Author: Admin

Visiting Joana Vasconselos’ studio in Lisbon is like climbing into a hyperbaric oxygen chamber without quite knowing what it will do to your senses. All week long, we had been fighting Lisbon’s damp, cool weather with hacking coughs and wicked colds. The only sounds that we heard were of sickness and fatigue. And then the burst of color, a wonder world where the impossible became real and people broke into a genuine welcome of fresh new life. We are on Judy’s inimitable annual art trip and this January it has been Lisbon.

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In the Vasconselos atelier, we find that everything that is right with the world is to be found here. An artist who has the highest standards for upholding employee wellness–this alone piques our curiosity. Here we witness an active work site where 60-80 studio apprentices of all ages are cared for like family. Nutritious meals are cooked everyday that soothes the body and eases the mind. Yoga and easily accessible meditation sessions helps relieve the stress of everyday life. Massage and bodywork stations de-escalate the pressures of a life lived on the quick. All of these quotidian, thoughtful gestures create an ambience of warmth and curiosity-driven problem solving. And if we have been the harbingers of chaos and catastrophe as visitors from the US, here is a model that promotes wellness as an antidote to the 21st century life of perpetual ill health.

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But this is getting far ahead of the story that Vasconselos weaves for us through her sculptural installations. First, who is Joana Vasconselos and how does she live life as fully as she does: unafraid, hopelessly hopeful, and immersed in the depth and breadth of each moment.

Our sources in Portugal had sent us a pre-arrival SOS that Joana Vasconselos was an artist who could not be missed. And indeed this is the truth. Everywhere around us are works that excite and surprise at every turn: its sometimes blatant use of Baroque overstatement, its subversion of traditional ideas, its willingness to make a point doubly and triply over in case we missed it the first time. Works that delight the senses and provoke thought all at the same time.

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Joana Vasconcelos is the artistic face of Portugal, a larger-than-life individual who creates epic-scale sculptural installations that are immersive and inescapable. She often mixes in performative components which encourage a whole-body experiential sensation from viewers–who are encouraged to walk through her installations and experience them with most of their senses.

Simply put, Joana Vasconselos mines the past to create new ideas for the future in order to better understand the contemporary present in which we all live. She blends art, design and fashion seamlessly so that the boundaries of one discipline bleeds naturally into another. In this way, she creates the layers of the contemporary moment.

What are the five facts that we need to know about Vasconselos’ art making?

Vasconselos takes an object and decontextualizes it, recontextualzes it. The transformation of extraordinary objects into something relatable and vice versa forces viewer response. The work retains its original distinctive shape yet becomes layered with new meaning. Thus, each piece becomes loaded with the possibilities that only art can provide.

As an example, her series of Valkyries float through the air and shimmy on land with an all-over presence. While their name has its roots in the dark and deathly, Vasconselos’ Valkyries are motherly and all-embracing. Waiting to be hugged, these critters are wrapped in traditional textiles that recall memories of childhood. Everything is laboriously hand sewn, just like your grandmother perhaps did in her time. The textile is inlaid with electrical lighting and other unexpected elements like music. Everything familiar is made unfamiliar. Meaning and sub meaning, connotation and denotation, are folded in to reveal the complex interweaving of a story that is rich with potential.

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Vaconselos wraps everyday objects– like a Venus de Milo or a bull’s head– in elegant, delicate crochet–an oxymoron that plays on the powerful feigning fragility and helplessness or vice versa. The wrapping is not meant for small objects alone, Pianos are wrapped as are laptops and commercially produced decorative objects in crocheted lentiling materials.

Vasconselos elevates traditional art to the highest level of artistic practice. She brings together traditional Portugueses handicraft techniques in sewing, knitting, embroidery, crochet and lacemaking. But in doing so, she also questions stereotypes, especially those lingering around the perception of women and womanly art. By revising form and content, scale and proportion, she forces us to remember the unsung weavers and artisans who remain anonymous and are forgotten by history.

Vasconselos first attracted international attention at the 2005 Venice Biennale, with A Noiva (The Bride)–a chandelier crafted with 25,000 tampons. And again in 2011, with her installation, Contaminacao, which opened the group exhibition, The World Belongs to You at the Palazzo Grassi.

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She raises critical questions on contemporary society–the status of women; class destruction; or national identity; the dichotomies of hand-crafted v. the industrially made, private v. public, tradition v. modernity, erudite v. pop culture. These are all analyzed for the possibilities that they create in the present moment.

She combines artistic with business skills that allows her to manage her large studio and her relationships with clients and patrons. Dior and Louis Vuitton are clients as are the largest of international art venues. She is a benevolent messiah who spreads her message with passion and colorful abundance.

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Vasconselos creates playful pathways into escapism, a fanciful flight into exploring new reinventions. She is vigorously involved in the merging and assimilation of several originally discrete traditions, such as the Baroque with the traditionally generated. She is capable of holding many values, meanings or appeals simultaneously.

Photo courtesy of Getty Images.

We see a lion wrapped up in docility.

Part of a three-story wedding cake, complete with candle holders and water spouts serve as decoration.

A Porsche gilded to the hilt and crafted with heavy woodwork reminds one of Louis the XIV. The inside of the car is velvety plush and feathery while its wheels are gilt-rimmed. It is the epitome of overstatement but its weight prevents movement: this car’s engine does not have horse power enough to move this monster of a piece.

An ice cream cone decorated with crocheted scoops.

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Three or four people are working on the Valkyries, while electricians connect the dots that will swell this Valkyrie with light. Color and design remind us of the comfort of home. But in this creative moment, Vasconselos reminds people not to forget their past. Don’t forget your grandmothers, don’t forget your culture, she seems to shout. They are the upholders of culture and memory and they are the only ones who will keep you grounded.

It is the brand new year and we begin it in Ensenada or San Diego South as it is most commonly known. The place is pockmarked with contradictions, each of them existing in clear sight before the other. For one, you can sense the poverty right away–the rough scramble of living on the edge with patrols touting AK-47s in every corner. Open jeep loads of militia with their firearms prowl every street corner. In reality, they are baby-faced young men trying to look terrifying in their impenetrable sunglasses and keffiyehs.

