The Ship of Skeletons

This is the story of two initiations, one initiation into a World that has been created and decided by Fear, and one initiation into a Future that has Yet to be Created.

     Once, and once, and once again [within a time existing side by side with many other times] there was a child.  This child was a girl to the world, but she was not yet known to herself as that.  She could have been anything, because, in fact, she knew herself as everything before her.  She did not yet know the world that separates every thing from another, with lines and words and definitions.  She was not yet in that world, nor was it in her.  Her world floated in and through spectrums of color and light and choral harmonies, becoming, revealing, filling.  

The Cape

     One day the girl’s father gathered his family, with news of a journey.  It was time to travel to a New World.  In order to get to this New World, the family would take a long journey together, on an enormous passenger ship.  The ship had many levels with even more hallways, and those hallways had even more rooms.  The ship also had a ship doctor, and when the child saw this man the hair on the back of her neck stood up and sent a cold wave spiraling through her spine.  

Close up - Ancestry Cloth

     The girl and her family had boarded the ship, and they sailed farther and farther from the shore she had always known. The hallways and rooms in the ship became darker and darker.  The child felt confused and lost, with no horizon to orientate herself to.  It seemed as if the ship moved furiously in no direction, towards nothing.  It seemed to the girl as if she could travel up flights of stairs and through long hallways for hours and never reach the main deck.  In time, her eyes acclimated to the darkness, and in the darkness she hid.  It was from this hiding place she spotted the ship doctor talking to her father and her mother.  He told her parents that each family member would require a special surgery before entering the New World.  One by one the girl child watched her family members disappear into the doctor’s quarters.  First her father went in, the door closed and she could no longer hear nor see anything that was happening inside.  When he at last reappeared from the operating room, the child covered her mouth and screamed. It was a scream only she could hear inside of her own head.  Her father was now a skeleton, walking and talking as if nothing had changed, except he had no flesh, no hair, no eyes. The girl remained in her hiding place as her mother disappeared and then, hours later, reappeared as a skeleton.  When the doctor left his room to find her brother, the girl ran down the halls of the ship, calling and crying to her brother, to warn him of the doctor’s true intent.  But the only one who heard her cries was the doctor, so she ran and hid.  This time she hid underneath the operating table.  From there, she thought, she could warn her brother.  But her fear had taken her voice, and all she could do was curl her body tightly into itself and listen to the sound of a knife cutting and cutting and cutting into flesh.

Film Still - Ancestry Cloth Performance 

     The child knew now that she would never be able to come out from under that table without also losing her flesh and her eyes and her lips and her skin.  From her heart she was still calling out warnings to her loved ones, but no one could hear her heart.  The only sounds to be heard on the ship were the sounds of rattling bones.  She huddled under the table for what seemed like days, and then weeks.  The doctor stormed up and down the halls of the ship, opening and slamming doors, calling out her name.

     Now the child had a problem.  She knew she could not stay under that table forever if she were to be reunited with her family.  She longed for her family more than she feared the doctor, but she loved her own body as she loved the world.  So she did the only thing she could in these circumstances.  She divided herself into two.  In order to camouflage herself she took pieces of everything before her and stitched them into a cape.  She took a sliver of wood from the operating table, a scrap of curtain, a torn page from the ship’s log, silk from the dress of a wealthy passenger, a feather from a gull, a leather luggage tag, rope from the deck, drops of rain, salt from the ocean, sand, floor dust, star dust and her own breath, and she stitched and stitched and stitched these things to her self and made a Cloak of Everything in which to camouflage herself.  When she divided herself into two her knowing self stayed under the Cloak of Everything and she sent away the un-knowing self.  Her un-knowing self ran out of the room with arms stretched wide open, crying like a baby, for her family. 

