Margarete Petersen Study -Mother of Feathers (Queen of Swords)

firemaiden

Translation

  • I am the mother of all movement. I move invisibly in all drections and leave no trace. I play with the leaves on the trees and dry the laundry in the wind. My spirit is present in all things. No prison can contain me, because I pierce through all barriers. With my sharp sword, I hack to peices the insatiable, brooding, obsessively-turning-in-a-circle, discursive brain-spinning.

    I look inward and outward. See new, freshly slipped-out and still damp thoughts -- Tender, transparent, arranging themselves into the feathers, plumage, and swaying of swans, singing through the air, breathing in the happiness of belonging together. With invisible threads I weave the screen of our projections. I am the Incorruptible, and recognize the grain of truth in words.

    From my husband who penetrates everything, I took the warm airstream of breath.


Link to image: Mutter der Federn



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firemaiden

Interesting text. What to make of it?

New thoughts are compared to newborns. -- freshly slipped out and still damp -- as in a new-born calf, freshly slipped out from the mother cow. The freshly slipped out and still damp thoughts then arrange themselves gradually into neat patterns, as little tufts arrange themselves into feathers, little feathers assemble into plumage, plumage assembles itself a swan, and swans assemble into a flock swaying and singing across the sky.

The sharp sword of the Queen of Swords/Mother of feathers must hack up the confused "Hirngespinst" -- which I have translated as "brain-spinning". It is a cocoon, or spun web of circuitous, obsessive and disorganized thoughts leading nowhere, a tangled web of superfluous thoughts -- it must be finely minced before it can reassemble into organized thoughts, belonging neatly together as a flock of swans.

Thoughts once organized will "take flight", self expression with "soar"...