They are here to inspire calm but all they do is its opposite. People mill around them in familiarity or pay them no attention at all. To the wandering tourist, they immediately inspire the question: who or what are they trying to protect? As if to mystify the situation some more, great swirls of Saharan dust have crossed the oceans and settled in Florida and Mexico. Ensenada is heavy with desert sand and grit that have clogged the atmosphere and made our lungs work overtime. The dusty heap of floating cloth pennants lining the streets to create holiday cheer only adds to the general sense of dismay. A few miles away, expensive yachts and tony catamarans that make Ensenada resemble Palm Beach or Cape Cod, are lined up in tidy rows. The new year begins on a surreal note showcasing the glaring abyss that divides the rich from the barely surviving, the real from the disembodied mass of being.

Once in Ensenada, we are bussed across the scraggly landscape to see its famous dancing horses. But first, we must drive endlessly over barren rock and empty dustbowls to get there. There is something disquieting about the valley. It sits unhappily away from the din of Mexico’s metro areas and it should be quiet, but it isn’t. Something doesn’t compute and it’s hard to put a finger on it.

This sensation persists till you get to the stables at Cocina del Valle in Baja California’s Guadalupe area. In these parts, dancing horses are an age-old tradition, an Olympic sport even–a forum for the education of Arabian and Andalusian studs who are taught to perform almost impossible complex footwork and dance routines. The dressage is carefully choreographed and looks effortlessly easy but it isn’t. Wikipedia describes it as such: “As an equestrian sport defined by the International Equestrian Federation, dressage is described as “the highest expression of horse training” where “horse and rider are expected to perform from memory a series of predetermined movements.”

Sitting cluelessly on huge bales of hay under the hot sandy sun, we wait for these predetermined movements to begin. The gaucho with his downward-tilted cowboy hat, rides into the stadium. The handsome stud trots dutifully on the outer perimeter of the ring. The circles get smaller and smaller as the routine demands tighter trots. In the end, the horse pirouettes on its hind legs and raises its front legs high up in the air. This act of grace lasts less than a minute but shows the extreme mastery of the craft and the training that the horse has received.

The horse has the ability to carry its entire body weight and that of its gaucho on its hind legs alone. This choreography is pure athleticism intersecting with gracefulness and even in these sultry places, we see true skill and beauty intersecting just like that. The effortlessness of the dance inspires the feeling of sprezzatura, the bubbling-over feeling of spontaneous joy that makes difficult tasks look easy.

Only the tinselly Mexican music breaks through the air. Later, more hard facts emerge that bring us down to reality. We are told that these thoroughbreds average $100,000 USD a horse. A quick arithmetic and we compute that these stables are worth more than 15 million USD alone in value, minus its upkeep and maintenance.

The dancing lasts but a few seconds and much of the time is spent in the run-up. It all goes by in a flash but what I remember from my day in Ensenada is more than the mastery of the craft! I see how lovingly the horses are handled by the stable hands. How readily they nudge up to visitors and swash drool all over them.

Of how baby goats are housed in each stable alongside the horses. Of how the presence of the strongest thoroughbred alongside the babiest of goats helps curb anxiety and skittishness. Of how we can all practice homegrown kindness and compassion past our differences. And of how, sitting on bales of hay in the bleached-white sunlight, we see all our divides melt away as we get to know a little about the art of teaching horses how to dance.

The cliff divers of Acapulco

The world famous Acapulco cliff divers make the task of climbing scraggly, vertical hills look easy. A bunch of beefy, perfectly toned young and middle-aged men, they repeat this task of climbing steep verticals, then diving into the deep gully below multiple times a day. After, they ascend the stairway to the top of the viewing platform where a crowd of spectators are waiting with thunderous applause. Our guide tells us that the sport is so extreme that these young men must retire by their early 30s–because the force of the dive into the water tears their retinas out of their rightful place in their eye sockets. But we see the men passing by. Either the elements have aged them or they are just plain older than their 30s.

One hundred and thirty-five feet up in the air, alongside a shrine to the Virgin Mary, they make this jump, 10-15-20 times a day, including in the evening. This last feat is done by torchlight–to show the viewer how high they are placed and where they are headed. The sheer white-knuckled part of the performance masks the fact that this is all practiced skill, expertise, and intuitive knowhow repeated over and over again. Acapulco’s cliff divers just know how far up they have to be, how to jump head-first into the gully 135 feet below, how to avoid the rocks from shattering their skulls, and how best to make it to the next jump. In terms of sheer numbers, the gully is 16-18 feet deep, while the width of the channel is 42-48 feet wide, allowing for a tidy window of opportunity for where the divers must fall albeit safely.

Acapulco is a major seaport in the state of Guerrero in Mexico, population 1.25 million. As we sail into the perfectly moon-shaped bay with its Caribbean aquamarine water, I can understand how at one time, this was the retreat of the Hollywood posse with its picture perfect light and its enormous wealth. Parts of the city, called Diamante and Las Brisas, resemble the tonier parts of Los Angeles in wealth. Acapulco came into prominence in the 1940s as a getaway for Liz Taylor, John Wayne, Cary Grant, and Johnny Weissmuller, who is buried there. But one can argue that the La Quebrada Cliff Divers–who are professional high divers–are the ones who have put the city firmly on the map.

In the 1960s and 70s, the US High Diving team competed with the La Quebrada Cliff Divers on an annual basis during the Acapulco Christmas Festival. Our guide tells us that the Guinness Book of World Records lists the sport as the “highest regularly performed head first dives in the world.”

In preparation, divers start young. It takes them years to arrive at the performance stage. Once they have proven themselves, clusters of them–8 to 10 at a time–climb the scrag as if on command. They do this several times a day and evening hours, this being their primary source of income from the tourist. On the way, they study rock, wind, wave, surge, and the elements to plot the moment that they must plunge. In 1996, women competed for the first time in the Acapulco Cliff Diving Competition and took home the prize money. While the sport is fraught with danger, it is reported that among the Le Quebrada Cliff Divers, not a single death has been reported since its founding in 1936. A bona fide union complete with safety and employment guidelines protects the mostly male divers of this elite community.

