A painting card on my table
M: M, you cannot write. just take notes. if these few painting postcards are your material for the day, look at it closely, write about it as a way of entering the material.
Painting 1. A royal woman sleeps in her chamber of marble and fur because that is what that paint does, bridges the distance between the textures of marble and fur. She sleeps and the houries come, wearing qawwali caps, in orange and just a bit of bum pink, the flying women minstrels make a margin around the simple page of the marble boudoir. If the painting is a pattern and the volumes need to be communicated- the page metaphor works. A sleeping chambers in marble and furs, in intricate cat greys and cat whites, is the main page, the houries are the margin of the notebook page. The margin is prominent because the Houries are heavenly beings, the margin is large.
The heavenly margins of the earthly life, takes over my other painting card. Tieopolo, a new discovery, from a chance interview read online, of Calasso. Hill clouds well watched over days, cloud light watched for hours and practiced, till, the clouds and light almost biblically known to the painting arm, now yields cloud beings on those massive surfaces, sun on their torso, shade on their groin. The idea of the skies much more vast and large than the idea of the beings that live among them and so the flesh and bone form of those figures convincingly live among the soft but strong volume of the clouds. Tieoplo's heavens of daylight and the deccan painter's night, and heavenly beings in both. Tieoplo's beings need no wings, their bodies are made for the playground of the clouds. A baby does a sky dive somewhere in the depths of the frame, while the adults pose upfront. In my mind the two skies, at different times of day- are on continuum, like all skies are, rome and hyderabad small beings merely, looking up.
I did an attempted photoshop, taken up by the conceit that the women houries might be framed against the freewheeling child diving into the skies, head first.. the satan like figure, flying mid space among the hourie spaces ..but my image work is merely a desire yet, writing it must be for me, for now.
the sky of the miniature- embedded with a disc of beaten gold with a beaten gold pattern of beauty, glory, excess. The wall of the compound is the threshold of the human world, watery marks of an ageing wall over which splendid houries fly. the human being on the cot, is a being belongs to the material land of the wall, inhabits those colours, but wears, edging her greys and white, those golden and rich maroon marks as a sign of desire for another world.
She lies like the quiet moon, in her chambers, the houries are drawn irresistibly to her.
Calasso who writes of mythology..
This comes from Plato, from the Phaedo. Socrates says that precisely. Within the realm of myth, you wander into this danger zone, and that is the zone of the unknown. What you can do there is, first of all, utter or sing a carmen, a word that is usually translated as “poem” but primarily means “enchantment.” That is the best weapon at our disposal.
We are already there. As Sallustius the Neoplatonist wrote, the world itself is a myth. So no matter what we are doing, we are in the midst of a fable. And fables are by definition what enchant us. The only question is whether we perceive it or not.
Myths are not invented, they are there. You cannot say a myth starts at a certain moment.
And myth is never a single story. It is always a tree with many branches. Unless you take into account all possible variants, you don’t truly understand it.
excerpts from Calasso interview
The gods come afterward. In India the gods are latecomers. First there is Prajapati, and we just don’t know who he is—and he doesn’t know either, which is the disquieting point. Then come the rishis, the seers. Then finally come the gods—and they are not taken so seriously. Indra, who is the king of the gods, is made a fool of very often in Indian myths. This happens far more often in Indian lore than for his equivalent in Greek myth. At the end of all are animals and men.
Well, you find that notion already in Genesis. But that has its own consequence—guilt. Guilt lies at the root of sacrifice. Sacrifice is not a way to avoid guilt or to excuse guilt, it is a repetition of guilt. In a sense, it’s a reinforcement of guilt. The first guilt is the very fact of making things disappear. Killing is only one of the ways of achieving that. Eating is another.
These actions are all very closely connected and they reach very far back into prehistory. They have gone on for hundreds of thousands of years and have thus left their traces in our minds. You can take them into account or ignore them. Our world attempts to ignore them, it considers all of these things as very remote. In my books, I try to unearth them.
