solitude

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Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.

Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism: they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet ~

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The vision of the center of this mandala beleaguered me in the same night when I completed Kabeirô -- and I even was told its name: Worlds within Worlds.

Instantly, I sensed a profound aversion to both the image and the name, and for about one week, I refused to start with the work on the mosaic.

Then, one sleepless night, I had another vision which was very weird: before I saw anything, I had the sensation that my body was a tremendous, overdimensioned black sphere which had a very small white sphere in its midpoint; not till then, I saw the image of the black sphere, but somehow two-dimensional (onyl the small white sphere in the center was three-dimensional), but I knew that my body -- more precisely: my whole self -- and the image were one and the same, and that something with it was quite wrong.

Then, after some frightening minutes or hours (I really don't know), another image arose: a white sphere, much smaller than the black one, and with a small black sphere in its middle. This white sphere was outside of my body, I only could see but not sense it, and the feeling of something quite wrong got stronger, and very scary.

The third image which arose after another frightening minutes or hours, was exactly the same I already had seen after I had completed Kabeirô: Taigitu, the symbol of life itself as well as the symbol of the polarity which forms the basis of everything in this wonderful and appalling world.

Not until then, when Taigitu arose, I understood what was wrong with the first two images: the black and the white sphere were meant to compose ONE sphere: a complete whole INSIDE myself.

On the following day, I started working on the mosaic, for I was completely aware of the NECESSITY of creating it. I just had one wish: that I was allowed to find a second name for the mandala which was concordant with my longing for staying integrated in the world of Greek mythology.

I worked on the mosaic from sunrise to sunset, and late in the night, I finally got to know the name I could welcome from the bottom of my heart: Kybele.

Kybele (English: Cybele), the great God mother of the mountain Ida (Latin: Magna Mater), was a goddess who originally was deified in Phrygien, together with her lover Attis, and later also in ancient Greece and the Roman Empire. The cult of Kybele and Attis was -- similar as the cult of Mithras -- a widespread mystery cult up to the Late Classic Period. The whole legend concerns apparently the gender dualism; it explains the origin of the world by an interaction of the male and the female element of the universe: the heavenly Attis must inseminate the mother earth Kybele with its blood so that the world can arise.

The mandala is not yet completed; I suppose that it's going to be quite huge and that I'll work on it for a couple of weeks, but I don't know definitely... -- well, we will see.

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