the spirit in the material because you watched it taking form as Selma snaked the chord through the sky blue fabric into a spiral winding up to your heart. The personal transmitted into the universal. It is the detachment that comes with having gone through the earlier stages – two girls smoking and giggling at the window. Every day is a ritual. Last night you ended your ceremony with the posting of five rejection letters in the window. Tonight you are celebrating the manuscripts completed during the first horn, Aries, and Aries appeared as John Knowles, telling you of his spiritual adventures in the last nine months since the ritual that began FIRE – the ritual where MP called in the Aquarian Age goddess. John is dancing as you talk to the gentleman you pulled in with your magick – your stroll to the U.N. which took you by the building on Dag Hammerskojld Plaza where you once worked as a researcher on international business and the restaurants where you dined with diplomats. There is an instant connection with this diplomat and his curiosity, you know it is authentic, so you wave him around to the side door and there you learned his many names and give him your card and he tells you that when he say, not the installation but YOU, sitting in the dark of the window writing this blog entry, he says, “I saw us dancing together.” He has an elevated energy that matches your own, and miraculously, he is grounded in the energy. Completely focused. And you know it is true because of the magic -- the Aries dancing as you are about to post the three manuscripts created to honor the first horn, Aries, the fire of the thunderbolt. And even then, nd with the most unlikely candidates for love, you knew that love was a dance. But here you are having reached the SUBLIMATIO after 25 years of alchemical experiment and who could this incredibly focused gentleman be but the Dumuzi suitor who comes from a land where love is a universal dance that unites human with the gods. This is another synchronicity. You write this even as the doves are flying off the wall. The release of the doves is the spirit of the SUBLIMATIO cops congregating in groups of four and smiling when you take their picture. And the week has only just begun! But what a beginning! You have been struck by lightening,

AIR (SUBLIMATIO): LIGHTENING

2007-09-24T18:51:00.000-07:00

You cannot remember when you first became aware of Inanna. It must have been Crystal, your mystical friend in Los Angeles, a Libran ruled by Venus, who sent the initial lightening bolt through your body. She resonated to ancient Sumer and modeled her life on the bold and illustrious goddess who proclaimed herself Queen of Heaven and Earth. You can’t remember the earliest initiation of the universal icon to whom you have dedicated your shrine but you CAN remember, however, when you fell in love with Inanna. It was when you discovered the book of her hymns that you refer to as the red bible. That was in the bookstore of the Louvre where you stood transfixed while reading some of the most erotic poetry ever written, where a woman’s vulva is compared to the land, “Lover come plow my fields!” Heyo had just transported you to her realm when he took you to the most ancient artifacts – the relics of Inanna’s image excavated from ancient Sumer. You found her! An ancient goddess so alive she jumped off the walls of the museum and into your arms. That was the lightening bolt! A return to the ever-present origin! At that moment, you knew the purpose of your life was to bring her into form! When you felt that electrical current (more on that tomorrow) you knew it was Inanna working through you. And so you declared “Hail Inanna!” whenever you called up that energy for a creative venture arising from your own energy source. How many tight spots did you escape from on the road by simply calling her name? How many manuscripts did you create in her image? Eighteen! So, here you are in SUBLIMATO, the name you gave to Selma’s spiral dress made for this performance on the magical evening of the Solar Eclipse! Spirit entering form. The balance of Pisces and Virgo! The sky blue spiral dress with a violet metallic collar in reverence to Inanna while extending blessings for the healing of the earth in the sacred space you created last night during a ritual ceremony. Two old ladies gaze in the window, smile and wave. The marigolds are appearing on the walls, the planting you made as a resurrection following the sinking into Earth, which you believed to be your own death. Now the pink roses, the six pack of pink roses expressing your innocence. The fountain of renewal that guided you on all the other paperworks revealing your language of symbols! All your favorite symbols contained in this magical space where angels have descended! Venus with her mirrored torso wearing your ripped T-shirt with your astrological chart, her star symbol repeatedly projected behind her. Here she has a face! Yes, a mask you created precisely at the Autumn Equinox, the sky blue face of the Sky Goddess woven with copper, the element ruled by Venus. She is carrying her golden rod with its feathers and blue ribbon washed by the tide. At her throat is a mirrored pentagram. The lightening is on her shirt, the symbol of Aquarius. She has arrived! The Sky Goddess! Back in Fire, when the gallery was mistaken for a brothel as you wrote on the black silk sheets your mother gifted you for Christmas, you had such a fervent desire to transcend. The ceremony you did with MP seems…magick is happening! John Knowles raps on the window and you invite him into the sacred space you created in his father’s hotel and he tells me of the molting he just experienced. And you know, the amazing synchronicity of him rapping on the window at the moment you – there are five cops standing right outside the window and lights flashing Secret Service men in black shades, even in nighttime. Barricades across Lexington Avenue. Empty streets. Eerie! The UN conference on global warming taking place. The fourth day of your fast and you are soaring but on Earth! An entirely new sensation! Such a convergence of Heaven & Earth. Saturn, the law, the authority protecting Venus brandishing her feathers, symbol of heaven, the angelic messengers. “That is an African figure you created,” says the African diplomat who called through the window. She emerged during a Fall Equinox celebration of Venus as Morning Star, you tell him. He wants to know more and John gives him the Roger Smith News card. He has many questions and wants to enter the space but the front door cannot be opened. Instantly you know he is a diplomat – he has an elevated diplomatic air about him – but it doesn’t take a psychic to make the association because this area, 47th street, is thick with diplomats. He loves SUBLIMATIO, the collaboration with Selma Karaca. He totally gets it: the snake spiraling up the body and the violet metallic collar over your heart – the universal love detached and liberated at last! You caught SUBLIMATIO on the side door and it ripped. Oh, there goes the perfection of the essence, the spirit in matter! But as you close the door, you have an inspiration – to put a purple star over the hole and when you re-enter the sacred space you place a star on each of the five horns of Venus. And you will place a new star on your dress for every day of the ritual. Eighteen unpublished manuscripts in five piles. Five piles of manuscripts ordered in the shape of a pentacle. Five nights of passing through the five horns of the pentacle and at the end you discover the ultimate – the resurrection of Venus as Lover. Heart and mind united with body. SUBLIMATIO is the extraction, the objective form arising from subjective experience. You know this birth of the spirit in the material because you watched it taking form as Selma snaked the chord through the sky blue fabric into a spiral winding up to your heart. The personal transmitted into the universal. It is the detachment that comes with having gone through the earlier stages – two girls smoking and giggling at the window. Every day is a ritual. Last night you ended your ceremony with the posting of five rejection letters in the window. Tonight you are celebrating the manuscripts completed during the first horn, Aries, and Aries appeared as John Knowles, telling you of his spiritual adventures in the last nine months since the ritual that began FIRE – the ritual where MP called in the Aquarian Age goddess. John is dancing as you talk to the gentleman you pulled in with your magick – your stroll to the United Nations which took you by the building on Dag Hammerskojld Plaza where you once worked as a researcher on international business and the restaurants where you dined with diplomats. There is an instant connection with this diplomat and his curiosity, you know it is authentic, so you wave him around to the side door and there you learned his many names and give him your card and he tells you that when he say, not the installation but YOU, sitting in the dark of the window writing this blog entry, he says, “I saw us dancing together.” He has an elevated energy that matches your own, and miraculously, he is grounded in the energy. Completely focused. And you know it is true because of the magic -- the Aries dancing as you are about to post the three manuscripts created to honor the first horn, Aries, the fire of the thunderbolt. And even then, nd with the most unlikely candidates for love, you knew that love was a dance. But here you are having reached the SUBLIMATIO after 25 years of alchemical experiment and who could this incredibly focused gentleman be but the Dumuzi suitor who comes from a land where love is a universal dance that unites human with the gods. This is another synchronicity. You write this even as the doves are flying off the wall. The release of the doves is the spirit of the SUBLIMATIO cops congregating in groups of four and smiling when you take their picture. And the week has only begun! But what a beginning! You have been struck by lightening,

AIR: PROLOGUE

2007-08-29T16:01:00.000-07:00

Alchemical texts
Typically
Forged into stone by men
What did they know?

The transformation takes place
In the body
Of the woman!

Mercurius
Curious fellow
So many characters
In the broken chalice.

Perceval, the Grail Seeker
Dumuzi, the Lover
Dionysius, the “homegrown” partier
Orion, the Hunter
And now, Priapus
The Prick!

Swallowed up
By Earth
Grotesque Priapus
With his pruning knife
Aimed at you

You got balls!
Razor sharp bite
Slicing the chord
Forever

You got balls, he said.
And hung up
Reap what you sow,
Priapus!

Society not ready
For the Sky Goddess
The Priestess tells me

And you have been placed
In isolation
In preparation
With the mother

When you have sex, the Priestess declares
Energies intertwine up the spine
Kundalini rises
To the altar
The crown

Alchemical
The feminine Salt
Purifying the Sulfurous
Male
Mercury creating connections

People who have sex too soon
Don’t know they are taking in
The energy of the Other
Toxicity engorging the prick!

Pirapus
Guardian of the Garden
Joint in the mouth
Leering with his blade
Too flabby to sluice
His own erection

Phallus
Growing larger
By the moment

Here is the change
Mercury in Leo
VENUS in Leo
Mars in Gemini
Jupiter Direct!

Death is the end
Of Earth
The swallowing
Of the Characters
Born in Fire

Y, the Yod with its
Conjunctio of opposites
Right & left paths
Converge in Salamander & Serpent

Fame
With its Mylar reflection
The Scales
Of Silver and Gold
The Pentacle
The Iron Maiden!

Death the ultimate
Grounding
Body decaying into Earth
Roots

Tentacles extending into the underground
The Spring
Bursting forth
The Aquarian Age Goddess

Created from Salt
Acting on Sulfur
Phew!

How he stinks
Of herb
Nicotine
Mercury poisoning
Sulfurous Priapus!

The spring
Reviving Life
The Underground Stream
Sophia Surfacing
In your body

Characters born of the Nigredo
Consumed by Earth
Goddess devouring
Preparing the ground for the New

Death the ultimate
Embodiment
Flesh & bones sinking into Earth
Womb of the Great Mother

Calling forth
The sign, Water Bearer
You wear it
Over your heart

Alembic destroyed
Experiment over
And so, death
To the Old

On with the New!
The return of the cross
Mars in Taurus
Stampeding bulls
Charging forth
The image for AIR

Chalice shattered
What does it mean?
Asked your left brain
Even as your right brain
Guided you to
Create in the darkness

Every afternoon
Three days
Until the finger is pricked
On the Broken Chalice

Blood, said the Knight
Over a blood sausage
And Spanish Rioja
There is no ritual
Without it

Reflecting the Water Bearer
Dragon at the base
Desire transformed
Into Spirit

Blonde Goddess materialized
At the center of your astrological chart
Covering your heart
Chalice containing the Star

The Water Bearer embodied
Declares a shimmering Pentacle
Inside the Broken Chalice
With spiral disk, slender stem
Surrounded by chards
Broken dreams

The mirror of the conjunctio
Pulled away & shattered
Mercurius disappears
Priapus swelling forth
Erection plunging into Air
Engorged in blood

Splattered in fury
You really got balls!
Erect phallus
Wielding a shadow
Over the experiment

Pruning Knife
Cutting of the connection
For ever,
So he warned

There was a female
Alchemist
Maria, the Prophetesa
Derived the formula
1+1 = 3

An exchange of sexual energy
Results in a third entity
The Conjunctio
Under the best of conditions
And the parade of archetypes
Under the worst

And so
Saturn rules this performance
What does the god say
CAPITALIZE!

