I knead hardened mud with knuckles, working water into it with my fingers, in attempt to make it more pliable. On the eve of a Hindu celebration, I sit down to quite literally shape the deity who will be worshipped, only to later be immersed in a water body.
Drawing from mythology, it is a Goddess who creates her son from her turmeric layered skin. This son who is to guard her as she bathes. The son, one could say is born of only the mother, now encounters the husband, who is not yet his father. The husband on encountering this child who interrupts his reunion with his wife, in a violent rage, beheads the child, who is not yet his son. The wife, and now mother, wails on seeing her headless creation. The husband replaces the head of their child with an elephant’s head, whom he designates now as the leader or pati, of the ganas. Ganapathi, the child of both mother and father and now prince, comes to be known.
When reading mythology, one should be sensitive of the many existing associations around the material. I claim to be no expert in either Hindu mythology, worship rituals and neither can I claim to fully understand its psychoanalytic reading. This essay is an attempt in engaging my own curiosities with different facets of this story, as I create, with my hands, God. I intend no disrespect to any culture, religion or tradition in this attempt, but to merely notice the ways in which mythology describes and elaborates on human tendencies and ways of relating.
Beginning with the very material of creation, I and God are made of the same. However, this essay is not meant to delve into philosophy, fully acknowledging that perhaps no new discoveries will be made here. I will work with what I can hold, and at the moment, it is mud. It is out of this mud, I shape this God. And it is to this mud which my body will return at the end of my lifetime. And perhaps then, the essence will continue. The mud will house plants, the plants will offer to animals and other beings, elements enter and exit these cycles. We are part of something larger, something beyond us.
As I learn of the human relationships, the maternal, the paternal and the child, maybe it is something I seek in painting this picture of connectedness and impermanence. Perhaps such are the tragedies and joys of a human life that I am left with no solace but to turn to what lasts beyond us, after us, and with us, even in the apparent loss. Maybe this is an essay for another day, of my oscillations between spirituality, faith and psychoanalysis and their intersecting truths. Cycling through different forms, for now it is the human body, with which I experience making God and typing this essay you are reading.
In the lore and in life, we see that it is the mother who creates the child. The lore has a way of bringing to our attention how the mother conceives the child to be as shapes she him, with her hands through her mind. The child is quite literally made of her. It is this oneness that is most striking and the end of this oneness that is utterly tragic.
Perhaps it is a rather human desire, to birth the Other. If we could create in the Other, all that we yearned for from them, there would be no Other. We would all dreamt up beings of ourselves and to think of all the longings, dilemmas and conflicts that would resolve. We would make the Other as we conceive them to be, of our skin.
A reproduction as reproduction is. The child as the mother imagines, the mother as the child imagines, the therapist as the patient imagines, the patient as the therapist imagines. In my work, we regard the Goddess Mother has literally projecting into her child, all of her skin, the child then identifying with all of her inside him, and becoming her son.
The child stands guard as the mother returns to herself. Although it seems much like a separation, perhaps it is not. Both mother and child are made of each other. It is the husband, who enters this intimate mother-child couple. The head of this child is beheaded, headless, thoughtless in the absence of the head the mother has shaped for him. The mother’s wails are agonising, it is her child’s head, but also her own that is violently beheaded. Her creation, the son she creates as a dream, has now come undone. As all our carefully held projections do, the child learns that the mother is not the imagined mother, the mother learns that the child is not the imagined child. The therapist learns that the patient is not theirs to create, the patient learns that the therapist is to theirs to shape. And it is terribly painful to have one’s head, this very head that shapes these intimate imaginations now severed from the body. One can imagine then how disorienting it must feel to have all of one’s imaginations decapitated.
Yet, as I shape this mud into a body, with four arms, an instrument in each, trunk, a belly, a lotus, a mouse. I do so, filling myself with a dream and love, as though it is my creation that I will worship. Such is this strangely beautiful existence, that we go on, even as know of its ends. We continue to attempt to grapple with life in the therapy hour, even in its inevitable end.
(to be continued, simply because on the internet, we can give in to the illusion of going on)
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