A postscript:

Visiting Mexico after several years made me realize how good things can come to naught by the ambition and greed of a few. A once thriving country where the general populace lived mostly in peace has been reduced to drug-infested gang warfare and extreme violence. The evidence of cartel money is everywhere. The existence of an elite dressage school in the middle of a desert is a case in point. Acapulco’s ritzy Diamante area must be protected by a group of elite security specialists at all times. The La Quebrada Cliff Divers must be guarded like a national treasure because they glorify Acapulco and bring in the tourist trade. But society is unequal in very many ways and none so than in countries already fringed by poverty. This season’s brilliant film, Emilia Pérez, highlights this very issue: the pitfalls of having and hoarding too much, the dangers of not allowing all of society to thrive, the sadness inherent in a system where some profit unequally to the exclusion of others. Society seems to be locked in a and/or continuum and there doesn’t seem to be a way out just yet. But the human condition gives off tiny sparks of hope. The horses in Ensenada are flush with good care and they drool lovingly over unsuspecting onlookers. An air of carnival exists around the Le Quebrada Divers: each of their successful dives also signifies that we the witness have seen a piece of remarkable history. And Emilia Pérez shows that even in the midst of extreme violence, honest love can exist at any moment in time.

2024 was a juggernaut that broadsided me when I least expected it. One minute I was sipping a Pisco Calafate in Patagonia and the next minute I was down on my knees, taking a full ten minutes to crawl the ten feet from my bed to the nearest facility. But this is getting way ahead of my story. 

2024 began with my firm resolve to continue with my blog—Mywanderingsintheworld.com.

I had begun it in late 2023, a few months into my retirement. I needed to find a calculus for my days, separate from watching the world go by. Putting my feelings down with specificity made sense to me—of writing a blog twice a month to capture my inside stirrings as I moved through my world. I traveled through Chile and Antarctica, Milan and Turin, Maui and Kauai, Trinidad, New York and Cincinnati, Highland Beach in Florida and the surrounding environs like Miami and Sarasota, Washington DC and Boston. In late fall, we went to a wedding in the Athens Riviera and then to India—Kolkata, New Delhi (again, for a mega wedding), and the soulful backwaters of Kerala. I ended the year in Patagonia, a place that made me fall in love again—not only with landscape but how we humans turn to nature to rediscover ourselves and our wayward complexities. 

In the meantime, the US, like India, tended to a monolithic nationalism. I barely wrote ten blogs this year. But I vowed to write more in 2025, beyond my daily scratchings in a bright red, 5-subject College Rule 200-sheeted book. 

I also moved, again and again, from temporary housing one after the other, to our condo in East Walnut Hills. The remodeling was complete—we were home again, the kitchen fully stocked, art on the walls. 

Our dearly beloved son also got married this year—in August, in a traditional blessing ceremony and in December, with an officiant competently doing her job. The newly minted couple looked relieved that the elaborate festivities were behind them; right away, they took off for Zanzibar, to the remotest place on the map that they could imagine.

And then the acute stenosis, the cramping of the nerve endings inside my spinal column, my body refusing to act on command and demanding its own rest and relaxation.

This year, I also continued my diligent work at several museums—as a trustee and docent at the Cincinnati Art Museum; as a docent at the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati; as a member of the Program Support Committee of the Weston Gallery; as a Board member and Secretary of Bader & Simon gallery in Cincinnati; as a co-chair of the Ohio Arts Group of NMWA; as a member on the National Advisory Board of the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC. 

Thinking about art all around me, my writing, and my family are the pursuits that take up my days. And then there are books to read and films to watch. 

This year, I am incredibly grateful for all the good-hearted, sensible, imaginative, creative souls that I have met everywhere. There are such people all over the world and one need just pay attention to one’s surroundings to find them. I am grateful for leaders calling for a ceasefire or those being ousted because they have carried it too far. I am grateful for the minuscule strides that we make toward a better world, a healthier body, a sustainable climate. I am grateful for artists who come in all shapes and sizes. I am grateful that I am not so jaded that I cannot lose myself in a good book or film. Mostly, I am grateful that I can lose myself in a museum, imagining through art how people made choices, or had these made for them, just like we do in our present time.

I am mostly, mostly grateful for the love that I feel for all humanity, and especially, my friends and family. I find myself still capable of a good cry. Gisele Pelicot draws tears to my eyes just as other innocents do all over the world. May we all find our singular peace in the time to come…

As we pass the controls at Paso Don Guillermo, we find ourselves at the border of Chile and Argentina.  Lancha Carrera then Santa Cruz, and here we are in Argentina.  We spot a marked difference right away; perhaps the deathly inflation rate of over 200% influences the geography of place and people. Starting with the littered landscape and the dozens of dead guanacos in rigor mortis roadside, I sense the chaos and unruliness of Argentina to Chilean order and control. 

We head up the motorway to the small border town of El Calafate, on the shoreline of Lago Argentina, the largest and deepest freshwater lake in the country. The lake flanks an entire swath of glaciers, some of which we will get dangerously close to: the Upsala, Viedma, Pope Pius XI, and the Perito Moreno Glacier all in the Los Glaciares National Park in Argentina. In preparation, we make a stop at the Glaciarium, the Patagonian Ice Museum, dedicated to the interpretation of glaciers. It provides an education on the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, the early explorers and scientists, how snow turns into ice, and how glaciers move. Alongside Chile, Argentina stretches over the third largest ice field after Antarctica and Greenland. 

We settle into El Calafate, a town of about 25,000 bustling with wanderers, tourists, and ne’er do gooders. Next morning, we depart from Punta Banderas and board the Estancia Cristina ship toward Upsala Glacier and later to Estancia Cristina itself—the ranch that put this land on the map of the world. We watch icebergs stand in sculptural magnificence in the North Channel, and when we return at the end of the day, we see that the iceberg has changed orientation—it is now flipped bottom-up. We ride a 4×4 to an overlook for the Upsala Glacier.  This is an open schoolhouse of nature, where one can view the entire range of an interconnected universe. 

