Persephone Series, Part II, Additional Images 1975-76 / 2019

The Persephone Series

Part II

Additional Photographs 
1975-76 / digital versions, 2019   

Introduction

The 40 photographs you will be seeing below are digital versions of original silver gelatin prints made in 1975 and 1976 for my Persephone Series project. They are being resurrected here with the intention of complimenting and extending the 13 images I included in my 2011 online project, The Persephone Series.  If you have not seen the online project, and if you have not read the introductory texts to that project, I encourage you to do so before viewing these additional images.  

I strongly feel that all 52 images need to be seen together--as a visual whole--in order to gain the fullest appreciation of what for me was--and continues to be--a most important project.  Similarly, the introductory texts to the 2011 online project will provide you with important background information that will help you gain a more complete understanding of these additional images.  

After viewing the photographs below, I have provided some additional thoughts I'd like to share with you, including how, in January 2019, I came to the decision of publishing this Addendum to the initial online version of the project.  ~  Welcome to The Persephone Series, Part II.

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The Persephone Series

Part II

Additional Photographs
1975-76 / 2019
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1. Gloria is pulling a tissue from the back of Shaun's pajamas (It's January, 1976, and everyone in our house has become sick)

2.  Shaun and Jessica, entangled in their play fantasies

3.  Persephone, bathing in dark waters, is startled by Hades who is about to abduct her to serve as Queen of the Underworld 

4.  Demeter is trying to fight off Hades as he tries to take Persephone, her beloved daughter, away from her






5.  A visual fantasy: Persephone's nocturnal journey down to Hades' "Land of Death" 






6.  Prisoners in the Underworld laboring--in darkness--to push a water-soaked log up a mountain.

7.  A prisoner being held captive in an Underworld dungeon

8.  Persephone, locked behind bars, in Hades' Kingdom  

9.  The winged feet of Hades, who is looking down upon Persephone, his captive Queen

10.  Persephone, half-buried in the dark sands of the Land of Death, her vision obstructed by the hand of destiny

11.  Persephone, struggling, surrounded by dark figurative shadows 

12.  Hades, behind his totem-animal, confused and frightened by his aggressions toward his Queen

13.  A anguished portrait of Persephone in the Underworld

14.  A Fantasy Landscape:  the Land of Death,

15.  A Fantasy Landscape: Winter, the season of Persephone's yearly descent into the Underworld

16.  A Grave-like hole in the Earth: Persephone's entrance for here yearly decent into the Land of Death 

17.  Fantasy Tableau for the Persephone Story (Front porch, with toys and plants)

18.  Soldiers, in the Land of Death, re-capturing an escaped prisoner

19.  An Underworld prisoner being explosively illuminated by an arrow of light






20.  A Fantasy Landscape: Persephone's longing to be reunited with her mother upon Earth

21.  Hades, in the Underworld, carrying his weapon of light

22.  Fantasy Image for the Persephone Story: Hades, walking among his prisoners held in cages

23.  Fantasy Image for the Persephone Story : the struggle, with animal-like instincts, to possess and control

24.  Persephone, Queen of the Land of Death, being held down by Hades 

25.  Hades, at the gates of his Kingdom, in which Time and Light and Darkness are of another order

26.  Shaun looking into the Underworld through veils covering a window 






27.  Persephone, with her protective shield; and Hades--lurking in the background--keeping watch over her






28.  Shaun being consoled by his mother after an argument with his sister 






29.  Jessica experiencing the impact of bacterial mutation i

30.  Shaun, dressed in his warrior uniform

31.  Persephone, in the Underworld, waiting for Spring to arrive on Earth--when she can once again return to her mother

32.  The struggles and transformations of sibling rivalry, being held in check by their mother

33.  Persephone, reunited at last with her mother

34.  Shaun, behind the multiple veils of Persona  






35.  Hades, King of the underworld, crowning his Bride, Persephone






36.  A Visual Fantasy for the Persephone Story

37.  A young bather, dreaming in water 






38.  Shaun, swinging on the front porch with friends

39.  Jessica playing with her magnetic letters on the metal cabinet

40  Shaun and Jessica, on a full-moon night, embarking together on their journey into the mythic realms of the Underworld