Film Still - Ancestry Cloth Performance

     Now the man known as the doctor was no longer pretending to be a healer.  He had become so furious in his search for the child all of his pretenses had fallen away and he was indeed a terrifying butcher.  In his rage he grabbed the un-knowing girl and her surgery was the most brutal of all.  He administered no gas, nor anesthesia, and he did not sterilize his tools.  The pain of the butchery caused the girl on the operating table to pass out from shock and forget everything.  From under the table her knowing self could hear the sounds of her own surgery, and she pulled the cape over her head and covered her ears.  That was the last she ever heard of her other half, who left the ship as a skeleton and reunited with her family.  

     The girl in the cape stayed under the table, frozen with fear.  There she remained, for years and years, growing from child to adolescent to woman.  At night she ventured out from the doctor’s room and crept into the kitchen to eat what she could without arousing suspicion.  She climbed up the mast of the ship and watched the waves of the ocean and the light of the moon and she called for her other half with a howl that sounded, to the sailors and passengers, like a powerful and haunting ocean wind.  And every day, just before the dawn, she climbed back down and returned under the operating table where she huddled under the cape that camouflaged her and protected her ears from the screams and the cutting and the rattling of bones.  But the cape heard it all and became very very heavy.  The cape continued to stitch the world into itself and every sound and every sight became its memory.  And the cape kept its memory in safe keeping until the time would come for the knowing self to call from the ship’s mast and be heard by her un-knowing self.

Film Still - Ancestry Cloth Performance

     The girl who had reunited with her family and entered the New World had a parallel life that looked very different but felt very much the same.  She longed for love with a sense of fear and distance that troubled everyone around her.  She would look in the mirror at night and spit at her reflection.  She cut into her flesh in order to know it as real.  She ate the feasts around her and vomited them up.  She saw her life ending even as it had just begun.  She wondered why she was so drawn to dark hallways and locked doors, but went into them nonetheless.  She could see in the dark, but when she told of what she had seen she was told she was mistaken.  In her mistakenness she looked for love in the world.  But the world was also torn from itself, and as it passed before her it showed itself as nothing but fragments.  She reached for the torn fragments and collected them.  She began to stitch them together.  As she stitched, she felt a strange breeze across her face.  She heard the sound of the wailing of the sea, she heard choral harmonies and she saw spectrums of light dancing before her closed eyes.  So she stitched and stitched, with what seemed like madness, driven from the realm of the unknown, or the yet to be known, or the yet to be remembered.  The fragments of the world became a cape, and she stitched more and more fragments into the cape.  The X-ray of her broken finger, a mirage of a faraway land, computer cables, her great grandmothers dress.  Dust from the room, dust from the stars, her tears, the hair of a newborn baby and a photograph from another time.  Cells and molecules so small they entered through the eye of her needle.  Memories and dreams so illusive they entered the cape while she was sleeping.  All of the opportunities for healing entered the cape, whether she recognized them or not.  

Photo from Performance of Dissimilation, Puebla Mexico
Photo courtesy of Arquetopia

    One day the cape was finished. By this time the girl was a woman with children of her own.  A voice rose from the cape.  The voice calmly instructed the woman, “Enter Me.”   The woman put the cape over her head and it covered her body, and all fear disappeared.  At that moment all the longing was fulfilled, and not in the way all the separate fragments had told her it would be.  The love she had longed for not something outside of her, it was all she had ever been.  At that moment she saw herself in the mirror and knew the one looking back.  At that moment she embraced her own body and it laughed out loud and cried in relief.  At that moment all that had been was no longer as it had been, and all that could be was to be anew.  At that moment the ending became the beginning.  

Close up - Ancestry Cloth
Photo courtesy of Bloom Photography by Kara 

This is the beginning of the Initiation of Dissimilation, where the structures are taken down and released.  Some things will be kept, some things will be released and all things will be transformed in the process.  We are no longer captives to a story that is not our own, each of us has a story, and no one story is more or less than another.  Each one of us makes the fabric of the multiverse the rich and powerful fabric that it is, and it is unable able to exist with one story missing.

