Lady Mesmerlaine, who has in her not only the sorcery of Circe and the unabashed sexuality of Manet’s Olympia but the disarming fairytale charm of Thumbelina, sits astride a gigantesque shaving brush handle as if on a combination barstool, horse saddle and throne. She dreams of soaring on a magic carpet woven from the beards of ancient sages high over the brazen crowned head of a tyrannous king whose flushed-faced mob of followers to a deity would appear as but clusters of poison berries.
Protruding from the gigantesque shaving brush handle, standing erect, is a big long screw around the shank of which grows thick and wild the pubic hair of an ogre. But it’s hard to tell. What clings upside-down below Lady Mesmerlaine’s lovely pedestaled derrière could just as well be a sea anemone which mimics spaghetti.
Her totemic broomstick in its pataphysical assemblage gives a sly nod and twist to Belgian conceptual artist Marcel Broodthaers’ Casserole and Closed Mussels.
Descended a long and winding way from the giant and mighty Polyphemus who once upon a time yearned for the beautiful sea nymph Galatea, is Nobo the cyclops, whose lone eye sits in its socket like a cueball in a high stakes game of pool which, badly mis-struck, spun off to the side and dropped from the luminous realm of ancient myth into a dingy pocket of this dark world.
Clutching his head with his eye clenched shut, Nobo stumbled into the lair of Lady Mesmerlaine, a single unbroken tear illumined by the dying golden light streaming down to his chest, turning clear and hardening into fishing line.
It didn’t take long for Lady Mesmerlaine to realize what a gift had fallen into her lap. She could now initiate an alchemy process by extracting blood from the still glowing viscera of this mythic creature, the elusive nourishment needed to vitalize something she has long dreamed of producing, a Medusanal Carbuncle, possibly the most seductively dangerous gemstone in the world, simultaneously petrifying and launching into transcendence any who gaze at it.
O Cyclops with your hourglass-shaped unit of eye, nose and mouth, if that mass was dug into and pulled out, and a hand balled into a fist was shoved into the dark gaping hole and then slowly opened and held there until all the skin and flesh melted away - the emergent skeleton revealed in a burst of adrenaline to be a special key - and the forearm was grabbed hold of and that special key was pushed in as far as it can go and then despite the excruciating pain was sharply turned, no doubt there would be a colossal black out, all in proximity to you collapsing and sucked into the void, but only then might the way be opened to another dimension, the mind flooded with light, the third eye exploding in sunlike brilliance.
Lady Mesmerlaine raised her right hand with her middle finger arched into a hook. With his head pulled down, his chin pinned to his chest, Nobo stepped forward and stopped, silent and still as a statue. Suddenly with a piercing cry Lady Mesmerlaine as if gripping a sickle swiped down so hard you’d think she slit the veil of Maya. Startled, as if catapulted from his neck, Nobo’s head sprang up, his eye opening wide, and from navel to sternum he split open.
As time passed the success of Lady Mesmerlaine was unclear. Nobo’s pelvis had become a semicircular stage for some bizarre symbiotically infused ritual. He parted his labial jellyfish garment like mini-theater curtains. The hollow of his torso had become a vessel for metamorphic transformation, a protean morass containing germ and seed of forest floors and coral reefs, out of which she coaxed arterial tendrils in a loose tangle to shoot across and plant themselves in her undergrowth, to suck secrets from his inner substance which still retained an extrasensory glow from the luminous realm of ancient myth.
Lady Mesmerlaine from just indirect exposure felt something wonderful in her body. It was as if a golden sweet liquid had dissolved in her blood and turned the lining of her arteries as silky smooth and rich as rose petals. The loveliest blush came to her cheeks, and her magic blossomed. She felt so deliciously voluptuous that she craved more and hastened to where she thought the source was. She shrank herself down into a leukocyte and swam the rivers and rapids of Nobo’s blood. She emerged fresh and energized and so unabashedly confident that she was ready to attempt a death-defying feat.
The big long screw upon which before she sat like a queen, she flipped head to ground and in a blink of an eye expanded into a base as wide as that of the Great Pyramid of Cholula. She made the screw’s shaft shoot with spiraling thread straight up into the sky, higher than a tower, higher than a skyscraper, and as it reached beyond the clouds and narrowed to a point, at the exact moment she directed a thrust at the eye of Providence, a witch hat she used to wear materialized out of thin air and the screw’s tip like the stake of Odysseus pierced the conical crown.
In one devastating instant what Lady Mesmerlaine with such magnificence had conjured and summoned to the sky vanished, and she plummeted into the nether realm where everything from the world above re-appeared turned inside out. She wasn’t even sure she still inhabited her body. She found herself haunting the liminal spaces behind appearances, looking through her eyes as if they were no longer her own.
Possibly she was going mad, possibly she was suffering the most grandiose delusion, possibly she was the one who was really screwed, but it was also possible that she was enduring the most critical phase of the alchemy process in which only by risking annihilation could the lowest be joined to the highest.
Lady Mesmerlaine in a sense had been split open like Nobo. The world she wove unraveled, her magic wilted, all her power spilled into the darkness. She could no longer hold radically different and even diametrically opposed elements together, embodying them with graceful finesse and casual charm, and use them in novel and shocking combinations to bewilder, captivate or mesmerize. She could no longer bear the pressure of living in unresolved ambiguity. Unsure it was imaginary or psychosomatic, she felt a single long sharp pain in the center of her forehead.
She had a vision of a single droplet of blood falling toward a pool of alchemic aqua. The droplet on contact and entry exploded into bloom, and out of the rippling rings a hand emerged and reached up. Her vision then shifted, and Nobo’s face was hovering over the dark deep, dimly glowing and spectral, his large and round eye staring. Exponentially growing and expanding, the eye with swirling iris rapidly turned into a massive whirlpool which pulled her in and sucked her down, spinning and whirling and tossing her around in a funnel as dark as the black of a pupil.
O Lady Mesmerlaine, has the pulp of your ego been pulverized and your name been shed like skin? She didn’t know if she had undergone a sublime transformation, into perhaps Luna approaching full integration with some unexpected incarnation of Sol, the moon and sun melding in a sacred marriage of opposites, or if she had only come full circle and was about to be blindsided by the realization that all she has done and been through has been for nothing.
A premonition grew in her that all along she was the one being primed, and that in the final phase of the alchemy process, it is her own heart like a basilisk fossilized in amber which will turn into the Medusanal Carbuncle and drop out of her split open chest.
Panicking she turned to escape but stopped dead in her tracks when in the distance she saw Nobo, now grown colossal and shrouded in fog and shadow. He had risen out of the dark deep and loomed above the horizon with eye clenched shut. No white of his eye was discernible, but for a brief moment, though no light beamed from his face, she swore his towering silhouette resembled a lighthouse.
THE ART OF JOHN DOCKUS 