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Some additional thoughts 

I decided to bring these 40 rather dark and emotionally charged images made in 1975-76 out of their storage box and into the light of day in January 2019 while I working on The Bathers project.  I had remembered a couple of photographs I made of our kids, and my wife Gloria, in our old bathtub in Milwaukee at the time I was working on the Persephone Series (though I had no idea at that time about Persephone and the Greek mythologies associated with the seasons).  I had wanted to experiment with flash-off-the-camera (a new technique for me) in addition to multiple-exposure-in-the-camera and local solarization of the silver gelatin prints, which I had used in two previous projects (click here), and I decided to try using my family members--Gloria, and our kids--plus their neighborhood friends as my subject matter for the experiment.  

As I looked through the storage box that contained well over 100 silver gelatin prints--each mounted on a dark gray mat board--from the Persephone Series, I did eventually find one image (#37 above) that was appropriate for the Bather project.  But more importantly, as I looked through the complete collection of Persephone images I was struck by the impact of the totality of their visual power, their intuitive-creative energy, their unconscious unveilings of archetypal-mythic dramas, and most importantly, the personal meanings which the complete collection of images held for me.  

I had created those images over 43 years ago! and yet I had included only 13 of them when I made the online version of The Persephone Series in 2011.  Now I was now seeing this much larger body of work with fresh eyes.  I had been a parent when I made those photographs; Jessica was one year old at the time, and Shaun was 3 1/2 years old.  ~  I was a grandfather now!  As I write this introduction (in January, 2019) Jessica is now a mother--her son, River, is five-and-a-half years old; and Shaun is a father--his daughter, Claire, is almost four years old.  (Sometimes, when I am playing with our grandchildren, memories and images will flash before me of playing with Shaun and Jessica when they were our grandchildren's ages;  and certain images from the Persephone Series have flashed through my mind as well.)

*

The thirteen images included in the 2011 online version of The Persephone Series were chosen for their dramatic visual character and especially for their narrative relevance to the Greek myths associated with the stories of Persephone and her mother Demeter, and Hades, King of the Underworld, the Land of Death.  I was very new at making blog versions of my photography projects in 2011, so it may have been a matter of convenience to keep the number of images--and the length of the texts--in those early projects to a minimum.  Perhaps I thought, in 2011, that the Persephone images were too intense, too strange to include more than 13 of them in the online version of the project.  

That, however, is no longer the case now.  When I recently viewed the complete set of Persephone prints I realized that many of the images I had not included in the online project were equally important and no less visually exciting than the 13 images I had used.  Those images initially left out needed to be seen as well. 

*

The 40 images I have chosen for this Addendum to the online project provide a broader and more deeply articulated visual-psychological context for both the archetypal-mythic narrative that belies the imagery.   And, simultaneously, the additional images unveil with greater clarity the very real personal-human dramas that existed between my wife and I, and our children, and their neighborhood playmates.  

Back in 1975-76, as I spontaneously-intuitively photographed the children playing together, I literally and imaginatively entered into their fantasy world as both a participant in their dramas and a witness.  I was able to observe in close proximity some of their intense and oftentimes aggressive interactions with each other.  Quite palpable feelings emerged in the midst of their play that had to do, it seemed to me, with such things as sibling rivalry, the bond between mother and daughter, the longing and terror associated with separation, and the anxiety of being dominated, held captive, confined, restricted.  Later, when Jessica was hospitalized, Gloria and I were overwhelmed with feelings that we might loose our daughter--that she might die.  (In my online Persephone project I have provided some detailed descriptions of our experiences of Jessica in the hospital)   

20.  Persephone's longing to be reunited with her mother

 *     

I have included titles under each of the 40 photographs.  If you choose to read them, you will note that I have tried to use the words to point toward both the mythic and the personal narratives that the work as a whole addresses.  I have intentionally titled some of the images so that the words will pull the contemplator out of the extraordinary world of the Land of Death's mythic time and narrative, and into the world of real time, of real children playing and interacting with each other inside our house or in our backyard.  For example, in some titles I have referred to images of our son Shaun as Hades, and our daughter Jessica as Persephone and my wife Gloria as Demeter (Persephone's mother); and in other titles I have referred to images of Shaun as Shaun, and images of Jessica as Jessica, and images of Gloria as Gloria. 

