Time (7). Time as a well
Dropping away beneath me
After all this investigation of lines of chronology, context-free themes, and dynamic particularity1, one day I fell off the edge of everything, into a timeless well.
I was reading Martin Gayford’s book, ‘How Painting Happens’ (2024), and came across this:
Murillo’s image of painting as an infinite well brought to mind the observation that Thomas Mann made at the beginning of his novel Joseph and his Brothers: ‘Very deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?’
Gayford, 2024:12
Suddenly I was 25 years old, watching the axe come down on the neck of a buffalo in Apocalypse Now, and thinking, ‘what the actual hell is that???’. I never understood why I remembered it so clearly, but revisiting it for this piece I learnt that the scene was actual footage of a real-time buffalo sacrifice, which caused a lot of controversy at the time. I don’t know if I knew that then, but I could feel the shock of it.
My questions about sacrifice led me somehow to the idea of ritual time, which I don’t remember the source of and have never seen discussed anywhere since. But it stayed in my mind. Ritual time was a time outside of time, a time where there was no past and no future, however conceptualised; a portal that cut through everything.
Searching for more on the idea of ritual time, I found two articles, from which I got two ideas:
Ritual practices frequently express multiple dimensions of time.
Time, place, and the rhythm of the seasons, essential constituents of ancient ritual, collaboratively shaped and channeled the experience of religious performance.
Journal of Roman Archaeology, Volume 37, Issue 2, 2024, p449-477
Multiple dimensions of time. It’s a bit vague, but it gets time off the chronological line, suggesting that a lot of things can be happening at once.
Time, place and rhythm points towards specificity, and ritual bringing time into relationship with location in a regularly repeating cycle. Both of these ideas fit with a dynamic systems view of time, and the idea of the circular rhythms of the seasons, but I think my ritual time was different.
My ritual time was a spaceship to some kind of eternal present. I saw the moment that the axe made its great gash in the buffalo’s neck as something that, through its repetition, somehow took humans out of time completely. Ritual time was repeating the same act, over and over; not going anywhere, with no destination, no directionality. Ritual seemed to join the person carrying it out with every other human who had ever done that ritual before them, in a place of perpetual now.
I thought about this when I was in front of the stone carved temple walls of Belur and Halebid.
It wasn’t exactly ritual, but looking at the places where the chisel had slipped, where the skill wasn’t so great, or where something interrupted the scene and the carving was never finished, I had a strong sense of the hands that had worked that panel of stone; of the human who stood in front of this panel, day after day, trying to make it take the form of their vision. I could almost hear them breathing.
Which brings me back to Martin Gayford:
‘Very deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?’
… This book has been composed in an anti-Hegelian spirit - that is to say that it has been written in the belief that, rather than constantly evolving towards some further state, painting in all its crucial aspects remains exactly the same as it ever was.
Gayford, 2024:18
The idea of the past as a bottomless well combined with the idea of painting never changing snapped open a trap-door beneath my feet. I’d been so busy looking backwards, forwards, across, and finally through my undulating web, that I’d given almost no thought to the ground beneath my feet.
I had started to think about ground in the final article about cycles and seasons; talking about hands digging into soil, returning to things that had been consigned to the past to see how they had composted. But now even the soil had vanished. Now there was only a bottomless well dropping down into a darkness with no end.
All the movement - the pressing onwards, the picking up threads, the spiralling, weaving momentum - had gone. Painting was an action that took humans into ritual time, where there was not even cycle or repetition, only now. I saw that all the histories of painting, wherever they were in the world, came down to this; the simple act of a human hand picking up some form of pigment and reaching out to make a mark on a surface beyond their own body.
I said last time that I had thought that my writing here was a chronological story, but that it turned out that it wasn’t.
What I keep learning is that all of it is here with me, in every moment. Mattancherry is part of my fabric, as is the temple at Belur, as are the Jain murals at Sravanabelagola; they shape my eyes as I look out onto a Scottish sea, as I wander around Edinburgh art galleries, looking for something I can relate to.
Perhaps I’m simply hovering above my own well, suspended in the ritual time of my life, which is only ever now.
Gayford, Martin (2024) How Painting Happens, Thames and Hudson, London
If you want to read the five articles about time, they’re here:
Time (1): A theme has no context, obviously.
Time (2): How did it feel, to have no history?
Time (3): Without context, we lose history
Time (4): The scarred particular
Time (5): Cycles, rhythms and seasons
Links to the five part series on time at the end of this article, above this footnote!
This article 'snapped open a trap-door beneath my feet'. Thank you, Tamsin!
You've given me a new lens to view my own work, not as progress, but as participation in an ancient ritual. Thank you for sharing 🙏🏿❤️😊