Deep in the heart of the Argentinian Patagonia, Estancia Cristina is only accessible via a 3-hour boat ride from El Calafate, sitting in the middle of 3000 square miles of rugged Patagonian wilderness. Cristina Estancia is named for Joseph and Jessie Masters’ daughter, Cristina, who died in her young 20s. The Masters were English immigrants who founded the Estancia in 1914 and lived there till 1997, when the last remaining family members passed away. 

A gem of a museum on the Estancia showcases the rich history of Estancia Cristina and the story of the Masters’ family’s obsession with Patagonia. It is filled with details from daily life—who the Masters were, the impact that they had on the land and its people even as new immigrants. From shearing equipment to carriage fittings, mountaineering equipment to milking technology–the museum has it all.

The journey to the Upsala Glacier is precarious and not for the faint at heart. From the overlook, we view a benign and pristine scene, but a reminder emerges from deep in its belly ever so often. Crackling rifle shots pierces the air, sudden bursts of water resemble gun-shot wounds. Snow hydrologists tell us that these are the sounds of the glaciers giving, of breathing and moving and moaning—making its presence known. 

The Perito Moreno Glacier likewise is a massive structure of ice filled with crevasses pockmarking its surface. The till and moraine of the silt lines the sides of the pristine glacier in caramel goop. The immovable block of ice exists as a source of great beauty and catastrophe at the same time.

In Chile, we have encountered Magellan, Ladrilleros, Bernardo O’Higgins, among others. In Argentina, we hear of explorers Moreno, Fitzroy, Prichard, and Masters. In each Patagonia, the landscape is different, Argentina is made up of active glaciers versus the Chilean mountains, lakes and deep valleys carved out by glacial activity. Argentinian Patagonia is dry and rugged, scrabbled together with vegetation that can be described as “xelic”–  it can hold water without getting dehydrated. Chilean Patagonia is made up of dense forests and rugged mountains which are lushly green. Even to a new traveler, each Patagonia looks distinct in its geography and temperament.

Patagonia reaffirms for me yet again that death and life live in proximate reality to the other. Both are intrinsic parts of this same, one life and both are meant to make us whole.

In its vastness and scale, Patagonia equates with wandering. Just being there made me feel mysterious dependencies and yearnings. I eased into my rootlessness and felt free to wander at will all over my geographic and psychological map. In this uprootedness, I felt calmly dependent on my inner being– this my flawed hunk of humanity that flowed out of the armature of my spinal cord and made me feel whole. Where others yearn for the safety of comfort, I realized that I live for the open road, the expressiveness of an unknown face yielding many truths. And I think to myself, there is no greater glory in the world than witnessing the spectrum of human complexity in one’s wanderings. 

I have read of monks in Japan (perhaps in Pico Iyer), who wander inhospitable terrain, enduring harsh elements and the rigors of a self-imposed discipline. Instead of shying away from it, they do this to meet suffering face-to-face. This is the only way across, from what I recall. I am no monk and neither do I endure suffering in my travels. I practice openness and a curious searching for how others make sense of their lives. I want to know the storyline that defines other travelers. Their truth confirms my own narrative: a story of early grief that put me forever on the road for how and why people choose the story that they want to live.

For this journey, here is the trajectory—from Cincinnati via New York we travel to Santiago, Chile. Thenceforth, we take a smaller plane to Punta Arenas at the bottom of Chile. In Punta Arenas (aka Sandy Pointy), we load onto buses—us humans and our 23 kgs of luggage each, and munching on our eggplant and cheese baguette, we journey to Puerto Natales and Puerto Borias. Puerto Natales is the capital of the Ultima Esperanza (Ultimate Hope) province and was ‘discovered’ on Christ’s birthday, 1894. This is deep in the heart of Chilean Patagonia and still considered to be civilization.

Ferdinand Magellan stumbled upon this area in the 1520s, putting it on the map of the world with the waterways linking the Atlantic with the Pacific in South America. The Straits of Magellan—this line of water—is the mark of Magellan’s insolence. That this man would refuse to give up on his wanderings and the ‘known wisdom’ of other discoverers, and that he would press forward on a hunch despite the specter of death, is why the Straits exist. 

As if an omen, pedigreed dogs wander motorways in Puerto Natales, skulking in between fast-moving cars and buses. They hide in plain sight for fear of being trapped. To what end will they go to avoid domesticity? How did these pedigreed dogs get to the streets in the first place?

Just like Antarctica, Patagonia is brutally honest and unfathomable. It seeps under your skin and overcomes you. You come here not merely for a hiking trip, or to attend to Chatwin’s “God of Walkers,” but to confront yourself head-on, just like our suffering monks in Japan. There is no escaping unless you are on the other side of the experience. 

In preparation, I had read Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia, published 1977. This book is a model of where an obsession will take you. Chatwin came here presumably to write an innocuous article for an English newspaper; he ended up becoming mesmerized by Patagonia’s geography of feeling. Chatwin writes of the harsh truths of everyday life in Patagonia through the stories of the Welsh, German and Croatian immigrants who wandered into this landscape and made it their own. It’s always the human stories intersecting with the mercurial landscape. But the humans are the only ones who can attempt at self-knowledge in the context of this vast natural canvas. They are critically dependent on the natural world that surrounds them. The landscape, on the other hand, doesn’t care. It is quintessentially agnostic: a theater for the unfolding of countless human stories.

Patagonia gets its name from its original inhabitants, a race of giants called Patagonians who were over 7 feet tall, our well-informed lecturer, Rodrigo Perez Diop, tells us. When the British colonists came, the made-up name persisted. The original Patagonians came from four distinct tribes—the Tehuelches, the Selknam, the Kaueshka, and the Yamanas—whose genealogic variety were added on to the Croatians, British, Welsh, French, and other immigrants who followed. As a result, Patagonia exists as a diverse United Nations of sorts. (The Historical Museum in Puerto Natales is a treasure house on everything Patagonian. https://torresdelpaine.com/en/tourist-attraction/puerto-natales-municipal-historical-museum/)

Darwin called the region “scarcely passable” and perhaps unknowable. Melville used the term ’Patagonian’ as an adjective for the “outlandish, the monstrous.” Shakespeare’s Tempest is thought to have been influenced by Magellan’s trip report. And Jonathan Swift’s Brobdignagian giants are said to be modeled on the Tehuelche Indians who once inhabited Patagonia.