The Water Bearer
In the Pentacle
Is You!
You claimed it
With your heart

Alembic broke
You give out no more
Experiment complete
Earth gives way to Air
Purifying Salt
Liberated from Sulfur

How liberating is this!
From your pattern
Usually you stick around
Dedicated to Sulfur

The work of a lifetime
Tireless & endless
Making Perceval conscious
Of Priapus!

You are the flakiest person
I have ever met!
He told you
When the Serpent descended

Priapus arose with his Pruning Knife
Chord severed
But not before heralding you
With the Sky Goddess
Projection

You have balls!
He told you
The second time

Alembic shattered by the force
Of the Bull
Characters devoured
By Hades
Experiment complete
You can fly again!

The Conjunctio
Is Internal
We know this after

After thousands of years
Women no longer slaves
To the Sulfurous male
In need of their purifying salt

You say
Take all the Earth
And its bodies of work!
Keep them as reminders

Souvenirs
Of female liberation
From the Alchemist
Slash Genius Slash
Priapus

Just stuff!
Take it

I never want to speak to you again!
He said
The prick!

And so,
The sulfurous masculine
Remains behind
Sinking into his own bile

Your conscience is clean
Years of confrontation
With the inner male
Mirror shattered

No more mirrors, he said
Indeed
And so, the image
Arising out of the shards
Of mirror

Liberation is at hand!
In his accusation
You got balls,
Says Priapus

When you ask for the bodies
Of work in his possession
(how many women artists have
gone through this with their male slash collaborators slash geniuses slash pricks!)

His parting gift
Acknowledging
The Hermaphrodite
In you

Triggering your vision
The inner conjunctio
Ready to roll

Sulfurous male
Descends
You fly
Phoenix out of the nest

You got balls,
He says
When you, all innocence
Nicely ask for your characters
The ingredients to the Mandala

But no,
You won’t see them again.
Mandala swept away with the Earth
Old mirror shattered
New mirror born

The Buddhist Monks
Sweeping away the Mandala
Letting go of the material

Embracing impermanence
As a lifestyle
At last!

In bed on this morn
Taking inventory
The silver mirror
Pentacle
Scales

Characters submerged
In earth
Underground
They will remain

You got balls!
The icon Inanna
Cherrywood
A gift from the sculptor
On your birthday, 1998

First anniversary of the
Hexagram
In the heavens
Doorbells for breasts
Wings
Carved penis, erect

You got balls!
Cries Mercurius
The work is done!
You have embodied the image
Fierce, winged, open, headless
Embodied
Vulnerable

Aquarian Age Goddess
Sulfuric man
Be gone with you!

You are the flakiest person I have ever met
Proclaimed Mercurius
Wow!
I am free to be me, again
You declare to yourself

Liberated from
The prison of these many years
Fourteen!
Of preparation
At the origin
In your mother’s garden

Where ugly plant bloomed
When you returned from the
Underworld
Free from Pluto’s clutches
At least for a season

Could it be for good now?
Mercurius in his multiple guises
Dionysius the tooker
Orion the boastful hunter
Dumuzi, the Beloved
Even Gilgamesh
Declaring
I will not be your next victim!

Of the fierce love
Of the Goddess
Stripped of power to make love
Wages only war

But you have restored
Queen of Heaven and Earth
For a new era

Opposites converging
In your body
Doorbell breasts revealed
To the world

Declaring the genius
Of the Male who confronted
Sulfur
To purify himself
For the Sacred Marriage

At least one exists
You know it
Because he appeared in your
Dream
Beside the canal in Bath
Asking,
Is that you healing me?
He knows!

And so we await the wedding
But first we claim our prize
Trophies Lost and Found
Reward Sought
A new work created
From the pile of found objects
Trophies of a long distance runner
A woman

You reward yourself
Trophies Lost and Found
For having gone the distance
Placed in a mandala
On the garden altar

Mylar mirror
You named FAME
Confiscated
Reflected now in the Venus
Mirror
Reflecting the Water Bearer
Your heart

Venus in her perfect
Symmetrical rhythm
Returning to eight years ago
The cycle that bestowed
On your path

The Beloved
Who created the American icon
That broke the alembic
Complicity between
Government and art
Could only be bad for the culture

Eight years ago
Mirrored in the star
Now the star
Is you!

Three drops of blood
On the reflection
Of the lance…er camera
Weapon of self-validation

Without it,
No record of the public experiment
The rest buried in Earth
Claimed by Priapus
As his own

Co-creator
Turned destroyer
Lance is the shiny reflection
Of the contradiction
Uniting
The World Axis

The cardinal points
(oh yes, how you needed his cardinal energy)
Cancer is the Yin & Yang
Entry point of the human manifestation
Of the universal archetypes
Of Capricorn

Oh the insights
Brought by the Earth Goddess!
Shared with the Capricorn priestess
Under this half moon in Earth1
Taurus, the budding priestess
Of Anja,
Child of the New Age

Cardinal points
Human & universal
Converge
On your personal axis
The turning point
We will see

Lance is Air
Masculine thrust
Element of your Sun
Opposed by Fire
Uranus in the sign
Of its fall

You have planted
Marigold anew
In the air
The deck of the High Priestess
Earth Mother

Mary Gold
The Heavenly Bride
The golden bloom
Off the Conjunctio

Little Fire Sun
Blazing a path
Underground
The conjunctio
Of Venus & the Sun

The chaos of change
Venus in the underworld
Shedding the skin
Of Capricorn
Preparing the fiery cloak
LEO!

Virgin transformed
Into Love Goddess
With her six blooms
The hexagram
Of the Lovers!

Your star burns
In your heart
Reflecting the heavenly passage
Of Venus
From Evening to Morning Star

A dream warns
No more time for reflection
When she arrives
Time for Action!

So little time left
Years of preparation
Underground
And now…

Air carries you
On the wings of angels
Supernova
Blazing image and word
Across the galaxy

Your task now
Aquarian bride
To find Leo
Lion of Judah
Consort envisioned
By Starbird

Materials scattered to the wind
Bride of the Wind
A healing image
Kokoska threatened to kill
His muse
Your image-maker only threatened
To break your legs!

Ahhh What an image!
Disembodiment
Legs grounded permanently in earth
Spirit flies
To great destiny!

Satiated in Earth
The deck of the Priestess
In Bloom!

Earth upon the Air
The only place there is sun
She says
What a manifestation
Of your in-between
Life

Finishing up Earth
Preparing for air.
Begonia, yellow
Forget me Not, bright blue

Our Lady of Guadalupe
Transforms structure
Hexagram
Roses changing
Mother Goddess
Into Love Goddess

Your spiritual guide
Whose burial
Lead you on the manifestation
Of earth

Mother
From her casket
Protecting her children
Through the scent of the rose
Spicy!
The abundance of the early harvest
Lamas!
Prepared for lifetimes

Spicy scent
Before the Death
Of the Mother
Who led you on the journey

Her blood daughter
Priestess with child
Relates the magic
Of the bloom enfolding you
In its spell
On air
The deck.

A stem flew out of the soil
Grew fast
Bloomed the day
She died
Flower stayed for so long

Earth Mother
Speaking to her daughter
Saying, I’m OK
You are OK
Go forth now daughter
Bloom with the New Age

Let it be
A sign of the cycle
Death and rebirth
The return of the goddess
A month ago
July

Thinking of the mother
Burst into bloom
So many blooms
Greeting you in air!

Mother speaking through the rose
Not just one bloom
But six
The number of the Sacred Marriage
Impending
What other sign do you need?

The matrix of the six
The beehive
Praying for guidance
Cluster of Six Blooms
You cheer over the matrix

Thank you Mother
For the six
Pink for innocence
The resurrection of the Groom
Who must die
Once again
To wed properly
In the Conjunctio

Oh, yes
Once more
The artist asks
How much deeper do I go

As deep as you need go
To manifest
The Eternal Return
Bringing in the myth
Of the Aquarian Age
Opposites equal
The balance of the Six

Illusions shattered
The faulty suitors
Imprisoning you
In the cycle of Preparation
Attraction, manifestation
Letting go

And so
With the High Priestess
The message clear
In your vision
To be codified in AIR

Mirror in shards
The pricks of blood
Cinderella emerging from the hearth
Cooked
Ready
For Marriage

The thirty years of
Glamour and disappearance
Finally over
She is ready

Venus in this incarnation
Too powerful
For words
Could only emerge
Through the union
Image and words

The roses in six-pack
Speak
Of legions
Six, the number of the Lovers
Page Six
The devastation of the Lovers
Revealed

Beginning With Spark
Fire
Flame
The Alchemist a product
Of the Nigredo
Lead transformed
By Mercury
Awareness of the pattern
Awareness of the conclusion
Of patterns
To exhaustion

Ultimately Boredom
The worst imaginable assault
On the sky Goddess
Is boredom!

Filled by the power
OF the co-creation
Conjunctio

Too strong
For the alembic
Shattered
Broken
Glass pricking your forefinger

Left hand
Guided by right brain
Intuition ruling
The solitary experiment
Alembic shattered
Blood flows
And Life begins

Blood, declared the English
Knight
There is ritual
Without it
So blood on the chalice
Drops on the pentacle
Reflecting

Your guiding symbol
Aquarian Age
Water Bearer
And so you tell
Your tale
The return of the Bride
The Resurrected Groom

The Grail
Carrying the Bloodline
The Conjunctio
Of God and Goddess
Jesus & Mary Magdeline
Inanna & Dumuzi

And so you return
To origin
The Aquarian wave
Cruising the blog
The carrier of the bloodline

Chalice Bearer
Whose cup you fill
With your Aquarian spirit

And so we return
Guided by the rose
Our lady of Guadalupe
Blooming in six
Number of the Lovers

Ego dies
I am mortal
It declares
Soul is eternal
Saturn rules the Coagulatio

Bye Saturn
The Great Mother
Coagulatio feels like dying
The transition is huge

Behold!
A new experience
After 20 years
And several lifetimes
Of alchemical experiments

Saturn transformed
From limiting father
Into Birth Mother

The ever-present origin
At its source
Birth Mother
Renewed of Spirit
Of her children

Old Saturn, the timekeeper
Withers on the vine
Priapus pissing
Over creation
That he cannot make real
On his own
No matter how long is
His prick!

And So
Earth Goddess
Guides you
Into living history
Evidence
The choreographer tells
Of a legacy that inspires

And so you dance
To the celebration
Death and rebirth
Your journalism
And creations merge
Into a single message
Ending your interview
JOY!

An image of your bicycle
Airborne
With wings

Fueled by your own power
Your unique path
Your self-created structure
The blessing of the Earth Goddess
Offering to Venus
Who has emerged
At last
From underground

Illusions die
But structure is real
The proof found
Yesterday
News of the perfect hexagram cloud
Hovering over the North Pole
Of Saturn!

