Levitational madonna

Still writing a day behind. This image, a woman floating above the waves [which are cropped out of my poor photo], comes to me again and again. What could it mean? I drew it and drew it exactly because it expresses an unknown idea. That is: when I drew it it seemed appropriate that the woman be hovering above the waves. People ask me what symbols mean and for as long as I've been alive, they can mean anything. In art history we learn about a fixed iconography: Jerome has a lion; Paul has a sword; Catherine has a wheel and Barbara has a tower; St. Lawrence, gruesomely has the griddle he was cooked on in his martyrdom. These are mnemonic devices- and not symbols per se - although they could be used symbolically. Quite possibly Bosch, when he painted his strangely surreal paintings was unaware of what symbolism he was joining together. The hollow man in hell just is - and what he is symbolic of is unknown. So today when we look at his paintings the wonder is our not knowing - that interpretation is elusive. Jung says that a symbol is a tendency in pursuit of an unknown goal. And so it is when images lose their charge, their energy, their symbolism is spent. To know is to be not useful - for what vexes us is the unknown. If we sat in a room full of knowns all day we would become agitated. It is the symbol that is the vessel for the unknown - like an algebraic variable - that pushes us forward. This is why we study scripture. When we think we know its symbols we turn from it, uninterested. But when we look closely, when we accept the text as provisional and connect ourselves into its world, we discover that we don't know. And the unknown pushes us from the inside to the symbol, to fill the symbol with thought, to as Ricoeur says, to say more to understand better. The symbol is the penultimate.