I had just last written of hammers and it was pointed out to me that I had not mentioned their nominal patron god, Hephaestus.  Indeed too, supposedly Hephaestus is the patron of blacksmiths and craftsmen and all those who make things, and this blog in general is mostly about making things, so stopping for a moment to reflect on Hephaestus seems nothing short of proper.

Of course I’d read the basic mythology, and also having a natural predisposition towards blacksmiths, it was easy to conceptually favor a working god.  Something about the moment of impact though, impact as creative transformation, had and has a very powerful appeal to my intuition.  Let me offer a little show and tell.

I drew this a few years ago, thinking about the moment of impact

and realized pretty quickly that the core element – the striking of a lightning bolt on an anvil – came out of a brief scene in Disney’s Fantasia.  There the Hephaestus is a little needlessly doofy but nonetheless he still has mighty work to do.

I think a fellow named Art Babbitt is to be credited with that art and I praise it highly.  It is very brief but conveys its message very powerfully.

The Greek gods in many ways were a bunch of immortal miscreants.  Neither had they wrought the universe itself, so much as they presided over it, nor did they serve it in a manner that rose much above capricious self-indulgence.  Myself having been born in an earthly monotheistic tradition, where God in addition to presiding was also the maker of the universe, its fabric and character, this brought about in me an imagination of an Hephaestus of cosmologically much broader authorship, as if the personified agency of God as maker.  Not so much the chooser of what is to be made, nor necessarily the maker all things such as our clay-like selves, but big mighty things such as the fabric of the universe and of time.  Blake uses the idea of the smithy of heaven obliquely in Tyger Tyger, citing the hammer and anvil and tongs –

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

but my imagination is not subtle.  This idea of the heavenly smithy though, in which the world as we know it was and perhaps continues to be wrought made me write, this is a long time ago, nigh on thirty years, this bit –

Hephestus on Hammering
Thwump utterly on the big drum
Shuddering pulses that shiver down
The ossified spine of history
Amplify, with irresistible euphony,
The pure and incomprehensible
Music of the void
Stretch the limits of desire
Past the love of control
And the poignance of pain
Quake the dormance of matter!
Quake the formation of substance!
Quake the making of time!

where thwumping of course is the hammering, the ‘thw’ being the woosh and the ‘p’ the impact – and calling it a drum because there is a rhythm and a music in these repetitions, but to get to the intent, what would a big Mr. H, charged with such a big job, think and be desiring in doing this work that took the fullest measure of his strength and spirit, that he would be trying to transform the dead mass into more than a shape, that by hammering to transform, but to transform into what, oh, the muse.

I am not much of a painter, nor a writer.  When I look at what is in this universe and what this universe is I am filled with wonder and I wonder what hath wrought it and if any design or intention or struggle, as we who make things experience, was in the making of things how they are.  I can’t even decide if I want that to be the truth or not.  I just can’t help but wonder.  I do know the painting above is certainly filled with imperfections – I was on an airplane the other day for a few hours – decided to touch it up a little electronically.  Except that he looks a little too composed now, almost as if he just got up from his desk job, the glaring wrongs spots are mostly addressed.