Work by Anuradha Nalapat

The Grand Cycle

What is the nature of experience? How do human being transcend from one state to another? How does an artist create daring the consequences? In a world infested with dualities, philosophical understanding of the dichotomies is more important than anything else, feels painter and writer Anuradha Nalapat.

Creativity/ Flow/ Energy
Trying to define or even express in words, something as fluid as creativity is an impossible task. It is a process, a flow, and therefore which part of the flow do we try and pin down; the beginning, the middle or the end? Since creativity itself is a process and an experience that we undergo; in our attempt to understand it and reduce it to mere words, we most often lose the essence. It is an often used and abused word and it seems to have gone past its expiry date. In order to recharge it and look at it afresh, I would like to call it by a different name which will help till the soil of our minds. We shall use the word ‘flow’ or ‘energy’.

Death – Transformation - Life
So if creativity is energy, then the nature of energy is not just creation, as we are trained to ‘see’ it, but the other side of the coin is about destruction. How so? In nature, energy is constantly flowing or is transformed from one form to another. The bud dies, the flower is created, the flower dies, and the fruit is created. Summer dies and gives way to winter; water becomes vapor, vapor condenses and we have rain. We ignore the destruction part and focus on the creation part alone. So it’s time we made peace with death!

The cycle of creativity with it’s play of opposites, is a part of the rhythm of nature and this age old truth has been passed on to us not only by our scientists who have proved that E=MC squared, where E stands for energy and M for mass, but also by our artists and philosophers in the form of symbols like the yin and yang, and the plus and minus. In fact, we live in opposites; there’s no day without night, and no good without evil.

Play of Opposites
We live in opposites. The cycle of creativity or energy that is inherent in nature, is a play of opposites which manifests as night and day. In the human being it manifests first as male and female and then as various dualities in us-good and bad, happy and sad, qualities like fineness and coarseness, giving and taking etc. Some of them can be grouped into male tendencies and the others into female tendencies to make it easier for us to understand this play. (Ideally there should be no opposites.) Our grouping them is a device we use in order to study and understand the qualities and properties inherent in nature. Quite like the imaginary lines we call Tropic of Cancer or the Equator; like the imaginary axis on which the earth spins; like the boundary lines between countries.

We could say that qualities of power like expansion, competition, aggression, control, self assertion are male oriented, and qualities like co-operation, nurturing, giving, integration, are feminine. Of course, there’s a male in every female and a female in every male. Now what does nature do with these qualities, or let’s say, what do we do about these qualities in us? Nature balances them and since we are a part of nature, we balance them too. And it is when they are balanced that there is harmony and creativity, or energy flows. In this state of balance, we are more sensitive to stimuli and more receptive and open to the creative flow. The disharmony now, is so huge that it has even penetrated our ecology. We willfully choke the bane of our very existence.

   ---Energy(Cyclical)-Manifests as opposites(duality)- balance-Creativity(love)---

The Balance  -   Ardhanareeshwara image
The Ardhanareeshwara image could be another symbol of the male and the female principles coming together. When male and female energies meet, at that moment of creativity/ flow, there is perfect balance or union; and there is both destruction and creation being played out at the same time. Tendencies have a way of rising constantly from within ones own self, and each moment, as they rise, they will have to be destroyed and hence automatically balanced. This demands a very alert or a deeply aware state of being. If someone did experience the ‘being’of Ardhanareeshwara, he would have described creativity as a ‘state of being’ in constant chaos. Why chaos? Because of the flux one is part of, and the relentless and constant cycle of rising and falling that is played through the individual. This seems like a high alert state of ‘being’ or probably a living on the edge! Walking on the razors edge!

We often forget that we are also part of nature, and hence also part of this flow; and right now, playing the roles of male and female. Within each male or female plays the opposite rhythms of qualities- of good and bad, happy and sad, of giving and taking. So when ‘giving’ dies, we learn to take; when coarseness dies, fineness takes its place, and so on.
But of course, nothing need die if we are already in the flow of creation.

Getting ahead of ourselves
We can be absolutely clear that we cannot get ahead of ourselves; we can only write or paint what touches our soul. So if we cannot get ahead of ourselves, then there’s nothing to fear, only to paint. Creative or not, the only way to move forward is to be disciplined and use the tool given to you to navigate your path.

We ourselves cannot create anything new. Yet another reason why there’s nothing to fear and only to do. We can only train ourselves to be in the flow of life by not hindering it with walls of thoughts. It is the nature of water to flow, all we can do is to scrape out the rust and residue in the pipe, keep it clean and wait for the water to flow; if it is meant to flow.

The dough of experience
Once the road blocks or rather mind blocks have been removed, the question arises as to what do we paint? We paint about our experiences; and what is an experience? It is the dough with which we make our stories; our paintings. An experience is made of thoughts. Thought patterns create behaviour/action patterns, and this emotional reaction of ours to a particular incident or event in our lives is what the wise ones call a conditioning, or a personal conditioning. Dr. Deepak Chopra says that if you change the larger context or circumstance in which an experience is played out, the experience itself will change. Context determines how we interpret events; and that interpretation becomes our experience. The same event will be interpreted in a different way if the context changes. He gives the example of a dog’s barking which can be interpreted as friendly, or vicious according to the earlier experiences of the interpreter.

Similarly, ‘being’ a wife, a woman is expected to fulfill certain duties and ‘being’ a husband a man is expected to fulfill certain duties. Take the woman and put her in an office, and her duties change; put a child in her arms and she will have to take on the experience of being a mother. Now tell her she’s not a ‘mother’ and put the same child in her arms. Does she still feel motherly? Give the dough to a cook and he’ll make a roti with it, give it to a child and he’ll mould a bird out of it; give it to a monkey and it might throw the experience right back at you. If I draw a triangle, it has the potential to develop into the beak of a bird, a boat or a fin or anything for that matter. It literally means that we are the ones defining or confining our potential.

So if we change the context, our experience changes; and if the dough of experience itself can be changed by our changing perspectives, then we cannot claim that our paintings based on our experience are the final truth. At best we could probably say that we have been true to ourselves; which is all that one can really do. That again, is a stepping stone... Each painting is as per the context of our experience and the meaning we derived out of it. Most often we tend to feed on the repetitive nature of contexts thereby giving ourselves the same experience, or the same painting again and again.

In essence, the view of the larger picture in which we are having our experience frees us from the sting (Karma) of the experience, or does not bind us to the experience.

Heisenberg’s principle states that a wave particle has potential to be both wave and particle at the same time. It is the act of observation of the wave particle by the observer that reduces or collapses it into either wave or a particle state.

The leap
This is where we leap. In order to get a bird’s eye view of our own oft repeated perspective, we have just one option- leap. Creativity is this quantum leap into the sea of raw potential. It is not that only artists and writers are capable of this, but yes, these people have left the safe ground beneath and have shown the courage to embrace the unknown.  And this view from the top which releases us from the mundane patterns through which we trudge along all day is what art is made of, and that glimpse of the valley from the mountain top is what we are all after, artist or not. It goes beyond just unloading emotions, but conveys an understanding of the source of all emotions and experiences.

The circumstance of the emotion might be personal and subjective; but every emotion in itself is universal. Which means our intentions should go beyond being just subjective.

(When electrons in an atom gain energy, they jump to the next shell. They do not travel the space between two shells; they just disappear from one shell and appear in the next! Quite like the creative leap. Also there’s a gap called synapse between two nerve endings through which information from the brain is passed on. Another leap?)