Ordering Chaos
Hermes - etching - 2011
How important is structure in your life? I realised last year that it was imperative to my mental well being. I think of that this week as my routines have been thrown into disarray for one reason or another. I feel a little unhinged and not quite in touch with my inner self. I’ve been snatching time in little gulps, until today when suddenly I’m back in the flow again.
On my bookshelf is a copy of Thomas Moore’s Care of the Soul: how to add depth and meaning to your everyday life. It’s not a book I’ve read from cover to cover. I tend to dip into it in times of need, randomly letting the pages fall open to what insight I know will find me.
Last night it was on page 45, a description of Demeter as she searches for her daughter, Persephone who was abducted into the underworld by Hades, who won’t return her. When Demeter withholds all harvest from the earth, threatening extinction of human life, Zeus intervenes. He sends emissaries to plead with her, yet it is Hermes, the great arbiter and messenger of the gods, who strikes a bargain with Hades to let Persephone go. Hades agrees, but secretly pops a pomegranate seed in Persephone’s mouth to ensure she will return to the underworld for a third of each year, the darkness of winter.
There are many interpretations of this myth of Demeter and Persephone. What Moore points out is that it is about mothering, both on the human level and the divine. In order to reconcile life with death we need look no further than Hermes, and “hermeneutics’ - “ the art of reading our experiences for their poetry”.
I loved that phrase, to turn experience into beauty, to structure the chaos into poetic metre, a daily ode to life told line by line, word by word. I had a friend who did an entire body of work about the pomegranate and its seeds, a powerful motif with its symbols of birth, death and resurrection through life experiences.
What I didn’t realise until this week is that I already knew my way back to myself through Hermes. I had written about an artwork of mine which featured Hermes on a 1/6d stamp. In this artwork I combined my own favourite symbols of maps and the mariners compass with Hermes the stamp and the text What is.,.
Like the wandering traveller, I already had the tools at hand to find my way back to myself. But I needed to go through this state of disconnection, before I could recognise that I had everything I needed to order my chaos. It is my past and future meeting in the present. A birthday gift of the present. The NOW in nowhere.
Birthday (detail) - collage 2012