What better sign
Could cross your path
Of the transformation

Of Earth
Saturn, ruler of structure
Projecting the Hieros Gamos
Into Air!!!

Grab a ring
You are
At last
Ready
To fly!

EARTH: EPILOGUE

2007-07-08T06:50:00.000-07:00

06/04/94 Exercise #3
The ending brings you back
To the beginning
Hampstead transcribed
By way of Morningside Heights

My teacher’s note:
Very funny and convincing
Well done

Because it was real!
A real experience
Leading me to Real World

You reminisce before the tombstone
In Harwich
As you write this epilogue

And so we return
Full spiral
Through the Heart Chakra
To Assisa
Not because her name rhymes with Lisa

But to acknowledge her courage
In the face of the struggle
To the Sacred Marriage

Her dying to the Hieros Gamos
As the first wave
Crested
1962

The love child
Carrying the seed
Destroyed by Lilith
Shadow of Inanna
Clouding the tree
Of the expectant Love Goddess

Cut down by Gilgamesh
Cedar hewn into throne
And marriage bed

What might Alexandra
Had become
Had she endured her celestial labors
To the second wave

The baker dozen
Or two
Brownies on Independence Day

Celebrating the triumph
Over the shadow
In timely fashion
7/7/7

Furies circling
The big yellow house
With their death chant
Death

An injured eye
Forcing an inward gaze
The emerald star
On the forehead
Enticing you upward

Third eye ignited
With plans for Air
At the antique show

Totems calling your attention
The brass airplane pin
With rhinestone eyes
And snake bracelet

An artist dies everyday
Every action
A stab in the dark

Initials carved on
Bloodied instrument
Carving a space
For the new form

Space and time intersect
Saturn and Neptune
Dancing cheek to cheek
Round the Summer of Love

You know your position
In the cosmic unfolding
How you must condition

To die
Everyday
In order to claim it

After the funeral
Of the Queen
You make a call
A reservation on Virgin

So you will be New again
If you follow your dream
Bringing the past
From the shadows

Revolution around a spinning record
Reliving the past
By kicking the obstacles
From the turntable

You too, doomed
By the stars
With your Pisces Moon
Stranded in the 12th house
Without an outlet

The trail of indifferent women
Pushing you
To self-sabotage

But this time,
You surmounted
Water

Made it through
Submergence
Imprints of defeat

Transmuted into triumph
In the solar plexus
To the heart chakra

Your sun opposing your ruler
A closed system
The astrologer told you
Freedom, freedom, freedom
At any cost

The psychotic father
Who pushed the Edge
Until he fell face first
Into the abyss

But what are our stars
In the 21st century
But fate
Written in the heavens
Transcribed in earth

Inanna straddling her lions
From the clay tablets
We gain the knowledge
To bend fate
Into destiny

But what of the golden fox
Stalking you at the Cape
Your totem animal
Whispering a message
Be clever!

Venus rising from the bathtub
In her silk sheath
Radiating chartreuse
Bye descending
Into chaos
Preceding a new form

Oh Mercury!
You change direction now
Guide me
Through this earthly passage
Commitments, scheduling

Fitting into the form
Of the totem
Love’s relic
With its pomegranate stain
Replaced by thunderbolts

Electrifying Love's current
Through your body
Wired as it is
To the zeitgeist

EARTH: DEATH

2007-06-23T06:41:00.000-07:00

Day Five
Moon in Libra

You died last night
In the Fountain
At 2:30 AM
You curled up
And died

Disappearing over Earth
Under the black night
The black satin
Covering the bed in Fire

Death seized you
In the matrix
Leading you to Real World
And back

You return to the past
To arrive at the future
The nurturing of the body

Through the Venus cycles
Honored on the altar
The five mounds of matter
Containing the purified
Relics

Her pentacle shape
The rhythm by which she moves in the heavens
And below

Venus projecting the force
Of the feminine
Through her cycles
Of Death and Rebirth
As Morning and Evening Star

Aries, Gemini, Leo, Scorpio, Capricorn
The five points repeating itself
In a perfectly symmetrical
Rhythm
Absorbing the energies
Of liberation

The symbol of the labyrinth on the wall
Reflecting the Real World
Above the shrine to the New Man

The adept must travel the labyrinth
To arrive at the center
The six-petal Rosette
Symbol of the ancient love Goddess
Queen of Heaven & Earth

Myths, proclaimed the great teacher
Are created for the first time by the gods
And repeated into perpetuity by humans

You died last night
To be reborn
Into the emerald star
The alchemist placed
On your forehead

The vision filled the vessel
Emptied by five days
Of ritual fasting
A walk
Through the Mandela
Delivering Cosmos into Body
In midtown Manhattan

Taking position
On the throne
The center of
The Finger of God
Before the pregnant cow

A manifestation of a dream
When you were in the labyrinth
A cow with a coin in its belly
Lady Liberty born
From the resurrected female

Your hands burning
Yes, it is time
So much
Love from the street

Couples holding hands
Smiling
Thumbs up
You know what this means
The constellation has landed!

To hell with the art world
The media
Academics
Tentacles of the Patriarchy
Repressing the knowledge
Of liberation

You hear the voice
On the street
Climbing the stairway to heaven
Through the chakras
Spreading a new idea to the people
The body as the temple
Of a new religion

And you think about
The woman who wrote the book
On charisma
How her ideas were controversial
Not with the people
But the media
Who believed only THEY had charisma

Ha!
The serpent power is accessible to all

It is your destiny
To bypass the art world
The media
The academics
To bring this knowledge
To the people

Why else would you have chosen a father
Who went all the way to a mountaintop in India
To find the secret of the serpent power
Which ultimately destroyed him
Yet left trails for you to follow
Through the labyrinth
To find establish your own power
In the world

Last night you died
The sacrifice was essential
To make this knowledge
Known to humanity
The injustices in the world
Are simply too great

You are crying now
In the Fountain
Emboldened by the Coagulatio
As you recall Death
The earth is suffering
The pain that humans have inflicted on Her
Is immeasurable

The green light of compassion
Must flow
It begins with a conscious act
By a solitary human being
Sitting in an antique iron bathtub
In midtown Manhattan
And spreads to the world

The pain inflicted on the Native Americans
Custodians of the Earth
They invited you into their church
Where they poured their pain
Into water over the coals
Horrendous stories
Of disconnection
Alcoholism and despair

The shaman with the limp
Body used
For Polio experiments
He told you that
He died twice

Once you overcome your fear
Of death, he said
You can move
Between the worlds
You become a shaman
Interpreter

You have died so many times
On this journey
All to sit
In the center
Of the matrix formed
In last night’s ceremony

How many times
Have you shouted to the universe
Use me!
And finally it happened
Right in public

Four lines of energy connecting
Uranus and Neptune
The mutual reception between
Pisces and Aquarius
Funneling
Into the Moon
And Venus

Mars, the Warrior
The New Male
Who is grateful
To the Goddess
For making him whole
This was your experience
In the Coagulatio

During the Solstice ritual
You proclaimed
For the world to have peace
Masculine and feminine
Must integrate
And so you created the Mandela
Of the Sacred Marriage
The peace sign

Meditating
Before the cow
Carrying the seeds
In her belly

You disappeared
Into a trance state
Joined the spirits
Dancing
Inside the alchemist’s emerald star
Icon of the Conjunctio
Marriage of Sol and Luna

Peter Gabriel’s Passion raising
The spirits to dance through the gallery
Injecting the message
Into your body
It is time

You have gone through
Many deaths on this journey
The more rapid the alchemical transmutation
The more deaths you must endure

Death in the high desert
Where you discovered
A biography on Krishnamurti
And there, in a photo of Annie Besant’s inner circle
A photo of Nick’s ancestor
In Bishop’s hat

You died in the presence of your suitor
On the beach in Malibu
Where he held your face in his hands
Words like a caress
We share a common destiny

The photograph was the signal
You had to go to London
The timing was crucial
Pre-selected
By the Universe
You had to comply

December 13, 1993
You remember it well
Your passport was renewed
With moments to spare
A miracle that you got on the plane
With the infected eye
An ominous sign of disaster

You struggled to make that
That Virgin Airline flight
The hands of your destiny clock
Rapidly ticking
Like a time bomb
Detained by an Israeli security guard
There is something about you, he said
Narrowing his gaze

Such was the energy
Propelling you to London
On that fated day

What is she doing?
A knock
Can I go in there with you?
No, you reply with a shake of the head
A flash from a camera

You rush Nick through
The British Museum
Not stopping your quest
Until reaching the oldest gallery
The Mesopotamian Room
With the clay cuneiform tablets
In display cases
You travel back in time
To the origins of writing

There you stood in awe
Caressing the image of Inanna
In your good eye
Holding her symbol of the Reed
The plant that grows
In the intermediate realm
Between conscious (land) and unconscious (river)

That pregnant moment
Interrupted
By a loud ringing
Doors to the gallery swing shut
Leaving you and your suitor
Alone among the ancient relics
A bomb scare, he says

And so
This is the bomb you arrived in London to defuse!
The guardians protecting knowledge
Of the empowered Venus
Self proclaimed Queen of Heaven & Earth!

You had to leave Los Angeles
First the riots
Then the fires
The ashes still warm
When you crossed a boundary
To tour the ravaged hills of Malibu
Delivered sweets to a woman
Mourning over the loss of her English garden
Lovingly attended over 20 years
Dead
She never recovered from the loss

A knock on the window
Another camera pointed at your face
You aren’t used to smiling
When you write
But you do for the camera

After your Narcissus bloomed
On the Spring Equinox
Running to Sedona
After hearing Peter Gabriel’s command
Jump into the water
As the washing machine overflowed

In the desert
You met a woman
Who had Peter Gabriel
In her backpack

The entire body of work
You listened to as you drove
Through the labyrinth
To the sacred sites
Body blown by forces
You had not the strength, the stability
To contain

And so
You bought another Virgin Airlines ticket
Slick patent leather
Trench coat placed on
Your shoulders by a friend

There, she said, now you
Will intimidate them!
Our other friend,
Who bought you
The Chanel lipstick
Coco Red
Bought by another friend

In London they thought you were
A high-class hooker
Trying to convert you to Jesus
In the Underground
Asking how much you charge
On the street

But you were in England
On a wedding march
Or so you thought

Nick took you through the rituals
Of the Sacred Marriage
The visit to the village
May Day ceremony
To witness the crowning
Of King and Queen
Around the Maypole

The visit to the castle
To have tea
With the husband
Of Princess Diana’s astrologer

The cleansing baths
In his antique bathtub
With feet

Now, sitting in your own tub
The Iron Maiden
Vibrating to the sound
Of death and rebirth
The Passion pouring through your computer
Moving the kundalini through the chakras

You realize what you were doing in London
In that get up
You were acting out the Magdalene
Experiencing first hand what it feels like to have the Goddess given power
Denied

Prospective bride
Punished
For running off to the high desert
To discover a secret
The occult ancestry
Of the groom
Hidden

Along with his magician’s craft
As he sought
The key to fertility
Yet repressed
Woman
Keeper of the secret of fertility

The prospective bride
Not yet returned
From exile

The fated encounter
Progressing
To the inevitable conclusion
Tossed out in the cold

The only shelter a red phone booth
With the crown over the door
Another sign of the Sacred Marriage
Which wasn’t meant to be

As you stood and watched
The lights go on
And then go out
Inside his Hampstead townhouse
As the phone rang and rang
In your ear

Gathering your slick trench
Around you
In the cold of the spring night
What other conclusion could you draw?
Only the most obvious

There is no place in this world for the
Empowered woman
In the 20th century
What else could you do

But retreat from the battleground
Return to your childhood home
As the century ran its course
To work out a solution

But first you returned to Bath
Where you got caught up in another myth
The return of Venus

A procession to the Cross Bath
Pagan figures with matted hair
Raising torches and candles
An offer of a flame
An invitation
To participate
In a mythical unfolding

Winding through town
To a Georgian building
With a serpentine east façade
The origin of the Cross Bath

The foundation of the city
And entrance to the Otherworld
Place of communion with the Earth Mother Goddess
Sulia, a Welsh name meaning
An opening, gap, eye or orifice

Within the gap between worlds
The observer transforms into participant
You sign the petition to restore the spring

The procession continues
A fellow in a shirt proclaiming
Save Solsbury Hill
They are building a new Euoroute, he says
Costing 75 million pounds

A boy hands you a map
Tracing the Euroroute with his finger
It runs beside the train tracks
That is right, he says
They are destroying a sacred site
Solsbury Hill

Solsbury Hill? Isn’t that from a Peter Gabriel song?
The hill existed before the song.
You can see the city lights. That is Bath?

