Silpa: the Art of Love

Chapter 1
Life is Art

I love this moment. Early morning, awake but eyes still closed. Just lying listening to the rhythmic roll of the waves breaking on Bondi Beach, the other side of Campbell Parade. It’s about the only time of day I can hear the waves from my bedroom; they’re usually drowned out by cars cruising the parade or by revellers come from across the city and around the world to party along the iconic Australian beach. But thoughts of everything outside myself evaporate as the sound of crashing water washes me into a serene sense of calm and, beneath the blanket, I enjoy the warmth enfolded around my mind and body.

Before the day begins I dose in and out of my thoughts and dreams, allowing the two to ripple and roll into a stream of unconscious consciousness, one rising as the other falls and back again. These undercurrents have for as long as I can remember surged through my entire being, sometimes forming my life into neat patterns that ebb and flow with the surety and strength of the tides, while at others churning my world with hurricanes.

The best ideas come to me in this semiconscious state, and I’ve trained myself to be able to draw in the dark without breaking my reverie on a sketchbook kept permanently by the bed. This is the means connecting dreams to thoughts; unconscious to conscious; night to day; inspiration and manifestation – a bridge built of pencil lines and shades. I’ve taught myself to do this as I incorporate insights gleaned from my dreams into my work; at least I mix the dreams with my experience of reality and view of the world to create polished pieces of art.

My life, after all, is my work, and my work is art.

Tonight I dream of death. Not my death, not of a friend or family, but of a woman I’ve never met. Her complexion is cinnamon, and her limpid eyes have a loving and longing look that transform her hazel irises into bright beams, even as life leaves them. She is with someone, not me, someone else. I’m an observer looking over that person’s shoulder, a masculine shape, at the occupant on a deathbed. Whoever the man is, this woman loves him with all her heart, more than she loves her own life, and doesn’t want to leave him for any reason, let alone into the permanent embrace of death.

She’s aware of my presence, and turns to look me directly in the eye. Though I feel like an intruder, I’m unable to withdraw my gaze, peering through her pupils and entering her like light passing through water. Instead of rejecting my intrusion, she absorbs me as the sea accepts the rain. I dive to embrace her, flooding me with sympathy for this drowning soul. There is nothing to know, there is only the indescribable feeling of my absorption within her. Her last breath exhausted, she sinks so far the light that brought me here can no longer penetrate, and I have to rise or go under with her. I want to join her in this voyage into the abyss beyond all discoveries, to explore the greatest unknown of all, only the buoyancy of my being and the upwelling of the fertile undercurrent that feeds on death to give new life combine with the pull of the waxing moon to force me up.

I begin drawing, depicting the image of the dream in a series of strokes, squiggles and curves as my hand darts around the blank page in the dark. What does the dream mean? I’ve been studying how Asian women have been stereotyped and exploited by men, both Western and Eastern, as comfort women and sex objects throughout the ages as the raw subject matter for my PhD in visual art. It’s as though this Asian woman has a meaning in allowing me to bear witness to her intimate departure from this world, a positive message far greater than the negatives of the war between the sexes I’d been fighting nearly every day of my life since the first signs of my becoming a woman: that love between man and woman is possible.

And, perhaps, even possible for me.

The headlights of a car passing in the street below sends two parallel shafts of light through the edge of the curtain and across the ceiling, the first of many in the morning traffic, and I turn over to check the time on the bedside clock. 4:18. I can feel myself sinking beneath the surface of sleep again, take a deep breath and pinch my nose. The weight of my body drags me down to the depths like a chainless anchor dropped overboard, drowning me in the engulfing darkness.