Air Machine
In Hermann Hesse’s Demian a youth man paints a falcon emerging from an egg, which pleased me as a lifelong birdwatcher. But I still marvel that identical imagery could later emerge from my own psyche at a crisis point in art school as a hyperventilating monstrosity whose chest expanded upward to be fiercely cut to fleshy ribbons by its own sharp wingtips. Only later would I encounter the classic alchemical motif the avis hermeticum where an eagle flies upwards to devours its own wings and tumbles again to earth. The dream’s intense impact called Whitman’s “I Sing the Body Electric” to mind, but this with quite a contrasting emotional charge!