You are in rhythm with the Durgas
Warriors of the Earth Goddess
Protectors of her sacred sites

You lived with the Earth people in America
The Native Americans
And now, these are the Earth people of Europe
In dreadlocks
Baggy linen trousers held up with a rope
Torn woolen jumper

Eight hundred sacred sites
Ruined by technology, you are told
The collective lament
Roads are for connections
They used to bring people together
Now they divide

You travel with the Durgas
To their camp
In a cow pasture
They invite you to spend the night
You decline but agree to attend
The pagan wedding ceremony
On the hill top the next day

It is drizzling in the morning
You arrive at the base of the hill
Torn up by the man made machines
It is a dramatic site

Children climb the bulldozers
And are flung to the ground
The engines roar
Over the wailing mothers

A graffiti message scrawled
On the trailer proclaiming
A menace that started small
Grown into a monster
Threatening to destroy the whole town

A fire at the center
Of an encampment
And there you meet Tinkerbelle
A fierce beauty

In a ragged peacoat
Golden dreadlocks
Matted by mud
You are the scribe, she tells you
You are writing the myth

Armed by this information
You long for perspective
And forge onward and upward

Wandering through
Fields of violet and buttercups
You reach barbed wire
Refusing to be daunted by a physical boundary
You climb the fence
Tearing the designer trench

The embattled warrior
Armor ravaged by the tension
Of warring archetypes
Projecting onto your mirrored surface

Suppressing your dark thoughts
You cast your gaze to your journey
Solsbury Hill above you
Majestic and proud
Oblivious to the war
Raged at her foot

You arrive at the top
Flattened in the Iron Age
When the breasts were removed
From the Earth Goddess
To make her into an Amazon

You find the shrine
A medicine wheel
Beside a white flag
Waving a simple message

Surrender
Venus appears on the horizon
Filling you with a
Serenity
You hadn’t experienced
Since the sweat lodge

An inner union
Magician & priestess
Engaged in the Conjuntio
An inner experience

At odds with
Your image
The femme fatale
Lent to you by female friends
Glossy black trench with its golden buttons
Chanel lipstick
The combat boots were your own
By the way

The next day, you amble
Through the village
Entering a shop
Where you showed them
The torn coat
They laughed out loud
And you had to join them in mirth

Where could you go now?
With your image in tatters?

Sipping cider
At a bar
You hear
Solsbury Hill
Son, we are going to take you home
And you knew precisely where
You had to go
Home

There was one more sign
In America
On the marquee of the Beacon Theater
Reads Peter Gabriel: Witness

It took thirteen years of bearing witness
While developing a form
That delivered you here in the Iron Maiden
Thirteen years for the artifacts of your mystical ride in England to
Resurrect

When you returned to New York
Taking a stroll up Broadway
There you saw it
The message
The Beacon Theater
Peter Gabriel: Witness

And so, you created
The Roadmap
Through the Labyrinth
to Real World

And truly, the story is quite funny
That is what your teacher wrote
On Exercise # 5
At a Columbia Writing Intensive
Where you attempted to pick up the wreckage
The Sacred Marriage
If not in love
Than at least on paper

And here they end up
Surrounding you in the gallery
A return to that early vision of
The Conjuctio

A knock on the window
Another camera
Two
You aren’t used to smiling
When you are writing

You considered last night
During the ritual
What would have happened
If you remained in that
Mystical world swirling around you
The wounded male spirit in his townhouse
Dripping blood from the penis

Nick who promised to remove
You from the Hall of Mirrors
And placed you even deeper
Into the myth

Now, 13 years later
You are finally grounded
Enough to return there
The land where the Goddess
Is remembered

From the Native American sweat lodge
To the Cross Bath
A cry for Her resurrection
The cry for her sacred spaces
To be preserved
And what was your role
In this passion play

Tinkerbelle told you
Scribe
So you returned to the hearth
The house where you were raised
And began to write
You wrote nonstop
For fourteen years

A virtual hill of writing
About the Goddess
A stream of energy
That could not be stopped
Only controlled
Poured into the alphabet
The alphabet transformed into images
Streaked with your menstrual blood
Your passion
Flowing with the Moon

This was the gift of the Goddess to humanity
It liberated you
Perhaps it can do the same for others

Blood
There is no ritual in the world
Without it

Eating blood sausages
Under an eclipse
Sipping the blood of Christ
In a Rioja

Men gashing their limbs at Sun Dance
Lilith runs off
To the Red Sea
Sleeping Beauty has her finger pricked
Before waking
And AIDS
The horror of death through sex

Blood
There is no ritual in the world
Without it
Purified, it gives life
Tainted, it kills

Your blood
The Passion
Transforming words
Into Sacred Matter
The Great Work
To be completed
At the Fall Equinox

The rest is up to the Universe

THE LAB GALLERY IN THE ROGER SMITH HOTEL PRESENT ALCHEMY OF LOVE: III AIR (SUBLUMIATIO), SEPT 23 - 30

EARTH: HARVEST

2007-06-22T10:19:00.000-07:00

Day Four
Moon in Virgo

In the Fountain
Soaking up the energy
Of Earth

You laugh as you remember
The dialogue propelling you here
Before the altar of the Earth Goddess

Five mounds of peat infused with Salt
Purified relics of the journey
Pieces of La Parca
Your Goddess dresses

The word Goddess is
Forbidden in the art world
Gae told you
As you sat before her new creation
A breakthrough

The self-contained Vesta
Who doesn’t give a damn whether she is
Called a Goddess

You repeated Heyo’s expression
The face of the feminine
Yes, she liked that

Today is Day 4
The Summer Solstice
Moon in Virgo opposing Uranus
Charged atmosphere
Of dissemination

Harvest
Arrived early
Due to necessity
The urgent message of the Summer Solstice
Accompanied by magic

You found a paperwork with two masks
One in metal
The other in feathers
With it is an invitation from Christopher Knight
To attend a wild party on the Solar Eclipse (1994)
Which required wearing a mask

You created Mask, an art piece
As a reminder of your colossal impatience
You wrote that you refused to wear a mask
You expected the face to emerge
On the Solar Eclipse!

Little did you know that it would take another 14 years
Two more turns on the pentacle!
How many masks you would have to wear!

You brought Mask to complete the dialogue
Returning it to the source
Your Virgin flight to England
In search of Her
At Stonehenge
Bath
Solsbury Hill
With its flattened mound

It is time
To celebrate the authentic face of the feminine in public
The Summer Solstice
Ruled by Venus
Elevated in Leo
Approaching Saturn
Opposing Neptune

A boomerang across the sky
Shouts a message
She arrives in a new art form
Mirroring a 21st century cosmology
Heaven &Earth

What makes you so confident?
The Solstice sunrise delivered a gift
News of a discovery
Hubble images of the two largest asteroids
Ceres and Vesta
Now holding their own
With Pluto

Ceres is thought to have a layered interior like the Earth
A rocky core, icy mantle and thin dusky crust
How fitting that Ceres, the Earth Mother
Has a body like Earth
And Vesta, with her face
Revealing a huge crater
From the explosion
Vestoids are born
Priestesses in training

Before the Greeks made her a vestal virgin
Vest was sacred prostitute
Her intercourse with the King
Assured legitimacy
Fertility for a New Earth cycle

You guided a performance under the Solar Eclipse
A day before the 2006 Fall Equinox
To honor the Sacred Marriage
Of Pluto and Persephone

An equal partnership
An archetypal couple
Sharing power equally
Made possible
By Pluto’s controversial demotion
Into an asteroid

A vote among astronomers
Who don’t believe in astrology
For the most part
Reflecting a change in cosmology
Men no longer steal the female power
They honor it
And so, this confirmation of your path
A gift from the Goddess

The universe is using you
To disseminate this message
Of equal partnership

You are in the tub now
Still under red lights
Awaiting the green stream
Heart energy
You earned it
By containing the energy
You used to pour so freely
Into the mouths of hungry men

You feel like a completely different person now
Unified
Strong
Purified by fasting and mud
Aware the universe is using you
To disseminate this message
Of equal partnership
Where women will be valued as creative partners

On your passage to the Lab
Now a sacred space
You put out a call
For a priestess to assist you

A wish placed before the Goddess
On the day of the Harvest
Someone to reap with you
Someone eager to learn

Having completed this call of necessity
You focused on a ceremony
Honoring the face of the feminine

Majesty
Appears at the door

Wearing a bright lime green shirt and tiny shorts
Long hair pulled away from her face
Hoop earrings
And the face of the feminine
Soft and strong
Contained and open

She appears at the door
As if she knew you were expecting her
And you let her in
She is stunning
A loveliness that radiates from the inside
Big oval eyes
A sweetness that is incandescent
She wants to know how to honor the Goddess
Ripe for priestess training

She tells you of the struggles
Young women have today
Not knowing what to do with this power
So vulnerable

She is frank about her needs
No seduction
No manipulation
Young & innocent
They mistake my kindness for weakness, she says
And you feel her strength
You realize she is a gift
From the Goddess

A surprise for the Harvest
You have just finished the Solstice Chart
And are making a crown of flowers
In celebration of the maidens of Summer
Persephone’s turnaround

When she appears at the door
Like an omen
You continue bending and weaving the flowers
As you talk
You are making a crown
A Solstice crown

This is the ritual
That could not have been planned
To weave while bestowing wisdom
The projection happens quite naturally
The omen in the Venus mirror with the handle
You were guided to place before a three way mirror

You came out of the sweat lodge and would see Her
The face of the feminine
Little did you know that it would take ten years
To put that energy in your body

Now
Sitting in the tub with the crown on your head
You are Queen!
Remembering the words of Heyo
So long ago
They are Goddesses, all of them
But do they know it?

