In 2020-2021, I made an experimental film (both live-action and animated) based on a poem I wrote in 2014 entitled, “The Mystery of Melusine.” You can see the final film here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOvqyxVqqbA&feature=youtu.be
This film has been selected to appear at the following film festivals: Montreal Independent Film Festival, Mabig Film Festival, Vancouver Independent Film Festival (Finalist, Experimental), Logicinema Art Films, Stockholm City Film Festival (Semi-Finalist).
Artist’s statement: In European folklore, Melusine agrees to marry under the condition that she be left in her solitary bath on Saturdays. Due to gossip, the husband eventually spies through the keyhole in the door, and is shocked to see that she is bathing with a finned tail. Secretly, she was a mermaid, but once her secret has been exposed, she disappears. This film is based on a poem I wrote several years ago that came to me in a single stream of consciousness and draws on ideas from the philosopher Martin Heidegger. I am re-interpreting the myth of Melusine in it. In my interpretation, Melusine is an ontological principle, a feminine creatrix, her seclusion the secretiveness of the way truth manifests and life unfurls its mysteries. It also provides a narrative for how life meets itself through otherness. It is also an alchemical poem, imbued with multitudinous allusions to other myths as well as philosophical and esoteric ideas. I wanted to give a treatment to this poem to vivify it; I have been tinkering with animation techniques for several years and wanted to do something experimental with live-action. As I feel I am inspired by her archetype, I decided to enact the character of Melusine myself. In some sense, by doing so, I am acting out my own psychic drama, rectifying my inner and outer life.
These are the words to the poem:
“The Mystery of Melusine” by Cecilia Rose Inkol, 2014.
The Mystery of Melusine
Death is the water of memories.
The memories of transmigrating souls, wandering planets.
Immersion.
Melusine,
Mellifluous, melliflower, flowing, unfurling
Her mystery of mysteries.
Its mysteriousness of mysteriousness
Mists of mists
A murmur of the wind
A whisper of a world
Along the black widow spider’s web
Spirit, murmuring
A muttering of a world
Growing louder
Seeds extending, vines encoding
A message and its messenger
A mustering of a will,
Its unmasking.
Her wyrded web speaking
Through its watery phoenix, its fish with wings
She sings.
She sings what is beautiful into being
With all the depth of her starry night.
Moon key, secrets kept, crept toward the ceiling,
Breaking the Ogdoad seam, opening its primeval sun
Veiled with the sail of a sailing voyage
But her heart is broken
And her siren song is a wailing
For the hidden light of the sun
That she can only see
Behind the clouded skies and its starry screen.
Mellifluous Melusine is melancholy,
A choir of frogs is singing with her.
Melusine is elusive, eluding, elusory
Her fog veritable illusion
And her song is enchantment,
Commandment
The logos scroll tongue uncoiled
To sing the song of the spirit, hissing voices
Her song bespeaks the forgotten primordial memory
Originary meaning and its fleeting,
Her heart sings her justice, its measure and meting
Her heart sings what is true into its seaming jointure
Eros, the most shining,
Psyche, the most wise
The pearl of wisdom
For this is her earthly kingdom, watery wishing well
She yearns for what shines most brightly, the most shining of the true:
The love of truth itself,
That which she knoweth best of, being wisdom, Sophia.
Following the sun’s paths in the skies at night
Reflecting its sun arrows with her Athena shield, Medusa’s celestial visage,
Athena, wisdom warrior,
harnessing the power of the Sun, rays raising
Her Venus mirror
To gaze upon her alien spirit being within,
Firing arrows of weaving sun golden thread
From the frays of her celestial robe
Meeting meteorite
Her beauty is war, heaven’s angel, weapon of death:
The weapon is the light of judgment
A sceptre of lightning, a flashing of insight
Reflecting the most shining of the true
Blinding in its rainbow emanations
The day is not yet born, that it may erode erosion, elute confusion
She escaped from her Babel-tower perch,
That she’d been locked within, extending her golden wings
Her phoenix mermaid
The rebirth of the serpent bird
Leaving behind shells,
The remnants of past worlds,
Former bodies, her chrysalis sarcophagus, these ashes and remains
The cliff-off, the bodies that live in ocean deep
Darkness.
Looking into the abyss
Many creatures return one’s gaze
In the inky blackness of deep
The dark night of the soul
The veil of the octopodes,
Her lady spiderweb’s watery underworld, catching prey
Her telepathic tentacles entwining life and death
Pixel filaments, static. Spinning electricity. Whirlpool vortex volvox.
Her blue-eyed lightning swirling towards the light
Like death to fire
Memorizing with her watery tear-stained memory
Water fall tear drop
But in a full moon of meeting nodes
Eclipsing the memory of the alien other
A twenty-two degree halo, resounding rainbows, reflecting from her prism refraction
Into the shining one, the primeval song, its sun
The creator of all, behind the volcanoes of tectonic shifts,
Jesus tekton, crafter:
Truth must create itself
Because it loves that which is: the beauty of the shining, her spinning mystery
Spinning through the firmaments with tentacle filaments,
Weaving, winding, whirling, wiring through the weft of the web’s words in what’s left of
All worlds, remaining, skeleton shell, her cocoon catacomb body. Accretion.
Wisdom becomes truth, with her chapel chariot
Because she knows it and loves it with all the reflecting shining of her being
And the moon becomes the sun.
In the mirror of the perfect moon, the shining can see herself. But the truth itself is blinding, Medusa’s wire coils
Selene became blind, so she constructed her octopus veil/ spider’s net/ maze-map
To remind herself to remember how to find the path for self-return to self
Her memories are crystallized in her oceanic teary-eyed in the search to find
With a hermit’s lantern, a torch lighting passage. Hekate’s torch key X. Mer-key in the murky depths.
X is magic. Veritable magic is alighting, alighting of the shining.
Allowing what shines most brightly to reveal itself, the alien spirit other
And the sun cries tears, falling on her oceanic eyes, a cure for blindness
With the arriving of the shining, suddenly her blindness veil of manifestation has lifted, opened.
The kingdom of beauty self-beholds its soul from its windows within
The glistening of the shining of the mirror allows the shining, her beauty, its being, to see herself.