I love this picture because I have no idea what it means.
To me it looks like sophisticated doodling, the meanderings of a creative mind stuck in a dull situation: chemistry class, a doctor’s waiting room, a train station without a train.
I fantasize that my ignorance would be enlightened if I could only read — what’s that, French? Italian? — but maybe it wouldn’t. Perhaps the words are meaningful only in the turnabout pathways of the artist’s wandering mind.
The picture evokes the Mercury archetype and his tendency to show up in the in-between places, in those spaces of life where boredom looms, in the margins between more noticeable events. The Roman god Mercury — Hermes, in the Greek — was in constant motion, wings on his feet, traveling between Olympus, earth and the underworld to deliver messages between gods and monsters and humans. He was the only one who could slip in and out of Hades without paying the ferryman.
We all have Mercury in our minds, slipping between the layers of our psyches, moving from conscious awareness (Oh! I should be taking notes on what the teacher is saying!) to the mundane insects of thought that cross our paths (I wonder if they’ll have that pea soup again at the cafe today.) to the unconscious, often-unwanted depths (I really don’t deserve all the good in my life.) to the upper registers of love and connectedness (I feel so alive today!).
Though he is normally associated, in the astrological chart, with mundane thought, Mercury’s real power lies in his ability to connect things. On a physiological level, connections are brain neurons — that is, the ability to process information through our minds. On a practical, everyday level, connections are made through language: through the words we hear and the words we speak back (which, by the way, are processed through neurons).
But on an esoteric level, connections are metaphor. And Mercury is the master of metaphor.
Carl Jung said that metaphor-making is the primary function of the psyche. Metaphor means, literally, to carry between. Interestingly, both parts of the word, both meta and phor, are related in their roots to words meaning “childbirth” and “midwife.” So there is a sense, in a metaphor, of carrying and delivering something profound, creative and meaningful in the space in-between two people. The thing is not Person 1, and the thing is not Person 2. It is something entirely third, but which connects the two together.
Where Mercury is concerned, the quintessential example of metaphor is language. All language is a symbol of something else: the word apple is a symbol of the apple sitting on my desk; the word relationship is a symbol of the collection of interactions between us; the word run is a symbol of me moving fast using my feet.
And all symbols, or metaphors, and thus all words, are ways of mediating between two things: a real thing and a way of representing it with my lips, with my tongue; a real feeling and the connection I want to have with you through it; an idea I have and the way it will become manifest in life.
And so I look at the picture above and I see Mercury in the margins, some sketching or maybe doodling that is a symbol of what’s going on in the artist’s mind in some in-between space: a space where a gap exists between what is going on around him or her and what is going on inside him or her.
The pictures here look like something being born from the artist’s inside to the artist’s outside. I see symbols being made, symbols that represent something in the mind that wants to come to the fore, symbols that are more direct even than words, that speak directly to the psyche instead of through the often-twisting manner of language, symbols that evoke quiet and pensiveness and reflectiveness and perhaps age.
Perhaps memory.
Photo: La Eu la lia
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