On the wall you are talking about the wisdom
Of the Third Eye
Majesty asks about the Third Eye
That is where you need to keep your energy
You tell her
This way you will be able to see the patterns
Pluto’s methods of stealing power

You realized at that moment
How much young women need this knowledge
How to be goddesses honored by men
As you are in the gallery

You are grateful for her presence
The young and innocent face
Your voice exclaiming outside the window:
I was wearing that dress!!!!
The dress you are looking at now

In the corner
At last, sitting in Earth
Listening to Peter Gabriel
Digging in the dirt
Stay with me I need support
The light bulbs have been changed from red to green
Relief!
Sexual potency no longer dominating the space
Now, it is filled with streaming heart energy
Of the conjunctio
Where you arrived yesterday
The flowering

What compassion you feel for this young woman
So much to offer the world
No support for the development of her Goddess given gifts
You resolve to help her
You ask her to write down her birthday

It is a fated moment
You both feel it
Your heart and mind at one
You glance at her birthday
The chart in your hand
The Boomerang at work
Under the eclipse influence

The threshold she has crossed
Closing doors and opening others
A budding priestess ready to be trained
You invite her into the Mandala
And give her a primary lesson
You tell her about the four directions
The four elements
Of transformation

You instruct her to sit in the south
The Pine
Place of rest and repose
You sit opposite
On Hemlock
A reminder that too much wattage can kill
You hold your energy

You tell her to let go of the past
Those who have tried to steal her energy
When Pluto was still a planet
And you ask her about her self-expression

You invite her to the Venus altar
The Goddess speaks through you
In the form of a prayer
That she will honor this power
By committing to contain it
in her body

North is the place of the Earth Goddess
Capricorn, the sign ruling the Venus cycle
Coming to a close
The north empowers the Queen
Consolidation
You feel the Coagulatio
In this installation

Where an impromptu visit is performance
Yet real
A shift of archetypes
Determined by the cosmology
An entryway over the Threshold
To Real World

You perform a ritual
By channeling the Solstice Chart
Just completed but unread
When she appears at the door
You are focused on the boomerang
Drawn on the chart like a peace sign

Moon opposed Uranus
The unpredictable
Crucible appears on the wall
Before you
Yes, this is a transformational moment
For you both

Writing this
In the tub
It is nearly dusk
Images are clearer
The chart

Saturn opposing Neptune
Nearly exact
Integrating the supreme creative act
Delivering art to its religious origins
In the vast ocean where
We are all one

The time has come
The face of the feminine
Has arrived

Majesty
Has this announcement written
On her stunning face

What is this?
A young man asks at the door
What do you think it is?
He shrugs
Read the statement
He does
Looks even more bewildered

In a moment
You turn
He is before the front window now
With a woman
Reading the statement
She is nodding
See, she understands
I’ll tell him later, she says

Women get what is going on
Men do too, but most of them have
A base question
Usually made with gestures
Is that your body projected nude on the wall?

A man in uniform yesterday
Smiling and nodding at the window
Thumbs up

Perhaps they are happy
To see a real woman’s body
Projected larger than life
You are huge
In a state of pregnancy
Indeed, you needed all that extra weight
To endure the labor

Oh, now you see
The planting on Monday
Honoring the Venus Moon conjunction
Gifted you with the detachment
To write through this

And so we honor the Goddess
Expressed by the movement of the planets
And prepare our body
To receive Her message

You have a vision of women
Dragging their men
To the 47th Street altar
So beautifully timed to the Summer Solstice
As a means of starting up a dialogue
Of a new religion

One the nourishes and forgives
And here you are on the wall
In birth position
Giving birth to this new religion

Your stomach looks huge
In these images
Amazing how the Goddess
So instantaneously expands your body
Federico’s voice so soothing
Let the Goddess tell you what to do

The message has become urgent
Even white men in government understand
The necessity of caring for the Earth
Least we all become extinct

And so, as you sat mesmerized by the dignity
Of Gae’s self-determined Goddess
Who will not go forth by that name
You resolved to bring the dialogue to the art world
The face of the feminine

Missing from every gallery
Every museum
How can such a colossal omission
Go unnoticed?

So right there you resolved
To bring the dialogue into the art world
You took photos of Gae with her faceless creation
Crafted from Asian fabric and plastic hair accessories

I want to make up your face, she declared
And you realized even then
That you had been launched into performance
Without the video to record it
Damn!

You surrendered
To a new face
You are wearing it now
Thick eyebrows
White in the corner of the eye
It makes them pop
She said

She taught you how to pose
Shoulder forward
Head thrust back
A bold expression for your new face

You agreed to bring the face of the feminine
Into an art world dialectic
Or so you thought

A few days later
You meet her
The woman with a face
From Crete
The last location of Goddess worship
In the Meditteranean
Before she was eclipsed

You encounter this extraordinary face
At a truly wacky event
The Warhol Superstar Banquet
Honoring the 20th anniversary
Of the Pop star’s death

Federico arrives
And now you are pointing down the street
The site of the Silver Factory
The origin of the Sky Goddess
In Pop
This synchronicity is caught on camera

Federico says the green light is much better
Yes, not nearly so erotic
That is the idea
Of the Alchemy of Love
Bringing the energy up to the heart

A loud rapping at the window
They all want to know the same thing
These men that knock on the window
They want to know if you Her
That face so made up
Face a mask
And body nude in birthing position
Except for purple lipstick on the nipples

You ay this out loud to Federico
As you write
Don’t tell them, says Federico
Who is shooting you Me now in the tub

The dialogue with Gae was prelude
To the convergence of superstar faces
At the Andy Warhol Superstar Banquet
But you find the face
Not in the camera ready names
But a critic, like yourself
A scholar from Crete
With a style to match your own

Robert Heide tells a story
Andy Warhol
Asking him to write a play about Edie
Committing suicide
Devil or angel?
You ask
But you know the answer
Both!

You meet Penny Arcade
The downtown performance artist
Performing nude since the eighties
You discuss the young female performer
Written up in the newspaper of record
Who sells photographs of faces
She makes on her vagina
Ugh!

She is my student, says Penny
Lamenting that young performance artists
Products of art schools
Lack personal material for their art form
Which comes with experience
And can only appropriate from others
Which gives their art an easy handle
Indeed

Despite all your private performances
Before the Cosmos
You never dreamed
You would be a performance artist

There is just this terrible urge
To tell your story
To remove the burden
Of this wisdom
From your breast

So much attention given to denigrating the female
In the art world
Is there no room for the Goddess
Who delights in her body?

Penny says when she performed nude
She would fatten her body
The intention was not to show off the body
In other words
But establish an individual expression

Your nude performance was totally natural
As in the desert when you came alive
With the connection to the Cosmos
And it can only come as a ritual
Imbued with meaning
In the words of the Alchemists
As above, so below

You would run off to Joshua Tree
Sleep on the picnic table
In the campground
To avoid the snakes
Climb a rock at sunrise
Strip off your clothes
And dance

Dancing naked before the universe
That was the most ecstasy
You ever knew
And of course, these dances were timed
To the cosmology
Openings to the sacred

Like today
This extraordinary Summer Solstice
You will perform a ritual to the music
That inspired you to strip down
Peter Gabriel’s Passion
Perform your passion, John said to you
Before Solutio began
Well, you did it for him for Nurturing
And you may do it again tonight

The oldest dance in the world
Dancing to the rhythms
Of the Universe

Walls of mylar
At the Gershwin
Warhol’s portrait of Marilyn
Above the silver door
The biggest superstar of them all

They can’t seem to get enough of her
An entire issue of a literary journal
Devoted to her image, her mask
Robert Heide at the reading
And you only wanted to talk about Edie

Behind the silver door
The smoking room
At the Gershwin Hotel
Quite a spread
Of food
And character
Missing from NYC
These days

A silver mylar chamber
For the superstars to relive
Their glory
Recreating the factory image
Those who didn’t die young
Aged well
Great cheekbones

Sally Kellerman
Mistress of Ceremonies
Regretting that she refused to appear
In the Warhol films
Because she was a Hollywood actress

Taylor Mead claiming that Warhol
Tried to rape him in a seedy motel room
And seriously still angry because the Pop Star
Still owes him payment

Andy Warhol selected his superstar
In his own image
But better
For his superstars
Fine bones that never go away
Like this cult
Bowing down to Andy
Midwife to the Superstar

And in the midst of this struggle to recreate
The Warhol era
You make a new friend
A Ph.D candidate in Women’s Pop Art
Her name is Kalliope

Days later
A passionate e-mail exchange
She tells you her name means
Beautiful of face
Well named, she is

And well timed her entrance into your life
A sign
The face of the feminine is emerging

You invited her today to celebrate
The Emergence
Venus coagulating through Saturn’s fixity
Before going retrograde in Leo
The sign of your new friend
Beautiful of face
People taking pictures outside the window

Control your expression girl!
Yes, that is it!
The message of Saturn conjunct Venus
Control of personal expression

One thing you can say about yourself
Who can’t manage to get a job
Or get published
Or get a lover
You are quite a magician
Marsilio Ficino would be proud
Of your fortitude
Ruled by Saturn as he was

Amazing how many good-looking guys pass by
A Manhattan midtown window!
And now you hear an accent
Suggesting the Celts
A neo-pagan from the British aisles, perhaps?
Here to celebrate a major holiday
Which Americans ignore

I think it is funny, he says
That catches your attention
The perfect thing to say
Because you nearly fell on the floor
Laughing
When you first saw the video

You put down your computer
And stand erect in the tub
Asking where he is from
Dublin, he says

He enters the space
Evidence of the magic
Writing about the good looking men
Through the window
And this man with the power
Of engagement
Does more than pass by
He enters

You are Irish, you say
You must celebrate the Summer Solstice
He stands before your naked body
On the way
But looking directly at you
In your virginal maiden dress
A crown of flowers in your hair

And tells you about how earth worshippers
Are all over the place in the British aisles
You tell him that this performance will take you
Back there

He apologizes for interrupting
Oh, no!
This is part of the performance
(it is all caught on camera)
You engage in a passionate discussion
About art and spirituality and literature

So, just by writing about good looking guys
Through the window
You pulled one in
Writing is magic!!!

Wow!
You realize now this ritual is about going
Back to Britain
Back to the origins
After suffering so long in Connecticut

The mask you discovered this morning
Connected to an invitation
Christopher Knight insisting you must wear a mask
To his wild Solstice party in 1994
And you insisting that you would not wear a mask
And here on the wall is your mask

With your declaration
To get behind all the masks
To find the face of the feminine
And so you remained committed
To the labyrinth walk
Making masks into art
Rather than wearing them

Which pays off now
Thirteen years from your wild flight to Britain
You celebrate Her entrance to Manhattan
Down the street from the original Factory
Where Superstars were manufactured from Mylar

You are ready to perform
The Harvest ritual
Confronting the face as she arises
And sending her on the way out of the gallery
Through the spiral
Made of the four directions
Pine, Hemlock, Cedar and Cow Manure

Writers never need to worry about their face
Except for publicity photos
They sit at home
Making faces at their computer
Not expecting to have them photographed
In the act of grimacing
Like now

Underground writers, like myself, you think
A man in the window telling you to get naked
With his hands
Behind your, your face covered in Peat Mosss
You wear the maks of Earth women
Two nights of primitive journeys
In volcanic mud
Under red lights

Now you feel completely
Cleansed
As good as a sweat lodge
Kundalini pouring into the heart
Federico provides the image
Streaming green light

You felt more serene yesterday
Than even in your life
Finally in your own space
Not at all interested in jumping
Out of the body
To see what else is going on
This is it!!