The Female Center

I sometimes hear voices.  I kept pretty quiet about that my entire life, because, well, I was afraid of being judged by minds that do not understand such things.  This has been a month of letting go of fears... so that one's gone too.

In the early morning hours I sometimes hear a voice, telling me one thing at a time, helping me understand. It's always been a fatherly voice, until yesterday.  Yesterday the voice was female. It told me to Enter. 

The words were "Put yourself inside of me."  (If you immediately thought about sex read the next paragraph.  If not, you can skip it.)

The sexuality of the phrase, while undeniable, could easily become a distraction from the larger lesson of the words.  Making female power centered on sex is a way of taking away female power, by limiting it to one dimension of human activity.  If we as a culture had a healthy relationship with feminine power, then the relationship between sexuality and all the other forces that drive us as humans would exist in harmony.

I reflected on the words I had heard, "Put yourself inside of me" until I finally decided to paint.

My first interpretation of the voice was that of the earth, the mother, the female.

Fire inside, fire in the center.  What to enter?  The Center.  It is in the entering that the understanding begins to unfold, through the feeling, through the energy, through the very act of entering.

We are at a time in history when we have so much to look back on and sift through.  Books and knowledge excite me, offering so many paths of thought and exploration for the mind.  But, in the end, I have to get out of my head for the clarity I need.  The clarity that is needed for peace comes from calling my ancestors and finding my center.  It comes from a place that cannot be defined with words.  

The knowing that comes from the mind and the knowing that comes from the heart's center do not need to be in competition.   Coexisting, they work together, for we are in the world, as well as the spirit, at this time.  This is the conflict I see around me, that of opposing poles.  How does one shift that magnetic push of opposition into an alignment?   By entering the center, where the forces no longer push or pull.  Rather than split the atom, enter it.

What my ancestors and spirit are telling me is to release fear.  This happens by facing fears, not suppressing them or pushing them away.  Looking at fear and then letting it go is the way through the anxiety of our time.  It leads to a centered calm.  Everything must change, in a profound and all encompassing way.  That change is happening, and in order to adjust to the change, a strong and centered female energy is needed.  And this is an energy that is misunderstood in a patriarchal world, where equality is often sought on male terms, and feminine power is still confined by those very terms. 

The imbalance has been focused on male, light, linear thought, hierarchy and force.  We are witnessing its final stages.   It cannot be tamed, let alone fought , with more of its own .  A receptive, dark, female energy encircles it and tames it, not with force but with unimaginable power.  This happens on every level of human activity, from the most intimate to the most public, through personal relationships to political struggles.  All we need to do is look to nature and spirit to bring our human world back into balance.  Starting with, but not stopping at, ourselves.

Female is reception.  It is Yin.  It is the stillness in the center of the storm.   It is the heat from the center of the earth.  

That is where I enter.  

i am usha

The Dark. A natural and essential part of our existence.  Not evil.  Not inferior.  Deep.  Forceful.

Darkness is intense,  and so widely misunderstood.  Who has not used the word "darkness" to describe something ominous and threatening; when in truth it is simply the unknown.  It takes a brave deconstruction, followed by an honest reconstruction, of language, culture and history to fully understand what darkness truly is.  It takes conquering the fear of the unknown.

One thing I have had to admit to myself, in these times, is my own reluctance to go deep and wide.  To be honest with myself and to keep Looking.  Especially when it is hard to look, when what I see before me is greed and unimaginable cruelty.  The Horror.  Looking at the world with my eyes wide open and my heart wide open feels like a punch in the chest, leaving me breathless.  I begin the year 2017 with the humble realization that I, too, have been hiding from my own intense darkness. 

What I learned as a child:

What one sees in the dark will not be believed.  

Turn on a light and it disappears.  

What I learned as an adult:

Leave the seeds of your own imagination and intuition in the light of the bright sun. 

They will shrivel and die.  

For they need the cool damp soil, the long dark nights and rain.

