Baba Yaga’s Garden

Baba is all seeing and knowing and is able to see the present, past and future in the crystal ball she keeps in her garden room.
The walls have ears and eyes and the doll is listening and gathering information.
Heather Blakey September 2007

The Mystery of Goya’s Saturn

The painting known as ‘Saturn Devouring One of His Sons’, by Francisco Goya, presents us with a terrifying cannibal god, Kronos, whom he depicts as a wild, revolting figure, consuming his offspring. The ancient deity looks crazed, his eyes are atrocious and the painting is one of those which imprints itself on the psyche of those who examine it closely.

‘Saturn Devouring One of His Sons’ springing from the Kronos myth, was a part of Goya’s ‘Black Painting’ series when Goya ‘carved his fates and inscribed his nighmares directly onto plaster.’

The earliest version of the Kronos myth–Saturn is the later Roman name–was written down by Hesiod in his Theogony, around the eighth century, B.C.E.

First comes Chaos; then Earth/Gaia; Tartarus in the bowels of Earth; and finally Eros. Earth gives birth to Heaven, also known as Ouranos, and then bears twelve of his children, the last, “most terrible of sons/The crooked-scheming Kronos.” Earth and Ouranos have three more sons, so fearsome and mighty that Ouranos forces them back inside their mother, burying them alive. She forms a sickle, and asks her other sons to use it against their father, “For it was he/Who first began devising shameful acts.” All are afraid, except Kronos. She gives him the sickle, hides him in her, and he castrates his father, preventing him from having more children, then assumes power among the Titans. But fear lives in his heart; a usurper himself, he learns that one of his own children will usurp him, and he devours them at birth:

As each child issued from the holy womb
And lay upon its mother’s knees, each one
Was seized by mighty Kronos, and gulped down.

Through a ruse by his mother, the last born, Zeus, survives, leads a war against Kronos, and casts him down to Tartarus. Even gods cannot overcome Fate.

Reviewers have asked what it was that Goya recognized in himself that charged the work with such raw, wounding power? Jason Scott Morgan, for example, alludes to the traditional father and son narrative which has been presented in, amongst other documents, the Bible.

Maybe Goya was painting this narrative but I suspect not. Before he began the Black Paintings, Goya survived a near fatal illness, documented in his Self-portrait with Dr. Arrieta. Goya depicts himself as a “pained and weary artist, surrounded by dark, phantasmal faces.” It is plausible that Saturn was painted as a way to express the lonely terror of mortality. Since my husband’s body has been ravaged by a third round of bowel cancer, and we have faced the lonely terror of mortality, I have every reason to think that this is likely. If I could paint I would paint Atrophe, towering like a giant, scissors in hand, tormenting us with the reality that she has the power to cut the thread at any moment. Goya’s Saturn touches me deeply because it expresses shared pain and his Atropos paints the dark dreams that haunt me.

So what charged Goya’s painting of Saturn? As his health declined, as he stared creative impotence in the eyes – Saturn’s eyes, Atrophos’s scissors his work gathered momentum and a dark force. It doesn’t really matter if Goya threw away his pastels and used someone like Saturn as a metaphor to represent the terror of creative impotence. Who cares if Goya used Saturn as a metaphor to depict the ‘black dog’ that consumes artists offspring — that hungrily devours work deemed, for whatever reason, not to be of any merit, not to fit the stereotypical mould. The main thing is that Goya went right outside the square and painted with force that speaks with passion today.

I imagine Goya must have smiled wryly when he realised that he had captured the demonic figure who had lived with him all his life. But most of all I am grateful that he has so powerfully captured the demon who lurks in my nightmares, for I know now that I am not alone.

image courtesy of Susan Seddon-Boulet Trustees.

In the beginning the world was a great shapeless mass.

First there was nothing, just wind and the dark abyss. In the immense clefts of nothing, the deeper Abyss, Raven formed and with her dark raven wings, she flew to wind’s arms and their passion, this procreative force, became known as Chaos.

Raven gave birth to wind’s egg. From this egg rose the Goddess of Love, the one who arouses desire and fuels creation. This Goddess who represent the spirit of love,fertility and creation, was the oldest and at the same time the youngest of the Goddesses. It was the Goddess, the matchmaker, who agitated(libido) and paired heaven and earth, ocean and and the land. Before Her no immortal beings existed. From the Goddess of Love came libido which in turn birthed the immortals who sprang to life on the wings of ravenous love.

It is the Goddess of Love, the procreative principle(libido) that permits the work of creation to continue. The ability to bring something new into existence is fundamental to the creative process. Reference is often made to somebody’s ‘fertile mind’, or to an inhibition of this creativity as ‘creative sterility’.

Many successfully creative people use procreative metaphors in saying something about their experience because, as artist’s know too well, when a person’s performance, work output or art doesn’t have soul it lacks passion or libido. Without passion or libido, without the inevitable tension of opposites, the artist lies, wretched, impotent, sterile.