I find this aspect of the titling quite interesting.  Images which function as symbols can "mean" on many levels simultaneously, depending on the capacity and willingness of the contemplator to open to a symbol's vast possibilities.  They can function as descriptions of real-life individuals and activities as well as images of transpersonal characters living in the timeless realms of fantasy, and the archetypal worlds of mythology--images that have sprung up from what Carl Jung termed the Collective Unconscious. 

Words have power.  They can direct us inside, to the Imaginal world--that world which is the origin place of symbols, and words can also direct us to meanings of the outer world.  The majority of the 40 images included here delve deep into the intuitive space between the unconscious realm of collective archetypal patterns and the everyday world of "real" personal acts, issues and emotional experiences.  Indeed, this is the extraordinary power of symbolic photographs: their ability to merge both interior and exterior realities into a single, visual, psychological-spiritual Unitary reality. 

* 

In this regard it is worth noting here that when I made the original 1975-76 Persephone photographs in Milwaukee I was still under the spell of my fascination with the writings and ideas of depth psychologist, C.G. Jung.  His remarkable knowledge associated with medieval alchemy, mythological archetypes, the symbol and, later, his theoretical writings on synchronicity were at the very center of my 1972 MFA written thesis required by the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.  (click here to see a summary of my thesis ideas) 

I carried those Jungian ideas into my first years of teaching, at Georgia State University, Atlanta, where I taught photography with John McWilliams from the fall of 1972 through the spring of 1975.  Then, in the fall of 1975 my family and I moved to Milwaukee where I was asked to create a photography program for the Art Department at the University of Wisconsin.  It was during our first winter in Milwaukee that we all got very sick and Jessica nearly died from a mutating bacteria.    

Between the years 1975 and 1987 my teaching continued to be influenced primarily by Jungian ideas.  Then in the summer of 1987 I met Gurumayi Chidvilasananda, a Meditation Master and the living head of the Siddha Yoga Path.  After experiencing her grace in a series of extraordinary life-transforming encounters, my creative process and my teaching gradually shifted to include both  Jungian ideas and the wisdom I discovered in the ancient yogic scriptures, and even more importantly, the modern-day teachings of Gurumayi and her Guru, Swami Muktananda.  

Gradually my creative process in photography and my Siddha Yoga practices merged into one.  I realized that Gurumayi's grace, or Shakti--the creative and transforming power of the entire universe--had become the most powerful and integral part of my creative process.  Just after completing the Persephone Series online project, I encountered her grace multiple times, in 2011, during a trip to Turkey.  Those experiences initiated a an ongoing series of new projects entitled The Sacred Art Photograph Projects.   

*

As I was working on this text for the Persephone Series, Part II photographs, I happened (synchronistically) to read an article published in a Siddha Yoga monthly publication, Darshan, in which Swami Muktananda (also lovingly referred to by others as "Baba") gave several responses to questions asked of him by Siddha Yoga students.  I found his comments about "seeing" and "perception" particularly relevant to this project and have decided to offer a few excerpts from his responses as the Epilogue to this project.  (The Hindu word Darshan is derived from the Sanskrit, and it has been defined by one Siddha Yoga Swami--see my Afterword to The Bathers project--as "perception that takes place in the Heart, in the space of the innermost Self." 

Epilogue

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The words of Swami Muktananda

The universe is just as you see it.  It does not have any independent existence.  Take the case of an artist who paints a canvas with one set of colors and one brush.  He paints all the different objects on the same canvas with the same set of colors and with the same set of brushes.  He may paint a . . . . human being, a river or whatever else comes to his mind. . .  The painter has only portrayed his own imagination on the canvas, whereas a spectator distinguishes different forms that have emerged from the same imagination.

As long as you do not perceive the Truth, you look upon the universe as diverse and manifold.  When one reaches a certain state in meditation by the grace of the Guru one doe not perceive different objects any longer.  One perceives only the same Self, one's own Self, pervading everywhere.

Baba then quotes the words of 17th century Hindu poet-saint, Tukaram: 

"This world is not world.  This world is in fact supreme Brahman, the highest Lord.  This world is His expansion, this world is nothing but the light of the Self, this world is nothing but the supreme Being."  