Time to celebrate the Harvest
20 years of nonstop spiritual growth
Digging in the dirt
To reach your core
The grounding of your being
In the alchemical fountain

Comforted by Pine
Emboldened by Cedar
Protected by Hemlock
Renewed by cow manure
Kundalini charged by the Iron Maiden

You have arrived
At the center
A truck outside the window
With a sign mirroring
The Liberty Coin
On the wall

Lady Liberty
You are free!

EARTH: FLOWERING

2007-06-20T17:22:00.001-07:00

A mournful cry outside the Lab window
The blues singer
Before the altar
With his cup
Jangling in rhythm

Up in the Ojai Mountains
At the sweatlodge
You listened to the hum of the Earth
This is what you remember when
You hear the Blues sung to the setting sun
On the eve of the Summer Solstice

A day for celebration
Earth formed into mandalas
Of Rebirth
The day of Persephone’s
Turnaround
The turning of the wheel

SELL OUT!!!
Graffiti scrawled on the door today
Matt thinks it is for him
You were hoping it is for you

Federico immediately understood the meaning
The eruption of the shadow
And your spine is burning
So it is a fact

Sell out?
We aren’t selling anything
No, that is wrong
We are selling an idea
Freedom

Cell
Celeb
She is reading
From the piece of dictionary
In the Earth tub

Sell out!!
The shadow has emerged
The disease of celebrity
Easily remedied
By making art in attunement with cosmology

Your hairdresser, Adamo
A master of martial arts
Sends you to heaven today
As he shampoos your hair
He draws the triangle
Heaven
Earth
Human

So this is the flowering
The opening of the crown
And the body in full attunement
With the shift
Following the longest day of the year

Summer is here
A joyous time of celebration
Marigolds in bloom
The heart opening
Sun passing through Leo
The strongest sign

Let us return to the journey
Yesterday the passage
From altar to tub

Today the passage from tub
To Real World
Before you is now a mandala

A knocking on the window
Women and girls smiling
They know you are liberating them
From the past

But what about the male liberation?
That came up yesterday
Testosterone overload in the gallery
Matt accusing you of flirting with John
So astounded you were by his transformation
Since he taped your ritual

The priestess observed
The New Man
Respected the boundary
Drawn around the bed with the wax

The New Man
With a warrior physique!
Protects the feminine
He assures you, this is Earth
It means solidifying your power

And suddenly, a creative solution
You knew what to do
With the testosterone
Channel it into ritual
John left to get his camera
You conceived of a new performance

A shrine to the masculine
Peter Gabriel’s voice in the street
And so with the camera at your heels
You stripped off naked

And created an altar
The Resurrected Groom
Moon guiding you

Demanding integration of the male
Into the space
To solidify the passage

Before your feet, facing east
The Moonflower
Embraced by a pair of Sunflowers
And the Matrix you created
The heart connecting the four materials

In the South
Majestic, comforting Pine
With the hay
Invoking Summer

In the North
The Green Man
On the mound of Hemlock
Favorite poison of the Greeks

In the East
Cow Manure
Substance of energy
Spring’s renewal

In the West
Before the fountain
Cedar, sacred material
Of the sacred marriage

In the center
A heart
Basket of Marigolds
In the center

During the opening ceremony
You created a matrix
Two mandoras
Funneling into the heart
Genital Heart connection
Cedar, in the west
Manure, in the east
The shadow had to be integrated

So
That is what the assemblage says
Below the map to Real World
Containing the shadow
The Black Face soap
Peter Gabriel’s Witness
From the Beacon Theater

So Over, Yet Everywhere
A New York Times article
On Conceptual art
Title says it all
And the assemblage adds to the dialogue
A bird’s nest with golden eggshells

Rebirth in the East
You add symbols to help it along
Inanna, the hermaphrodite
Before the rabbit
The scales
With eggshells of gold and silver

Sol & Luna
Gold & Silver
Conjunctio in the heart

You knelt down before the clay vessel
Dipped your hands in volcanic mud
Poured water from your ancestral green vase
And entered the Earth
You became mud woman

As mud woman
You knew precisely what to do
Fixing the mounds
In the North
The mound transformed
Into the Goddess
Androgynous
Slim wasted

The integration of Sky Goddess
And Earth Goddess
Green Man at her head
Masculine and feminine merged
In Hemlock
Passion and poison

Opposite the Goddess
Another figure
Created with the Pine
In the South

The Venus symbol
A mirror
Changing to Mercury
Patron of the Alchemical Experiment

Mercury is the third ingredient of Alchemy
With sulfur and salt
The triangle of transmutation
You honor with the daily writing
How apt to welcome him into the circle
Another androgynous figure

Bringing down Mercury
Made the rest of the ritual
He guided you to
The bags Federico
Your Gemini partner
Handed you
Before departing on Sunday

A knock at the window
A young couple holding hands
The woman smiling and waving
You want to tell all men
To treat their partners like goddesses
That is your message
And when you see erotic displays
You know they get it

Peter Gabriel’s voice
Penetrating the shadow
The ego that refuses to surrender
Don’t talk back
Hands at the wheel
Don’t turn around
This is for real

The stones Federico polished
Poured into a basket
Dropped on the cedar

And the empty vials of Gingko
Brain food
He saved
Healing the mind
Of impurities

Cartesian thinking be damned!
You surround SO with vials
Healing the Left Brain dominance
In art and society
Mercurius at work!

The mandoras began as Yods
Projection and Image
Across the East-West Axis
Matrix ruling this space
Projection and image

You place the Mexican altarpiece
With its miniature narrative
Before SO
A painted image of
Man and Woman in the garden

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A guitar
A platter of fruit
Tree of Life with Sol & Luna
On a branch

Oh, the flowering!!
Erotic charge pouring through you
Memories
Of the last shrine
Made with a male partner

The renegade painter who interrupted
Your journalist career
With his display of passion
During your interview

It occurred to you recently
That you went through all four stages
With him

The Alchemy of Love
Transforming the fire of attraction
The angst of Solutio
To the lovemaking of Earth
And friendship of sublimatio
The entire cycle
With a Leo

But tonight,
With Intima tonic
In your tea
You are recalling
The intimacy
Short lived
As it was

One good night
Of passion
That is all a Hispanic man gives you
Before running away
You give them this information
As the attraction
Gets out of control
And they say, that is prejudice
No, it is a fact!

So, you planned the night
Drew up a chart
Went to his studio during the day
And surrendered to his charm
His sweetness

You fucked on his futon
With your clothes on
His demons leering down at you
But you said
You must spend the night with me

And so you went to the Magic shop
Purchased a ritual package
Oil for the anointing
Candles for inscribing your astrological signs
Leo and Aquarius
Incense

Not a typical Leo
An eighties icon
East Village figure
He does something strange
Treats you like a friend

He shows you photographs of his
Mother & Father
Tragic beauties
Emaciated girlfriends
Lays down his myth
The child of bohemia
Caught in the romance
Of artistic suffering

And couldn’t you have predicted
After the flowering
The sculpture your lovemaking created
When the wax of your green candles
Green the color of the heart chakra

Aquarius & Leo
Melted into Oneness
The Conjunctio
He goes to the Munch exhibition
And drowns himself in the suffering

Love is a celebration
Not a tragedy
Well, the ego considers it death
To hell with the ego
Tell that to a Leo!

John tells you he is sweating
He sits on the ledge
You suddenly know how to proceed

You remove Inanna from the base
Of the Heart mandala
And Place her on the Peat Moss
In the corner of the gallery
Below the Goddess dress
Hung from a branch
The yod

Inanna on the mound
Solsbury Hill
Where you met the female warrior
Descendant of Ishtar
Iron Age goddess
Of war

The mound flattened
Into a male shrine
You take the cow from the window
The cow with the seeds in its belly
Moonflower and Sunflower
Planted in your mother’s garden

The cow with the seeds in its belly
Lords over the Mandora
Of rebirth of the masculine
Groom to the resurrected bride

Linked by a basket of marigolds
Flower of the heart
To the mandora
Of the Sacred Marriage

The cow as Great Mother
Honoring the birth
Of the New Man
You see them flowering
As they wave from the window

Matt who enters the gallery
And asks you to draw up
For his wedding
On the Leo Full Moon
A Sacred Marriage
Bringing Heaven down to Earth!

At 8:10, the precise moment
Of Federico’s solar return
You bless his process
Of honoring the Earth Goddess
And the Goddess in the woman

The flowering of the New Man
In the alchemist’s images
Peter Gabriel’s voice
The mournful Bluesman before the altar

All leading the way
Through the triangle
Heaven, Earth & Human
Into the Sacred Marriage
On this Solstice Eve
Blessed be!

EARTH: NURTURING

2007-06-19T20:57:00.000-07:00

BLOOD
There is no ritual in the world without it
You are told this at a pagan barbeque
Of blood sausages
And Spanish Rioja

You bleed
On the Full Moon
And now, the New Moon
You flow
River of connection
Between Body & Earth

The body knows
Listen to the body
Let the Goddess shape your body
Those were your instructions
When you began
The journey to Real World

And now you are
Following the trail of Blood
From the mouth of the Knight
Blood authority
And his merry band of wild women

Signposts on the trail
From the Virgin flight
To the Aquarian goddess

And now, 13 years later
Blood lubricating
Midnight ritual
Under a Leo Moon
Preparing the space
For the conjunctio

Stillness
Calm waters in the fountain
Where the wave will collapse
How you have anticipated this stage
Coagulatio
Things coming into form
Crystalization

Last night
Leo Moon
The lover’s moon
The maiden in her “wedding” dress
Face made up
So still in the tub
The alchemical fountain
They thought you were a statue
A museum goddess

An eleven o’clock appointment
With the groom
And so…

You moved
Picking up your cell phone
At the appointed hour
A response from the window
CALL ME!

You look up
Ten men standing outside the glass
Staring at you in the tub
A man in the front beckoning with his cell phone
CALL ME!

What a moment
Selected for your sacred marriage
Your Aquarian Venus rising east
Uranus setting West
Your life’s torment and joy

The erotic pull
Between these planets
Electrical Storms fury
When love turns into its opposite
The mechanical bride
And her bachelors
Enough already!