Over recent weeks I have spent dark days
Lethargically slumped
over my writing desk
I have been feeling dispirited and dull
My concentration has gone
and I am now prone
To frequent,
unpredictable mood changes

For days now I have felt indifferent
decidedly irritable and
if you so much as looks at me
I am likely to snarl viciously and
Aggressively demand to know
why, just because
I teach people how to write
Everyone expects me to be an accomplished writer

What could someone
With a banal daily life like mine
Possibly have to write
In verse or prose for that matter?
Of what consequence
Are my sporadic, deranged mutterings?
It has all been a façade, a masquerade
all done with smoke and mirrors

This proliferation, this sudden invasion of my organs
this debilitating infection of my brain has left me
suffering from a chronic, torpor
It is an effort even
to raise my pen
I am suffering from daytime insomnia
exhausted by periods of sleep-like unconsciousness
And fear I will slip into a deep coma
wither and die of sleeping sickness

Sleeping sickness?
First described in the fourteenth century
when Sultan Djata of the Kingdom of Melli
was stricken by a lethargy that killed him
Only methodical destruction
of the tsetse flies habitat
repelled the spread but now, centuries later
a fresh reservoir of blood lies unprotected

Only a vigilant mobile surveillance system
with specialized staff
using effective diagnostic tools and
improved field control strategies
Will repel this resurgence
control this vigorous strain of sleeping sickness
causing neurological impairment in
lonely writers and artists all over the world

Gregarious maggot masses
Armed with mouth hooks
Prepare to rake over the
Black bitter heart
The decaying flesh
Of a lifeless writer
Slumped over a desk littered
With recent rejection slips

The haunting eyes of Anubis,
Watch silently as the skilled embalmer
Works through the night, her fingers
Caressing the artery reverently, impregnating
The lifeless writer with aromatic substances
Masking the decomposition
repelling the maggot masses

The embalmers composition lies complete
With just a hint of sandalwood in the still air
Accompanied by his embalmer, hia wife
The dead writer dressed in formal day suit
Awaits Christian love and forgiveness
For the eulogy to be
Tenderly spoken
For the ceremonials to begin

A cell phone’s ring tone breaks the silence
As the writer’s wife
Plans a merry weekend with
A gregarious editor who
Having agreed to publish
The writer’s retrospective
Prepares to rake in royalties

.

The mosquito-borne parasite
Plasmodium falciparum
A veiled lady
Dances slow measured tango steps
On a ballroom of red blood cells

Disguising herself
She skilfully
Plays,
A genetic game
Of hide-and-seek

The mosquito-borne parasite
Plasmodium falciparum
A veiled lady
Wrapped in tightly bound bundles
Of red organza

Swirls in rhythm,
Camouflaged
Among helpless,
Ruptured red
Blood cells

Alert immune system spies
Sensing danger
Astutely identify
This red veiled lady
Dancing disguised

Sounding the alert
They spring to defence
Only to have her
Deftly switch form,
Change makeup, costume

Sixty different genes
Sixty different protein shields
A united force lined up
Barely discernible
Demanding
My body play catch-up
As plasmodium falciparum
Switches first one masked gene
Then another, relentlessly
Preserving
The disguise

Weary I lie
Red cells ruptured
My body
Listlessly battles
The wily parasite

Before I succumb I must
Like Captain Kirk
Unravel the secrets
Of the veiled parasites
Invisible power over me

.

A cabinet of wondrous curios
A delightful collection
Objects,
Carefully placed
Lying, seeming unconnected
Next to each other
Evoking,
Triggering memories
Permitting the mind to
Wander to faraway places

Microscopes,
Scales, microtomes,
Drafting tools,
Cameras,
Magic lanterns
Antique candle powered projectors
Fine laboratory glassware
Vintage beakers, funnels, test tubes, crucibles,
Dessicating jars
And a one-off hand blown, baroque piece carefully stored

A pair of rare wax anatomical models
Crutches and callipers,
Arm braces,
Blood pressure meters
And first aid dummies
Antique botanical prints
Woolly mammoth hair
Coprolites,
Spiny trilobites,
Skulls, fish and ammonites stored in labelled draws.

Butterflies mounted in Petri dishes
An Atlantis Moth
Obscure,
Whimsical and wonderful
Packets of seed,
Very old taxidermy birds, in excellent condition
Hand-made pills,
Patent medicines and toiletries.
The scent of human breast milk, swamp water and sex
Stored in tiny laboratory vials

All combine to fill
A purveyors
wonder chamber of
creative stimuli

Radiant heated fear
Pulsates through blooded intestines
Pressing on my sphincter
Demanding I purge
Bloated intestinal tubes

Tubes pumping, pulsating
Razor edged emotions temporarily purged
Nervously anticipating another
Spontaneous panic filled attack
Triggered by relentless, stalking, circling fear

Fear of loss, of grief
Of utter helplessness in the face of
Chronic, debilitating pain
Fear that nothing will
Appease or palliate.

Palliate or appease the pain or
the rising bitter tasting vomit
Wedged in my throat
Unrelieved by sips of water.
Desperate I consider the gate of Mount of Purgatory

Purgatory no lofty island mountain
With indifferent angel keepers guarding the door
Demanding Prudence, Temperance, Fortitude, and Justice
Bowing my head in penitence
Will not change our fate.

Fated to stand on earth
Fated to bear witness to
a multitude of injustices meted out
By the hands of capricious
Mother Nature