Then Baba concludes like this: 

The world is as you see it.  What you see outside is a creation of your own vision.  If your vision became divine the world would not appear to you as it appeared before. . . The truth is that this universe is a play, a sport, of the infinite Being.  Published in Darshan, issue #48, "Doorways to the Infinite." 

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This project was posted on my blog's Welcome Page
on  February 2, 2019.  

Other Related Projects and Links

The Persephone Series  1975-76  (The first online version of 2011)

Symbol and the Symbolic Photograph

The Bathers  February, 2019

Welcome Page  to The Departing Landscape website which includes the complete hyperlinked listing of my online photography projects dating back to the 1960's, my resume, contact information, and more.

A technical note:
These 2019 digital versions of the Persephone photographs were made by scanning the 7.5" square silver gelatin silver prints and adjusting the digital files with Photoshop software tools.  These digitally adjusted and refined images are more visually articulate in nearly every detailed way compared to the original silver prints.  In general they are much richer in tonal depth, and they are certainly much more luminous.   And since I have been able to make the digital prints larger (15" square) the black spaces are more open and spacious, more palpably alive with presence.  Their greater physicality has also amplified the psychological-emotional-dramatic aspects of the imagery.  Without question I prefer the digital versions of the Persephone photographs, but of course they could not have been made without the original silver gelatin prints I made in 1975-76.

The Persephone Series is part of a triad of related projects created between 1974 and 1977.  Click here to see the other projects.

Bathers : part 6 : WATER photographs

  The Bathers 
  Part 6, WATER Photographs 

1.  "My grandson, River, wading in a puddle"         

click here

  WATER Photographs : The Complete Project Titles                                                                                                                                               

     1.   Introduction & Puddle Photographs       4. The Brook : Water Photographs        7. "Rain" and "Misc. Water Photographs"

     2.  The Water Mirror in the Temple               5. The Lake, Ponds, & Rivers                 8. Water & Death, Fog & Snow

     3.  Falling Water                                           6. The Bathers                                         Epilogue

Introduction

This, the sixth part of the WATER Photographs project will focus on the theme of bathing, wading, swimming, and in general human immersion in water.  Bathing is one of the most common visual tropes in Western art history. (See this recent article which provides a brief art historical overview.)  As a metaphor or symbol, bathing imagery has the potential of relating to religious and even alchemical purification rituals; indeed, bathing--immersion in water--is known to have palpable creative power or energy which can invoke real psychological and  spiritual transformation.  

In the Christian church, it is said that baptism--which can take the form of a mere sprinkling of holy water on the head, or an entire immersion of the body in water--purifies the soul of the initiate.  

In the Islamic, Jewish and Native American traditions, ritual bathing or washing is a practice intended to cleanse (purify) the body of the worshiper in preparation for his or her silent conversation with God in deep, intimate prayer.

The yogic saints teach that the grace of God is being showered upon us constantly, and, in those extraordinary moments when our hearts are fully open, when we can receive this blessing without reservation and absorb its Shakti, or divine energy into our entire being, we will be transformed, purified by that energy.

Wading in water is a form of immersion that can manifest transforming experiences especially in one who "wades deeply," that is to say, one who is immersed no only in water but in deep concentrated states of Mind and Heart.  Over the years I have made many photographs of people experiencing water in various ways, and wading is a common theme that runs through my creative process, as you will see in the pictures I have included in this project.  Because wading is so often performed in public places this subject has been readily available to me; and, for whatever reason, clearly I am attracted to photographing people who are noticeably introspective when they are wading or bathing in water. 

*   

For example: my photograph above shows my grandson River dressed in a red coat and rubber boots wading in a large puddle in the meadow path just beyond our backyard.  As he splashed his way through the puddle and stirred up the mud under the water, the image of an animal-like figure manifested in the water--a kind and playful image, perhaps of a dog or cat.  River's reflection in the water falls between the the animal's two eyes and then extends down to nearly touching the animal's nose or mouth.  By all appearances, it seems as if the water (and the Imaginal animal) has enjoyed River's playful and yet contemplative presence and has warmly welcomed him with a smile on its face.  

