Mercury Rising

When I was a kid my dad brought home a little thing of mercury and I rolled that little bubble around in my hand over and over getting the greatest kick out of the "quicksilver." I could drop it on the table and watch it splatter into pieces and then slide across the table and reform like magic. Hours and hours of endless fun... simple amusements for simple minds. These days handing a child a drop of mercury would probably get you thrown in jail for child endangerment and I suppose that one could ask the question as to whether or not the mercury could be the reason for some of my odd behaviors and strange mental breakdowns.

One could but it would be a dumb idea. There are oh so many things I could use to disavow personal responsibility for various absurdities in my life (both intentional and unintentional) but all that would really do is qualify me for a position in the Bush Administration and since they're on the way out... thank God... well, what future is there in that?

The thing is, like so many things that "just happen" in life, that mercury drop was a synchronistic window into my psyche and a door into the ongoing theme of my life. It was a starting point for my fascination with the Trickster qualities of the psyche and my love for all Hermetic (Hermes being the Greek version of the Roman God Mercury) Trickster myths from Mercury and his winged feet (a root of my love for and the emotional salvation of running), to Brer Rabbit and his West African ancestor Anansi, to Iktome and Coyote and Raven, the shapeshifting bird (a creation that I utilized in an Irish tale of my own that I wrote some years ago). Hermes is guardian of the roads and friend of snakes and clever beyond imagination. Even astrologically, the planetary ruler of my sign - Virgo - is Mercury. These are all images I like... Images that serve me well on the day to day. They are the reason for the name of this blog.

Recently, I found this picture of Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate sculpture in Chicago's Millenium Park on Flickr and it brought back memories of those early experiences with the element that led to my obsession with all things Mercurial. I can look at this picture for hours, imagining scenarios where the giant drop might split up and roll out, gathering in cars and buildings and people and then gathering itself back up again to sit placidly in the park as if nothing had changed.

In that stream of consciousness way that thoughts flow into each other like particles of mercury, all these images have this morning led my imaginings to that quintessentially Mercurial character of the modern era, The Silver Surfer. A comic book image (and I'm not much into comic books, but hey... he's The Silver Surfer!) that haunts me with its surprising power whenever he appears on the event horizon, as he does now with a film debut tomorrow. I don't have any idea if the movie will be any good, and frankly I don't care. That's not the point. Like many other Marvel Comics characters (Spiderman in particular, another trickster archetype) Silver Surfer slides into the contemporary consciousness straight out of the playful heart at the center of our collective unconscious. One of my favorite cinematic references to him comes in a film from 1983 called Breathless (featuring a very young, spry and just damned exciting Richard Gere), an American remake of the Francois Truffaut/Jon Luc Godard film À bout de souffle. In Breathless, Gere's cheap crook lost boy character - a shape-shifting Trickster in his own right - is obsessed with Silver Surfer comics and the adventures of this free floating vagabond of the Universe, traveling the stars on his Mercurial Longboard. But for Gere this sure footed guardian is always arriving, like The Messiah, but never here. Unable to distance himself from the myth, Gere's character ultimately meets with disaster. The power of the myth is in the power it gives us for the day. The question for those living with a mythological consciousness, as Joseph Campbell might have called it, is to find the power for living and take that gold from the myth while maintaining a safe distance from the power that will, if you are not careful, consume you.

What we need right now is to rescue ourselves from the obsessive-fundamentalist right wing literalist interpretations of religion (any religion)brought on by preachers, teachers, rabbis and imams, and the over serious super cowboy obsession that Pardner Dubya has brought to bear on our national psyche. Both of these obsessive perspectives have civilization held hostage to our collective shadow and they threaten to take all of us down in a blazing orgy of gunfire like that faced by the anti-hero of Breathless, coping an attitude, wiggling his trigger finger and singing Jerry Lee Lewis at the top of his lungs.

We need a new hero for a new day and the Surfer may just be our guy. He's sleek, fit, capable, relaxed and attentive at the same time... He's a surfer! What more is there to say?

Mercury's rising... The weather's about to change.