Iris

“Ganesha is widely revered as the remover of obstacles, the patron of arts and sciences and the deva of intellect and wisdom. As the god of beginnings, he is honored at the start of rites and ceremonies. Ganesha is also invoked as patron of letters and learning during writing sessions.”

I am not a believer in much of anything, but I respect people’s right to believe. I believe in my ganesha, for example. I first heard about the ganesha when I was googling something about medieval bestiaries. There are some really creepy animals in those old manuals, and pretty much you don’t want to run into them on a dark road. I sure wouldn’t. In contrast, Ganesha as believers in Hinduism see him, is a lovely being. That’s why I was thrilled to come by my own ganesha, who fits the description above that I took from Wikipedia. My version has the same name, but please know I am not so presumptuous as to think I can have my own personal deity. I need that to be clear. 

Anyway, my ganesha is a girl and doesn’t have an elephant head like in Hinduism. I repeat: I do not wish to offend anybody, but am very grateful my little one found me. She has probably saved my life and I’d like to tell you all about that. 

She is small, soft, and curls up next to me, over my heart, on my shoulder beneath my ear, or some other part of my body. I call her Iris, because she has that scent of light purple irises in late May and the gentleness of the fuzzy part you find inside the swirled-up petals.

Sometimes it sounds like Iris the ganesha purrs, especially when I stroke the top of her head with the tips of my fingers. It’s not like a cat’s purr, but rather like what I imagine the sound would be if a chipmunk or an opossum could purr. It’s a rather odd sound, because the vibrations from Iris’ throat originate inside her and pass into my body like water from a gentle stream. When this happens, which is often, I start to purr, and nothing can upset the apple cart that is my world when my veins and bones are resonating like that. Time stands still, almost, and the creaking wheels of my mind go utterly silent. That total, still, apocalyptic silence is what allows my synesthesia to activate. 

You haven’t lived until you’ve been in synesthetic mode. You know, that’s when the world turns all sorts of luscious colors, words acquire different temperatures, or food produces music. Things like that. Really wild. Really psychodelic, I imagine people used to say back in the 60s. I wasn’t around then, but who hasn’t seen all those flowery, high drawings of how they felt and thought? I don’t see fake flowers, though. However, if I happen on real ones, their colors sing, the air around them feels like silk, they smell purple and pink and crimson. The sun warbles.

When Iris is in action, I am pretty much invincible, as you might surmise from my description of the flower scene. None of my crossed cables, as you might call them, produces a negative feeling in me. I look at the azaleas or rudbeckias and smell vanilla and lime. The sun stops warbling and starts to taste like honey. The leaves on the single birch tree in my back yard are velvet.

It wasn’t always that way, but I wasn’t aware of what Iris could do or even if I deserved to have her. Not that I own her - that would be an awful thing to do to such a precious being - but you know what I mean. A ganesha must be completely free, must not provoke any fear, and most be serving only good purposes if you mean to keep it around for very long.

No, Iris isn’t an angel. She’s not an animal, plant, or mineral. She’s certainly not in any of those bestiaries, even though those are what led me to her, in a roundabout way. I think it was when I was reading about ancient travel when she came to me. In olden times, travelers used to find many species of plants and animals, but they might mistake them for something else, like a manatee was seen as a mermaid swimming alongside a ship or a long-haired native person was thought to be an Amazon. We know these confusions were honest mistakes and were due to overactive imaginations. People needed to invent stories to keep them going as they explored, stories that would explain the unknown. The stories filled maps and countless chronicles. I know because I read a lot of them.

My ganesha is different. She has been a life-saver, not only because she’s given me the gift of synesthesia, but also because of her other powers: she can move huge boulders, she helps me think clearly, she helps me make good things. I’m not going to bore you with a list of the ways we interact, but trust me, she’s worth all the effort I put into taking care of her, all the time we spend together. Obviously, I’d be lost without Iris. My ganesha. Not my pet ganesha, because she can’t be anybody’s pet, but she is mine nonetheless.

Let me give you an example, just one, of how intimate and special our relationship is. Please keep in mind that by intimate I just mean how close we are. Iris seems to like to cuddle just under my jaw, either on the left or right side, almost clinging to my shoulder. I have to tell you this because obviously you can’t see her and you’re not likely to catch me actually talking to her. I’m not crazy, you know. Closeness can’t be measured in terms of inches or feet, and maybe not in words. Not spoken words, at least. The example I’m going to give you is true, however.

A Ganesha is regarded as a patron of letters and of beginnings. My Iris is all of that and then some. While I was looking for inspiration for an artist’s book - a book that is a work of art as opposed to merely a book with front and back covers and printed pages in between - I happened on all the bestiaries. Well, I knew about them before, but hadn’t done any serious study of all the types of beasts were in them. A lot of the artistic renderings showed hybrid beings, impossible combinations of fur and scales or horns with slithering movements. Nobody was high on drugs when creating them, either. I wager nobody thought the authors of the bestiaries were mad. It is important to point out that Europe in the Middle Ages paraded its beasts around as educational and didactic texts, while the animals in the religious repertoires of other parts of the world - say, Asia - served other purposes. That’s where elephant-headed Ganesha and various similar deities come in. However, Irish, in addition to not being a male deity, is not a deity, and she does not have an elephant head. She has all the other features, however.

