The Miraculous Journey of a Little Vixen

Ana Maria Pacheco The Miraculous Journey of a Little Vixen

The Miraculous Journey of a Little Vixen

Ten drypoints by Ana Maria Pacheco Text by Marius Kociejowski

Pratt Contemporary

Plate 1 On the high seas with unwelcome companions … Might it not be that she is the unwelcome one with her high boot on the shoulder of one of her fellow passengers? Or is she so absorbed by the stars and the dark waters that she barely registers this world? Why a vixen though? A vixen barely rates in the world’s mythologies and even the poets have given her rough ride. Keats, gentle soul, not even he could resist the pejorative: ‘She staid her vixen fingers for his sake’ and there’s poor forgotten Robert Lloyd who writes of ‘the hen-peck’d culls of vixen wives.’ Roget’s Thesaurus dumps her amid the synonyms for ‘vermin’. Almost always she is ‘slanderous’, ‘spiteful’, ‘crafty’, ‘wanton’, ‘shrill’ or just plain ‘dirty’. Ana Maria Pacheco seems to have in mind an altogether different creature, one perhaps closer in spirit to the cunning little vixen of Janáček’s opera, who is quite without malice, and who survives by means of her wits simply because she is forced to. Yes, she commits crimes but the crimes are those born of necessity. Semper peccator, semper justus is how she has been summed up elsewhere, ‘ever sinning, ever righteous’, and it is no surprise that in the figure of the vixen Pacheco alights upon the contradictions also inherent in human nature. There’s nothing flashy about this particular creature. She is not, as someone said of Marlene Dietrich, ‘a serpentine vixen who glowed in her movies like the full moon’ but, rather, she is the dowdy cousin from a distant province, whose wardrobe never quite fits her. She knows that nakedness is not allowable on this journey and so she takes with her various changes of clothes. Where is she going to and what has she left behind? The open sea, especially at night, is a terrifying place to be with there being so very little for consciousness to cling to. The ship’s rope ladder prefigures the various ladders Vixen is going to have to climb or descend during the course of her journey which will be not just spatial but spiritual as well although probably she’d be embarrassed to hear it described so. She might prefer to call it a struggle.

Plate 2 Shipwrecked in an inhospitable land … White mist etched visible. Already there has been a gap in the story, a typhoon maybe, or a sudden squall, which would suggest that what we are dealing with here is not so much a narrative as a series of images set down in the manner of a dream. They are disconnected, and yet, as in dreams, they are a synthesis of sorts: they are their own sense. Vixen is, in this desolate situation, beached upon somewhere quite unfamiliar to her. It would be an overstatement to say where this place is or what it is meant to be, but as someone who hails from the southern hemisphere Pacheco says that such a landscape, when first encountered, is rather horrible. Saying this, she who has handled so much dark matter in her work produces one of her exuberant chuckles. A winter afternoon, the sun low, the branches bare, there is, after all, something rather beautiful about it all. Given sufficient time, she says, it becomes an acquired taste. One interpretation may be that this is a tabula rasa upon which one is forced to make a fresh beginning. It is tempting to read into this an autobiographical element, the artist’s journey to, and her arrival in, a new country, and by extension a new language, and yet one must resist the temptation to interpret overly as to do so would be to scuttle the craft, the precious vessel of our creative urges. One must seek to sublimate or, as Wolfram von Eschenbach has it in his Parzival: ‘es muoz unwissende geschehen’, which translates as: ‘It must happen unknowingly.’ As important as any autobiographical elements are the mythic elements that Pacheco brings to the fore. George Steiner writes: ‘Greek myths, what stays alive in our culture of the Greek lyric-existential idiom, are our fragile moorings to Being.’ And speaking further on the Hellenic poets he remarks, ‘It is by their light that we set out. It is they who first set down the similes, the metaphors, the lineaments of accord and of negation, by which we organize our inner lives … Our lion-heart and fox-cunning are theirs.’ Vixen knows better than we do about ‘fragile moorings’.

Plate 3 At the crossroads, Vixen plays dice with Hecate … Ambivalent goddess of the crossroads, chthonic lass, arbiter of chance, Hecate is so hard to define. She feeds on dogs’ flesh. She does a strong line in black magic. She may bring good fortune or she may bring none. The ancient Greeks who brought her into being hardly knew where to place her and so she straddled their religion’s outer edges. It serves to explain her extraordinary power: the frontier that is so difficult to cross in the real world becomes so porous in the imagination.

