The Grapevine Art & Soul Salon

Musings on Being and Becoming Human

Issue 3: Fall 2005

AT HOME here are writers speaking in a style more conversational than studied for an audience who might be seated on a front porch at night watching fireflies create random small rays to light up the listening, or in the dining room of an ancient inn with lamps and perhaps a hearth fire to kindle community.

It takes only one or two steps of the imagination to move through the dusk to the dining room at the inn or the porch of a house or, by daylight, to a backyard garden for picking grapes and for gossiping, a verbal mode associated with the term grapevine. We say, I heard it on the grapevine, referring to rumor, advance news of interest to the community, sometimes scandal, always a dramatic story or piece of a story, circulating, making the rounds, lingering on the surface even when it suggests hidden things.

Gossip is a varietal narrative to be cultivated for its piquancies. But art, like soul, yearns for depths. And for that we look to fecund metaphor such as the comment from Mechthild of Magdeburg, speaking to the soul: You taste like a grape.

The comment is recorded in Thomas Moore's book The Original Self: Living with Paradox and Originality (New York: HarperCollins Pub Inc, 2000). Moore elaborates (76):

We may think that sensation is a purely physical experience, but it is also a way of imagining. We taste a grape, and we know it firsthand. We know its properties through taste, and then we can go on to find grape poetry everywhere, as did the Greeks and the Christians who followed them. The grape became the image through which to find the God of ecstasy, Dionysus, and the God of Love, Jesus.

The grape, like the soul, has many levels. It can be eaten whole and is often used as a symbol of sensuousness--grapes dropped indulgently into an open mouth. Its juice is nectar, but when it is allowed to ferment, it becomes the source of deeper pleasure and intoxication. The grape, like the soul, has a whole culture around it, as well as art and religious imagery inspired by it. Jesus says, "I am the vine," and wine becomes the centerpiece of his eucharist. Elsewhere, as in the Jewish Purim and Greek libations, it calls forth the religious spirit.

In earlier issues of The Grapevine we have commented on the association of the Greek god Dionysos with the grape, the vine, the symposium. It is our pleasure to amplify these images.

One room of the site is the salon in which presentations are going on. Another is a reading gallery for exploring parallel worlds in art and mythology. A third contains a miscellany of items meant to enlarge the ongoing theme of this symposium: what it means to be human.

The SALON presents a variety of storytellers and image makers and thinkers, from promising beginners to seasoned artists of mature and full-bodied talents.

The Grapevine Art & Soul Salon welcomes comments from visitors. Use the Contact button to send e-mails that will be forwarded to appropriate persons.