~my homunculus~

April 28th, 2009

Today while on the bike at the gym a German TV station presented a movie I had never seen: Bühne frei für Marika. A Yma Sumac/Lucille Ball type–by which I mean an actress attempting to convey a sort of “other” sensuality that argued with her inclination towards physical comedy–was dressed as a silver-clad, ponytailed space alien. She wandered through a jungle set expressing “wonder,” stopping at an apple tree draped with a giant live snake. She promptly did a perfunctory sort of Eve dance, stiffly writhing with the snake, hitting her marks.

Later I learned that Marika Rökk was famous for being a star of the Nazi-funded film industry, as well as for being a hardcore careerist. Her co-star in this film, Johannes Heesters, refused to shoot further films with her, calling her Kollegenfresser, a “partner eater”. Nice. But it was the tree that caught my eye, as I had dreamt of one this morning.

Two dream images. First:
A pale pink satin bedcover printed in cyanotype blue with stills of Muybridge’s pigeon in flight. I was buying the cover for Alfonso and I. He told me (in waking life) that in German vögeln which translates to “birding” is rude slang for, um, mating.

To follow the bird image thread: my grandpa Boone raises homing pigeons. We have been thinking a lot about home, possibly returning to the states, the how and when. The next time I know I will be there (there being my first “home,” Los Angeles) will be to celebrate Boone’s 85th birthday in November. I filmed his birds in slow motion, looking not unlike Muybridge’s birds–which have always seemed like dream-images to me–for my movie Wanderlust. The film features a narrative describing a woman birthing an unidentified something.

Second image:
A gorgeous egg cracks open and out flies a tiny hermaphrodite who hovers in front of my face, wings fluttering humming bird fast. S/he sprouts roots from finger tips and tree branches for hair. Roots: again, home. In the dream I know the branches are the Tree of Knowledge, not as in the shame-laden Original Sin parable, but as in wisdom, bearing the fruit of life experience. All the joy and sorrow of the world was contained within it’s limbs. Joy/Sorrow, Male/Female, Earth/Sky. Prima Materia.

Jan Švankmajer made a film called Otesánek based on the Czech fairytale of the same name. In it a childless couple raise a tree stump baby who eventually comes to life and reveals an indiscriminate and insatiable appetite and has to be murdered. It is horrifying and quite funny. In the press notes he wrote, “We have touched on one of the basic myths of this civilization: the myth of Adam and Eve, or, if you wish, a myth analogous to that of Faust.”
Faust is perhaps my most beloved story, despite it being considered a “Tragödie.” I wouldn’t agree with that perspective any more than I would agree that eating from a knowledge tree is grounds for expulsion. Let’s instead conjure images of the Buddha and the Bodhi Tree, or a myth of arboreal enlightenment of your choice. Let’s hear it for was die Welt im Innersten zusammenhält (the quest for the true essence of life)! Right on curiosity! Free-thinking rulz!

The egg…is not just a cosmogonic symbol–it is also a “philosophical one”. As the former it is the Orphic Egg, the world’s beginning; as the latter, the philosophical egg of the medieval natural philosophers, the vessel from which, at the end of the opus alchymicum, the homunculus emerges…the spiritual, inner, and complete man. ~Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious

The hermaphrodite is traditionally a symbol of “complete man” as well, the merging or integration of the anima and animus. It is also a symbol of transformation to the Greeks (from Hermaphroditus in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, to Cal in Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex).

The Rosarium Philosophorium (Rose Garden of the Philosophers) is a alchemic treatise dated to 1550. I had not heard of it before my dream, but it would seem it was speaking to me. A detailed description and analysis of the woodcuts therein can be found here. Essentially is it taken to be a description of a person’s own transformation by spiritual alchemy. In it, the seven stages are described thusly:

1 An entry into the vessel of transformation,
2 A conjunction of the two primal archetypal forces,
3 Their merging into an hermaphrodite in a death or nigredo stage,

4 The extraction or ascent of one facet of the soul into the Spiritual realm,
5 The descent of a spiritual dew or essence from above,
6 The return of the extracted soul forces,
7 The final formation of the Stone pictured as the resurrection of the hermaphrodite.

It would appear that my dream egg hatched a creature that is the very personification of potential for transformation, reaching to the earth’s core and the vast sky and in doing so sprouting it’s own enlightenment. Or that’s my take. Or rather, my plan.

~AND THEN, IN THE REALM OF THE UNCANNY~
Later this evening we learned that our contract in Switzerland will end in four weeks, five months earlier than planned. The position is evaporating, like many have in this economic crisis. We are not clear yet what this means for us, except this: big, nearly immediate change. Flight, a new home, transformation. Some spiritual dew, as it were. Stay tuned.