Figure 1: Elliot R. Wolfson, Serpent's Dream, 2007. © Elliot R. Wolfson.

Imagine that you are sitting with a Native American teacher, who gives you the exercise of assembling a ceremonial pipe. You are presented with several individual pipe sections, and you experiment with fitting the various components together. As you try different formations, you realize that the pipe can be assembled in a variety of ways. Each configuration will yield a distinctive implement, and each will accomplish its work in a unique manner. You are then presented with some ceremonial tobacco. As you place the tobacco into the pipe, you realize that the pipe and the tobacco represent distinctive elements of a reciprocal ceremonial structure, one whose typically invisible bonds suddenly become visible as the smoke rises all around you.

Wolfson’s canvas, Serpent’s Dream (2007), loosely evokes this vivid ceremonial imagery through smoky, ethereal forms that are painted in a southwestern, “Native American” palette. At first sight, the painting may appear vertically bifurcated, as a central dividing line seems to demarcate the left and right sides of the composition. Yet when the picture is viewed at close range, this subtle optical barrier dissolves, and the two sides of the painting flow together as a single form. Just as contemplative immersion facilitates such creative transformations, the painting appears to be a kind of shape shifter, a formally unified construction in which distinctive passages become fluidly interchangeable, thereby lending themselves to multiple symbolic arrangements. Recalling the imagery of a medicine dream, the painting displays sidereal shades of red, maroon, orange, and violet, which appear as fluctuating clouds of colored light. Three oval patches of bright emerald green—mysterious elements that suggest a disembodied, primordial gaze—float freely at the center of the canvas.

Just as the shifting surface of Serpent’s Dream resembles a diaphanous veil of open sky, the underlying composition displays internal configurations of interlaced forms. Examining the canvas closely, it is possible to discern subtle traces of a helix structure, a spiraling coil that resembles an uroboros, a twisting serpent swallowing its own tail. Just as the verticality of the snake becomes circular within the swerving conventions of the iconography, the uroboros represents an archetypal image of androgyny.1 Conjoining these associations, the title of Wolfson’s painting, Serpent’s Dream, symbolically evokes this complex coil of interwoven significations.2

With its embedded sense of internal multiplicity and its abstract depiction of the varieties of oneness, Serpent’s Dream displays the paradoxes of an “open enclosure”:3

in time

that measures

fissures & faith

flowering

on dreams

dispersed

one is

not one

unless it is

more than one

in time

that measures

fortune & fate

flickering

on fury

infuriated

two is

not two

unless it is

less than two

in time

that measures

foot & face

floundering

on paths

divergent

three is

not three

unless it is

more or less three

Like the layered coils of a clay pot, Serpent’s Dream and “open enclosure” can be viewed metaphorically as spiraling configurations that incorporate and disperse flickering forms through porous surfaces of permeable containment. Another of Wolfson’s artworks that engages these themes is Pistis Sophia (2007), an abstract painting resembling a luminous bouquet of scattered, disembodied forms. Painted in bright shades of gold, blue, green, and purple, swirling clouds of mass and light evoke a coupling that is born of three. The title of this painting literally signifies “Faith in Wisdom.” In particular, Pistis Sophia is the name of an ancient gnostic gospel and, as Wolfson points out in Language, Eros, Being, this trope refers to a mythic triad found in the Nag Hammadi text Eugnostos the Blessed. In the latter context, Pistis Sophia represents a mystical image of the divine pleroma that conjoins the presences of the father, son, and daughter. In his analysis of this gnostic imagery, Wolfson notes that “the pairing of son and daughter, the Savior and Sophia, or Pistis Sophia, as she is also called, produced six androgynous spiritual beings in the pattern of the first androgynous man. The twelve powers, six male and six female, beget seventy-two powers, the totality of the six contained in each of the twelve, and each one of the seventy-two powers reveals five powers, to yield a sum of 360 powers, the union of which is called the ‘will.’”4 The erotic union of Pistis and Sophia thus engenders powerful androgynous imagery that incorporates complex mystical and numerological associations, as the coincidentia oppositorum of the bonding of “more or less three” generates exponential spirals of light.

Figure 2: Elliot R. Wolfson, Pistis Sophia, 2007. © Elliot R. Wolfson.

Traversing the open boundaries of convergence and divergence, Wolfson’s poems and paintings display distinctive pathways that melt and merge in the disintegrating patterns of oil on canvas or words on a page. Like the distinct indistinctiveness of the pipe and tobacco, the poems and paintings can be seen as offering androgynous visions of interchangeability, protean configurations of dreams that are diaphanously clothed and ephemerally dispersed on smoky coils of burnished light.