This puddle-wading image is, for me, one of those gifts that comes with the grace of my creative process.  I did not see the animal in the water.  And just now, as I look more carefully at the image, the puddle suggests to me a mother's womb--an intimate, nurturing place full of warm, sustaining, loving water--which has not only lovingly embraced the contemplative child, but his "animal friend" as well.

  

Bathing, purification, transformation

In a wonderful resource book entitled The Book of Symbols - Reflections on Archetypal Images, its multiple authors write about ritual baths and how they mark major life milestones such as birth, burial and marriage.  They also quote from Lyndy Abraham's book, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, who wrote:  "In medieval alchemical symbolism . . . bath, submersion, drowning and baptism are synonymous and symbolize the breaking down and cleansing of old outmoded states of being, leading to the birth of the rejuvenated illumined man."   

2.  Bathing in the Illuminated Universe"  

click here

The authors go on to write about swimming, bathing and showering in term of depth psychology--as forms "of immersion in unconscious forces that can dissolve the dreamer's cramped outlook and bring the possibility of change."

The concept of immersion can of course be considered in many other terms as well.  Later below I will introduce the idea of immersing one's self in three forms of yogic practices, including the recitation of sacred yogic texts.  It is said the sounds and rhythms of ancient Sanskrit words and versus carry tremendous creative energy, or grace, which can transform those who becomes deeply immersed in them.

Bathing and dissolution in deep primal waters 

For now, however, we will return to Gaston Bachelard and his poetic study of water and dreams.  He writes about immersion, in his "Introduction" to Water and Dreams, An Essay On the Imagination of Matter, the kind of immersion that brings one "to their destiny;" the kind of immersion that takes the form of merging with and disappearing into . . . not only "deep" water, but also "far horizons," "infinity," and "the destiny of water:"

 To disappear into deep water or to disappear toward a far horizon, 

to become a part of depth or infinity, such is the destiny of man 

that finds its image in the destiny of water.

3.  " A Bather (and two buoys) approaching the far horizon"   The Lake Series, Collage     

click here

To bathe, to wade, to swim or float in flowing water . . . is, according to Bachelard, related not only to the process of purification but also to dissolution and death.  He writes: "In his inmost recesses, the human being [who] shares the destiny of flowing water . . . dies every minute; something of his substance is always falling away."

Bachelard explores at great length Shakespeare's character Ophelia in the play Hamlet.  In her deep despair Ophelia ("incapable of her own distress") apparently drowns herself in a brook.  Her young, innocent body is found--lying still, silent--below the surface of a brook's flowing water.  One poet who writes of Ophelia imagines her long hair swaying gently in sympathy with the water's continuous rhythmic movements.

"Primal poetry" says Bachelard, allows us to "taste our inner destiny."  True poetry "is a function of awakening."  In the realm of the imagination, he says: "favorite images are nothing but projections of a hidden soul."

  

4.  "Persephone, bathing in dark waters, is startled  by Hades, King of the underworld" 

click here  The Persephone Series Part II

Persephone : Bathing in dark waters 

My daughter Jessica was only one year old when she nearly died in a hospital from a bacterial mutation.  That experience awakened in me something akin to a new awareness and respect for life and death.  Indeed, the experience unveiled an abundance of archetypal patterns, though I didn't recognize them until after I had completed a photography project in 1976 which involved photographing my children and their friends at play using experimental photographic techniques including multiple-exposure-in-the camera, flash-off-the-camera, and a transformative printing technique known as "local solarization" of the print.  These techniques helped me work very intuitively, on impulse, for I could not pre-visualize how these techniques would manifest as finished images.  I simply had to trust my creative process, my intuitions and the transforming power of the photographic medium and see what Imaginal fruits they would yield.  

When a friend (who was well versed in literature) looked at the completed body of photographs, he saw multiple thematic ideas within the imagery that paralleled in uncanny ways the greek myths associated with Persephone (the daughter of Demeter) who was abducted by Hades and taken to the Underworld (The Land of Death) to be his Queen.  

Apparently, I had unconsciously-intuitively dipped into what C.G. Jung termed the Collective Unconscious as I immersed myself in my children's archetypal world of play and fantasy.  See my 2011 digital online version of The Persephone Series for the entire story and a selection of 13 photographs.  And be sure to see Part II of the Persephone Series, which contains 40 additional digital Persephone images.  

