THE INDIVIDUAL IS AN ILLUSION
Mother-Father, You Guide Us (detail) - mixed media painting on canvas, 2023
As a young child, the concept of my individuality was understood to be permeable. While I knew myself as contained within a human body, it was clear that my existence was merely a continuation of those lives that preceded mine. Indeed, I took it for granted that my life was related to the lives of the trees and insects around me in the present as much as it was to the fossilized dinosaurs and sea creatures of the deep past. To my young mind, these things were a given fact of living.
It came as something of a shock to learn that this was not a commonly accepted idea amongst my peers and elders. With time, I learned from the culture around me to understand my place in society as an isolated individual, connected to others by tangible interaction within in a physical space. The ideas of early childhood persisted, but were kept carefully hidden along with my sense of living as part of a collective being.
Presently, as part of my/our “unmasking” of the self, there has been an earnest return to the idea of permeable individuality. As the four of us within this body have begun to share our personal understandings of life we have uncovered greater meaning in the concepts of our childhood. Ultimately we have settled upon a belief that individuality is an illusion.
What does it mean to know the individual as an illusion (for us, at least)? The illusion of individuality is, of course, quite literal for us — four individual persons/spirits exist within a single body which is externally perceived to be a single individual. But it goes even deeper than this. So deep, that it’s difficult to articulate verbally. For us, the apparent individual is the growing tip of a vine, whose stem is comprised of several ancestors who came before. The vine stretches so far back in time that the point where stem becomes roots is unknowable, obscured by the millennia. The further back you go, the less human the lives are — humans, plants, fungi, and all animals grow from a common source and are eternally kin growing from the same roots. In the more recent past the nodes of the vine mark the lives of our ancestors (of blood and of kinship). Their movements in the past shape our movements in the present — a path that was laid by those before us shapes the journeys we make in the present.
In this there is a tinge of fate and a realization that our life is not fully our own. The ways we travel have been laid for us by ancestors once living and is guided still by their spirits. The dead have as much of an impact on our daily life as the living. In this way life is experienced as an endless river, made of the blood of our mothers and fathers. We row ourselves ever forward with the current, guided by those spirits who have traveled similar paths in times prior. As a ship that sails the same ocean route: the ocean and weather are ever changing, but the journey is made along the same path, no matter how time shapes the world around it. Yet here the ocean and ship are of the same cloth, they are separated only by an arrangement of materials and imagination. Ancestor and descendant are one.
Beyond this, words fail me/us. Through imagery an attempt is made at reducing our cacophony of thought — a murmuration of sensations, sounds, and visuals from several individuals — into a static form capable of conveying a breathing story. We are never really certain if this is pulled off, but words hardly feel more reliable.
The thoughts written here, among many others, brought us to create the painting detailed here, Mother-Father, You Guide Us. The piece came forth spontaneously in drawing (below) form following a tarot reading we did on the topic of our ancestors and the path we travel in this life.
This piece was shown as part of a juried group show at Gallery A3 in the Summer of 2023. We gave a talk as part of the gallery’s art forum, discussing this piece and others. || See or read our discussion of this work and others here ||
Colored pencil drawing responding to our ancestors and our path that inspired the painting Mother-Father, You Guide Us, 2023