Brazil, which is where Pacheco comes from, has its own Hecate or, rather, one very similar in nature. She is still active. She bares her breasts to the world at large. Pomba Gira, like Hecate, is on the periphery of religious belief, the Devil’s mistress, and she too is a mistress of the crossroads. She is racier than Hecate but like her she is imbued with the power to magnify or diminish good fortune.

So far in time and distance from her Greek forebear, and perhaps with a mythological stopover in Africa, or maybe she is no relation at all but some female hustler who has crept inside the Brazilian psyche, she is similarly configured. She, like Hecate, loves anything to do with sensuality. Give her perfume, red roses and pretty combs and she may be on your side – equally she may turn on you, which is why in that magical milieu she is so greatly feared. We could say Pomba Gira merges into Hecate because, after all, dreams are where one may swap or rearrange faces. Vixen, whose power it is to alter or escape fate, sees to her left the gate that opens onto the next stage of her journey, which will be an even darker, even deeper, place. Such is the price she pays for consorting with the likes of Hecate. She must go deeper before she is able to frolic in the sun.

Plate 4 In a dark cavern, Vixen meets the Three Fates … the Moirai: Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos, or, in their Latin equivalents, the Parcae: Nona, Decima and Morta. The first spins the thread of life onto her spindle, the second measures the thread of life allotted to each person, and the third, brandishing shears, cuts the thread of life. Gods and men alike are inexorably bound to her dictates. ‘Comes the blind Fury with th’abhorred shears, / And slits the thin spun life,’ writes John Milton in Lycidas. Plato makes singers of them. There is a layer of skulls beneath their feet. They serve to remind us of the insubstantiality of our existence (or, once again, those ‘fragile moorings’). ‘Man’s life is a day. What is he, what is he not?’ writes Pindar. ‘A shadow in a dream is man.’ The Homeric world is, ultimately, a dark place. Vixen who is in her work clothes lights up with her torch the faces of the Three Fates who are surprised by her presence.

They say to her she can’t stay here; they say to her this is the land of shadows whereas she belongs to the living world. The ladder is there for her to make her exit from where death rules supreme. Vixen, a creature of the imagination, goes where she likes, which is not to say it’s easy for her, but such is her power, to flit through our consciousness. She of all creatures is the most difficult to trace.

She has magical properties. The forester in Janáček’s opera says that to partake of a vixen’s dried tongue makes a man invisible.

Plate 5 Vixen struggles to get to upper airs … She gets to the next level only to discover she must escape from there by means of a ladder wreathed in flames. She must go through fire just as Wagner’s Siegfried must go through fire. She has been looking for, and is now almost fully reunited with, her shadow. Among primitive peoples, and seeping from their beliefs into the folklore and literature of our own culture, is the idea of the shadow being one’s soul or a vital part of one’s existence. Vixen can’t live without a shadow for it is an integral part of who she is, but there is a slight problem here: the shadow does not yet fully conform to her shape. It is veiled which suggests its owner’s journey is not yet done. Symbolically the veil conceals certain aspects of truth. Jacob’s ladder? Or could it be the ceremonial seven-runged ladder of Mithraic tradition, each rung made of a different metal to symbolise the seven celestial bodies?

Pacheco’s dream images invite all the weight we can put upon them. Mircea Eliade speaks of ‘breaking through’ by means of steps the various levels of existence. Osiris is spoken of as standing at the very top of the steps; in Islam, the Prophet Mohammad sees the ladder the just must climb in order that they might reach God; Jacob’s ladder has seventy-two rungs, its uppermost ones disappearing into the clouds. Steps beneath the earth’s surface are a symbol for openings into the infernal regions but Vixen knows that what goes down goes up as well except that the flames will make her journey all that much harder. She is about to bid farewell to the caged creatures, and, with Fortune on her side, she will climb the rungs one by one, unscathed.