Eros enters the space
The groom has arrived
The Lion of Judah
Entered to fire up the ceremony

Eros has landed!
In the body of Toth
His Moon opposing your Sun
The Sacred Marriage of opposites
Welcoming the goddess to midtown Manhattan

Venus rising/Uranus descending
You never did quite relate the stars
To the body
The mind could not encompass the
Wholeness
That swallows it

Many a man used to tell you
What is up there, meaning your head
Is also up there, meaning the sky
So look at the setting sun
Perched at the edge of West 47th Street
A big red fiery ball

Blazing into the Summer Solstice
With a pronouncement
Persephone begins her turnaround
To her underworld rendezvous
Lion of Judah
Partner of the Aquarian Age goddess

N/S/E/W axis
Orientation point
For the conjunctio
Marriage of Sun & Moon
Art & Cosmos

East 47th Street, the silver lined Factory
Warhol manufacturer of Superstars
And now
The biggest superstar of all,
The Earth Goddess
Midtown at Midnight
Settles into the space
Created for her emergence
From Earth

And so, the seed planted
In the cow
Carved from a tree
Six seeds of the Sunflower
Six seeds of Moonflower
Planted in the cow
In your mother’s circle
Symbol of wholeness
The fertile connection
Among women

Six, the Sacred Marriage
Sum of Leo and Aquarius
Leo ruling the heart
Aquarius, the circulatory system
Disseminating the blood

The Aquarian-Leo marriage
Nurturing the seed
Through the body
The personal body
The public body
Marriage of opposites
Creating a New Birth

And you are sitting naked in the tub
The birthing position
Expecting the new birth
Delivered through the Great Work
The Alchemy of Love

Fountain fortified
Bed of cedar
Ceremonial material of the ancients
King Solomon’s temple made of Cedar
The marriage bed in the holy of the holies
Cedar fountain
Of death and rebirth

Beneath the cedar
The purification of memory
Peat Moss masking your face
Limbs
Stomach

Alchemical bath
Under the full moon
Sulfur purified by the love
Of the Goddess
Pieces of La Parca
Bits of dictionary pages
All forming your be
Gifting you with their solar power

Goddess dresses propelling your journey
Purified in Salt
Healing the wounds
Of all the failed experiments
The would-be bachelors
Flying boys who refused to be men

The Goddess and her son lover
You lived that role
Many times
They preferred rebellion
To the inevitable

The rebirth of the male in the 21st century
The path forged by artists
Men who support and protect
The newly emerged feminine

With this memory of defeat
Transformed into triumph
You sprinkle Hemlock
Over the cedar

An essential reminder
Of the power of love
What heals can also kill
To much of a good thing
Becomes its opposite

And the cow manure
Placed under the map to Read World
The map that includes the shadow
The black-faced soap won as a booby prize
A warning
To the Sky Goddess
Do not interfere with the body process
Kicked out in the street in her
Patent leather French designer trench coat
Foolish girl!

Get grounded!
Here in the manure
Material of expulsion
Decay and renewal
Transformation of energy
In Matter
Mater, the mother

Your mother is in the heart
Cast from stones in her collection
Leo, ruler of the heart
Aquarius circling the heart
With her blood
Flowing over earth

Inside the heart
Earth Mother excrement
Death & renewal

Outside the heart, Cedar
Cosmic Tree
Strength & incorruptibility
stateliness & beauty
nobility
Tree of Life

Pine
Conductor of life energy
Soothing, cleansing, healing
Pine trees recharge our energy
Courage & faithfulness
Sacred to Diana, Venus & Jupiter

Finally Hemlock
Healer & Destroyer
Instilling the power of the opposites
Leo, the performer of Cosmic law
Aquarius, the interpreter of Cosmic law

Merging
In a new earthly form
Dictated by the heavens
The rhythmic dance
Between Saturn and Neptune
The pressure on the unconscious

Tell the story
Provide the narrative
Express the Real
Through the journey to Real World
But of course
How simple!

A pair Sunflowers
Protecting the Moonflower
At your feet
As you listen to your voice
Talking about the movement
Of the kundalini
Through the chakras

Your voice
So detached
So loud at times
So uneven

Well, of course!
You have the green mirror on your throat
An amplifier
Expressing every AHA moment
Of your overactive brain
And there are many

Finger of God
Or is it Goddess
Reaching from the clouds
Proclaiming the wisdom of the body
In the space
With your journey to Real World

The mating dance of the male turkey
Majestic creatures
Richly textured coats
Relaying the patterns of nature
Beards marking time
The natural selection
Hemlock mound
Earth’s bosom

She seeks her revenge
On the Greeks
Exalting word
Over image

Leaving the once dynamic goddess
Divided, immobile

The northern spirit
Earth’s domain
The darkest night
The Coagulatio
Where structures are crystallized

Death to the illusion
Shouts Saturn while ramming the sickle
Whack!
Was Real World just an illusion?

The theme of this marriage
Renewing the foundation of creativity
At the source of creativity

Where human expression
Reflects cosmic expression
Myths are created

Saturn and Neptune in a mating dance
Since March when they were in stand-off
When you met the alchemist
Through the transmutation of fire
Ridding the negative patterns
For good

A new crystallization
Timed to close Earth
Termites eating through the birthing dress
Meshed in your blood
A sign of the Times
Pronouncing Female Icons
Under her bosom

Golden termites doing their part
Eating through old structures
So the new can be born
Female termites doing ALL the work

Your voice filling the gallery
With your process
Intersecting right and left brain
Through symbol
The written symbol

What joy!
Real life symbols
Reflecting your philosophy
Life/death/decay/rebirth
Natural cycles
The alchemist examines in nature

Golden termites in slow motion
Through the lace
Nature’s patterns and rhythms
Embedded into the birth
Of a new form
A form uniting heaven and earth

Symbols fade in and out
Absorbed into the body
Through the performance
There is so much commotion outside
A Naked Woman!
Cries a female from the window

No, a woman filled with the Goddess
So powerful in this media driven celebrity age
It should be banned for its potency

But the Great Work is the transformation
Alchemical symbols show the way
Crucible
Sprouting seed
Cross
Lady Liberty coin

Now green fire
Heart Chakra energy
A river of Absinthe fire
Peter Gabriel’s voice
This time you have gone too far1
Don’t say nothing!

Digging in the Dirt
Stay with me, I need support
Capricorn moon
Emotions run deep

Embedded in Earth
You are
As the Goddess dictates
Pouring ashes from the Crucible
Into a pot
The remnants of a death ritual

Ashes still warm
The sacrifice of the cow
Whose belly you were cutting
To receive Lady Liberty
A manifestation of a dream
Explosion!
Kundalini on fire

A man on the street adding to the rhythm
Of the Earth
Shaking his cup filled with coins
Singing the blues before the altar
An ode to the Goddess

When will I be a success?
You asked the yogi twenty years ago
As you placed your nervous palm
Under his discerning eye
The pronouncement grim
When you get into your body
Say what?

And here you are
Solid
Embodied
In the tub
Burning

Naked flesh bearing down
Image of flesh
Absorbing into flesh
What a grounding ritual!

The body contains a memory
The Earth goddess
Covered in volcanic clay
In the Midnight Ritual
Will remain forever

Twenty years of rituals
Brought you to this temple
Golden goddesses welcoming all travelers
At the door of the hotel

The center of Manhattan
The center of a space
Made sacred by ritual

Ceremonies dictated
By the stars
Dredging up hermetic practices
Ficino in the Italian Renaissance
Making the planets REAL in daily life

Like Now
Saturn opposing Neptune
The burning in your spine
Connecting body
To Earth

Real world is Real again
In the body
The body of the work

The body knows what is real
The body is the public
The public is participant
At dusk
Blues singer outside the window
Participant in the ritual
Of making the Goddess Real

Goddess
Defender of Solsbury Hill
Site of an Iron Age fort

On the top of the mound
Below the map to Real World
And a Mexican altarpiece
Image of the conjunctio inside
With a guitar
And plate of fruit

Sol & Luna embracing
Inside the World Tree
Aquarian Age icon
Marriage of Sun & Moon

Under eclipses
Life changes
Opportunities knock

And the path has been carved through
Those openings, eclipses
La Parca, symbol of fate
Touching the Earth Goddess
The kundalini snake coiled in ther body
Y over her head
Sacrifice of the dying god
The salamander and snake
Right & Left paths merging at the apex
The birth of the New

Next is the mirror of Venus
The silver lined wrapped around the handle
The box with the ashes
Of the wish you burned
At the close of Solutio

The wish for a sacred marriage
Made real
Led you back to REAL WORLD

Y is here too
The Yule Log

Next item
The triple mirror
The power of projection
As protection

And further on the path
Golden suns
The alembic
Containing the residue of Solutio
Coagulatio
Into a new form
Things coming into form
Patterns made clear
Ribbons of copper
Forming the kundalini stream
The Alchemy of Love
Is in the flow

Robert Smithson
Your image calls out the artist
Maker of temples
As you hold a mirror to your hear

Digging in the dirt
The work of alchemist
Never ends

Flowers form your mother’s garden
Mother who gave birth to you

We arrive in the heart
A stone heart with branches
Gift from a Cow
A symbol of grounding

Then the vase of roses
From the alchemist’s garden.
The sunflower
Golden energy
Of the aristocratic heart

And now you are at the center of the path
The iron maiden
Holding your body
Arousing your kundalini

The warrior queen
Uninhibited
Unafraid
Passing
Through all the chakras to reach
The ultimate goal

The Hieros Gamos
You are in Her
She is in you

Earth Goddess
No longer
Immobile
She is free to move
With the rhythms of the planet
Guiding us to wholeness

And the rest of that journey
Is for tomorrow to relate
Blessed be!

EARTH:PLANTING

2007-06-18T10:19:00.000-07:00

Look at them!
They are all goddesses
Says Heyo in admiration
They just don’t know

The two of you sitting in a Melrose café
Smelling the buds
Pubescent bodies
Already tamed

And then, the enticement
We haven’t yet seen Her true face
Who?
The goddess!
She could be you

The call to action
In a Melrose Café
What would Marcel say?
Rose is Eros spelled backwards

Buds bursting into bloom
Just a block or two from the French Bistro
Where you meet over a Tarot reading

Smoking mirror
Bad vibe
He saw the Italian from Little Venice
Claiming to be from a Palacio in big Venice
He pointed on the map
There it is!
A peculiar Italian accent
Or was he just Argentine?
Leading you into a toxic tango

You get a far better offer
From the card reader
Get out, he said,
I’ll take you to the Indians

And so he did
Guided you right up to the Red Road
On Turtle Mountain
Straight to the womb of the Mother
The inipi
Blessing the ancestors
OMITAKEYASEN!

The strong Germanic women
Aquarian chain
And you are the last of them
Independent to the end

But what of Her face?
Lost along the line
You struggle to find her in the dark
The womb of the Great Mother
Who receives your seeds in her flesh

And lo
You beheld her through the sweat
Beads reflecting the struggle
To bow through her birth canal
Her reflection compensating for expulsion

The authentic face
Spied in the glass
Face streaked in dirt
Hair askew
Wild Woman
Yes!!!!!

