1

Many years ago in the city of Oslo, having been out to attend various Halloween parties at night, I was returning with a friend to the place where we were staying. It was very early in the morning; the night was still dark, as it was the pitch-dark autumn of Northern Europe. Suddenly I stopped. What I saw at some distance from me was a huge waterfall, the water descending soundlessly to the street below. I just stood breathless, struck by such beauty right in the heart of a big city. I looked in the direction of the person accompanying me. He had also stopped and was looking awestruck at the same spectacle facing us. I said in hushed tones, “You mean it’s really a waterfall?”  “Looks like one, but I’ve never seen it before,” he said in equally hushed tones. He had lived in Oslo for a long time, and this was his first night encounter with a waterfall at not a great distance from where he lived. We walked on in the direction of the water, still dizzy from both joy and a certain fearfulness.

In a few minutes, we were both laughing our heads off. It was a huge gray wall on which the moon had been painting its magic during the hours when we had no time to see it. All the same, we had seen a waterfall and had been touched by its intense beauty. The laughter came as a release, not diminishing our joy in the least.

We walked on silently, smiling a little to ourselves. In a few minutes, we glimpsed a beautiful sculpture in a garden at some distance, the statue of a male figure holding an animal in his hands and leaning forward towards the hedge. This time, my friend had noticed this work of art, bathed in a glow visible to us from a distance. When we came closer, the sculpture changed its posture and let the hedgehog he was holding go into the dense green garden fence also lit by the same magical light. My friend had recognized his neighbor now, who was engaged in this strange nocturnal task of restoring an animal to its more natural habitat, the hedgehog to the hedge. They both exchanged a greeting, and we moved on. The statue had been transformed into a human being right under our gaze. We began to think we had fallen under some spell that made us traverse so miraculously between illusion and reality in a chilly autumn night of Scandinavia.

What is it in these experiences that give us a glimpse into the nature of the artistic experience, the aesthetic joy in a poem or a painting? It was the unexpectedness of nature itself that steals in on you in a work of art and, in this case, the wonderful interplay of illusion and reality. The gray-white-bluish paint on a canvas that was just a luminous waterfall a short while ago. Look at the waterfall and marvel at the light, marvel at the silence it envelopes you in, and then the heavy strokes and layers of white, gray and blue make an appearance under your gaze, thick paint that achieves such an unbelievable, shimmering illusion of a water body descending with such force. But this movement from the illusion to the paint and from the paint to the illusion is loaded with magic. A poem can be dark, very dark, and yet have incredible light that makes it glow from within. That too is magic. A painting with rectangles and triangles and lines could well take you into the heart of light, where there is such deep silence waiting for you. Both the poet and the painter are makers of images. They both sometimes envy each other for the apparent ease with which the other’s image implodes with utmost silence and light, whether in words or in strokes laden with color and movement. And they are both immensely reliant on their ability to materialize a waterfall from the huge gray wall of a municipal corporation. A young woman in Vishnudharmottarpuran can’t respond to her lover’s embrace as the figures on the mural in front of her are so full of life that she has a feeling they are watching the couple.

2

As a poet who always had very close friends among painters, it’s perhaps worthwhile for me to dwell on my irrepressible lifelong desire to be able to paint. I had watched some of my painter friends painting in their studios. At times I was given a place to sleep in the studio itself, and when I opened my eyes in the early hours, a particular friend of mine would be silently working on his canvas unaware of my having woken up and watching him paint. I began to see how, by scratching a color with a tool, light suddenly flooded some space on the canvas. As he continued to use several techniques and strategies far removed from the brushstrokes we commonly associate painting with, rectangles began to dance, filled with the morning or evening light playing on water. My heart began to beat violently…

But it wasn’t until a friend’s son (whose name is Utsuk) made me lose my fear of doing something as adventurous as letting another medium, another art form, to take almost complete possession of my days and nights. At nine, he was painting beautifully in vivid colors with no anxiety about representing anything. He constantly reminded me of the painter Nietzsche might have had in mind when he said, “A painter is part of nature. That’s why he never imitates nature.” One day I asked Utsuk what exactly urged him to paint, could he possibly describe the sensations involved in painting? He said, “I like to discuss my palette with you, don’t I? Once I get to know what colors I’ll paint with for the day, I just follow the movement of my hand.” At nine, Utsuk was saying something that seemed to have described a way of writing poetry. Intervening too much would utterly destroy the impulse. He had also said something about human hands that made a deep impression on me.

However, I still wasn’t satisfied with my investigations into the art of painting and continued my dialogue with Utsuk while occasionally watching him paint without his permission. One day, having caught me red-handed, Utsuk got mad at me. I tried to make an excuse saying that the curiosity as to how such a splendid work comes into existence is something I can’t overcome. He handed me an excellent handmade sheet and some oil-pastels saying, “Why don’t you see for yourself, Teji Amma?” I immediately began to try… Just following the movement of my hand and scratching through layers to colors hidden underneath with tools I kept inventing by the minute. Since that day several years ago, I have been painting unstoppably for many years until the time that the physical presence of hundreds of paintings that demanded to be seen by others began to exhaust my mind.

But meanwhile, it is true, that my hands had really woken up in a way very different from their wakefulness while they write poems. I became aware of my hands to the extent that I even forgot their existence. They stopped nagging me the way they nag an inexperienced theater actor and they began to think completely on their own in a language of color, movement, light and strokes. My hands began to pick up tools that could produce a certain effect; they made me rush in the direction of the colors most appropriate for what they wanted to paint. They had been waking up gradually during the years I had spent visiting galleries both home and abroad, just letting myself come face to face with my masters. I noticed that I was looking at paintings also in a different way now. I was also studying the dots, the lines, the colors of shadows, the light flooding in from god knows where into the water-lilies and on the apples lying on the table. In the minimalist blue-brown landscapes in which various parts seemed to be stitched together with blades of grass, I began to guess at the techniques, and also the tools that might have been used. I saw gorgeous birds taking off from mountaintops like arrows shooting themselves into the still center of light, and my hands began to feel a desire, making me deeply aware of it. But most importantly, I was constantly studying the strokes of each individual painter, and that’s what my hands were watching with rapt attention before they woke up in this crazy way that they didn’t want to stop.