Through my eyes, Patagonia looks sparse– in truth, it is fat with the bounty of nature: copper, tin, silver, gold, and natural gases. Hugging the Magellan Straits, a spit called Fire Island, which is potentially flammable, bulges over thick with veins of underground gases. 

We see a variety of birch trees lining the pampas middle ground: nirre and koi. They are bent almost at 180 degrees by the intensity of the Patagonian winds, almost parallel with the land on which it stands. In these parts, you can tell the weather by reading the Andean tarot cards: the Andes mountains in the distance.  Where there is smoke and a whiteout on the horizon, you know that the weather is worsening. 

The barren, monotonous landscape is home to animals that camouflage readily: the guanaco—ostriches revered in Chile but gunned down in Argentina as a pastime. The South Andean deer, the Patagonian mara, the sea lion, the Chilean flamingo, the upland goose, the austral pygmy owl, and the crested caracara. This is the natural bounty of the Chilean Patagonia and chief of them all is the Andean condor. It circles overhead relentlessly. The world’s biggest bird of prey, the Andean condor’s wingspan measures a whopping 10 feet. Associated with the sun, the condor is thought to be the ruler of the upper world.  Through our time in the Chilean Patagonia, we see bus drivers and tour guides pay homage to this being. Always, there is an upward glance and a smile, a silent prayer of humility. 

On a cold October day, we take the 21 de Mayo ferry through the fjords to Bernardo O’Higgins National Park on Ultima Esperanza. Everything here is a reference that serves as a reminder of Chilean history. On May 21, 1879, Chile won a decisive naval victory in the Battle of Iquique in the War of the Pacific. A series of naval and amphibious strategies defeated the armies of Peru and Bolivia.  Bernardo O’Higgins, after whom this large natural reserve is named, freed Chile from Spanish rule in the Chilean War of Independence. A founding father, O’Higgins became the first Supreme Director of Chile, heading a fully independent Chilean state. 

Bolstered by the importance of O’Higgins, we proceed on our hike through the park named for him. It is cold and a steady rain makes the granite path slippery. On a sunny day, this walk would be termed an easy one; today it is rife with impending disasters. But these are ancient paths that have been crisscrossed by travelers from Juan de Ladrilleros (1505-1574) who was the first to cross the Magellan Straits in both direction to Lady Florence Dixon, (1857-1905), the English explorer who went through these parts and wrote two books about it.  

Like the landscape, the Chilean fjord system is also vast. Wikipedia informs that Chile has at least 43, 471 islands including almost 4000 of them that are significant in size. They are a series of punctuation marks that lead us in and out of the southern waters. Gabby, our guide, tells us that the Patagonian archipelago is land, sky, sea and wind. The wind is the main protagonist here—the driving force, it lurches and blusters and knocks us off our feet. It throws people off the ledges of mountains, cracks open windows of cars, and upturns big buses like toys. In a moment, things turn on account of the wind. But a complete whiteout will lead instantly to blue and streaky skies. Lenticular clouds are common in the aftermath—pillowy clouds resembling a giant shoe, an UFO, a stack of pancakes. A reminder of familiarity in an otherwise hostile environment.

An exploration of the Torres del Payne (pronounced pie-nay) or the Blue Tower follows. This was declared a World Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO in 1978. It has three horns and the metaphoric peaks—together constituting the 120-million-year-old Payne massif. Brilliant blue lakes and lagoons, cascading rivers, and roaring waterfalls overcome our senses. The double and triple rainbows cascading over the valleys. And then the wind, reminding us of the swift changes in nature. 

The bigness of this world demands a singular approach from me: That I let the answers to my questions come to me. I am at the Singular Patagonia in Puerto Boreas. Here, we have met pastry chefs from Bretagne who have settled in Patagonia via Marseille and Morocco. We have met the whole gamut of humanity here:  mountain climbers, archeologists, sea farers, climatologists, anemologists (those who study wind), artists, and ritual seekers. All seem bent on creating an ideal society in Patagonia

In Kauai, the quiet hits you like an anechoic chamber, a contraption that you may have seen on Nova—of a thing that cuts out all noise from the environment so that you only hear your stomach churn and your heart beat in iambic pentameter. Here, silence is so thick that you hear your muscles flex, your food travel glibly down your alimentary canal and the stream of warm blood rush through your veins with alarming velocity. Buddhist monks in Bhutan or Cambodia speak of these occurrences, of how silence can make you hyperconscious of the microsounds of your own body.

In Kauai, the quiet envelopes in a way that it does not in Maui. Returning to Maui for the 8th time in two decades, I couldn’t help but think of it as an extension of the Sunshine State, a Florida 2.0. Expansive in its picture-perfectness, the sun always shines here and people from all places frolic under the balmy sky. The familiarity of home coupled with the perfection of beauty is what Maui promises and this is what you get.

Not so in Kauai where the mood and the ambience are quite different. Here, the tone hangs lush. Here, the children look flushed and happy in the hot sun. They will not be over-managed or heckled into submission. Instead, they are self-absorbed in the natural world, staring down the large monk seal that has washed up in a sorry heap on the shore. They maintain a foot’s distance as they witness the fold of the seal’s skin hooding it like a reclusive monk in its cowl. There is no reliance on electronic devices here, no twitching to its alerts, no jerking to its commands. The children here look rugged and happy, the kind who bite into a tart granny apple to stave off hunger and observe the grittiness of the black sand under the still-soft soles of their feet. If there is a correlation between quietude and wellness, it is here.

