Winter 2015 WWW11

Skeleton Woman Story, Life/Death/Life Force as Metaphor for Transformational Painting

There are many versions of Skeleton Woman, this is the condensed Inuit story told by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Jungian analyst, poet and story teller. I roughly follow her breakdown of the story to illustrate how the story is rich in various parallels in life, is a metaphor of creative process and how it particularly relates to Transformational Painting.

In the Inuit story of Skeleton Woman, a young woman is thrown into the Artic Sea by her father, and eventually is turned into a tangled mess of bones. It is significant that no one remembers why she was discarded into the icy depths, only that she offended her father.

In time, she is hooked by a fisherman’s line. He thinks that he has caught a great fish. When he turns back with his net and sees her mossy bald skull rising from the water attached to his fishing pole he is terrified and paddles like a demon for his life. Clutching his pole the whole way he hears her at his heels. He hits land at a dead run until, at last, he reaches his village. When he dives into his snow house he breathes a sigh of relief thinking that he has been saved, but as he lights his whale oil lamp he sees that she has come home with him 

Slowly he recovers from his fright and, in the soft light, our fisherman reaches over and begins to set her bones in order. Singing as he works, he finishes by wrapping her in warm furs. Completed, he then crawls into his own sleeping furs for an exhausted sleep. In the depth of night Skeleton Woman arises and crawls close to him to drink the one glistening tear of his longing, thus satisfying her thirst of many years. She then reaches into his chest taking the drum of his heart to sing on her flesh. After calling forth "all the other things a women needs" she returns his heart, undresses him and joins him in his furs to spend the night together, “as men and women do”. Thus joined it is said that they lived prosperously and happily together until the end of their days.

In the story, as in the creative process, you cannot go from finding accidental treasure to love making in one fell swoop. You cannot go from beginning a painting to a finished piece by skipping the chase, the untangling, the tear or the fleshing out through heart as in the story. In our contemporary culture we are bombarded with stories of the magical union where a couple meet and go straight to bed and thus all is complete. We have come to expect a fast-fix, from food to medicine to information and we expect satisfaction as soon as we engage. We have carried this expectation over to love and art making. Transformational Painting offers a way to reestablish that essential path of development and provide an avenue to reclaim the other kind of satisfaction that is received from fully engaging in the process. 

The Call. The treasure we receive from creative process is equal to our willingness to enter into the depths of the psyche. The portal into our essence demands curiosity and wonderment and a release of the unfolding images of our deeper being. Like the fisherman in the story, we are unaware that we do not know. Also like him, we are hungry for relationship to our creative self but may not recognize it. So we search for a way to catch the big fish. We coast for a while and think that we can play around, unaware of the profound journey that awaits us. There may even be a ticket in our fist at this very moment, but we cannot know the scope of the journey nor the price it will entail.  If this is more enticing than frightening you may be a candidate yourself. 

Answer to the Call. If all parts of the story are indeed us, the fisherman must answer the call as well as the Skeleton Woman. He puts her bones in order out of compassion and covers her in furs. He trusts her as he falls asleep letting his deep tear of feeling escape and begin the transformation to meet her in lovemaking. She makes the agreement too, as she is being dredged up from the depths of the ocean floor to create an existence bigger than everyday life. That is what art is about. It is the soul that answers the call. The poet David Whyte defines this as “the largest conversation (relationship) a person is capable of having with the world.”  Our Skelton Woman story tells us how to have that conversation. She is the Life/Death/Life force beginning as disused and misused and resurrected again by answering the call. Creativity is set free when we  make  her ally, lover, and teacher. She will guide us through our wounds if we give ourselves wholeheartedly and begin our own life/death/life or creation/destruction/creation cycle.

The Vertical Alignment. Poets as artists help us to understand creative process and even more so Transformational Painting. Deena Metzger, poet and author, contrasts poem and story, describing poem as a penetration into the essence of something. A poem expresses the inexpressible adventure deeply. While, she says, story and prose, spreads out, wanting to speak to the mind, to the intellect. The horizontal gathers information, technique, momentum, while the vertical is outside of time, it changes our life as participant. Jane Hirshfield, Poet Laureate, tells us poetry's work is the clarification and magnification of being. Poetry creates a vertical experience, an evocative and in depth exploration that is mirrored in the methods used during Transformational Painting.     

continued with The Shadow, The Chase, Organization of the Bones, Sleep as Rebirth & more.