in praise of mercurius
“It is Feast of St Mercurius, who was lent a sword by the archangel Michael in battle. He was known as Two Swords Mercurius, until he was martyred. He miraculously jumped out of an icon to kill Julian the Apostate; when he reappeared, his spear dripped with blood.”
When the Reverend Richard Coles tweeted this story, Philip Pullman replied:
“That’s too good a story to leave unstolen.”
Said Rev. Coles: “There for the taking!”
November 24th 2020, on Twitter
***
A story. A story within a story. A story in words from a story in images from (presumably) some source tale spoken and passed on, before anyone thought to paint it or write it down or tap it out on a phone keyboard at 5 in the morning. A story that sparks a tradition, a conversation, an exchange of ideas; seeds further inspiration, might make new tales to fire the imagination of anyone beholding.
The life in the original telling extended in such new ways, out of its own time; this weird future where it manifests fresh, broadcast as words and pictures out of one hearer’s mind. Twitter functioning here like a retrospective, deconstructed, interactive ur-form of television, its signal amplified instantly and everywhere as it is beamed out. Ephemeral in one sense, deliciously close to eternal in another: in the tempting dream sense that it might be detectable to some species out there in the cosmos, with instruments calibrated sensitively enough to reconstruct the picture and the words even as the signal is degraded, the further it traverses the long cold of space. Quickly! Hear us! Before we become once more indistinguishable from the background noise of the universe.
Maybe it’s best this way. That we, for now, go undetected. But it is the dream when we give utterance to anything, especially online: broadcast received! In this case by me and other followers of the Rev. Cole and Mr. Pullman. What will I do with it? How does it help me live?
I know that it does. It wakes up my mind with its flash of gold, all its impossible possibles. It reminds me of old love for an old friend, who introduced me properly to icons and their beautiful, formal restraint, their tiny, perfect capturing of the glory of the infinite. Which sent me, in my turn, in search of Andrei Rublev and, later, Tarkovsky.
Stories from images, images within stories coming to life and yielding new adventures. Isn’t that just what it’s like: being excited by the mind’s momentary flickering at something into the sudden full flare of imagining? Isn’t this also the promise hidden deep inside such tender, felt recollections when they surface so unexpectedly, calling to us, bringing with their moment an unlooked for, reflective calm?
It’s winter here so my mind has a nostalgic tint to it. This tale of the image of Saint Mercurius coming to life and changing the known world reminds me of other examples of pictures that blur and break the borders of reality: in children’s books, stories with illustrations from which I still take solace.
The first is from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. (Albeit not my favourite scene: the one where Eustace, transformed into a dragon in his greed for gold, is sorrowing in a valley and has his scales and skin and pain clawed away by Aslan, peeling him back to the raw boy beneath.) It is the moment when Eustace, Lucy, and Edmund end up in the ocean in Narnia after falling into, or being absorbed by, a painting that moves and swells and spills into the room, and soon has them swimming for their lives in another country altogether.
Recently, I re-listened to C. S. Lewis’ Narnia novels on audiobook. I mostly wish I hadn’t. They were so strong for me as a child, my first reading of them when I was eight a feature of early public library happiness, maxing out my green children’s card (three books at a time), then being granted one or two borrowings from my mum’s pink card (six books!). Later, just the memory of them – their full colour covers, the deeper images behind half-preserved, half-imagined pencil drawings still treasured and retained – was life-saving in its way when I was all at sea, floundering as everything in our family was suddenly transformed away from joy. In the end, I suppose I can’t fully regret having revisited that remembered world again. Though it was, for the most part, a shiveringly expected, long dreaded sorrow.
What now survives the adult carnage of Lewis’ sometimes shockingly ugly narrative theologies and moralising meanness? Reepicheep! His gallant mouse, fearless and awed at the boundary with the other world. And the ship, the sea of lilies, all those beautiful drawings by Pauline Baynes. I wanted them to come to life. In my mind they did, long after I stopped checking the back of the wardrobe. I can close my eyes and still see it: the great waves pouring into the room where Eustace was hating the world, overwhelmed by everything in it. Lewis wasn’t wrong about that part.
