an open letter to 2022
I spent the first few days of this year, in silence as the snow fell. We got good snow.
The Sangre de Cristo mountains are dusted with snow. The junipers are laden with snow. My driveway is coated with it and mud too.
There are the tracks of a deer going across the yard.
I relished the silence, the meditation, the disconnection to electronic things, the connection to stillness, moment by moment.
And I was reflecting on how much I love nuance in art making, and shadow and the light and how I really love the language of the senses and most of all, the silence behind words and images and feelings.
I was thinking this and I was wondering if the love of these things means I will forever be a hidden artist, mostly invisible except for those who are already in the dark and love it and embrace shadow and love metaphor, muddy with fresh rain, the kind you wade in with your gumboots during the monsoons.
Oh, that squelching sound of my childhood in Bandra. That sound of rain. I remember a whole morning of unrelenting rain.
It had already begun by the time I left Mount Mary’s Road and by the time I got to Carmel Convent on Hill Road, the water was up to my knees. I was eight or nine and I don’t know how tall or short I was. I remember I was with my ayah. She held my hand.
There was a peon — we used such words in my childhood. I think “peon” is still a job title in India.
A peon for our Catholic school was the gate attendant. He was there when we came every morning and we nodded to him. Sometimes, he may have delivered a letter or papers for the nuns or maybe they sent him to buy bread from the bakery across the street.
That morning, his job was to turn us all away, saying go home, go home. Ghar jao. School bund hai.
Apparently, the playground was flooded, and the classrooms, especially the fifth standard room, were also flooded.
There was confusion - a whole sea of umbrellas and raincoats and ayahs and parents and children crowded near the gate.
But eventually, the clarity of no-school emerged and that was tremendous.
And the danger too, of the rain, already up to my knees. Rivers of rain on Hill Road. It felt like the ocean down the road, the Arabian Sea, was emptying out.
I remember the thrill of going home in the rain, a bit scared and holding on tightly to the hand of my ayah. And the truth is, I only remember her hand. Not her name.
And my not remembering takes me into colonization and myself being part of a class of Indians created by the British to speak English and be a buffer class, and the rations officers in my lineage, the uncle who cried when the British left in 1947 and said, Bloody Indians and drank his whiskey.
August 15, 1947 merepix.com
The Catholics on one side, the Muslims on another, the Hindus before all of that — and neither lineage telling the whole story of me or of themselves.
But I also wonder why I’ve gone and put Catholics and Muslims and Hindus here. Yes, they are all in my lineage but am I pandering to the reader, showing my Indian credentials, my relevance to write about authenticity and mystery, how Indian are you anyway, and also, who is authority, and also, what is India and who was there first or last and where do you factor into it all?
Also, what is the dark made of, also what is the light made of, also what happens to the dark when we die, what happens to the light when we sing?
Mostly I am wondering about my commitment to nuance, to expressing myself in shade and shadow, my unease with slogans, M for messages — will all this relegate me to a certain kind of obscurity, will it keep me invisible?
And thinking this, I look at this new year 2022 who is not itself and me, not myself, not who I have been.
This new year cannot be the same as other years. Too much of consequence has passed. And I am not as I have been. I am not cowed by this love of nuance anymore. I am not overshadowed by my love of shadow.
I write this as an invitation to step into the dark, into shadow work and shade work, into sluices of light, into whatever the story wants to be, and if someone says to you, what is the relevance, what is the message? take them by the hand and bring them into the dark with you.
Let the message become sodden with light and dark, with the thing you cannot name. Let the message became a river running fast or a swallow nesting under a ledge of sandstone or an egret that suddenly alights in forest gloom, unfurling wings in a flash of white.
Let the message become the egret or the river or the swallow or you watching the egret, the river or the swallow.
Let the message become a garden grove, let it become grief or blood running from the heads of those who refused to change their name, let it be the sword of the colonizers, and let it be the man with the sword, who has a mother and a daughter who both loved him.
This is an invitation into the dark, the self-speaking to its own silence.
After two years of stillness, loss, grief, delight, relief, poison, division, anger, judgement, chaos, lies, truth, do not come into this new year as if the world is the same.
It is not. Nor are you.
The sky is falling, the oceans receding, the songs drowning, the old order standing in its last gasp for power. I mean gasp.
Because I am thinking of breath and I am thinking of George Floyd and I am thinking of prana, the first breath, and the first sound and I am thinking of the kudiyattam and theater teacher Venuji whose workshops on performance energy opened a new world of dark and light and fire for me — how once he told a story of the first time he saw the performance of the man who would later become his own teacher and mentor. He said, “seeing him, I felt I was breathing his breath.” And feeling the breath, he knew that he had to follow that singularity of connection. No matter what. Just because.
This year, I write to the new year and I write to myself, with the silent snow in sight.
This is an invitation to do what is true even if the art you make is a drop of night onto a canvas of midnight, and only you and the moon will see it.
Be that drop of night onto a canvas of midnight.
Because someone will see it and recognize it. The truth of that one drop will arrow into the core of who sees it and it will unfurl into their own truth and it will emerge in a new tale of their own telling.
If I tell you the name of the place where my great grandmother may be buried — we are not sure but someone said once Palgad — if I tell you that, if I say it out loud and write it here, the sound of it will resound somewhere. It will invite you into your sounds, your own specificity.
I think also of the whole enterprise of grant-making for artists which means well and is necessary. But it too, needs to change in 2022.
We need each other — artists and those who seek to support artists with money to manifest the art. It is a dance.
I feel the enterprise needs to become responsive to the language of art, the process of art-making, not the other way around.
I do not appreciate reading descriptions of grant making groups that laud their own acumen at choosing art that matters, that give itself authority.
I say this from writing many grants and receiving some. The ones I appreciate most are the ones that ask just for the work done in the past or the work in progress or what you have done before and a brief description of what you mean to do.
The ones that feel dissonant are the ones that ask me to scour myself to the very bone to describe the story in full light, the meaning, the relevance, why it matters.
When, for me — at the start of a project, what a beginning needs is that you go deeper into the dark first. To rest in the unknown. The forest dark. The mist dark.
I think of that documentary, Touching the Void, when the climber, his leg broken, stuck in a remote mountain crevasse in Peru, looks up at the long road to light, the upward climb that he cannot do with this broken leg. And he chooses the way, down, into the darkness of the crevasse, and from that choice, he finds the way out to the side of the mountain. The dark takes him into the light.
There are so many ways to ask an artist to describe what does not yet have form, that is in progress, that is near completion — ways that respect the mystery of creating.
In Defense of the Necessary Dark is the other name for what I am writing.
This is an invitation to be true to whatever you call art, to keep its mystery, to keep doing what you love for the sheer love of doing it.
This is an invitation to the shab that named me night in Persian, to the ana which is I in Arabic.
Be the muddy gumboots that love metaphor.
Turn around at the gate of the old school.
This journey you will have to make alone.
But it’s okay.
It won’t be raining every day.
And even if it is, turn your face up to sky.
Let the hood of the rain coat fall away
and let it rain on you.
Wash clear what is not true
what wants to be relevant
important
seen by authority.
In finding what belongs only to you, you’ll meet the embrace of all that is shared, all the stories, all the vulnerabilities, yours, theirs, ours.
May the story you tell be faithful to itself, riven with its own mystery, made whole by it, whittled down to the oldest stone, the one that remembers dark.
I do not know all I mean to say.
And also, I feel I have said it.
Once, someone asked me why we need art.
I was twelve and fumbled with long answers, complicated reasoning, anxious to prove my point.
Now I would say, the need is reason enough.
The need is always enough.
January 2022