Among some unforgettable lines of poetry, this is what surfaced many times during those days. It’s a famous one by Paul Eluard: The earth is blue like an orange. I would like you to feel this line before I go on. The earth is blue like an orange. One could think it’s a line written by a poet who is also a painter. One could think that it’s possible to paint this line. But it’s not. As a line of poetry it will wake you up to the magic of the earth and its infinitely shimmering quality, but the visual of a blue orange might just end up making it lose all its ambiguity and will perhaps turn it into kitsch. That’s why, for a blue orange, a nirguni painting must come into being, a painting in which it is in some way possible to be rid of the human world. As a poet pulled into painting by a violent force, I was also longing to be rid of the human world, not to be involved with the merciless working of the human mind, or my own mind for that matter. It was possible to stop thinking at last and to silence the language humans had invented. But it was also possible to do the same thing in poetry, except that you can’t write poetry for twenty hours at a stretch. Poetry is more about waiting than writing. One is after the hushing of everyday language so that poetry can speak its own language. If you can’t do that all day and you want to, perhaps painting could assume some importance in your life.

I apply the same test that I applied to Paul Eluard’s orange to a fragment of my own poem and I get the same answer:

Paani mein
ek morpankh girta hai
chaand ke aks par

In the water
a peacock feather falls
on the reflection of the moon

I really needed to turn to painting in order to lift this image into a completely non-human world. I mean the non-human or more-than-human world that I enter when my hands take over from me and devise a language of their own making. The light, the depth, the colors, that come into existence go and wake up the light, the depth, the colors that already exist in my body. When I think of what Van Gogh had said in his letters once, I’m surprised that a painter should find an element in his way of painting that I’m trying to escape from. But perhaps I misunderstand him. Perhaps we need to reflect on the possible meaning of what he wrote, trying to describe his sensations while painting: “the strokes come with a sequence and coherence like words in a speech or letter.” Coming to a writer who had begun to paint, let us look at D. H. Lawrence who had asked himself: “What am I doing, bursting into paint? I am a writer; I ought to stick to ink. I have found my medium of expression: why at the age of forty in 1926, should I suddenly want to try another?” When Lawrence was dying slowly, he returned to painting after having given it up in the intervening years because, as he said, “it gave me a form of delight that words can never give. Perhaps the joy in words goes deeper and is for that reason more unconscious. The conscious delight is certainly strong in paint.” Rabindranath Tagore took to painting late in life and rediscovered for himself the joy of being an artist without the anxiety heaped on by market or by fame:

For his proud name, acclaimed by the market
Ignores the painter’s brush
Leaving it free to follow its path,
Free, as is the Spring with his paint-box.

(Translator not named)

3.

The image in which the visual and the written come very close together, and which has served as something that finds resonance in one’s desire to both write and paint, is that of Lord Shiva whose entire body is composed of the alphabet according to Shiv Puran. Let us assume that the script is Devnagari, in which case the left ear is the long u, the right the short one. The ee sounds are the eyes, and so on all the way down, with compound letters where the body gets a bit complicated. The Lord – Shiva – father of this river/mother goddess: his body is made of the letters of the alphabet I write with. The whole body – from head to foot, including the crescent moon (arguably standing for half a nasal sound[1]).  But after a point, the letters are pulled out of nature to turn into abstractions so that infinite combinations are possible in language. However, among other things, it’s good to remember, both as a poet and a painter, that the chandra-bindu is always the crescent moon, which it should be in order to retain the beauty of the visual and to nasalize sounds in a visually appropriate way too.

There are no surprises here in the body of the Lord giving space to the letters of the alphabet within the elaborate iconography of his being. In the Vishnudharmottarpuran, the Chitrasutra stipulates that for any understanding of chitra, it is essential to have knowledge of natya, or dance, for the understanding of which, the knowledge of instrumental music is a must, which in turn requires a proficiency in vocal music, which depends deeply on the knowledge of language, both classical and unsophisticated. The poet, therefore, trying to paint is doing nothing unusual.

The modern times have pushed painting to a very anxious place in the market, and it has come rather far for many painters from being the devotional enterprise that it was supposed to be.  The poet has more or less still remained untouched by the market and, instead of making a living out of her calling, she waits for large chunks of time, simply waits. Sometimes that becomes unbearable, and time begins to crush a human being trying her best to wait for a poem. When she can’t write one, she tries to paint a poem instead. Poems are not always written down things. The light and color have entered her limbs from a deep contemplation of the river and the trees, the moon and the night sky. They have found echoes in her body, and she tries not to hurt that which gives her life. She doesn’t want her brushes to bleed their color into the river close to where she lives. She picks some Neem trees and makes a vivid green out of it. The bark of the Arjun tree gives her a brown she can never find elsewhere. Pomegranate shells give her pale yellow, black and a mellow brown. Turmeric powder gives her burnt sienna, cadmium yellow, and tart lemon. From Jamun and rose and hibiscus, she gets violets and reds. She makes sure never to pick fresh flowers as she has seen birds and bees and butterflies making a living out of them. When she picks up fallen flowers, she makes sure she leaves quite a few for goats and cows, as the goats and cows come so often to her street and visit her poems when they have the leisure to do so.

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[1] See any edition of Shiv Puran, for the chapter “The darshan of Lord Shiva’s body made of words”.