Plate 6 Vixen joins a caravan of musicians heading for the circus … Suddenly, and here surely is proof enough that narrative bows before dreams, we are in the world above. We are back among the living, and it is a place very much like that which Bakhtin describes, he who gave us the word carnivalesque. ‘Carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people,’ he writes. ‘They live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people.’ One cannot be a mere tourist here. One must enter the hubbub fully and noisily. Between the mediaeval viol to the left of the picture and the modern saxophone to the right all time is condensed. The Wheel of Fortune at the centre of the image is echoed by Vixen on her odd bicycle. The wagon of fools and jesters with their mediaeval tassels joins forces with a more modern Pierrot beating his drum. They could be figures out of Goya. Also they could be members of the commedia dell’arte for whom it is only a step away from the street to the stage. And what are those shadowy figures in the background? Those camels in silhouette suggest that this is a world on the move, nomadic in character, and, above all, transient. Pacheco speaks of her childhood memories of older people’s memories of the carnivals as they used to be before they were sanitised for the tourists – the entrudo when its participants threw dirty water or stones at people, and later, as it became more genteel in character, they sprayed the unsuspecting with perfume from bomb-shaped bottles. What the participants experienced at every historical stage, however, was a complete reversal of hierarchies, which, so Bakhtin tells us, is at the very heart of carnivalesque.

Plate 7 Vixen sees the elusive stag at the circus, behind bars … A clown rides a distressed tiger; an angel with strapped-on wings scoots along, a nod and a wink at Velasquez’s Christ After the Flagellation in which the angel’s wings are quite clearly strapped on because, after all, who in an Age of Enlightenment would accept a fleshly grafting of bird and human? This reminds Pacheco of when she was a child and given angel’s wings to wear, which were made of real feathers. And there are yet more musicians, one of whom sits on a star globe.

The starry skies of the first image are, for the time being, brought down to earth, confined to the human sphere. Vixen in fishnet stockings, another change of clothes, walks on the tightrope, always a perilous place to be, which is where any pilgrim must sooner or later take a chance. She has yet to notice the white hart to her right, which is behind bars, and which might have made its way there from the back of the mysterious Wilton Diptych at the National Gallery in London. A king’s emblem, a mournful creature, almost prophetically so, the white hart is also redolent of the alchemical and the Christ-like. So numinous he is, so perfectly still amid the circus bustle. What he in his quietude knows is that sooner or later the carnival must come to an end and when it does serious questions about the meaning of existence will be asked of him that will require even more serious answers. It’s still party time though, and one can hear from afar the world’s laughter. Amid so much else happening here, Fellini enters the scene or, rather, his creative spirit does. The frenetic tumult of his movies almost always finally gives way to the sound of wind, which without actually saying so reminds us of life’s transience. The Fool (“Il Matto”) in La Strada appears wearing angel’s wings and in the circus his job is to walk the high wire. Fellini is a late flowering of carnivalesque. Is it true that the relentless sound of that all-conquering wind was made by him blowing into a microphone?

Plate 8 Vixen goes in search of the stag and finds him on the island of eternal bliss ‌ Time must have passed because the white hart or stag has antlers which it didn’t have before. Yet again, as in dreams, there are holes in the narrative. What is he doing here standing atop a crown of burning trees, so calm, just like in those mediaeval images of saints oblivious to the tortures being afflicted upon them? The stag is more like an apparition really, an angelic being that only appears to be surrounded with fire. The flames do him no harm although one is reminded that in Pliny and elsewhere the smoke from burning antlers is thought to be deadly to snakes. Other legends have the stag actually consuming those snakes. The trees are reminiscent of the burning bush in the Book of Exodus from whose branches an angel directs Moses to lead his people out of Egypt and into Canaan. Moses, say some modern commentators, may have been having a psychedelic experience, the acacia tree so common to the region where he lived containing a powerful hallucinogen. There is a danger of becoming overly reductive, of course, but the Indian tribes of Brazil have a similar brew that makes them lose all sense of time as well as being able to see fire where there is none. Should one deny them their revelations? Should one deny Moses his?

Should one deny Vixen hers? It is a spiritual fire she sees, which does no harm to those whom it envelops in flames. Vixen’s ladder is no longer the precious, possibly Mithraic, emblem of earlier times but a lightweight aluminium ladder such as one finds in any hardware shop, a jarring note, and yet it is so very practical and easy to transport if one is to get closer to the truth. Vixen wants to be at eye-level with the oracle.

Plate 9 Vixen granted an audience with the stag, who reveals to her the mysteries of incarnation … Something’s happened. Our stag has sprouted wings.