Finally, I not only understand darkness; I thrive in it. I am learning to see in it.  I need to go into darkness to fully understand myself and the world.  There I have found a deep connection with my ancestors.  My ancestors are my connection with the unwritten past that I carry within, making them the seeds of compassion for myself and all life.  

In the light of day we learn we are all one in the world, and we reach out to the sun.  In the darkness we learn we are all one in the universe, and we germinate.  

Darkness is where seeds germinate.

My journey into this acceptance takes me into the mythology of my patrilineal ancestry and my Sanskrit name, Usha.  Let me be clear - India is more than the land of chai tea and asanas, colorful goddess memes about enlightenment and little brown men in tree poses.   That is the surface of India, the travel brochure ad, the guru's full page ad.  I love my yoga classes and I appreciate the West's need for something to ease the imbalance in its own culture.  I struggle at how often that leads to a narrow vision, the appropriation of only a slice of a monumentally complex culture, existing now in a country devastated and transformed by Neocolonialism.  There are certainly many Westerners who consciously address this problem.  And I respect the complexity of American life, being a part of it while I sometimes bristle at it.  I have driven home frustrated from at least a few yoga classes, when, chatting after class, I have tried to explain my own experience of India.  I lack the words as much as the culture I live in lacks the understanding.  It is an impasse that has led me to create a world of art surrounding this name, Usha, and all it represents.  You cannot embrace the shiny surface of India without swallowing the darkness that is as much hers.  And this goes for all of spirituality, all of nature, all of this existence.

Usha is also a character I have worked on in several stories.  Often intensely personal work,  I seldom felt comfortable having my stories be public.  They are stories that reflect my most personal struggles, my relationship with my Indian father, my outsider status, my stubborn pride over an identity I fail to fully understand.  Usha has been a protagonist in a private monologue.  She journeys into darkness, giving me the courage to reveal these stories and the imagination to create new ones.  In the dimming light of the Empire's Lies I feel the time has come.

 I am one of many.

Sometime in the 70's:  a day in the life of Usha.  

"I am Usha" is not about history and a retelling of ancient myths.  There are piles of books for that.  It is my personal discovery of an unknown lineage through the journey of visionary art making.  It is my own solitary conversation with my ancestors when I wear my Sanskrit name.  It is a change that occurs when you see your present self through the eyes of your cellular memory.   It is more than a name, and more than an exploration of culture; in the end it is a search for meaning in the abyss.  Implicit in the search is the release of old norms of thinking, a rejection of dogma, opinions and assumptions.  What replaces these untruths does not reveal itself immediately and an uncomfortable darkness descends.  Uncomfortable because it is the unknown, the one thing feared so deeply.  But Darkness and Unknowing have become my closest confidants in this language of art I have developed in a lifetime.

"I am Usha" is a journey into the mysterious understanding of the necessities of darkness that ultimately leads to the light of communicating and connecting with the world.  Each of these cannot exist without the other, making me realize "I am Usha" is my way of joining the divided parts of myself as a mirror to the divided world I live in.  It is my hope that this creative vision quest will unite past and present, illustrating the illuminating potential of darkness.  In the end this is all I ask of my art.  

Note: all paintings are my own, painted between 1994-1997.

Dreams and Visions - paintings in their raw states

I have made two decisions this month.

One is to leave paintings in their raw state.

The Other is to share all of my visions, even the ones I have been quiet about.

I don't turn on a lightbulb. I see in the darkness and find my way through it.

What i see in the dark, i can't see in the light. Not yet. Go deep, wake up. One day you will do both. 

We are in Kali time. I am Usha. My time is not here yet, but I am preparing for it.

In Kali time the darkness makes the others remember. We are not smaller than the one controlling the story. We control our story. We heal and are unafraid of the darkness.

The governments of the world call it post-colonial. We ARE living in a Neo-colonial world

My ancestors came to me in a dream. They were refugees from a war with no winners. 

They were seeking shelter in my cellar.

I asked the smaller man in front of the group, 

"How did you get in?"

he said,

"We always find a way in."