Bathing in the Wisconsin River

About ten years later, in the mid 1980's, I made a photograph of Jessica holding my hand while she was enjoying the flowing waters of the Wisconsin River.  This image conjures up memories (for me) of photographs I had made of her for the Persephone Series.  And, with my recent reading of Bachelard's book, Water and Dreams, the image also invoked many of the passages in which he wrote about water and death and Ophelia.  Indeed there is a famous painting of Ophelia that Bachelard mentioned that I have seen many times in Art History books which the picture of Jessica (below) reminds me of. (click here to see the painting)

 

5.  "Jessica in the flowing waters of the Wisconsin River"  Family Life series 1985-88 

click here

6.  "Bather in the shallow waters of the Wisconsin River"  Family Life 1985-88 

click here 

Water always flows, always falls, always ends in horizontal death. 

Death associated with water is more dream-like 

than death associated with earth.
Bachelard, Water and Dreams

The soul suffers from a deficiency of material imagination.  

By grouping images and dissolving substances, water

helps the imagination in its task of de-objectifying 

and assimilating . . .  Water becomes a sort of
plastic mediator between life and death.  

Bachelard, Water and Dreams

I took both of the photographs above in the Wisconsin River in a beautiful area north of Prairie Du Sac.  I was working on a project entitled Family Life (1985-88) at the time, and I made the picture of Jessica during a camping and canoe trip I had taken with our two children, Shaun and Jessica (my wife Gloria was at home working on a graduate research paper.)  During our adventure on the Wisconsin River I nearly drowned myself when I banged my head on a tree stump hidden under the water.  The experience, though quite bloody and which left scars on my body, was life-transforming.  It awakened me to what I believe had been an unconscious death wish that I'd been carrying around deep inside my psyche that undoubtedly related to the death of my father when I was nearly ten years old.  (See Stories #5 & #18 in my essay Death, Art, Writing).

The following year, during another visit to the Wisconsin River, I took the above photograph of a man laying in the river's flowing shallow waters, enjoying the warmth of the sun.  I cannot help but associate this image with my own near-death experience in the river the year before.  Like so many others who have experienced near-death experiences, the immersion in nearly unconscious waters was--for me--like a ritual purification experience which changed my relationship to death--and my relationship to my dead father--in a profoundly deep, important way.  

It is for me worth noting here that shortly after I made the above photograph of the man in the water, I met Gurumayi Chidvilasananda (in August, 1987) who then became my meditation Master.  Without question, that first meeting with Gurumayi was the most auspicious, purifying-transformative event of my life.  It now seems to me that my entire life leading up to that meeting with her had been preparation for my experience of her divine energy which in Siddha Yoga is known as Shaktipat. (See my project Photography and Yoga.)

Novalis and his dream journey
In Bachelard book Water and Dreams - An Essay On the Imagination of Matter he mentions multiple times the writings of a young German poet, mystic, philosopher and author whose pen name was Novalis.  In one passage Bachelard noted that Novalis once referred to water as a "dampened flame."

Novalis (George Friedrich von Hardenberg) was born in 1772, and he died at the very young age of 28, in 1801.  I first learned of Novalis in the early 1980's through the poet Robert Bly, in his important book News of the Universe .  Bly cited five aphorisms by Novalis, the first one, which I will quote below, sparked my interest especially in the way that it affirmed for me the ideas (which came via C.G. Jung) about synchronicity, the symbol, and the symbolic photograph.  Novalis wrote:

The seat of the soul is where the inner world and the outer world meet. 

Where they overlap, it is in every point of the overlap. 

When Novalis was 23 or so, he fell deeply in love with with a young woman named Sophie.  Bly tells us that Novalis had what Jung would have called "an anima experience."  Bly suggests that through that experience "his whole feminine side opened up to him, as well as the richness of dreams, the mystery of transformation, and the power of night."   When Sophie died two years later, Novalis wrote Hymns to the Night, "an amazing book," says Bly, in which "all that had been ignored in Europe for centuries is praised: the unconscious, night, sleep, sexuality, and woman."

Bachelard writes at length about a dream Novalis had that involved immersion in water.  The dream seems to have been sparked by a story Novalis heard when he was a young man that involved hidden treasure and the mention of a blue flower.  Novalis was haunted by his image of the blue flower and perhaps it initiated a long, detailed dream journey, parts of which Bachelard wrote about in his book Water and Dreams - An Essay On the Imagination of Matter.