So back to my story. I was intent upon finding some inspiration for my project and as I looked at images on the internet, I found her. She looked at me with the softest eyes imaginable, and then came to me without a sound. She moved onto my shoulder and then snuggled into the spot under my jaw and began to communicate. She was, in all truth, my beginning. She urged me to start creating, to strive to be original, to take all those proverbial leaps of faith, those darn clichés that mean you’re trusting the process even when there’s no process.

Please don’t get me wrong. Iris the ganesha is not a muse. Muses don’t exist; they’re all in the artist’s mind. Iris is real. Iris inspires me and gets me to look at things in a whole new way. She makes it possible for me to be original, to combine the parts of the world in ways few people do. She is very supportive of all my efforts, but is the most helpful when she catches hold of my hand - I don’t know how she does that because she doesn’t have hands OR paws OR claws - and when she lets go, something lovely always emerges. The first time, with the first artist’s book we made together, she revealed how words have angles and colors and overlap in space - not on the page, in space. I was ecstatic, beyond words. The book I made was a thousand miles long, longer than a rainbow and as strong as a footbridge like the one behind my house that spans Mere Brook.

The next time Iris came to my rescue was when I was struggling to make some block prints for a piece of art that had a deadline in three days but I was completely stymied. (Hate that word, but it’s how I felt.) First I threw a few (breakable) things at the wall in my studio - or maybe it’s the room where I’m sitting now, remembering all of this - and then I succumbed to total anguish, bursting into tears and certain I’d reached the end of my career. I was unable to see, feel, or do anything at all. Iris wouldn’t have any of it. She snuggled into her favorite spot and communicated. No sound except a very quiet purring that I felt as a tiny blue light that darted up to and away from my shoulder. I was very nervous about this, afraid either somebody would grab her and take her away from me. Either that or they would think I was not in my right mind.

Well, as you might imagine, our first collaboration - the book - was a success. It was such a hit that I won first prize in the competition being held by the gallery. (The gallery was one of the many you can find on the coast of Maine, but it was one of the bigger ones, more exclusive, so you can imagine how thrilled I was.) They did have a challenge displaying the book because of its size, but in the end, the people who went to the exhibit were very impressed. At least that’s what I was told.

Now the second time, when I was working feverishly on the carving for the prints and was watching the hours tick away, my dear ganesha took pity on me. She must have known I was high maintenance. The tools I was using were inadequate, so I put them down and just started using my fingers. No, I wasn’t digging with my nails, I was just using my fingers. And it happened: the blocks took on perfect form, moved toward the paints I use to ink them up, and released the figures and patterns onto the delicious Arches text wove paper. I was done in two hours. It had been a rough two hours, but the prints were done. They turned out exquisitely.

Only I think I made one tiny mistake. You see, I took all of my prints to submit instead of the three each participant was allowed. The organizers told me only three could be accepted and that I had to select the pieces I wanted to put in the competition. Well, as you might imagine, I was a bit perturbed. No, a lot perturbed. After all, Iris has put a lot of work into all those pieces. There were around twenty, maybe twenty-five, and they all were just as good in quality, not one was better than the others. The organizers insisted on three submissions, and so finally I lost it. They were insulting my ganesha, my Iris who was kind, creative, and a true mentor of synesthetic experience. She had put everything she had into helping me get started and helping me reach my goal. 

I told the committee for the gallery what I thought of them. I had to speak up for my ganesha, who had helped me win an artist’s books competition and who had helped me make prints with the scent of grape hyacinth and hyssop, the flavor of mint and cayenne, the color of cold and heat, the sound of milk and marmalade. There was only one solution to the problem, one way to let those know-nothings see the error of their ways.

I flung every last print, all nicely matted and framed, in their faces. Yes, that was a little over the top, a slight loss of control, but Iris was worth it. She had given me so much and I was bound to take up her cause. Unfortunately, a few committee members were offended, and had even been bruised by the flying prints. They were unhappy about that, which led to what transpired afterward.

Now I am here, in this room that resembles my studio. There are acrylic paints, stencils, gelatin plates of various sizes, paint brushes, and carving blocks, all sitting around on tables or organized neatly in drawers. However, they will only let me have my carving tools when I’m under supervision. That’s all right. I’ve got Iris, my ganesha, cuddled up near my shoulder. She can always find a way around conventional artistic technique. She has taught my fingers to inscribe designs on linoleum blocks, she knows my eyes can now laser new designs for stencils, and she can mix paints together to come up with shades of blue and green that taste like fog in the early morning.

As long as I have Iris, it doesn’t matter where they put me because I’ll always be wildly, madly, happy.