Maura Holden – Divisions of Neptune

Feb 28, 2009 Daniel Mirante in Interviews, Mythos 1 Comment Tags: maura holden, mische technique, visionary art

Maura Holden is a painter whose work is a new and exciting amalgam. The domains depicted in her art do not make apologetics either for spiritual globalisation, new age or tradition, but stand in their own integrity, belonging to their own, unfamiliar and strange continuums, histories and intelligences. It is very rare, in these times, for art to arise out of a sense of wonder. Holden is one of a rare few creating from the place of awe.

It is with great honor that Lila is able to present Maura Holden’s latest finished work, ‘Divisions of Neptune‘, accompanied by her short story ‘The Air Speaks‘, a work of mytho-prose reflective of some of the originating feelings and meditations contained within this unique painting.

The Air Speaks

By Maura Holden

I was a serving maid to the queen, now I am soon to be no more. I gaze into the last hours of my life as though upon dreams sliding between all places and times:

The king is dead. We prepare to accompany his mummy into the earth, and, it is hoped, the afterlife. The entire court is present, dressed as gods and celestial dancers. The royal procession swarms toward the funerary complex, an underground replica of the palace, and the splendorous oiled arms of the queen, stacked with bracelets, manipulate a feathered fan for the final time…. With the sounding of the conch shell, the ibis-headed god raises his quill and opens his beak, “What openeth the kingdom of the dead into Heaven are the two hands of the god whose name is hidden…”

Winged standards rise and fall, jeweled canopies sway, and watery silk flutters. Harnessed monkeys and squirrels chatter and paced on leather leashes. I clutch the ivory handle of the queen’s mirror in a white-knuckled hand, while beside me Her Majesty walks like a soldier, devoutly reciting the madness of the age. At the edge of the pit, she turns to me and speaks:

“Say the rabbis, ‘have we not heard it said that a serving maid on the Red Sea was vouchsafed a greater vision than Ezekiel?’ It is rumored that suffocation brings great visions.”

“Yes, my lady,” I say, but gazing into the sky, wishing to see only it.

All — faithful, unfaithful and unknowing — climb down the cobbled staircase, into the earth. Beneath our painted feet, each step is meant to represent a planet: first Saturn, then Jupiter, then Mars, Earth, Venus and Mercury. The hills of my childhood were green hills, with cardamom and rose-berry…

We swarm through the gilded halls, and take our places. The shaman blows the conch shell again, and hundreds of men fling baskets of heavy clay onto the rooftops above us. Throughout the afternoon the ceilings rattle ever more faintly. Our muffled voices merge into a rippling buzz, scribbled on the heavy black air.

In the queen’s chamber I lie beside Her heaving royal breast, and I began to see: a cloud of misty fire burns away to unveil the painful solar light. We’ve been buried in the heart of the sun, and we burn.

The sun explodes, hurling forth two firebirds. They appear as two, and yet they’re of an unlimited number: male and female, each different, each the same, having many minds and bodies in constant transformation.

They fly past the known planets, and discover others that are unknown; the goldsmiths add extra branches to the menorahs, and the astronomers expand the charts. The firebirds pass stars and galaxies beyond counting. At the limit of space, they break through a shell, and burst out of a great sea and into a new world.

The strange new atmosphere of this world transforms them into human creatures with winged heads. Without moving, they travel to secret dimensions and visit long forgotten and unborn events. In this bright realm, there is no time, and the two that are many are One…

As the sun sinks, our prayers taper into silence beneath the thickening clay. Black flames consume the four letters of the unspeakable name. The alphabet lies in a heap. At sunset the men stamp down the earth and, impressed with thousands of footprints, the clay shimmers under the rising moon.

I watch the moonrise, for, divided from myself, I am at One with the All. I am sand and air in transit through the neck of an hourglass. Downward flows the lament of heavy life: persons, events, debts paid and unpaid, energy and joy turned to agony and waste. Upward fly the winged eyes: airy thought swelling into bright ether. I am the air. I am the immortal breeze that ruffles leaves and hair. I am everywhere and always: before, after, within and beyond: beyond service, beyond kingdoms, beyond deserts, beyond religions, arcing across the domes of cosmic shells. In airless darkness, I am endless light.