Luminous Incubation

Luminous Incubation

Acrylic on paper, 22”x30”

I don’t understand how it came to be. I take in the painting as I take in a breath. Not with intoxicated sanctity but with a dose of pale trembling. I look deeply into the painting. Do I see who I am? A book-chewing rat eating myself back into a singular aboriginal beginning. In a toss of butterflies that is the unconscious one thing remains: the alchemical symbol of the egg. A matrix or uterus from which the filius philosophorum (“philosopher’s child”) is born. A soul-egg that is neither hardboiled nor devilled. Just generated and regenerated. Birthed and rebirthed. Always new life and possibility. My innermost name growing as an embryo. An enchanted seed, the prima materia. On the black heels of thought I am carried by a wasteland wind that asks: what is this incapsulated serpent you unknowingly created? What is it that strikes not as a solar gaze but as a lunar nerve? Who is the stand-in for the golden-winged Phanes, deity of light? If you speak of Phanes you must also speak of that badass, all-devouring force of reproduction, Time (Cronos). In the reddening of reflection is a new self-giving. The journey in and from the studio that began at the edges has spread itself wide. I have traveled far into the kingdom of the egg where the sun never sets. The eye blinks a thousand times. In the Dionysian stratum of the soul a luminous incubation has become a placeholder of the mysterium tremendum, a sun ascendent and a speech of shadows.