Ô fils noble (ar enmara aw want ar ena mara)

Tibetan flying monks are recurring subjects in two paintings from Bonjour Monsieur Indigo.

Ô fils noble (ar enmara aw want ar ena mara)

2017

Oil on linen

73 x 54 cm

In this second piece, the Tibetan flying monk from the Rubin Museum that I had sketched back in 2005 has undergone a certain transformation.  He is no longer directly quoted from the original source.  His green magic robe has morphed into a royal purple fantasy and his original placid two dimensional features are now a bit rattled by photography, and, dare one say, the realities of anatomy.

The title “Ô fils noble (ar enmara aw want ar ena mara)” has two roots.  At each reading of the Bardo Thodol, at least in Antoine Volodine’s novel, the recitation of the monk giving counsel to the deceased begins with this call, “Ô fils noble,” or “Oh, noble son.”  I presume that it changes to “Oh, noble daughter” as well, but in Volodine’s novels, the deceased happen to be mainly of the male gender.  This invocation is presumed to call to attention the dying person’s spirit to be aware of the journey being undertaken, and to seek the light, not the bright yellow light, but the green light, or the red light, the other light, to Nirvana, and to resist the incessant call and base desire for re-incarnation.  Don’t forget that the deceased are in a continual journey of dying, which lasts for 49 days.

The second root of the title, ar enmara aw want ar ena mara, is a verse of poetry in Wardwesân.  Frédéric Werst’s work is a recurring element in my work, and in fact, my paintings since 2010 are rooted directly in the soil of his imaginary land of the Ward people and the ever evolving language of its people.  This 11 syllable verse has appeared before, back in 2010, in a painting, not in the current syllabary characters, but in roman letters, directly painted in red on the canvas:

ar enmara aw want ar ena mara

(l’angoisse est le commencement du lointain)

2010

Oil on linen

97 x 130 cm

“Anguish is the beginning of the faraway” would be my rough translation of the verse, but I am not certain to have successfully conveyed the recurring sonorities of the original text, a circular ellipse of a repeated rounded vowel, punctuated by the same r, n, m, and w consonants two times round  but as a mirror image, an expanded paronomase, not an ambigram, but close (Go ahead, take a moment to read the verse out loud).

The syllabary system of writing is based on phonetics and so repeated sounds, even from different words, have the same base character.  The meaning of the text only becomes apparent as one reads the entirety of the verse.  One of the main motivation of this poetry being the repetition of the same sounds but diffused in different words, a penultimate Alexandrian fantasy, the impulse to transform, but only within the confines of rather strict rules of construction, is a deep driving source, the spring, from which the text is created.

What does all that have to do with the painting, one might ask.  Perhaps nothing, perhaps everything.