Making love to the Impaler
When your pleasures and long-term plans are mercilessly impaled by the immediate present
This is a long post but do have a read in full if you have recently felt vulnerable because of a sudden illness / accident / event..
“I am earning $X from job now. Not too great but nothing to complain about. Next year it will be 1.2 X. I also kind of like what I do in my job and if I carry on in this way in 10 years my salary will reach 10X. Hmm.. Not bad!!!!” - That’s how I used to frequently think.
But it all changed on Jan 5th this year.
On Jan 5th, I had to go through my first serious medical test. From Jan 5th to now, I have gone through several medical tests.
I am very lucky that no serious illness has came out in these tests.
Nonetheless, these tests did introduce me to perhaps the biggest Impaler of my life - the possibility of dying an early death!
An Impaler like this brutally punctures all your long term plans / goals / aspirations.
Plans to create a side business? Plans to grow savings through a steady job? Plans to expand this art journal? Plans to become a full time art teacher?
All these long term plans get a thick, boar-killing spear pierced through their chest as soon as a serious medical emergency arrives.
And the medical emergency could arrive anytime, without any warning, and completely upside down your life.
So, how does one life happily knowing that there is a possibility that an Impaler (medical emergency, accident or any other serious event) can come and strike you down anytime with no prior warning?
Whenever an Impaler arrives, life takes on a completely different route compared to what it was before the Impaler had arrived. How does one accept this fundamental discontinuity of life?
When we are deciding our goals and creating plans to reach those goals, we never take into account the Impaler strikes - the mishaps that could completely change our course of life. At least I never do.
The goals, the aspirations, the dreams, the plans that we create for ourselves would never be bold or beautiful or worth chasing if God / Fate told us things like “Hey fella, great to see that you devoting all your efforts and energy to make more money for yourself. But, guess what! At 5 pm on Jun 16, 2024, you will be struck with an accident that is gonna leave you bed ridden for 6 months and wipe out half your savings. Take care. Bye!”
I feel that Impaler strikes are beautifully and very visually captured by Shakespeare in these lines from his play Hamlet:
“The native hue of resolution is sickled over with the pale cast of thought”
In our context these lines would translate to:
“The the pleasures, the Joie de Vivre of life are immediately sicklied over (made weak and dull) when the pale cast of the Impaler arrives”
It is impossible for us to accept the Impalers. Isn’t it?
We try to distract ourselves when our thoughts move towards sickness, accidents, deaths etc. Perhaps, this ability of ours to distract ourselves at will is key to our saneness and also happiness.
But after having gone through so many serious medical tests in the last two months, my mind just does not let me ignore the Impaler.
It tells me to build up my mental fortitude so that next time when such a medical test or perhaps a real Impaler (like diagnosis of some serious medical condition) arrives, I don’t feel helpless and vulnerable.
So how do I prepare for the next arrival of the Impaler.
My deep interest and time investment in art should at least be of some help here.
But artists usually thrive on slow burn.
The tragedy slowly unfolding, the mind steadily corrupting, the sickness gradually getting over you, the lover moving away from you week by week - artists can deal with any negative theme provided it is slow enough to give them adequate time to reflect on it, feel it and then paint.
I feel that anything that happens abruptly like an accident or sudden death or a sudden event is very, very hard to portray through paintings or other forms of visual art.
But fortunately there are some exceptions.
Here is my selection of works of art that help the viewer get up close with the Impaler (sudden illness, possibility of dying early etc.), see different dimensions of it and thereby gradually develop acceptance for it.
Close examination of a powerful shark = Close examination of the experience of death.
The installation (and even the pictures of the installation) lets you encounter the shark from all sides. You closely observe the intimidating size of the sharp, its sharp teeth, its open mouth and its mechanical eyes. And yet you know that the shark cannot harm you - you are safe.
To me looking at this piece of work again an again would remind you that death is not a a ‘too painful to observe and understand’ concept for a living being and that one must try to accept it and reduce his / her fear of it.
After looking at this artwork, do you also feel the same?
Indulge, relish and struggle in life without loosing sight of the fact that any-day it could all come to an end.
Bacon’s self portrait has a man with a twisted, complex, and impossible-to-understand face. Isn’t that a beautiful metaphor for the complexity in our own lives? Thoughts, desires, actions, results, emotional bonds etc. make our lives deeply intertwined and almost impossible to explain or define on any one dimension.
But this man also has a prominent golden watch in his hand - which reminds him that he too has an expiry date. He must accept his own mortality. He must accept that none of his connections, dependencies and attachments with others and the complexities within himself will survive after his death. So, he must not lead a life as if it is granted to him forever.
That’s how I read this work!A human being has the power to add a great amount of dignity and meaning even into the act of dying.
This is one of my all time favorite works of art. It is supposed to have been made in Greece in around 320 BC. This marble sculpture shows an fatally injured warrior (see image of the stabbing wound on his chest) in his last moments before death.
Despite extreme pain and the feeling that his energy and life force are moving out of him every single moment, the warrior maintains a dignified pose. He is using his left arm to support his body. His face clearly depicts that he is swallowing much more pain than what he is showing on his face. The posture and the face shows his inner strength. He is a human being - even in his agonizingly painful death, he is behaving like a dignified human being and not like a restless animal.When faced with imminent death or any other dire circumstance one must face it like this warrior and not like a headless chicken - this is how I read this sculpture.
Death is nothing but a part of life. And like all other things in life, it can be played with and made fun off.
This masterpiece by Basquiat presents a very different perspective on death. It shows a man riding death, which is shown as a crawling animal with just 4 long bones and a skull.
Just look at the skull and the collar wrapped around it mimicking the collar of a pet dog. Does it not represent the taming of death by man?
Death here has been stripped off its all-powerful stature, invincibility and mystery and reduced to a harmless caricature. This artwork does make you question whether death is really the most significant and most difficult aspect of life OR is it just another completely normal aspect of life (like adolescence, marriage, old age etc.) that everyone has to go through.Stitch, Stitch and Stitch! Man has the power to stitch together back whatever is left of his life after an Impaler strikes.
The Impaler tears apart the very fabric of your life. The scars, the burns and the holes left by impending death (and other Impalers) have been beautifully captured in this fabric art by Alberto Burri.
Please do have a good look at the fabrics.You would notice that both of these artworks also have hundreds of small and big, fine and coarse stitches in them. To me these stitches represent the deep strength in us to stitch back the fabric of their life after every unforeseen event. And so I feel that the fabric’s worn-out and irrecoverably damaged look make it look like a piece of cloth worn by a brave soldier when he fought for a just cause!
I hope these artworks did provide valuable perspectives on how art can help us reconcile with as difficult a subject as sudden illness or anything that strikes suddenly and changes our life.
Now I want to share with you my own little art experiment that I did last weekend to help me make peace with the Impaler:
I would love to hear your thoughts on this post and also how you deal with the Impalers in your own life. Please feel to share your thoughts by replying back to this email or commenting below. I really value feedback. Thank you!