The Iraivan Hindu Siva Monastery on the Wailua River in Kapa’a is no different. It too reflects a similar vibe: the air hangs thick with years of practiced self-reflection and meditation, just as the century-old banyan tree does, straggling its genealogy in its roots. It is the monks of the monastery that President Clinton consulted when faced with national censure and the possible removal from office in the 1990s. And it is to the blessings of this timeless peace that Clinton returned when he was impeached. There is no judgement in silence. Only a large space in which the mind is allowed the freedom to think about its misgivings.

Photo Credit: Raji Writes
Learn more about the Iraivan Hindu Siva Monastery and Rudraksha Forest

In the rudraksha forest, the only one of its kind in America, one traces the trample of footsteps deep in the undergrowth. A lot of walking has been done in these places, a lot of churning over the stuff of life to get over to the other side. People of all ages come here to get perspective—to ask the What If questions. What if things had been different? What if one had taken the path not chosen? Monks in white robes, young ones, middle-aged ones, tread softly in the forest. Visitors talk among themselves or look upward at the trees, snarling Van Gogh-like, upward into a cumulous sky. How do we find relief from the mind? How do we get across to the other side?

I had read Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational several years ago in one of my Design Thinking classes. And I remember being surprised by the recognition that all things of value are determined only in the comparison of it. That the human mind bears witness to one’s truth only in terms of relativism or comparative analysis. In comparison to Maui, say, I prefer Kauai and its absence of frenetic energy. Relative to Maui, for instance, I find it easier to still the mind in Kauai. Everything is on overdrive in Maui—but only by comparison. There, playtime and beach time are scheduled into one’s calendar while Kauai allows for the next moment to reveal itself.

We were in Kauai with our daughter, Priyanka, and son-in-law, Chris. Between the two of them, they had crisscrossed the entire length and breadth of the island several times over. Out hiking on the Kalalau Trail on the Napali coast, they were undeterred by the warning sign posted in clear sight: “The ground may break off without warning and you could be seriously injured or killed.” Perhaps it’s the thrill of extreme adventure or the adrenaline rush of inhaling cool, pristine air, I can’t fathom what it is, but they seem to veer toward experiences that border on the edge of nothingness. They are bent on self-discovery and they return to nature to find answers.

Out hiking on the fabled Kalalau Trail, an 11-mile stretch of difficult terrain that typifies a savage beauty, they are unafraid to bear down on Crawler’s Ledge. This is a clearing that is only 1 to 2 feet wide with sheer rock faces on one side and the crashing ocean hundreds of feet below. The Daily Beast (2019) put the number of deaths from falls off the ledge at 100 in that year alone. This is the same precipice where the nolo or black Hawaiian noddy rests comfortably, away from predators. They are all alone in the world, facing sea and surf on this impossible ledge. But they also look self-sufficient, almost pridefully so, standing apart from the whirling predators high up in the sky or close to water. In recent years, the US Park Rangers are said to have closed these trails because of the deaths of 100 swimmers who have drowned and 85 hikers who have fallen off the ledge. But the nolo is exempt from this possibility. It can fly away at will.

Priyanka and Chris are ultra-marathoners and long-distance bike riders. They are the sort who routinely bike 100k on weekends just for the fun of it. In Kauai, they know the easy feeders of bridle paths that veer off peoples’ backyards and gardens. They know where to go and what to do which makes them ideal guides for willing tourists. And with them, we hike. We do easy runs in Waimea Canyon, where the geography looks like a serving of raspberry ice cream, scooped atop a platter. In its verticality, Waimea Canyon resembles the Grand Canyon, except why was it that I had not heard of these Kauaian canyons before arriving here? We slip and slide on treacherous walkways, through waterfalls, on inclines that are devoid of bugs or snakes. We hear a warthog in close quarters. But strengthened with group resolve, we walk on. Foot falling, heel rising, we repeat this step a million times over.

I want to say that the natural beauty in Kauai is democratic. Most beaches (except for Mark Zuckerberg’s property ) are public land and open to all. The coastline stretches as far as the eye can see, all 111 miles of it, mostly available for all and sundry. Fourteen hundred acres of this coastline belongs to Zuckerberg—his $270 million home on Kauai’s sealine—but the rest of it is public. It is open to the blue-tarped shanty dwellers sleeping in the uproar of the ocean’s noise as it is to those in high-end resorts by the water. From our hotel balcony, we watch a young family of 5 making their way to the beach at sunset for five nights in a row. They carry sleeping bags and full-strength parkas, woolies, and mittens. Night after night, I see them hunkering down for the night on the beach. Around 7 in the morning, they collect their belongings and make their way back to the comfort of their hotel rooms. Later, I hear that they are protesting the existence of homelessness and the paucity of affordable homes in Hawaii. They are making their statement known, and every night, we hear of similar happenings all over the island.

What was I expecting? After all, I had been to Kauai zero times to Maui’s 8 (the number of times I had visited). We were comfortably ensconced in a roomy hotel overlooking Kanapa Beach, a natural bay where locals from Lihue paddle-boated endlessly. I watched a man paddle boat for hours on end every day. He seemed to be sorting through the chaos of his life as he crisscrossed the bay again and again. There was something repetitive and meditative about his practice, as if through this patterning, he would find a way forward, perhaps in a different direction. This lone man in a lime-green bodysuit typified for me the essence of Kauai—where at once guards with firearms block the multiple entrances of a 1000-acre property while in Hofgaard Park in Waimea, an older man with brown mottled hair lies in an open cot under a tree. We are navigating imperfections all along and as my toenail catches on skin and splatches of blood soaks through my sock, I think of this.

Try as I might, I just couldn’t shake off the idea of the feminine divine. I admit that I don’t have perfect clarity on this fixation. All I knew is that there appeared to be an enormous chasm in my understanding between the godliness defining the goddess figure from the sheer hypocrisy with which she manifested in the real world. And so it was only appropriate to do due diligence by thoroughly sweeping through Kurt Behrendt, Vidya Dehejia, Devika Singh, and Stella Kramrisch. But try as I might, every attempt to figure out what the feminine divine is in Hindu life and art was met with a fog of resistance. And as if this curse was not bad enough, on the day of my presentation on the feminine divine at the Cincinnati Woman’s Club, my Word document vanished in one plop of a sound byte. It was as if it was not meant to be. It was 4:06 in the morning, and I had woken up feeling somewhat settled and composed. But that feeling withered away in a nanosecond. Everything changed. Suddenly, I was left with a blank slate in which to create a version of what I believed to be true.