I was afraid I could not care for them and I left them.

They left me.  For many years they were hidden in darkness and unknown to me.

I promised to stop hiding from the darkness of the world, 

as I promised to not let my grief for the world blind me.

I promised to walk out into the darkness and face every fear.

They are coming back to me.

Ancestors - India

To speak of Ancestors of to speak of the past in its human form.   

Dad leaving India

An Ancestor Cape I finished this week

All my life I’ve thought about India.  Before I was born my father left on a ship.  It set his life on a course that took him further and further away from his birthplace.  And all my life, even before I knew it, I have been drawing and painting, and crafting a path back.  

Miniature Painting: The Victory of Ali Quli Khan on the river Gomti-Akbarnama 

When I was a very small child I drew meticulous miniature drawings, with battle scenes and leafy trees, looking like something out of the Mughal Empire, without the skilled hand of a Court Painter.  It was like that all through my childhood, sometimes just a shape or a pattern of curves, or a color palette, would bring a little India back into my present day life.  When I began to recognize this it seemed a bit like magic, as if the voices of the past were whispering in my ear.  Very possibly the books about India that were scattered throughout the house, as well as a family trip right after my tenth birthday had more to do with these visual tendencies; either way my interest in Ancestors was sparked.  By the time I was a graduate student in the arts I focused a great deal of study on Indian history and art, even taking a Hindi summer course with UWMadison’s own Virendra Ji, where I flailed through the intensive study of a language that felt surprisingly foreign to me. 

I find it ironic now, reflecting on my personal quest in the nineties, when I was so focused on India Past.  Simultaneously millions of young Indians were pursuing new careers, moving to cities like Chennai and Mumbai, and looking towards a American ideal of the self made man as a new way of seeing themselves and their futures.  While they were casting away Old India I was catching it in my net and spreading it out on notebooks and canvases, creating a visual incantation of a past I had so little connection to, apart from the blood in my veins.  What we were all doing was putting holes in the walls that blocked out the light of our imaginations.  For me the light filtered bits of a past where I imagined I belonged, and for the millions of young Indians at the end of the 20th century,  a yet to be imagined future.  I wonder now if we had torn down the wall completely would we have found each other standing hesitantly on the other side?

My painting: Mughal's Climb 1996 

At the time, focused on All Things Indian, I was forging a path back through the terrain of weeds and heavy brush that had grown in my father’s footsteps.  He had left it all behind a generation earlier and my idealistic quest for cultural belonging both amused and annoyed him.  I was poking holes in the veneer of Being an American - something he had worked so hard and long to afford us.  But right under the surface of the veneer was a richer history that my restless fingers picked away at.  Of course the holes I created were small and only offered a tiny glimpse of the full picture.  They were almost harmless, like tiny moth holes in a wool sweater.  No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t unravel the mystery of my own past enough to understand my place in the present.  In Virendra’s Hindi class I realized I had less in common with the Indian kids than the Caucasians.  But the reality, that I belonged to neither gnawed at me enough to make me continue picking and poking, until my whole world looked like Swiss Cheese.

Layered Print, one of many I made in the 90's

With all those holes in my psyche it was time to start the process of REPAIR.  And so began a lifetime cycle of tear and repair , that has revealed to me who I am as much as it has made me.  

Layers, Labyrinths and Ancestors

Mughals Dream  1996

I've been so busy sewing cloth lately I can't find time to write, but I have thoughts floating through my mind that threaten to leave me if I don't give them my full attention.  Thoughts can be fickle and needy that way.  But perhaps they are just realistic, most anything ignored fails to thrive.  

I have a photo shoot scheduled and I want lots of new pieces of Ancestry Cloth.  The photos will be taken in the woods where my father's ashes were spread.  For me this is a gesture of respect and honor, was well as a beckoning for energy from Dad, who now exists in the Ancestor realm. 

