They spoke of the hubris of the Age of Reason and the easy overturning of the banquet table with one hiccup.19 Gaia does not create balance and harmony that the mind can calculate and control. ‘The earth is unthinkable, untameable, an impossible wildness’,20 they joyfully and drunkenly proclaimed while pouring another pitcher of blood-red and blood-warm wine. A toast is poured to an inebriated British diplomat stumbling in Mexico under a volcano.21 You only live twice,22 said Medea, laughing,23 and they pour another round, making dirty jokes of dark and stormy nights and the illogic of any city having a true last day.24 The day simply changes. The Pythia danced around a makeshift omphalos made from living karst.25 The deception, the misperception, the seduction: there is no fire and pain filled portion of the garden of earthly delights,26 no icy entry to a searing hell or dark world guarded by three-headed Cerberus.27 To believe such is to imagine the existence of a single place. A single end. No such thing exists in the constant motion of the earth. 19. The Enlightenment, or Age of Reason, burst out of the Dark Ages with a fervent philosophy that all in Nature was knowable with work and science. The crumbling of this assurance in the current era compounds the uncertainty caused by the erosion of our
Cartesian confidence in a Nature versus a Culture.
20. In The Inhuman, French philosopher Jean-Françoise Lyotard voices this
seduction and deception of a stabilized idea of nature as a relationship of order, which is in fact only a confluence of mind and things.
21. Malcolm Lowry’s alcoholism consumed him in a pyroclastic flow of drinks, just as it did his character in Under the Volcano. 22. In the James Bond movie by this name, a volcano shelters a secret rocket base that erupts on command as part of a self-destruction system. 23. As the granddaughter of the sun, Helios, The enchantress Medea has a genealogy of fire. 24. The Last Days of Pompeii, Edward Bulwer-Lytton. 25. In the Fontaines Pétrifiantes in France, a different type of tableau was created by placing molds under dripping karst to create bas-relief objects of cast stone (Ilana Halperin, Physical Geology [Slow Time/Cave Cast] 2009). The objects were carefully turned each day to keep them from cementing to the interior, like stalactites and stalagmites the cave is more prone to form. 26. The Garden of Earthly Delights, Hieronymus Bosch c.1504. 27. In medieval Iceland the volcano Hekla was thought to be the gateway to hell. If human hell is universal then Cerberus, the three-headed dog that guarded the ancient Greek entry to Hades, had a long commute. Cerberus likely slept in Cumae, southern Italy, where giant chains were found attached to the walls at the shrine of Hades and Persephone. THOUGHTS ON A VOLCANO: AN INFERNAL DINNER PARTY was originally commissioned by artist Ilana Halperin as part of the Alchemy Fellowships at the Manchester Museum in 2008, following discussion with archaeologist Karen Holmberg on how to ‘observe the volcano.’
22
watershed