Bird of Healing

SERPENT CHAINED. (Chinese Ink and pastel on handmade paper. 1997. Collection of the artist.)

‘Serpent Chained’, a third picture in this series,
suggests that the healing of the self-mutilating violence, the self-exclusion in wild places, and related traumas of Mob calls for a burning up, a rising from the old ashes, Phoenix-like, into flames of new life. (The Hamsa is sometimes identified with the Pheonix-like Flamingo found in India). And it is the Healer who is aflame, aflame with passion, holding close to his heart the struggling figure of the ‘demon-possessed’, a figure entwined with a writhing snake, the ancient deadly enemy of the bird. Death, then, as well as the distress of our life, is overcome in the heavenly Bird’s fire of love