Thoughts on a Volcano: An Infernal Dinner Party Words by Karen Holmberg Prints by Illana Halperin NOTE: Should the occasion have required music, the 1964 composition by Icelandic composer Jón Leifs, Hekla Op. 52, could have served well. The performance of the piece requires sets of volcanic rocks that are hit with hammers, anvils, cannons, metal chairs, steel plates, a choir, orchestra, and an organ. The beginning was slow but colossal. At the onset of time, on a day that began with breakfast over deep-sea vents,1 Pele sat down to a fiery dinner with Thor.2 The banquet table was provisioned with a roast phoenix and the customary sides.3 The Oracle of Delphi poured the wine and swayed in the fumes4 from Vulcan’s pipe.5 Hephaestus6 sat with Geryon7 who watched, red-faced, as Sir Hamilton enacted uproarious tableaus and set them in stone.8 (footnotes) 1. Archaea
is the term used to describe the first lives on the planet, which formed
3.5 billion years ago. Shallow - formed in a boiling, salted, motherless milk.
over deep sea volcanic vents longing
2. Pele, Hawaiian goddess Norse god of thunder.
life
-
with such deep
of fire, lightning, volcanoes and violence.
Thor,
the
3. The ancient Phoenicians revered the phoenix as a sacred firebird. 4. The
cryptic
Oracle
of
Delphi,
also known as the
Pythia
or priestess of
Apollo,
sat on a tripod seat over an opening in the earth from which snakes of intoxicating telluric vapors rose.
5. Vulcan,
Roman god of fire, was married to the beautiful but Venus. Each time she betrayed him, his anger was channeled into metalwork in his workshop under Mount Etna, prompting sparks and smoke to erupt from the volcano. the ancient
promiscuous
6. Hephaestus, the Greek counterpart of Vulcan. 7. Geryon, a red monster who tended red cattle in a volcano crater, is known to us from a 6th century BC epic poem by Stesichorus. Geryon featured more recently as the protagonist in Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson. 8. Sir William Hamilton, ambassador of Britain to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in the 18th century, was one of the first modern volcanologists. His scientific passion and vigor to understand Vesuvius led to the Campi Phlegraei, a magnificent book with hand-painted illustrations about the life of the volcano. Hamilton’s second
18
watershed