RETURN FROM THE UNDERWORLD

Like Persephone, I spend long stretches of time in the dark chambers of the underworld, periodically coming out into the light of day and human society for a season. My own personal underworld has been constructed partly by the rhythms of academia and partly by my own doing, with the result that I spend considerable stretches of time toiling away like a mole digging through solid rock, trying to find a little soft spot where I can surface for a while and catch my breath. This beautiful morning is one of those brief times when I can pop my head out, sniff the fresh air, and wave to you from my blog with my grimy mole-paw.

It’s warm and sunny in the Pacific Northwest, but definitely getting to be fall. Last night we went for a walk and were practically physically assaulted by the smell of bone-dry grass and weeds, brought out by the touch of cool dampness rising from the nearby wetland. At intervals along the way there was the unmistakable musky, jammy smell of ripe blackberries. Even though I couldn’t see them, I know exactly where I would go this weekend if I wanted to pick blackberries and had the time to do so.

For some reason, everything feels peaceful and “right” to me when the air is dry, the sky is clear, and the grass is dry and tawny-brown. I’m not a fan of green grass. I remember last spring walking across the highly manicured, damp, cool, green lawn at the Seattle Center in flip-flops and suddenly thinking to myself, “This grass feels dead!” There’s something a little morbid about your feet being touched by anything so damp and cold. Grass like that usually has a hovering smell of death, too, a combination of vegetation that is too unnaturally green, and earth that is too full of fertilizer and whatever other chemicals are sprayed on perfect, green lawns to kill everything but the grass.

I won’t get into the ecological issues related to the obsession with green lawns today, just the aesthetics. In a part of the world where there are so many green trees and plants in summer and so many evergreen trees and plants all year round, we are constantly surrounded by green on green. To me, the dry, brown grass of late summer is a welcome break from the sight of way too much green. 

[Photos of green lawn, dry grass and star-nosed mole from Wikimedia. Blackberry photo is mine.]

THE JUGGLER

I’m back from Southern California, both physically and mentally, ready to start posting again.

Anyone who has followed my blog for a while will know that I go through phases of prolific posting interspersed with periods of nothing. It’s just the nature of my life, in which I juggle many different parallel streams of activity and can only hold onto a few at a time, while the others move on their own from the momentum that I create. I’ll admit that this modus operandi partly stems from my own nature, which tends to make me want to do one thing obsessively for a while, then take a break. If I care enough about whatever it was, I’ll come back to it, like the burning torch that eventually sails back to the juggler’s hand after following its own independent trajectory for a while. If it gets dropped, I probably didn’t want to be juggling it anyway.

This whole discussion of juggling made me think about the symbolism of juggling. Medieval jesters and minstrels are sometimes depicted as jugglers (jongleurs), and that reminded me that at some point I’d heard of a tarot card called “The Juggler”. I looked it up and found that it’s what is now known as “The Magician”, the first card of the series, symbolizing new beginnings, new ideas, new journeys, and hidden things revealed. The Magician also appears to be an alchemist, scientist, shaman, con man, and trickster, so incorporates both positive and negative qualities. He’s God, the manager of positive energy and the Devil, the manager of negative energy (a la Quantum Demonology).

What I like best about the juggler, though, is the fact that he necessarily symbolizes both the beginning and end of the circle, the point where things come back to where they started, but continue on in a way that is both the same and different. The never-ending moebius strip of an infinity sign over the classic Tarot magician’s head.

As T. S. Eliot said in Little Gidding,
“What we call the beginning is often the end

And to make and end is to make a beginning.

The end is where we start from. …

… We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.”

I think this way of thinking really epitomizes my need for working in cycles. Each time I come back to perfumes long finished, perfumes in progress, or to my blog, I start over again, knowing each of those things for the first time.

[Fire Jugglers and Tarot card images from Wikimedia]