Edible Ephemeral Art, Permanent Patterns

Uchhapur, India. A woman paints her wall in prayer to Lakshmi. 

Photo by Stephen P. Huyler, Meeting God, p. 67

       Looking at the photos in Painted Prayers: Women's Art in Village India, a book by Stephen P. Huyler, I'm dazzled by the edible, ephemeral art.  In some areas of India, each day before dawn women make paintings on the ground in front of their houses to fete a domestic goddess.  In other places they paint outer walls and doorframes during certain holiday and festival times, all in honor of her.  They use paint made of rice powder.           

       The art doesn't last.  Things eat it.  A young woman interviewed in the book says, "This powder itself is auspicious.  It feeds birds and small insects.  Holy puranas tell us to be good to other beings.  By these kolams (the daily designs made on the earth) we are sharing our food."

         The paintings aren't just effaced by hungry creatures; they're smudged by movement, the flow of existence.  Life doesn't stop because the art is there.  The rice powder paintings, whether white or colored by natural dyes, quickly disappear.

         Following custom, women make new paintings at the appointed times.  Paradoxically, the patterns for the paintings aren't edible and ephemeral.  They're handed down from mother to daughter, generation to generation.  They travel with brides from village to village.  They constantly change in individual hands.  In some regions where the women's art is particularly vital, women keep notebooks of patterns and are constantly creating and inventing.

         All in honor of Ma.  That's one of the names of the domestic goddess;  she's different in different places but she's one in her spirit of abundance and protection, and Ma seems to me a good universal name for her.  A primal syllable, frequently the first uttered by infants crying for nurture, protection, sustenance, guidance.

        Edible ephemeral nurture -- permanent patterns of existence -- spiritual and physical requirements – we ask those blessings of our Immortals, our guardian spirits.  Always, the old prayers; constantly, new prayers.  Admiring the ancient forms that make the designs for India's "painted prayers" I'm reminded of the Farsi alphabet, so I write --

            The Persian alphabet – letters waving

            o's and curves at me, words wending their

            way to me from right to left – knits new

            patterns for an old pet prayer,

            "Bestow upon me a heart diamond-

            bright," and i add, "that I may be like

            King Jamshid's cup of immortality

            and lift up my heart in turquoise hands."

This apple is long gone, but Apples remain.

The Young Hero: Dreamer of Dreams

Dreamer
collage, jr-s 1998

           Today, from my Persian Poets Augury Box, I randomly picked a little paper roll-up, unrolled it, and read:

            The old man ran from the young hero's bow

            Straight down the mountain quick as he could go...

                   Ferdowsi, The Book of Kings, (transl. Dick Davis)

Persian Poets Augury Box
jr-s, 2011
                

         How apposite.  Lately I've been thinking about a certain cultural figure: "the young hero."  The Persian term for the young hero is javanmardi.  I came upon it while reading Peter Kingsley's In the Dark Places of Wisdom.  Kingsley equates the term with the ancient Greek title kouros (a word older than the Greek language).  For the young hero, chronological age is beside the point.  He's "needed for prophesy," Kingsley notes, "for receiving oracles, for the magical process of lying down in a special place at night to obtain messages from the gods through dreams."           

            Dreaming is a gift of the youthful spirit.  One who is old in spirit will talk a dream to death.  But the young hero (who may be 19 or 100 years old) can shoot down a visionless oldster (who may be 19 or 100 years old) in an instant.  So the oldster flees the young hero's bow. Which reminds me of Athena, the Greek Goddess of Wisdom.  She's the best archer, hunter and warrior. She never loses a fight and is an eternally pure, flashing-eyed, beautiful maiden.  She/he -- doesn't matter – the javanmardi is evolved "beyond time," gone "to the heart of reality" to find "what never ages or dies," Kingsley writes.

            I'm glad to discover the expression javanmardi because it clears up one of the mysteries of my life:  I always wondered why the Bab and Baha'u'llah, even when past the age for it, called themselves and each other Youth. Now I have the cultural root:  the tradition of javanmardi or, in Arabic, fata.             

According to my current Farsi teacher the javanmardi spirit is passion, specifically bravery and the willingness to give oneself entirely, to be a sacrifice.  Javanmardi is a virtue, a godly attribute.           

            Javanmardi animates Tahirih's verse and that of her brother and sister mystics who have that spirit.  Someone always has that spirit.  According to tradition, true javanmardis live as earth lives, "often ignored and almost always misunderstood," to quote Kingsley, but they "keep existing because they have to."  We're never without them.  We can open our eyes, look through past and present time and find them.  One of my favorite poems, Ode, by young Arthur O'Shaughnessy (1844-1881), says it well.  It's a one-hit-wonder, but it's all O'Shaughnessy needed to do –

            We are the music-makers,

                 And we are the dreamers of dreams,

            Wandering by lone sea-breakers,

                 And sitting by desolate streams;

             World-losers and world-forsakers,

                 On whom the pale moon gleams:

             Yet we are the movers and shakers

                  Of the world forever, it seems.

            With wonderful deathless ditties

                 We build up the world's great cities,

             And out of a fabulous story

                  We fashion an empire's glory:

             One man with a dream, at pleasure,

                   Shall go forth and conquer a crown;

             And three with a new song's measure

                    Can trample an empire down.

            We, in the ages lying

                    In the buried past of the earth,

             Built Ninevah with our sighing,

                    And Babel itself with our mirth;

             And o'erthrew them with prophesying

                     To the old of the new world's worth;

            For each age is a dream that is dying,

                     Or one that is coming to birth.