Taking a break from the Danse Macabre, an incarnation of Death, lying in a coffin-bed at the bottom of this picture, looks with amused pride at what rises out of its bloated belly.
Nestled in its navel an egg is set like a ball on a tee, a mock Omphalos.
At the top of the picture is what may be a cherub, some personification of divine childlike innocence with budding wings, but a mask conceals the face, so we can’t be sure. Arms unseen reach down into the larger head of the artist, perhaps massaging the folds of the brain, helping along the firing of synapses. The cherub, asleep, who appears to be both listening and dreaming, has head rested against the pages of a book yet to be written or in the process of being conceived.
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Flashback
When the mind soars so high that, disappearing from view, even the faintest ripples from the beating heart no longer reach it, the cord joining the upper and lower world may snap. Such happened to the artist in this picture: Using all his psychic energy and strength he conjured an incarnation of the cosmic egg. From its center he pushed up through the white toward the dome, intending to cut a hole in it and rise in glory through it like the sun; but before reaching that point the cord within snapped, and he was jerked down with such force that the yolk splattered and the shell was cracked, knocking him unconscious.
This stirred from the surrounding darkness a sinister entity which swirled around, then streamed in through the cracks, entering the artist’s mouth, pushing down into his body. The artist slipped into a coma, Death’s cocoon, and as his organs were being sucked out and replaced, he had a frightening vision:
An immense sphere glowing white floated out in dark cosmic space. All was quiet and majestic. The sharp tip of a gigantic spider’s leg suddenly poked out of the sphere, then another poked out, then another, the long spindly legs waving around in space, the spider’s terrifying face concealed but its presence which could induce paralysis still felt. Its legs cracked the surface and reached out and waved around with incredible dexterity and precision, masterfully spinning and weaving, transforming the whole sphere gradually into planet earth. During the transformation the spider absorbed all the white light into itself while turning inside out like a torus form. The spider finally became invisible on the outside, crawling all over the surface of the earth.
“Ab Ovo!”, muffledly cried Anansi who had puffed himself up to the size of a whale and pushed into the oviduct of the gigantic spider as it was turning invisible. Feeling both voluptuous as Venus and pure as a baby, he shivered with perverse pleasure as he wiggled and pushed through the contracting walls. What a sight when at the moment the gigantic spider turned completely invisible, Anansi reached the opening of the oviduct and stuck his head out. From the outside you’d think his head had been cut off and was floating like a balloon. “Ab Ovo!” Anansi ecstatically cried down into the face of the deep. “Ab Ovo!” returned his siren-like echo. “Ab Ovo!” he spewed for the last time from his blow-hole, before pushing free as if being born for the first time.
What happened next is anyone’s guess. It could be that a luminous white light beamed from Anansi’s body as he fell, and around his head as he picked up speed there appeared a radiant halo yellower than yolk. It could be that such light grew so intense that suddenly there was a blinding flash, and a thick cloud of black smoke, out which Anansi dropped like a bomb. It could be that when spotting the artist for the first time with head tilted up, eyes shut and mouth agape, that Anansi as if opening a parachute began spinning all his long spindly appendages like the blades of a helicopter, circled around and steadied himself, then pulled all his appendages tight to his body and dropped straight down into his gullet.
When the artist finally emerged from his coma, suddenly jolted awake, what horror he must have felt when, unable to move except for looking around with eyes shifting and rolling in their sockets, he realized he was turning into a kind of mummy or being made into a sort of taxidermic dummy, not at all the glorious heroic figure he imagined when he really believed that through his art he might achieve immortality, that he had it in his power and ability to close the gap between immanence and transcendence and weave them together into a powerful unity.
* * * * *
Fast forward to the present
The artist’s face is webbed over, his head becoming cocooned. Emerging out of his mouth, fused with his lips, is a kind of dwarfen trumpet of the apocalypse/ hypodermic needle hybrid, enwrapped by a scroll, with a little ear opening out of the other end. Configuration for the performing of ventriloquial sorcery? It appears Rimbaud’s famous dictum calling for the long, boundless and systematized derangement of all the senses as the way to break free of conventional ways of perceiving and experiencing the world has for this artist only turned into a disaster.
Out of the side of his mouth (“talking out of both sides of the mouth” alluded to) rings emerge and coil into a serpent twisting down, its head etched into, superimposed over, or even at one with an upside-down nude woman’s private parts. Serpent eye vagina. A mask is over the woman’s face, just beginning to fall away. Maybe it is Eve who so long ago was cast out of the Garden of Paradise that she no longer remembers and is only now waking up to find to her horror that she is part of some sick and twisted composition in an age where everything is subject to manipulation and nothing shocks anymore.
Rising on the left like a totem, near the tender pink ass of the cherub, with spidery humanoid countenance, kind of androgynous too, with a thick mop of unkempt hair over his bulbous head, warty growths on his forehead turning into secondary eyes, his face full of menace and mischief, is Anansi the trickster, the surreal eavesdropping provocateur and stealthy esoteric pioneer who has a field day in shadowy zones of disintegration and dislocation.
Below him is a larger face, also his, he at the very least two-faced and damn proud of it. His larger face below, mask-like, acts in this picture as both shield or weird scarab breastplate and decoy, long spindly arms shooting out from under it, Anansi setting to work weaving his web.
Above and behind him is a mysterious spiral, which if not a sign of the infinity of his subversiveness or a drain-swirl emblem of his rank could be seen as a sort of pin-the-tail on the cherub, or the coiled tail of the manifesting serpent on the other side of the picture, or perhaps it’s a comma hyperextending into an accordion. Why not? Around Anansi, an inter-dimensional being, anything is possible and nothing is as it appears. What on its face is plain and simple can in his cunning and uncanny presence suddenly have its bottom drop out and suck you in, sending you spiraling down and flying out like a dizzy and disoriented bug straight into his web.
THE ART OF JOHN DOCKUS 