Skulking in the blare of my computer screen, I reconstructed word by word my ideas of the feminine divine. As I did so, I realized that my insights on the topic were juvenile at best, or compassionately stated, emerging. I knew that I had plenty of skin in the game, having been brought up in a traditional, conservative Brahmin family that was famous for abiding by the letter of the law. But the endless divide between the idea of the goddess and the practice of it in an actual setting kept confounding me. Relentlessly.

On my blank slate, I chose to become clear-eyed about all the things that I didn’t know and perhaps would never know about the feminine divine. Who was she, this goddess figure? What was her role in life and art? How did she hold a mirror to those in the living world? Was there even a place for her in our 21st-century world? And the questions continued at a tripping pace.

I don’t know if there are answers to every question that pops up in our mind or if we are meant to be in the dark about the Mysteries of Life. But that didn’t stop me from reconstructing a vision of this layered complexity where women are both revered as a goddess figure and minimized, sometimes brutally, for being who they are. She is at once a patriarchy-endorsed mother figure providing sustenance and comfort in the world. Simultaneously, she is also responsible for holding up half the sky, as Nicholas Kristof aptly noted in his study of gendered identity in the Chinese ecosystem. If our goddess figure exerts agency in the world, she is bound to come up against physical and psychological tribulations that are well beyond what is considered acceptable or reasonable. At the same time, there is enormous pressure to maintain the status quo, to let our gendered identities know their place in our homes and workplaces alike. Go figure!

Going back to the recent scholarship, Dehejia, Kramrisch, and others tell us that among God-fearing Hindus, the goddess exists as a living legend, a woman larger than life and worshipped for the ideal she represents. Still others suggest that the goddess bears a social agency in modeling how women should be. But can this drive toward the ideal triangulate into what’s real in the living world? Can this figure cohabit simultaneously the spirit world as an idea and a living world as a real thing, a woman who lives in accordance with her potential? Can she unperch herself from our living altars as an object of reverence and descend into the rough and scramble of a life lived? Can these precarious twains ever meet?

Judging from recent events in India, I think not. But I am getting far ahead of my story. First, I have to unpack, albeit in very broad brushstrokes, how our ideal image of divinity is forever held up in our imagination as a source of emulation and inspiration. This ideal is our gold standard, and to me, it appears as a hollow monolith that is forever locked into an ongoing fight with the reality that surrounds it.

To come to terms with all this stuff, I recounted all the things that I did know about the feminine divine. I listed, sorted, and categorized to come to a few scratchy pieces of evidence.

I came to see that the idea of the feminine divine is as old as recorded history. When did it officially enter the canon? Who were its originators? Did any defining text, like the Quran in Islam or the Bible in Christianity—form the core of its belief system? No one knows the answers. But one does know that the idea of the feminine goddess, forming the central core of Hinduism, is likewise older than recorded history itself.

In its early stages, Hinduism seems to have placed a huge premium on the worship of the goddess. She was way more important than her male counterpart, and where the male was allowed presence, it was often as an Ardhanarishvara—a half goddess, half god figure, that existed only in collaboration. Wikipedia notes that festivals, such as Vasant Panchami, Navaratri, and Dussehra, are wholly dedicated to goddesses. The Rig Veda contains hymns composed by women such as Lopamudra and Maitreyi. Hindu epics such as the Mahabharata and Ramayana idealize women, embodied by depictions of Draupadi and Sita. It is common lore that for a Hindu to find transcendence in life, one must have visited Madurai’s Meenakshi, Kanchi’s Kamakshi, and Varanasi’s Vishwalakshmi—shrines glorifying the goddess Shakti. In these ways, Hinduism remains one of the few major religions in which women have occupied respected positions in spiritual leadership.

Through the Shilpa Shastras, we come to know that Hindu art is a highly stylized ideal and does not bear any resemblance to reality. The idea of copying—of being derivative—was the greatest skill that an artist could perfect as well as the highest compliment that they could bestow upon their master. There is little emphasis placed on being original or unique because this is not relevant to the practice. Rather, the emphasis on following tradition and adhering to its stylistic history was observed carefully and diligently. For this reason, the artist is anonymous till much later in the evolution of Indian art. And for this reason, much of the representations of the goddess follow a prescription, an ageless tradition that is known to our ancestors as they may be to our grandchildren.

The ways in which the goddess is represented are outlined in an important guide of aesthetics, the Shilpa Shastras. This text is not a standalone book; rather, it is a composite of numerous prescriptions scattered through the breadth of Indian scriptures. The Shilpa Shastras define in detail the practice of the arts and crafts, and their design rules, principles, and standards. It ranges in description from the creation of perfume and the architectural construction of a temple to the proper proportions of the human figure and the composition of dyes. The entire gamut of artistic expression as manifested in real life is to be found here.

In Hindu aesthetics, the goddess gives very little away, so uniform and unreadable are her facial expressions. Rather, the gestural language of her hands and feet, her spirit animal, and her standing or seated position provide evidence of her mental landscape. What is the storyline? The defining theme of this moment in time? How is she thinking? How does this affect the trajectory of the viewer? Through an analysis of the entire picture frame, we come to know that this is her calling card. Through these stylized semaphores, she conveys information on what’s going on and how she is of relevance to us.

The Goddess in Worship

The feminine divine plays a central role in Hindu cosmology where she is worshipped as Shakti or the Divine Mother. G​od as a Mother Goddess is responsible for the well-being of the Universe and is considered the embodiment of incredible power.

The Hindu tradition also considers women the vessels of shakti. This identification with shakti acknowledges women as the containers of both creative and destructive power. Some feminists and scholars criticize this identification because they believe it has led society to label women either as saints or sinners, with little room for nuance in between.

