Ouroboros

Osiris was born again as Ra, in The Enigmatic Book of the Netherworld, found in the tomb of Tutankhamen. The formless recycling which underlies every day translates easily into the electrical grid which connects the universe to itself and makes energy exchanges instantaneous, even across endless spaces. It is the ancient Norse dragon Jörmungandr which surrounds the world, as do the Biblical Leviathan, the Vedic Kundalini, and the alchemical mandala, and the recursive cybernetics of cognition theory where a feedback loop reinvents data, as the body replenishes itself like a tree, known as autopoesis, the self-maintaining chemistry of living metabolisms.

The eukaryotic cell is the core of the human body where an internal exchange of molecules maintains the structure which in turn gives rise to its own components, the way a surfer on a board shifts his balance on a wave. Waves and particles take turns being each other, as Cathy says.

The same regeneration fuses through me in the middle of the night, filling me with warmth and acceptance, and with ideas. It is the recycling channels of phloem and xylem in a tree that exchange energy between the soil and the sun to produce leaves and bark, the Gnostic duality of existence. It is the Jungian dawn state which gives birth to ourselves in a waking dream, the eternal recurrence, Buddhism’s endless knot, the shrivatsa.

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra says, “All things are entangled, ensnared, enamored; if you ever wanted one thing twice, if you ever said, ‘You please me, happiness! Abide, moment!’ then you wanted all back…For all joy wants—eternity.” He called it amor fati: “one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely to bear what is necessary…but love it.” The French physicist Henri Poincaré’s recurrence theorem states that certain dynamical systems, such as particles of gas in a sealed container, will return infinitely often to a motionless state of entropy, close to their original state. Thomas Pynchon applied the concept of entropy to his fiction. Financiers speak of reversion to the mean, wherein theories of wealth are ultimately controlled by logical values, the fundamentals of financial merit.

Like grains, which disappear into the earth and are reborn with the spring, Persephone was abducted into the earth, into hell, that magically distant chthonic land of myth, but allowed by her father Zeus to return in the spring, as the land had withered and died without her. She is the Queen of the Dead whose secret rites of regeneration at Eleusis promise immortality to initiates.

Death and eternity are thus fused in an eternal loop, an ouroboros, a self-regenerating cell.

I was thinking that Dylan Thomas’ iconic poem, “In my craft or sullen art,” had a few misplaced images (not that I don’t love this poem to pieces). The arms of lovers shouldn’t be around the griefs of the ages unless they are restraining those griefs. Thomas means I suppose the opposite of what he says, that lovers absorb and diffuse all the grief in the world, rather than embrace it. Maybe they accept it by embracing it. Love contains, erases grief, gives us compensatory joy that negates grief.

Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.

It’s generous when Thomas says that he writes for the lovers, when he’s actually writing for love itself, for his own love. Poems come, for me, out of an excess of life, out of a love for the world which cries out to be expressed somehow. It is an “immortal longing” which, like Persephone’s death, produces a concentrated explosion of life, the flowers that grow out of death, the hope of endlessness which any glance out to sea evokes. The eternity of the horizon, when you live on an island, is a constant role model for our emotions, as when Ulysses looks out across the Aegean in Godard’s film, Contempt, to Georges Delerue’s infinite musical still life, as timeless and motionless as the “Largo” from Vivaldi’s Lute Concerto in D.

As the music conveys, it’s the emotion behind the film, not the film itself. It’s the telling, not the story. An event happens, but its eternity lies in the story it creates and recreates with each new telling.

I write, not for lovers, but for love. Out of that circulatory flow of self-replicating spirit, that phloem and xylem, which is in everyone’s DNA. In our own way, we are trees. In between the soil and sun is the human being. We are the channel of love. Death. The sea. La tendresse. La vengeance. Photographie dans tout en magic en Francescope et en technicolor.