puer aeternus: a dirge
Let me recount the tale of ‘Sun, Moon, and Talia’ for you, a tale about lust and depravity. The deeper message I impart is one learnt from Ibn Arabi and the Mundus Imaginalis: the surface of a thing ensures no way to measure its depth, nor does depth convey anything worthwhile about the surface. These two, among couplings, are a distraction: I go whole. Reality hovers somewhere between the two, a floating layer in which matter and spirit abide and transform one another, as will be recapped in closing. Meanwhile, in the tale, a great lord’s daughter is confined at home to protect her from a terrible fate foretold by astrologers: a splinter of flax will endanger her life. And, as must inevitably happen, our heroine encounters an old woman spinning flax on a spindle and asks to take a turn. Pricked under her nail by a sharp fibre, she falls into an interminable stupor. Rather than have her buried, her father removes her to one of his country estates. There she is discovered by a horny falconer king, who rapes her body. Remaining comatose, she brings to term his twins, a boy and a girl, whom he later names ‘Sun’ and ‘Moon’. At this particular juncture, I feel inclined to mention the Indian mystic Anandamiya, a virgin exuding pure and radiant joy, who blesses evil and admonishes virtue, admonishes evil and blesses virtue, in an inimitable dissolving of separation between any layers, any sun and any moon, any twin.[i] Anyway, one day the young mother awakes to find that her daughter, in place of the proffered nipple, has suckled her thumb and drawn out the splinter. On a further visit, the rapist king and Talia reunite and fall in love. After he returns to his queen, the (unnamed) king’s secret is soon exposed when, in sleep, he calls out the three names of the children and his mistress. The jealous queen coaxes the young twins to court, where she orders them to be killed and served up on the plate of the king. As happens in fairy tales, her orders are not obeyed, and the children survive. To make a short story shorter, the king hears the cries of Talia, who has been coaxed to court by the queen to be burned alive, and he comes to her rescue. A ‘happy ever after’ ending is contrived: the king and Talia marry, the queen is incinerated, and the cook who saved the twins (a pair of young kids was served in their stead) is promoted to royal chamberlain. I want to tell this story because recently my own mental life has become, in John Donne’s words, ‘like gold to aery thinness beat’.[ii] You may ask how I intend to reconcile what has brought me to this point in the text and the surprising rupture that I now introduce. You see, increasingly the sense grows that the world spins on my fingertips. In a way it is a magician’s spinning, like that of the old woman’s spool, and the resultant spell that is cast is hard to break. I think of the four universal elements introduced three millennia past by the pre-Socratic clairvoyant Parmenides: earth, air, fire, water.[iii] You have touched or been touched by each. Such a beautiful fullness is given. It is a spell of existence in which we are suspended, like Talia in her world of stupor. Indeed, the saints and demons tell us so; think only of Scylla and Charybdis, my unruly companions in the water. One floats in the element in which one is sustained. A thing ever between. Everything bobs in the amniotic fluid of our lives: this is love.[iv]
notes
[i] Given as a child of thirteen to a much older man, it is reported that whenever lust arose in him, Ma's body would assume the terrible form of Kali, the Goddess of death, and he would retreat. Later he was renamed Bholenath and served her as a devotee. Another story relates that a sorcerer casts evil spells over Ma. Because her loving nature is incapable of resisting, she falls ill, only to be saved by her retinue of followers.
[ii] ‘Dull sublunary lovers' love / (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit / Absence, because it doth remove / Those things which elemented it’ (‘A Valediction Forbidding Mourning’).
[iii] Even a modern clairvoyant such as Jung incorporates four element wholeness into his hermeneutics. One of my most interesting experiences as a student at St Paul’s College in Auckland was to be introduced to the four humours (based on the four elements) by Br John Joseph, himself a kind of volatile sylph.
[iv] Amniotic fluid is the protective liquid contained by the amniotic sac. It serves as a cushion for the growing foetus, but also serves to facilitate the exchange of nutrients, water, and biochemical products between mother and foetus.