This work follows on from my previous painting, concerning the ancestral voices going back seven generations, the thread of knowledge that we may be able to learn how to grasp once more. Only this time, I acknowledge too the original guardians of wisdom, the serpents who are at the core of the mythologies of so many cultures around the world; the snakes that women once spoke to, and danced with, and welcomed into their houses with bowls of milk.
I attempted to get the paint to crack again, though the result is not as even as it was the first time. Yet it is enough. I am embracing imperfection, learning how to work with the things that do not go to plan, and create what I need to create anyway.
I am finding that painting is something that I can do at the moment (little by little), in contrast to writing, which requires a kind of mental energy I just can’t summon. Though I miss playing with words, and feeling stories flow through me, I am instead speaking through images, and returning to ideas that tugged at my heartstrings half my lifetime ago. If I can, I am going to follow this serpentine thread back into the heart of things. Maybe it will lead me to my mothertongue—my inner wisdom, and the wisdom of my foremothers—which will give me the knowing and language I need to speak with words once more.
And now the words ‘mother tongue’, language, widen out for me, as I see that the relationship to the one who has given us birth, and to that universe which engendered our being, might be the same as our relationship to language: we must trust words and the coming of words. (Susan Griffin, from ‘Thoughts on Writing: A Diary’, in Made from this Earth: An Anthology of Writings by Susan Griffin, Harper & Row: New York, 1982, p. 230)
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| Mothertongue, watercolours and gouache on gesso prepared paper (2019) |
i like the variability of the cracking---and the two pieces make a fine pair.
ReplyDeletei've been thinking a lot lately about the coming of words into humanity, and how they are so important. defining, in some ways. how the ability to speak is not unique to humans by any means, but the way that our language has shaped us seems to be unique. and finding our way back to a mother-tongue---language that enmeshes us in our matrix----is urgent and healing. true wisdom lies there, not in airy mythologies or abstract philosophising which extract us from the ground of being, and distort the nature of things.
Thank you. :)
DeleteYes, for some time those have been my thoughts too. I love Robert Bringhurst's take on language, essentially saying that language is to humans what feathers are to birds—i.e. it's part of our biology, and completely natural to us. (Writing, however, is optional, and tends to create problems. Thus there are people like David Abrams who are advocating for a return to oral culture, in some capacity, without wholly rejecting writing). But I have been thinking what our mother tongue could be, and what the first human words were, and I suspect that praise must have been a big part of it.
You are right, we need language that connects us with the ground of being, and distortions in language, and consequently in our thinking, have led to our disconnection from the earth. Truth-telling isn't popular in these 'post-truth' times, yet that's precisely what we need.