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Chapter Seven of Marcia Brennan's Flowering Light: Kabbalistic Mysticism and the Art of Elliot R. Wolfson
Elliot R. Wolfson, Serpent's Dream , 2007. © Elliot R. Wolfson.

Flowering Light -- buy from Rice University Press. image --> Imagine that you are sitting with a Native American teacher, who gives you the exercise of assembling a ceremonial pipe. You arepresented with several individual pipe sections, and you experiment with fitting the various components together. As you try different formations, you realizethat the pipe can be assembled in a variety of ways. Each configuration will yield a distinctive implement, and each will accomplish its work in a uniquemanner. You are then presented with some ceremonial tobacco. As you place the tobacco into the pipe, you realize that the pipe and the tobacco representdistinctive elements of a reciprocal ceremonial structure, one whose typically invisible bonds suddenly become visible as the smoke rises all aroundyou.

Wolfson’s canvas, Serpent’s Dream (2007), loosely evokes this vivid ceremonial imagery through smoky, ethereal forms that are painted in a southwestern, “NativeAmerican” palette. At first sight, the painting may appear vertically bifurcated, as a central dividing line seems to demarcate the left and rightsides of the composition. Yet when the picture is viewed at close range, this subtle optical barrier dissolves, and the two sides of the painting flowtogether as a single form. Just as contemplative immersion facilitates such creative transformations, the painting appears to be a kind of shape shifter, aformally unified construction in which distinctive passages become fluidly interchangeable, thereby lending themselves to multiple symbolic arrangements.Recalling the imagery of a medicine dream, the painting displays sidereal shades of red, maroon, orange, and violet, which appear as fluctuating clouds ofcolored light. Three oval patches of bright emerald green—mysterious elements that suggest a disembodied, primordial gaze—float freely at the center of thecanvas.

Just as the shifting surface of Serpent’s Dream resembles a diaphanous veil of open sky, the underlying composition displays internal configurations of interlaced forms. Examining thecanvas closely, it is possible to discern subtle traces of a helix structure, a spiraling coil that resembles an uroboros, a twisting serpent swallowing its owntail. Just as the verticality of the snake becomes circular within the swerving conventions of the iconography, the uroboros represents an archetypal image ofandrogyny. For Wolfson’s discussions of the uroboros in relation to kabbalistic thought, see Language, Eros, Being , pp. 67-68, 271. Conjoining these associations, the title of Wolfson’s painting, Serpent’s Dream , symbolically evokes this complex coil of interwoven significations. Along these lines, Wolfson has characterized dreams as transitional, hybrid states that are oftenmarked by the coalescence of opposites. In an analysis of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century Habad texts, which themselves drew on earlierkabbalistic thought in their engagement with dream imagery, Wolfson has observed that “the oneiric imagination is privileged, as the way to reach the unknowableand unnameable is through the mental faculty that combines opposites and thus points to the mystery of equanimity, the state of indifference wherein oppositesare identical in their opposition.” See Elliot R. Wolfson, “Oneiric Imagination and Mystical Annihilation in Habad Hasidism,” ARC, The Journal of the Faculty of Religious Studies, McGill University 35 (2007), pp. 131- 57.

With its embedded sense of internal multiplicity and its abstract depiction of the varieties of oneness, Serpent’s Dream displays the paradoxes of an “open enclosure”: “open enclosure” appears in Pathwings , p. 92.

in time
that measures
fissures&faith
flowering
on dreams
dispersed
 

one is
not one
unless it is
more than one
 

in time
that measures
fortune&fate
flickering
on fury
infuriated
 

two is
not two
unless it is
less than two
 

in time
that measures
foot&face
floundering
on paths
divergent
 

three is
not three
unless it is
more or less three

Like the layered coils of a clay pot, Serpent’s Dream and “open enclosure” can be viewed metaphorically as spiraling configurations that incorporate and disperseflickering forms through porous surfaces of permeable containment. Another of Wolfson’s artworks that engages these themes is Pistis Sophia (2007), an abstract painting resembling a luminous bouquet of scattered, disembodied forms. Painted in bright shades of gold, blue,green, and purple, swirling clouds of mass and light evoke a coupling that is born of three. The title of this painting literally signifies “Faith in Wisdom.”In particular, Pistis Sophia is the name of an ancient gnostic gospel and, as Wolfson points out in Language, Eros, Being , this trope refers to a mythic triad found in the Nag Hammadi text Eugnostos the Blessed . In the latter context, Pistis Sophia represents a mystical image of the divine pleroma that conjoins the presences of the father, son, and daughter. In hisanalysis of this gnostic imagery, Wolfson notes that “the pairing of son and daughter, the Savior and Sophia, or Pistis Sophia, as she is also called,produced six androgynous spiritual beings in the pattern of the first androgynous man. The twelve powers, six male and six female, beget seventy-twopowers, the totality of the six contained in each of the twelve, and each one of the seventy-two powers reveals five powers, to yield a sum of 360 powers, theunion of which is called the ‘will.’” Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being , p. 157. The erotic union of Pistis and Sophia thus engenders powerful androgynous imagery that incorporatescomplex mystical and numerological associations, as the coincidentia oppositorum of the bonding of “more or less three” generates exponential spirals of light.

Elliot R. Wolfson, Pistis Sophia , 2007. © Elliot R. Wolfson.

Traversing the open boundaries of convergence and divergence, Wolfson’s poems and paintings display distinctive pathways that meltand merge in the disintegrating patterns of oil on canvas or words on a page. Like the distinct indistinctiveness of the pipe and tobacco, the poems andpaintings can be seen as offering androgynous visions of interchangeability, protean configurations of dreams that are diaphanously clothed and ephemerallydispersed on smoky coils of burnished light.

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Source:  OpenStax, Flowering light: kabbalistic mysticism and the art of elliot r. wolfson. OpenStax CNX. Dec 09, 2008 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col10611/1.1
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