reconceptualising the land

I'm currently reading Diana Eck's latest book, India: A Sacred Geography. Eck is best known for having previously written a book about Indian images called Darshan. Darshan is a unique Indian religious concept which refers to, amongst other related things, the moment that the worshipper looks up at the image situated at the dark centre of the temple (often after a lengthy circumambulation that has taken them into increasingly smaller and darker physical space) and meets the eyes of God. When you think about the fact that the image is believed by a large majority not to be a 'symbol' of God (as in, the one God of the universe), but an actual manifestation of God who has descended into its material form, this is an unbelievably potent idea.

This time, however, Eck is looking at the idea of India as a sacred whole. The word 'sacred' is deeply problematic in an Indian context. It assumes a distinction between 'sacred' and 'non-sacred', which many would suggest is largely meaningless in an Indian context. Talking about pilgrimage centres (which are dotted all over India, North to South, East to West, joined together as a vast web of tracks over the entire continent), she says:

....there are so many tirthas [pilgrimage sites] in the sacred geography of India that the whole notion of 'sacred space' as somehow set aside from the profane is cast into question. In Hindu India, sacred space is so vastly multiplied that there is little left untouched by the presence of the sacred, reminding us that ultimately what is at stake is not the capacity of the gods to be present in the world, but rather the human capacity to apprehend that presence. In Varanasi, they say, there is not a place as big as a sesame seed that is not a tirtha, and the same is said of many of India's great tirthas, and perhaps of India itself.... The world is saturated with the sacred.

I'm not quite sure why this interests me so much. It suggests to me that Native American idea of the land as a living body which must not be defiled, which has to be respected. Indian practices call into question almost all of the assumptions that Judaeo-Christian cultures are based upon; not only the idea of human dominion over the earth etc. but also the assumed separation between God and human.

It's no longer possible to take the view of nineteenth century European historians of religion and glibly say, 'Oh, a pantheistic religion, like the Greeks, seeing gods everywhere', or 'Look, primitive peoples believing that nature spirits control the earth'... This is a completely different way of understanding being in the world. What exactly does it mean to understand that there is not a place as big as a sesame seed that is not sacred? What are we talking about using the word sacred to define something that has no opposite - where no non-sacred is possible? How does seeing things this way change the experience of being human (and what might the wider consequences be of shifting to this world view?)


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two strands

Slate image by George Garson; catalogue prints, repeated

There seem two be two strands to my interests at the moment. In my head, they join up. In the painting, they don't quite, not yet, if they're ever going to....

The emergence of Indian art and the sculptures of the gods is discussed in some of the posts below, and is ongoing. It's intense and difficult, and I find I can only take so much of it at a time. It's very conceptual, albeit much of it conceptual about a particular approach to aesthetics (two terms that are often assumed to be contradictory in contemporary discussions about art...). The whole thing hinges on loosely and widely-conceived links between ideas of  'gods, God, man, and nature', in a way that I can't put into words. I perhaps should say, though, that God for me is an idea, not a personal reality.

The other strand of work eddies around a fascination for natural forms; fractals, repetition and novelty. I've just written a post on this on the Exploring Creativity blog. In terms of the images, there perhaps doesn't seem to be much link between these two areas. But in terms of the ideas and the feeling, somehow there is.

Let's see if I can unravel those links through time and working.


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the body adorned

I have an instinct towards this project that comes out of deep memory and association. It's a project that brings together, unasked, but quite perfectly, a number of different strands of interest and experience. A relationship with the colours, art, people, and land of India, which goes back thirty three years. An interest in ideas and in the philosophical, but the long-standing impossibility of finding a home in 'Western' politics, philosophy or art. A delight in writing and words as a means of exploring ideas. A surfeit of academic words relating to the social sciences, and an exhaustion with the disembodied theoretical. A craving for the aesthetic; for the felt and experienced rather than than the conceptual. An interest in movement and the body as an antidote to these things.

After over two years of struggling to return to my painting roots, the unexpected appearance of the Indian dancing human/godly form in my work was a big surprise. For the last couple of months I've been trying to follow this without asking too many questions. I've always been aware, though, that this dancing Indian image (as understood both within Indian textual traditions and within the lives and practices of living, earthly people) was some kind of still point which in brought together many things which are traditionally seen as separate in my own culture. The conceptual versus the aesthetic, for example, or bodily sensuality versus rarified philosophies. Most interestingly of all, for me, was an apparent stress on the primacy of nature - the vastness of the universe, human beings, the smallest flower - which sometimes involved a concept of God or gods, and sometimes did not.

It may seem strange to suggest that images of God/gods may not always be much to do with the idea of God/gods at all (at least as these concepts are understood in European and American cultures), especially in the context of traditions that seem to use images of gods and God in their every nook and cranny. But that's part of the intention of this project; to try to open up a space, physically and aesthetically, which questions or reframes what might be understood by  words like 'gods', 'God', man, nature - and the separations so often assumed to between such ideas.

In this wonderful book I've just received through the post, Dehejia talks about ''the extraordinary body-centred literary imagination' found in Indian art and literature.

'A stone inscription of thirty Sanskrit verses composed in the the late twelfth century speaks of the earth, the sky, and the temple in terms of human erotic love...:


First gratified...with the close embrace of the thighs of the earth, enjoyed by many princes, the surrounding sky, like a clever lover, accompanying his action with a smile of extreme love, eagerly, within sight of the damsels of heaven, kisses...the face of Fortune, this (temple) desirous of receiving on all sides the heavy embrace of bodies, trembling with pangs of love, of the women of the regions.' 

2009:6'

And this description from a 12th century Prakrit text associated with Jainism, of the river Jamuna:

Her upper garment was the globules of foam and her glorious breasts the sporting rahanga birds. Her romavali, effective in distracting the  minds of learned men, was the network of algae. Her beautiful ringlets of braided hair were the rows of bees, and her lengthy eyes, the petals of the blossomed lotus. Her navel, dispelling the heat of those with fever, was the whirlpool churned by the wind... Her buttocks were the wide, glistening sand banks.


romavali: fine line of hair running upwards from the navel and considered a mark of beauty

2009:8

My oh my.

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