Disappointed Mouras

THE DISENCHANTMENT OF GROWING UP STORYLESS - Part 2

Jun 09, 2023

Symbols

On the other hand, I've been fascinated by symbols since I was a child, and like all human beings, I've always created and destroyed symbols. Around the age of six, I remember looking, crying with emotion, at an archaeological site in Mértola where people were working, clearing away the earth and dust. I wanted to be an archaeologist, to dig deep and discover languages, stories and memories. I was also fascinated by fossils, having a mother who was part biologist, part geologist, who was amazed "just" to look at the rock strata. "Just look at those strata, a million years condensed into mere centimetres," she used to tell me whenever we walked. Rocks also have languages, stories and memories, though not confined to the human domain, I've recalled ever since.

And then there's art, cave or contemporary, complex or simple, in all its multiplicity of expressions. I always liked drawing, so I did it everywhere, literally everywhere: walls, furniture, floor, sand or tree bark. And I drew everything: memories, legacies, worries, imaginations or stories. So going to art school seemed like a good idea. However, when I started "learning" to draw, studying all the techniques and planning the creation, everything disappeared. Suddenly, I couldn't draw anymore. Abruptly, there were right and wrong drawings, ways to hold the pencils correctly and layers upon layers of mediums and techniques. My expression was silenced and I remained almost ten years without drawing anything, least of all from the Soul. It seemed that a source of water had dried up inside me. I could perform the technical aspects, but in a disconnected way.

While at college, graduating in graphic design, I once again took refuge in the mind, that familiar and apparently controllable place. Despite everything, some subjects brought me emotional solace, such as gestalt psychology, symbolic reasoning or history of traditional Portuguese culture, to name a few. Design ended up being one of the routes I integrated in order to travel the symbolic path. Deep symbolic power had always resonated with me, as each symbol is a living, sentient entity that carries energy and possibilities for transience and transmutation. In 2009, fourteen years later, I wove it all together with the Serpente da Lua (EN: Moon Serpent) personal project. The symbolic thread was mature enough to emerge with intuition, ritual, earth and cycles in a project to reconnect the body and places to the origins of feminine mysteries.

Now twenty-five years have passed and, more than ever, the symbolic mind and heart are awake in me. They resonate through my inner and outer life, fragmenting and breaking down what is assumed, and recognising the power of creation at the threshold of modern western normative culture. After this time, I can now understand that designing the tool that brought me here, the design I had denied for so long, was indeed fundamental. The creation of patterns and rhythms, visual or verbal, artistic expression and places are primary and fundamental.

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This book and its stories are an expression of all these places. It is an imagined and creative fabling of tales of place and bone, according to the ancestral perspective of deep history. Some of these stories came to me through dreams that I then ventured into telling and writing. Others were imagined recreations of various mythical elements, from tales of the places of this territory with their native symbolism, to fables derived from other tales such as Little Red Riding Hood (in The Red Cloak) or Cinderella (in Lucifera).

These tales and book weren't woven in a linear or logical analysis, the one the left hemisphere of the brain likes so much. The invitation is to bring the non-linear perception of these words as a roadmap along this chthonic and fractal journey, in an integration between the linguistic, logical and linear left side with the undervalued right hemisphere. As Daniel J. Siegel, clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and founding co-director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center, says in the preface of the book "Psyche's Veil":

“When we try to see the nonlinearity in the world, the left is blind but the right comes alive. (...) the left loves certainty while the right relishes the unknown. (...) the human mind’s ability to comprehend reality is constrained by the neural circuitry of perception. When we only see through the linear lens of the left side, we come up with a cause-effect set of explanations of a limited and linguistically delineated world. We can widen our receptivity to the world as it is by actively inviting a different mode of perception: the nonlinear, holistic, imagery-based, somatic, sensual and affective world of the right hemisphere.”

Chaos, Complexity & Fractals

Stories are one of the fundamental tools for working with valuable complexity, with all its living and emerging paradoxes. The paradox present in these stories and book is that they're based on a living, tangled and dynamic kaleidoscope, which enables a convergence towards integrity. Remember that complexity is not complication, and that its opposite is not simplicity, but reductionism, as Nora Bateson points out.

We start from the principle that we are porous, without any clear boundaries between us and the other. This is an obvious challenge to rational logic, which has such difficulty in the face of extreme complexity, while the non-linear and synthetic style is intrepid and courageous in this context.

It's important that we bring in some outlines of non-linearity as a framework to understand how stories relate to intuition, complexity, and creativity.

As Terry Marks-Tarlow refers in her book “Psyche’s Veil”: “Nonlinear dynamics represents the science of change, and offers metaphors and models closer to embodied experience (...) Nonlinear science specializes in facets of nature that are idiosyncratic, spontaneous, irregular, emergent, discontinuous and unpredictable.” There are three areas of contemporary Western science relevant to the purpose of this book: chaos theory, complexity theory and fractal geometry. As Marks-Tarlow puts it, chaos theory grounds us in the inevitable tumult of discontinuities and the limited predictability of life. For its part, complexity theory reveals how development and creative change self-organise, spontaneously emerging at the edge of chaos; while fractal geometry detects complex patterns of the whole as they extend through the parts of a system, including paradoxical boundaries that are simultaneously open and closed, bound and unbounded. Taken together, these sciences model and express in modern Western language what Indigenous peoples, artists and poets have known all along: the deep and mysterious systemic interpenetration between self, the world and others.

The Invitation

The invitation of this book is not predictable, of simple cause and effect relationships, because here the whole is not exactly the sum of the parts. The fractal and kaleidoscopic dimension in which we now move opens the door to non-linear systems, where interdependent parts contribute to the whole in a multiplying way, and simple cause and effect relationships break down. Through non-linearity we open a direct bridge to the ongoing complexity of life. As Marks-Tarlow says, everyday logic, whereby we use left-brain thinking to separate and understand experience, discerning cause and effect to mentally calculate our next step, is both linear and reductive. The journey in Cosmic-Cthonic Cartography implies that we cannot separate people, landscapes or relationships at any level, either literally or symbolically, without destroying their wholeness and integrity, for the dynamic metamorphosis and transformation essential to life always occurs organically and fractally, in a non-linear rule, in contrast to the linear exception.

The Offering

The narrative of these tales takes place in an archaic time, where the animals still speak and the "other" is within the reach of sacred dialogue, because they are not yet demonised. They're tales of landscapes where women haven't been drastically forced to forget their sovereignty and haven't been raped, abducted or taken by force. These tales counter the hagiographies, the stories of saints, where the sacred is exclusively anthropomorphized and only in human dialogue, which creates a monoculture of the transcendent limited to the myth of the male hero. Here we walk deliberately into a feminine and chthonic mythic landscape, in visceral intimacy with the sacred depths of the earth, in an immanent pilgrimage of catabasis, the ancestral descent into the subterranean sacred worlds that comprise the geography of death. The Tales of the Serpent and the Moon therefore follow the profound principles of shamanic and animistic living.

These living stories were offered to me, I offered them to my daughters and now to those who read them.

Why are these tales important now?

INTRO, tale list and chapter references.