The second set of drawings that come to life (and to the rescue) feature in The Box of Delights by John Masefield. Later the book, but first the BBC television version from the 1980s. With lovely Patrick Troughton, who once described stage acting as “shouting in the evening”. His hushed performance as Cole Hawlings (even when he was shouting) and his crinkly, steady eyes were their own reassurance and comfort for the soul afraid. I escaped with him from the worst of Thatcher’s Britain, and my doubts about the very church that is saved in the book: we walked together into an Alpine painting on the wall of an English parlour, a sketch on a napkin in a dungeon, the glowing jeweled musical box of children’s television itself.
These kinds of stories – Mercurius “coming to life”, someone’s survival being threatened then affirmed via images in which may be taken a quasi-religious refuge – are not intended to be histories of what happened. Instead, they are more like histories of the human mind as it tries to understand its own experience via consciousness that can indeed feel like a suddenly deluged storm scene overspilling its frame. The sea walls will not always hold. The mind can move and cut and thrust in any direction; it has seeming power, at once so immensely generative and containing the seeds of all destruction. The Flood is there, as are visions of the flaming sword and the angel that guards the Tree of Life in Eden.
Such images are amongst the earliest we seem to have. They are encoded at a genetic level, as if each of our cells held a core or root collection of Live Photos, always in motion in our mind’s eye. Perhaps that’s why the feature on iPhone is so wistfully beguiling. Any any rate, it arrived just in time to capitalize on the global delight at Harry Potter and its world of interactive, living pictures: where, whether painted, photographed or printed in a newspaper, captured representations of people become characters in themselves, and may be for those so captured even a stay against death itself in small but significant ways. They continue to have circumscribed forms of life and agency long after the passing fact of physical demise has registered, the ink dried on the moment.
It’s not that these kinds of images are living templates for the future based on the past (though their stories may capture the dynamic nature of actions and consequences; there may be a moral in the tale). In fact, when we treat them as such, stare into their mirror too long and take them literally in the wrong way, that is when we swamp our minds, risk sending our own flood waters rampaging out over the world leaving, invariably, wreckage in our wake. Our images are the visual echoes of our mind. To believe so fiercely in what is given back to us is in this way is to stand too much on one particular reflection of our own magic as a species. It’s a short step from that power of the mind to other, murkier kinds of envisaging; to claiming foolish dominion over the world and all life in it, which now must be made in our image. The damage then is animal, environmental. And human too: we lose our minds, we lose track of what we like to call our ‘souls’.
When we dwell instead on images as containers of stories, the kind of creative and beneficial effect on the heart is akin to learning to breathe under the surface of the burgeoning river; learning to live on the flood tide. There’s a whole ecology of previously unknown life down there. In time we can come to know it, and how it leads to the ocean.
Whatever the details of our stories and images – whatever they contain and channel, including violence, pain, and sorrow – what we do with the force of mind expressing its experience matters. We may be frightened by the power we have. Indeed when we are stressed or aroused in any of the deeply instinctual ways (including the erotic), it may seem, feel, ‘other’ than us. It may appear that something is happening to us as the water levels inside rise in response to whatever is going on; as emotion brims over the edges of our ‘normal’ experience (which is typically governed by the evidence of other, more easily physically located senses than the mind). No wonder we assume at such times that the products of our minds are not something for which we can ultimately take responsibility: they’re so impersonally strange to us, even as they are also so recognisably and personally dramatic: the devised works of external agents – eternal agents – universal beings, primeval forces, that take us over. Call them gods and angels. Call them archetypes or saints. Call them whatever you must.
Buddhist perspective on this goes one stage further. The fundamental idea is that all of this is a result of our perception in the first place. It’s not so much that our minds flood – regularly or occasionally – and cast us up with the rest of the jetsam on the shores of this or that tale (evidence, ultimately, of the displeasure of the heavens). It’s more that the nature of reality itself is flood to us perceiving; and that the nature of consciousness in response is story. Our minds don’t see things clearly; and we can’t know them fully. What we regard as ‘normal’ is the vague collection of reassuring tales we’re telling ourselves about the world (the ones we learned and have improvised upon) in order to try and contain and constrain the surging waters all around us. Reality, as we know it and make it, is a vital metaphor. We choose our stories then go and live inside them.