  

Innocent and Kind  1994

                              

Ancestry Cloth 2016

As I sew I think about layers.  I have painted in layers for years.  These layers represent time and memory and the limits of both.  How we view things from the present changes the image of the past. It is impossible to see everything at once, so we pick and choose the details to focus on and those to cover with new experience.  Which brings me to patterns, because it is our patterns, of thought, of language, of noticing, that determine the final image.

While I'm sewing and cutting Ancestry Cloth I realize I am doing the very same thing, but (at the moment) in abstractions.  Because I am creating these patterns and layers of abstract shapes my mind is free to take them to places unrestricted by a storyline.  They are simply layers and patterns, the ancestors talking to me and me talking back.

Ancestry Cloth, back view 2016

I have also been noticing my stitches spiraling into labyrinths.  So I think about labyrinths. There's the trap of the labyrinth in the story of the Minotaur.  But there's also those in the Buddhist Stupas, a spiral walk intended to center your mind.  These are the labyrinths that intrigue me most.  This stitching centers my mind in a way that makes me think at times I can almost articulate the emotion of this work.  

This emotion feels a lot like caring, and it is possible that it is love.

Adinkra  2014

"Love is the only Engine of Survival"  L. Cohen  (from "The Future")

Ancestor Dress 2016

A Brief Introduction to Ancestry Cloth

I made a promise to myself that I would start to write about art again when I felt like I had something to say, something worth putting out into the world.  That’s a heavy proposition.  Who has something relevant to say?  With all the voices on the internet, in the news and on the street I have been leaning towards silence lately… silently making clothing and art and not saying much.

Now, after much silence I feel that I have a few things to say.  I don’t think it will change the world or anyone’s vote in the next election.  Nonetheless I have had some revelations in the studio and at the sewing machine and in the shop.  Now that the days are getting shorter, the leaves are just starting to fall, the reflection sets in. So, here I go.

Ancestors.

We all have them.  Mine are often a mystery to me but at the same time I am very aware of them.  They are always with me.  Without embarking upon any religious or magical worldview, I can say with all certainty that I know my ancestors walk with me AND I do not know exactly what that means.  Could it be that being in a family that has crossed oceans away from the PLACE of their ancestors makes it more difficult to know?  Or could it make it more poignant and pressing, a connection fused from a stronger longing than any native could know?  I don't resist the areas of “not knowing” because I love the mystery; in fact I love it so much more than the certainty.  While certainty provides some comfort, the mystery is alive, ongoing and always changing.  Without an acceptance of unknowing, all becomes stagnant and dead.   So everything I create must in fact express that belief more than any other.  If I have any religious belief at all it is that 

change is the only constant, and mystery is the only certainty.  

 

And I have a mysterious certainty that my ancestors walk through this life with me, changing me as I change them.  

Out of this belief of mine a fabric took form, and I call it Ancestry Cloth.  This cloth is formed from days of destruction and rebuilding.  I accidentally discovered the process, which makes it even more special to me, because I don’t really believe in accidents.  Sometimes “accidents” happen because we are not present, and missing the signs we misstep.  But sometimes “accidents happen because we are very present, acting on intuition and listening to the silence and seeing the unseen. 

Many of us call this serendipity.

  

One sunny day this summer I “accidentally” distressed  (it was actually falling apart!) some very expensive fabric in the process of drawing with bleach.  The creative and somewhat desperate solutions I came up with to bring it back led to some telling discoveries, about fabric and clothing as well as about myself.  

Because I make the Ancestor Cloth it is specifically a story of my ancestors, and I hope to be able to articulately tell that story in words and pictures in the coming months.  But it is often in the most personal stories that the most universal truths are told, so I can only hope that my paths of destruction and repair are metaphors that many can understand, whether or not they have walked the immigrants path.  After all, we are a country of immigrants, with the exception of the the original Americans, the native tribes of this land.  (And perhaps Native Americans have had to repair the most destruction of all, as it is still happening.)

The final stage in the Ancestry Cloth is the “wearing” and that is, I believe, when the magic occurs.