2 TIERRA Y CORAZON

Earth and Heart.

Professor Dubovsky has asked us to think about earth and heart in the specific context of our own lives. “…Something which expresses the meaning of these words to you--in your life, in memory, and in what you know of your family past.” 

I actually have an object to talk about, and the words “Earth and Heart” are far less personal than SOY YO (which I’m still not sure precisely how to interpret: “it’s me,” or “this is me,” or “here’s me/myself”…?) so this is (should be) more straightforward. 

Having had only a couple and a half hours to think about this assignment, due to my joining the class late, I sized down and greatly simplified a first (rather frazzled) idea, and have thrown (tried to throw) the colors of places of personal histories, and insinuate their textures, onto small blocks of wood. Two of these blocks are trying to emphasize the paintiness of paint, the fact that I’m reaching into something that doesn’t exist (anymore). I’ve never felt farther from/more uncertain of memory and family past than I currently do, so I wanted to pile on thick splotches of paint, to say, hey. i could be making this up. (but somewhere in there, sharing space with the ambivalent colors of Southern California, are ponds and backwaters and mango trees and coconut trees and the redness of the earth after the monsoon, and the smell, and the cricket-filled night. My words, much more clearly than these rather unsuccessful blocks of wood, smack thickly of Romanticization to the point of delusion. Reek of sentimentality. Many mid/later-century popular Indian rhetorics, visible for instance in film, tend to reify deify the Village; the Nationalistic; the a-colonial, uncorrupt Rural. Anti-industrial and Un-modern. (The search for authenticity in your own goddamn country). Am I guilty of nothing less, in a way? MORE paint, then—and thickly, obscurely—to alert you to the falsehoods of the mythicizing painter). Note that this is NOT metaphor, & this is NOT symbol. 

The idea, also, was evocation: the desire to evoke sensory experiences—smells, textures, colors, maybe even tastes and sounds—rather than to record or symbolize (a statement about) a personal relationship between Earth and Heart.