According to Borges who claims to have extracted his information from the writings of a sixteenth-century rabbi in Fez, who in turn got it from the now-lost work of an unnamed scholar from ancient Greece, the winged stag is a peryton. It throws the shadow of a man until such time it kills a human being and is rewarded with a shadow that fits to its own shape. A phalanx of perytons will bring about the destruction of Rome. Was Borges having us on? We know he loved literary games. And then there is the winged stag of demonology, Furfur, who heads twenty-six legions of demons, who is a liar until such time he is compelled to enter a magical triangle where he becomes a lovely angel and provides truthful answers to every question. The winged deer also has a presence in ancient Indian sculpture. Pacheco’s winged stag probably has more in common with that found first in Philippe de Mézières’ Songe du vieil pélerin, in which Charles VI is portrayed as a winged stag (cerf volant) and later in a fifteenth-century French tapestry, which purports to represent Charles VII at peace in his kingdom. Surely, though, in both instances the stag is also imbued with spiritual purpose.

Here, we find him nestled in the roots of an upside-down tree. At the beginning of the fifteenth chapter of the Bhagavad Gita Lord Krishna says, ‘The banyan tree with its roots above, and its branches below, is imperishable.’ The asvattha tree with its roots in heaven is a symbol for the transcendental origins of human existence. The mind with all its paraphernalia is like the leaves which, transient, wither away. It is there in the Jewish mystical tradition too, the upside-down tree with its roots flowing from the infinite light of the divine, and, once again, in the Europe of the Middle Ages when the earliest Christmas tree, a fir, was hung upside down as a symbol of Christianity, or, more specifically, the Holy Trinity. Vixen has put on her finest apparel for this audience. She is a candidate for the Sistine Chapel or a Greek temple.

Plate 10 With a weary heart, Vixen sets course for a distant star … Why so heavy a heart? Yes, but whoever said knowledge brings happiness?

Only rarely does wisdom get to join the dance. Joy belongs to the carnivalesque and it is therefore fleeting by nature. Apprised of life’s mysteries, Vixen will now have to carry that huge weight and it’s not something that she’ll be able to share. She went through hell to get there. Maybe that’s why a star is her destination, there being nothing left for her to commune with here on earth. She and the creature that bears her away are conjoined, if not physically then in spirit, for he who reveals mysteries becomes an integral part of she to whom those mysteries are revealed. There is always a reckoning to be made and it is never an easy one to bear. Ambivalent though it may be, whether in Furfur’s triangle or upon the roots of an upturned tree, the winged stag is a numinous figure imparting truth. These are sacred spaces in which there can be no more lies. The winged stag exists because we need him to. As Rilke in his Sonnets to Orpheus says of the unicorn, O dieses ist das Tier, das es nicht gibt: ‘O this is the creature that does not exist … Indeed it never was. Yet because they loved it, / a pure creature happened. They always allowed room. / And in that room, clear and left open, / it easily raised its head, and scarcely needed / to be.’ This, and it is one of the keys to Pacheco’s art, is suggestive of the imagination’s ability to bring into being that which never was so that in ‘our fragile moorings’ we may feed on the possibility of existence.

Ana Maria Pacheco The Miraculous Journey of a Little Vixen Ten drypoints printed on Somerset Satin soft white 300gsm in editions of 15 plus 3 artist’s proofs, 2 publisher’s proofs, 1 printer’s proof and 1 archive proof Plate: 24 x 30.5 cm Sheet: 41.5 x 45.7 cm Published by Pratt Contemporary © 2014 Text by Marius Kociejowski © 2014

Author’s Notes

Plate 1

Semper peccator, semper justus, Germaine Dieterlen in Penguin Dictionary of Symbols.

Plate 2

The translation of the line from Parzival, Christopher Middleton in conversation.

Plate 4

Pindar, Pythian Ode VIII trans. C. M. Bowra (Penguin, 1969)

Plate 6

Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (M.I.T. Press, 1968)

Plate 9

Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings (Jonathan Cape, 1970)

‘a serpentine vixen …’ – Michael Atkinson in The Guardian, June 30th 2000.

George Steiner, Antigones (Oxford University Press, 1984)

Plate 10 Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus trans. M. D. Herter Norton (W. W. Norton, 1942)

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