Novalis describes how his dream travels eventually takes him to a grotto.  Inside the grotto  the dreamer becomes dazzled by a mysterious light that showers down in sparks into a great marble basin.  The light is quivering with every color of the prism.  When the dreamer dipped his hand into the basin and then touched his lips to the water he felt a thrill of energy pervade his whole being.  An irresistible impulse led him to undress and bathe in the basin.

According to M. J. Hope, who wrote the book Novalis-His Life, Thoughts, and Works, this immersion in the luminous-mystic water invoked in the young dreamer images of "immersion in sunset clouds, indescribable bodily enjoyment, while a rush of quickened thought and feeling called up new and amazing images and pictures which seemed, as he gazed, not fancy, but reality.  The very element which surrounded him grew transformed into beauteous fire-maidens . . ."

Bachelard interprets the dream psychologically, like this: "the dreamer's 'uncontrollable desire to bathe' was initiated by the substance, water itself.  The water summoned the dreamer materially by virtue of a magic participation."

Bachelard continues: "The dreamer undresses and goes down into the basin.  It is only then that images come.  They emerge from [the water]; the images are born as if from a seed, from a primitive sensual reality, from a drunkenness that cannot yet be projected."

Then Bachelard quotes Novalis directly:

From all sides unknown images surged upwards, images which blended into one another to become visible beings [which surrounded the dream-bather], so that each wave of the delicious element stuck closely to him like a sweet breast.  It seemed that there was dissolved in this water a group of charming maidens who, for an instant, became corporeal again at this contact with the young man.

Bachelard comments: "It is a marvelous passage, manifesting a profoundly materialized imagination, where water, in its volume and mass, not simply in the fairy-world of its reflections, appears like . . . the liquid essence of maiden."   And later in the book Bachelard mentions: "the maidens are quickly redissolved in the element, and the dreamer, 'drunk with joy,' continues his journey without experiencing any adventure with the ephemeral maidens."   Bachelard Ch. 5  Maternal Water and Feminine Water

7.  " A young bather, dreaming in water"   from The Persephone Series II

click here

8.  "Bather,  standing in a lake, her hair wrapped in a white towel "  (Gloria, August 1969 )
click here

Everything the heart desires  
can be reduced to a water figure.
Paul Claudel, quoted by Gaston Bachelard 
Water and Dreams, Ch. 6  Purity and Purification


Water is the profound organic symbol of woman who  
can only weep about her pain and whose eyes
are easily "drowned in tears.

Gaston Bachelard (Ch. 3)  

Bachelard writes of lying quietly in a tub, a pool or a boat: "All images are absent, the sky is empty, but the movement is there, living, smooth, rhythmic, in a movement scarcely perceptible, and quite silent.  Water carries us.  Water rocks us.  Water puts us to sleep.  Water gives us back our mother."  Then he tells us that, following these reveries, other dreams will continue to give us "happiness and a taste for infinity."

"It is near water and on water that we learn to sail on clouds, to swim in the sky . . .  Water invites us on an imaginary journey . . ."

*

I will leave you with one last quote from Bachelard's Water and Dreams, a brief passage in which he gifts us with the words of Lamartine:

It seemed to me that I was swimming in pure ether

 and being engulfed by the universal ocean.  

Chapter 5:  Maternal Water and Feminine Water  

9.  "Dark, Solitary Bather emerging from light-rayed water"   Lake Series, Collage 1982 

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10.  "Bathers"   Lake Series, Collage  

click here

11.  "Two Swimmers"   Lake Series, Collage  

click here

12.  "Two Bathers Looking At  Each Other"   Lake Series, Collage  

click here

13.  "A young bather holding two dolls"   (collage)  from the Dream Portrait project

click here

14.  "A Family of Bathers"

click here

 15.  "Bather Apparition"

click here

16.  "Shaun bathing in the Wisconsin River"  Family Life 1985-88 

click here

17.  "Young Boy wading in water by a fallen tree"

from the "Images of Eden Series"  1983-84         

click here

18.  "An angel bathing in the Universal Ocean"  from Part 2 of The Angels project      

click here

19.  "A streaming-down of light, a rain of grace, a down-pour of tears . . .  
the transformation of a Bather." 

click here

*

Afterword

________________________________________________________
______________________________________

Immersing OneSelf in the Guru Gita, 

Darshan and Contemplation

__________________________________________________

One who knows the truth always bathes in the waters 
of the Guru Gita to wash away his worldly  
impurities and to become free from 
the snares of worldly existence.