You can work with any story to some degree, but not all stories are created equal. The vaunting, possibly insecure claim of the famous film title, ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told’, speaks to the messily primal nature of the Bible’s appeal as a narrative collection of records of human fear in the face of the unknown (death), and of human resilience (resurrection). The Bible works, of course, because it’s both rooted in suffering and offers hope. In that sense it’s easy to relate to, and in terms of appeal has the same starting point as the Buddha’s own story. The path begins in sorrow – we are lost in Dante’s dark wood – because that’s a place everybody knows, again at a genetic, cellular level. We’re scared of the serpent for more reasons than the Devil! Our species is there in the dark wood and in the genome has all other species contained within it. And they’re afraid too, inside and outside of us. In this sense, all species have knowledge of self and world, of good and evil, even if it’s only fight or flight and the yearnings of instinct: I want this, I don’t want that.
We seem to be looking for something. A sense of an ending? A sense of the endless? Perhaps both are tricks of the mind, potential tales that might be told as temporary stays against the flood of unknown everything. Seeing how much we construct our own fictions – especially the ones that are meant to save and redeem us – is profoundly uncomfortable. Even within the ways in which the Buddhist tradition tends to conceive of and express the possibility of a personal liberation apart from all external agency (lovers, gods and saviours) – in how we try to come to terms with the living idea of freedom within dualistic minds – we tell a story around “Enlightenment” that has a beginning, a middle, and at least a sort of end (even if we sensibly hedge and say this is merely a crossable horizon); a story that helps us make some sense: to ourselves, to others coming later. Whether that narrative of observed impermanence - in the light of which we might choose to live for the benefit of all life - represents a purely generous impulse or is the subtlest, cleverest form of desperation still in the face of the fleeting and the unknown, what matters is that we’re taking part in something essentially elusive. There is no essence to our reality, and that is its and our essential nature. The end! (The beginning!)
From our perspective, it’s easy enough to assume this is the nature of all processes and apparent things born of energy and matter (including the ones we haven’t seen), precisely because impermanence already colours the experience of our own consciousness. And consciousness, so far as we know, is finally a manifestation of energy, whether you think (as I do not) it’s immanent in the universe (which panpsychism suggests) or arises and is focussed only for a time in passing vehicles like us, based on the odd matter that makes up big brains residing in appropriately wired host bodies, in conditions that can support the biochemistry behind organic life. And yet we also know reality is not actually centred on human consciousness, perception, and experience. Training ourselves thoroughly out of believing that it is seems to be the heart of experiential liberation, at least for practical Buddhist purposes. When you do that, the tradition says, something new happens within consciousness. Buddhists aren’t the only ones to have figured that out (or at least surmised it), but we have available to us, I think, a uniquely targeted and focussed lineage of explicit training in this regard.
A late flowering love for science, especially the science of genetics and evolution by natural selection, has given a glimpse of the potentially verifiable “truth” of that basic proposition to this Humanities kid every bit as well as literature, art, and religion ever did. Scientific experiments may be affected by the human beings watching, but that doesn’t disqualify science’s deeply noble intent to strive to understand squarely what is and is not the case at every level, assuming a constructive incompleteness all along as it goes. If we’re open to the “experience” of not knowing this necessarily implies, if we relax around it, the scientific method too can confirm and comfort us in elusiveness. The electron microscope’s picture of the double helix strand, the ultrasound scan of an embryo, the fossil record written in the rocks like tablets of clay: these images are alive inside all of us. As is the image nowadays of our blue earth floating yet tethered to life somehow in the vastness. These are our icons now.
All of which is a very roundabout way to say thank you, Twitter. Thank you, brilliant Anglican priest who trained where my family went on holiday soon after my father died, and who used to be a pop star back when I was watching and reading my way through grief and wonder. Thank you, wonderful, sometimes splendidly poky writer of superlative tales that enthrall the heart and mind with daemon voices; father of Lyra, respecter of wild things, of the witches and bears inside us. And thank you, bonkers Saint Mercurius! Who quickens the soul to strange wonder. And thank you for reading.
