We Are A Song Being Sung Elsewhere
Bologna Part Two & An Italian Fairy Tale
On alchemy:
Its beauty lies just in its materialised language which we can never take literally. I know I am not composed of sulphur and salt, buried in horse dung, putrefying and congealing, turning white or green or yellow, encircled by a tail-biting serpent, rising on wings.
And yet I am!
James Hillman
Hillman’s great hero, Henry Corbin, said that where there is only logic you will find a place strewn with dead angels. Corbin an academic and mystic, Hillman a brilliant shrink (as he would put it), both believed in a world ensouled and personal fidelity to an art-making that reached out and touched such vivacity.
Today in Bologna while nursing a double espresso I saw a beggar slip by the window of my comfortable, air-conditioned cafe. Something was wrong with her arm and her face was covered in Kabuki-like white paint, she rattled her tin and alarmed tourists who hurriedly stuffed coins into it, before she scuttled down a side alley into whatever Underworld she had arisen from. And I don’t say it lightly – the Underworld word – it was like something rearing up from the down below into this world of lofty Renaissance ideas. She was just the kind of person who would be making a bee line for Jesus. He never neglects to address the Underworld of his times, the leprosy of his times, the dementedness of his times. I’m not sure I can always say the same.
As you may remember from last week, here in Bologna I am running a parallel narrative of arriving in Rome almost twenty-five years before. Then a young painter with half an instinct for a Christianity I hadn’t yet encountered, but that I’ve now articulated to some degree in my essay on The Merrie. As I wistfully did the maths I realised that twenty-five years in the future I would be round about seventy. That gave me a sepia-tinged, soft, happy-sad feeling of the passing of time. This quickly drained away when I realised I was still terrible at adding up.
Eighty baby, eighty.
Ok, better make the most of it then.
I Am A Small Boat That Tucks In Behind Jesus
I’d left Rome and gone into tent life for four years. It was about billhooks, cords of rope, rain on canvas, rabbit for the pot. All virtual social communication was handled by an alchemically red phone box on the main road between nearby villages. I had plenty of books to read, and the endless visionary gawp of watching weather bound through the valley below the tent – squalling rain, stuttered snowstorms, and a furtive sun that gradually turned my canvas from monastic black to a rather washed out grey. I could drive, and had – mercifully – friends, I worked a bit, so it was a tempering in solitude but not complete isolation. And the only way to talk fulsomely about what was happening inside of me was myth. Anything else was a little feeble. Like Hillman’s example from the beginning of today’s essay, I knew I wasn’t a mystic knight living in a forest in the middle of a great quest, but at the same time I knew I WAS.