Verse 157, Shri Guru Gita 

The Guru Gita is a collection of brief Sanskrit verses selected from multiple ancient yogic texts.  It is chanted every morning in Siddha Yoga Ashrams, and in the homes of Siddha Yoga students around the world.  Gurumayi's teacher, Swami Muktananda, the founder of the Siddha Yoga Path, said that the Guru Gita "is the one indispensable text" and "the King of all Mantras."  

Swami Shantananda wrote in his essay The Significance of Shri Guru Gita on the Siddha Yoga Path (posted on the Siddha Yoga Website in January, 2019)  that the practice of chanting the Guru Gita, its sacred texts and sounds, "Invokes grace, Quiets the mind, Purifies the intellect and emotions, Increases concentration, Strengthens and frees the breath . .  "  

When someone asked Swami Muktananda about the Guru Gita he said this:

The Guru Gita is the foremost among all the Gitas.  It bestows all powers and realizations.  . . .  If you continue to sing the glories of the Guru you achieve Gurubhava, or identity with the Guru.  The Guru Gita says that Gurubhava is the holiest water.  We bathe in the holy waters to purify ourselves.  For purification, we practice yoga, mediation and prayer.  Gurubhava is the best of these all.  It completely purifies the inner being at once.

*

Darshan
and 
 Contemplation

I want to close this project with a brief discussion of a Hindu word Darshan (derived from the Sanskrit) which is often used in Siddha Yoga that has special meaning for me.  Darshan more generally means "seeing" and in a more spiritual sense it means experiencing the "Light of God," the divine Presence within all the things of this world and within one's own Self.  I especially like the way Swami Shantananda put it once in an essay published on the Siddha Yoga Website.   He defined Darshan as "perception that takes place in the Heart, in the space of the innermost Self." 

As a student of Siddha Yoga, and as a photographer who is using the medium of photography as a form of yogic practice, my intention is to have the experience of Darshan--the experience of being fully immersed in what I am seeing--directly through my creative process, and through my contemplation of the images I have made--very special images, images that function for me as symbols, images that were made with grace, images radiant and overflowing with grace.    

Contemplation is a process of becoming immersed in an image alive with grace.  In a meditative-like state of absorption, the contemplator allows the grace of an image (its Shakti, its divine, creative-transforming energy) to merge into the Heart of his or her entire being.

Many of the greatest poet-saints have written of their experiences of Darshan.  Here is an excerpt from a much larger poem by an unnamed saint who "sees" the Beloved in the pain of separation, in the darkness of night, in water, in the entire cosmos:

Wherever I look, O my Beloved, I see You.

Wherever my eyes turn, they meet a mirror

In which I see the reflection of my own heart.

. . . 

You are in the pain of separation.

You are in water,

You are in the darkness of night,

Your vibration pervades the entire cosmos.

. . . 

This life, truly speaking, is only a reflection of You.

 Cited in a 1987 talk by Gurumayi published in
 Darshan, #48 : "Doorways to the Infinite"

______________________


This project was announced on my blog's Welcome Page 
on February 2, 2019   

  WATER Photographs : The Complete Project Titles                                                                                                                                               

     1.   Introduction & Puddle Photographs       4. The Brook : Water Photographs        7. "Rain" and "Misc. Water Photographs"

     2.  The Water Mirror in the Temple               5. The Lake, Ponds, & Rivers                 8. Water & Death, Fog & Snow

     3.  Falling Water                                           6. The Bathers                                         Epilogue

Related Project Links:

The Persephone Series

The Persephone Series, Part II (40 additional images)

Death, Art, Writing  (see in particular stories #5, 17 and 18)

Photography and Yoga

Welcome Page  to The Departing Landscape website which includes the complete hyperlinked listing of my online photography projects dating back to the 1960's, my resume, contact information, and more.