1993 Wandering in the canyon
Under the eclipse
A lunar landscape
You discover Kerouac
On the Road
Sign of a journey
Archer shooting into a distant goal
The sacred marriage

Message relayed in the pipe
Stem is male
Bowl is female
United it blows smoke rings of union
The Woman in the Man
The Man in the Woman
US

This you remember
The road signs on the journey
As you lay in the alchemical fountain
AKA the Iron Maiden
Preparing for the Planting
Venus at the Sixth Gate
Second Chakra
Attachment through Detachment
The chart reads

The doorway to creation
The universal persona
The disconnected connected Goddess
Attached to her journey
Never the outcome

Her face
What does she look like?
Is she ancient?
Greek perhaps
Or new?
American

You are in the fountain
In the Lab
A new experiment underway
Seven hours of the conjunctio
In action
A self-organizing process
Of symbols jockeying for placement
In the unfolding
The Woman in the Man
The Man in the Woman

And what symbols!
Roadmaps created in isolation
Labyrinth to Real World
Awaiting the projection
Self-devouring Uroborus circling round
The artist cannibalizing himself
In search of truth

So much red in the fountain
Red above – the spotlight
Red below – the banner

Reborn in the iron maiden
The first ritual
Pouring the purifed Earth
From the ritual projected on the wall
Into the iron maiden
The red stain on top
Fresh blood over the old
Red Moon setting over 47th Street

Direct angles cutting the Manhattan grid
East, South, Weat, North
Birth, Flowering, Harvest, Death
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter
Material laid out in the grid

Now you get it
The essentiality of your natural chart
Cardinal points
Pluto almostPassion touching your Midheaven
It dawns on you on Madison
Why you only do rituals on eclipses
And the cardinal points
The mystical marriage of the opposites!

The fruit of this revelation
Pouring a river
Of blood
Into the alchemical fountain
Red Cedar
Used to build Solomon’s Temple
Sacred material
The bed and throne of Inanna

Passion flowing through the green light
Of the heart chakra
Magic abounds
A transcendent reality opens
Real World

Planting of the hieros gamos
Sun flower
Moon Flower
In the body of the cow
Primed to birth
Lady Liberty

Let the Goddess shape your body
Said Heyo
How, where, when
Why don’t you just let it unfold
He suggested

And here you are
Unfolding
Naked before the world
The corner of the world that is 47th and Lexington
Red stains obscured by the red banner
Of freedom

Gift of Freedom awaits
You sure could use the $$$$

To your right
Beloved staring
Reflected by Red Light
And the pentacle
That rules this journey
The symmetry of Venus
In her journey
To the underworld and back

So much red
Above, the spotlight
Below, the banner
You are on fire!
Red mixed with green

The green
Oh the dress
The raw silk dress in your favorite color
Charteusse
Embroidered collar
Worn for the first time

To meet the Flame
Sweet nectar of Pommegranite
Spilled down the front
Stripped off the stain
In his bed
Warring between the opposites
Exhausted by the battle
Despite your name

Root chakra on fire
Base of your spine
Lined up with the apex of the Yod
Forged in wax
The red sheet
Gift form the Mother
A celebration of the conjunctio
Born in the Great Mother

But that came after Real World
Remember the proper order of things
First the planting
Then the nurturing
The pod came after the physical journey
A seed carved in earth
Between a natural Yod, a branching

Finger of God
Pointing the way
To the Growth
The hieros gamos
Male shifting to female
Ancestors honored
And you descended
Into a long gestation

Your journey to Real World
A road sign
Doors open all too briefly
Then close
This happens during eclipses

A long grounding ahead
In the company of artists
Fellow travelers to the
Icon of the 21sst Century

Road signs
Cosmic signs
United is the marriage
Heaven and earth
Uniting the constellations

The pod a seed
Arising from the Bog people
Preserved in Peat Moss
The Dutch artist, Carolee
Created the seed
Meeting over a death
In Greens Farms
Mourning to come

So here is the progression
Without Real World
No pod
No comfort
Of the firm left arm
Right brain ruled
Gemini who switches gender
Hermaphrodite

Music the purest form of art
Closest to the Gods
Highest chakra
Other disciplines to follow
Sixht chakra – poetry
Did that
Fifth chakra – literature
Did that
Fourth Chakra – theater
Did that
Third Chakra – Criticism
Did that
Second Chakra – Fine Art
Did that
First chakra – dance
Done

It began with music
The genius guiding your journey
Through the ear
Pressed to the Great Below

How did it happen?
To die and be born in the inipi
To travel the Red Road
To create a codex
Of the hieros gamos
Born of a collaboration
A Man in a Woman
And Woman in a Man

No Internet in those days
Airspace
Closest thing to cyberspace
Virgin Airlines to London
Red damsel luring you into
The journey

Your injured eye
Impelling you to leave your seat
Head for the last aisle
Empty except for a lone figure
Powerful, like an Indian
Holding the energy

Holding a crystal for a cure
Vision obscured
Holding a crystal for a cure
Dinner served
A gentle voice
Would you like my roll?

The face, stunning
A New Man
Reacting to the Face of the feminine
Perhaps

You accept the offering
On the Red Road the women feed the men
A relic from the hunt
Where the men caught the food and the women cooked it

And you make an earthly exchange
He hands you the roll
You hand him the codex
The cosmology of the hieros gamos
Discovered in the Sweat Lodge

You must meet Peter, he says
Peter?
Peter Gabriel, he wrote a song about a sweat lodge
He tells you he was the drummer
For the rock star
And is on his way to Real World

Eclipses deliver change
Doors close so others may open
The door to Real World
A universal story searching for a global form
That could not possibly exist in 1993

A form born in the womb of the Great Mother
Evolved with the Body
Codex inscribed in flesh
Face submerged in the alchemical bath

Arising from the purified sulphur
You now have a recipe for containment
Creative collaborations weep no more!

The union of the Woman
And the Woman in the Man
The song goes

You produced a Virgin birth
Everest your first mountain
The air so rarified
Get me down before I fall

The Sky Goddess jumps levels
From the highest chakra
To the lowest
14 years of manifestation
2 seven-year cycles of Venus returns
To its natal retrograde in Aquarius
The task of manifestation nearly complete

But we get ahead of ourselves
First the planting
Next the nurturing
Then the flowering
Harvest follows
Ending with Death
To begin the cycle anew

Today the planting
11:07 AM
The second Gate
Swung Open
To Real World

In the cow
Mother Earth
Purified the journey
Through the relics
The discarded skins

Oroboros circling the labyrinth
Protecting the treasure
At the very center
The rosette
Symbol of Venus
Queen of Heaven & Earth
The hieros gamos takes root
Fertile, fecund, feisty female
EARTH!

EARTH: PROLOGUE

2007-06-17T09:32:00.001-07:00

POP!
Blackbirds dropping in the Lab
Skins on the floor
Holding the memory
Invocation of Her face
Relics purified

Skins discarded
Batteries dead
Cell phone run down
MAC in revolt
Entropy

Death
Dreams of Asissa
Her tragic life/death/life cycle
Under your skin

Why, Matt asks
When you tell him
Rhymes with Lisa
Her Jew-German Selves
Divided

Lilith, the child killer
Crushed by the mirror
Child gassed
Double Pisces, vaporized
By the stars

When the artist dies
What becomes of her sky children?
Fallen like the blackbirds
Over the memory of the Ouroboros

Summer Solstice near
Spring lovers nearly cooked
Sulphur purified by Salt
The child caressed
Beneath the skeletons
Between green sips of mojito

Coagulatio beckons
The body entering the cacoon
Seaweed rubbed by Bulgarian fingers
Body exhausted, limp
Lilith flies away
Green Goddess enters

Pain of birth
Reality
Crushing the dream
Gallery shut
No entry

A march up Fifth Avenue
To the Citadel
Mac World
Down the spiral
Beyond time and space
The Genius Bar
And lo, an immediate slot
Eyes of an old soul

I lose time here, he says
X symbol (the lost bride?)
Replaced by a black line
51 percent charged
Onto the Prologue!

Your natural horoscope
A body clock
Dead and reborn at the cardinal points
Tropic of Capricorn
Tropic of Cancer
The Earth lives in the body

E-mail check
Starlight message
A reminder
Pluto lined up
With Gallactic Axis
Mercury retrograde
In Cancer, sign of the Mother
Say what??

The Eternal Return
The Earth cycles
In the body
Life, death, decay, renewal

WATER: EPILOGUE

2007-05-30T06:33:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-11T11:37:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-10T20:49:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-09T22:24:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-08T23:00:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-07T20:02:00.001-07:00

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

2007-05-06T19:54:00.000-07:00

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

FIRE: EPILOGUE

2007-02-01T18:15:00.000-08:00

Tonight the Full Moon illuminates the passage of FIRE, installed moments before the New Moon.

Six pomegranate seeds.
Six for the Lovers.
Six for the meeting and merging of Upper and Lower Worlds.

Six for the sixth of January when you attended the 25th anniversary party of Redtape magazine at Tribes Gallery. There you came full circle -- reuniting with Jim C., the East Village anthropologist you interviewed for EAST VILLAGE USA and Thaddeus Rutkowski, the rising literary star who became the first visitor to FIRE!

Six for the Philosopher's Stone. Six for the hermaphrodite, the integration of masculine and feminine.

Six for the union with the Beloved, which would not have happened if on January 6 on your passage through the East Village you tangoed with spark, flame and fire!

You remember what you wrote: "A spark flies. A flame. Buenos Aires is on fire!” And in the window of FIRE, you placed flaming red Epilogue, written in the very same Avenue D apartment building with the fire engine red door where you stepped into the crossfire of EAST VILLAGE USA ten years later. A full circle made in the same epicenter of Alphabet Land where the fire...

...has been spent...

The only sign you needed that the journey was at an end were the six uneaten pomegranate seeds on the white plate of the elder, the only man, a 90 year old artist, at a dinner to greet the New Year, 2007. This was the man whose son was sacrificed at the begining of the journey, in 1997, the last time Venus changed direction prior to your natal Venus position.

Six seeds as a reminder of a cycle into Matter completed and an evolution back to Spirit begun.

Six months underground completed when Venus appeared on the horizon on the Winter Solstice 2006 and six pomegranate seeds on the plate of the father of the sacrificial son to greet her.

Six months in the East Village, from the longest day of the year to the shortest day of the year. You performed SURRENDER at on New Year’s Eve, your mother’s dinner party, attended by you and your sister, another mother/daughter, the artist and his wife and an Aquarian woman. You read the poem and everyone cheered; on some level they knew you were telling their personal story in the universal myth of the female spirit liberated at last from exile...

...Persephone breaking free of the grip Pluto forever and ever...

Six seeds! “SUR-REN-DER” you cried in a voice originating deep in your spine. No loudspeaker necessary to alert your audience of Her return. SURRENDER you barked in the voice of Pluto, that Lady Killer! And who left you a sign but the father whose son was sacrificed following that winter of the Descent in Aquarius, the constellation where Venus greeted the Moon on January 20, 2007 and you welcomed the Aquarian Age goddess into the LAB with M.P.'s ritual ceremony!

The number six signifies dualism, the union of Fire and Water, elements when properly combined gives rise to the human soul.

And Water is where you ultimately SURRENDER.

The journey is over, yet just begun. This was the message of the six seeds left on the white plate of the elder.

Six for the Lovers. Six for your January 24 birthday. Six for the geometry of the hieros gamos -- the six pointed Seal of Solomon appearing in the sky during your solar return on January 23, 1997 --alerting you to your role in the creation of a new myth.

Six for completion of a cycle.

Yet, after each stage of the alchemical experiment...

...there is death.

And so, you must die anew!