A Conceptual Touch-Free Car Wash

The Mother of Khaita

 

 

 

Dionysos
Carl Kerenyi
Bollingen Series LXV.2
page 108

The Homeric version of the death of Ariadne becomes fully comprehensible only if there was between her and Dionysos the closest relationship possible between a man and a woman...

This passage deals with some intricate ideas about Ariadne and her exact relationship to Dionysos.

When it dawned on me that the closest relationship meant that between a mother and her son, I felt my own mother's presence... I saw her not in an "Ah-ha!" experience of great clarity, but as if I were in a car watching sheets of water streaming down the glass of the windows: it was not clear and not easy to see through them, but it was as if they were melting, changing, streaming, blowing, absolute clarity combined with turbulence and opacity.
As if sitting in a car wash, I thought.
Something changed within me, but it changed in a way that I could not grab and put into a concept.

This was two days ago.

Things are so rarely as we experience when introduced to the history of Freud. Things rarely are encapsulated within one single and clear concept, and that single concept does not lead us to "Ah-ha!", but more often to a more rigorously defined mystery.

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