The feminine divine is at once a mother and a shrew, an annihilator as well as a giver of the life force. She is everything everywhere all at once. Her mandate is all of the above: to give hope; to uphold the powers of womanhood; to serve as an unabashed sex symbol in her clear affirmation of the beauty of the female body; to be a superpower when she wants to be one and self-effacing when she is not up to it. Her everything everywhere state of mind is reflected in the breadth, range, and scope of her being. She is comfortable being who she needs to be and in this way, she provides purpose to those around her.

Goddesses Come in All Forms

In the Hindu pantheon, we get to choose the figure who most resonates with our inner self. Thus, goddesses come in all forms from the fair-skinned and demure Gauri, with curvaceous hips and full breasts, to the ferocious crone, Chamundi, who lives in cremation grounds with predatory animals like jackals and vultures.

Durga is the fierce warrior who rides her lion into battle at a time of crisis at the behest of the male gods. She slays the evil Buffalo Demon who is threatening to destroy the world.

When things get rough, Kali appears as the terrifying dark-skinned goddess with wild hair, blood-dripping fangs, a skirt of human arms, and a necklace of skulls. She arrives to cleanse the world of evil and to provide space for new beginnings.

Yogini or Dakini is the archetypal dangerous female associated with the darker or more wrathful manifestations of the goddess. She personifies extreme and unorthodox practices that can be terrifying. In a different time and place, women have been demonized as witches and have been burned at the stake. Perhaps this fear of yoginis reflects the cultural fears within orthodox Hindu culture of female sexuality and power.

In the end, much of these ideas exist as just that: ideas. To the faithful, perhaps this is enough of a guide to see one through. In the context of 21st-century complexities surrounding the Indian woman, it may be said that India has not lived up to the Hindu ideal of gender parity and mutual respect. The country is deeply entrenched in patriarchal sometimes archaic norms where women are largely unseen, unheard, and unacknowledged. Often, her efforts at autonomy do not end well. All of this can be contextualized with the disclaimer that among the educated, the Indian woman is generally recognized for who she is. Among the vast population of the illiterate, neanderthal ideas still run deep. Change comes very slowly if at all.

In the end, the conundrum continues to baffle ordinary folks like me. What is the value of an idea, I ask myself? Can perfection be achieved or sustained in the material world? Is the opposite of reality, another reality, that is humanly off-limits to our understanding of things? 

New York in the summer is a sure recipe for heartache. There is something in the air, a fragrance wafting from the direction of Carl Schurz Park, say, that makes you stop and look around. The city feels new as if it has undergone an exfoliation of dermis and epidermis. Old skin has been ceremoniously removed. A rebirthing is in process. The leaves are freshly minted, the horses high-footed in their clip-clopping around the city streets, the air is thick with expectation.

Am I the typical tourist who is awe-struck by New York? Not so. In fact, this is the city of my initiation into American life. It is the city where I found a rebirthing when I arrived here as an international student in 1980. This is where my life began again and this is where I grew to be the person I am. For this reason, I love New York in all its avatars—its paranoid misgivings, its energy, its artistry, its chaos, its wild and feral beauty. But after spending much of my adult life in the American Midwest, I find myself yearning for the dullness of routine, the surefootedness of predictability. I can only take New York City in spurts any more, knowing that I can flee its electric energy and return to the quiet of my Midwestern existence at any given time. Even so, I visit the City several times a year, so gripping is its magnetic overreach to us in the faraway hinterlands.

Olivia Laing wrote that New York is perhaps one of the loneliest cities on the planet. And this is evident in the faces of people walking by, their faces monolithic in their isolation, their eyes dulled into automatic by the lack of human connection. Edward Hopper got this alienation spot on, of people staring out of windows into a teeming landscape but seemingly focusing nowhere, remaining all alone in the world.

This time around, I am staying in New York for a full two weeks. I tell myself that I want to feel like a certified New Yorker, on first-name basis with Johanna at the local bakery between First and York. I want to befriend our local laundress, Mrs. Ma, who is impressed with my beginning Cantonese. I want to get to know the local UPS storekeepers, the Tal-ben Bagel shopwallahs, the Italian, Lebanese, and Honduran eateries all within a few blocks of the other. I want to know my Bangladeshi fruit seller who plays lesser-known Johnny Cash songs on a radio hung on a clothesline. The lucky ones who successfully guess that sooty, coal-like voice, gets to take home a free fruit. I want to know my neighbors from Mt. Sinai and Sloan Kettering, their stories, how they got here, what they have made of their lives. And it is this search for connection that keeps my mind from becoming lost in my own wanderings.

In my aimless wanderings in the City, I find my people not only in the alive company of our adult children, whom we visit by dusk. But by day, I turn to the faces lining the walls of city museums. Each time in New York, I go to the Met (only a few blocks away from our pied-a-terre) and MoMA, and then I add on one more with each visit: the Museum of the City of New York, the Tenement Museum, the Frick, the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of the Moving Image, the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, the Ford Foundation, Asia Society, P.S. 1, the Brooklyn Museum, galleries in Tribeca and Soho and Chelsea, and the list goes on. The offerings are so plentiful that one could spend an entire lifetime here and only get to know New York as a speck on a pointillist canvas.

Today, I have come to the Met to get to know some humans in whom I’ve had a passing fancy. Once within the museum walls, I strategize my reach. I will meet two individuals in half an hour and I will get to know them best I can. Speed-dating you may call it, and this works for me as an antidote to my loneliness. These are the characters who are so entirely memorable in how they present themselves that they have become alive to me. They define not only their times but also an ageless present in which I feel recognized.

I first meet Bronzino’s Young Man created in the 1530s. He is by far one of the prettiest boys that I have seen, serving as an advertisement for material excesses of the most opulent kind. Gorgeous architectural details in his background speak to his class and the wealth—which as we can see, he enjoys immensely. He stands lord and master of his domain by mansplaining in clear sight. His slender fingers—not used to manual effort of any kind—appears boneless, it hangs loose like a piece of elastic, dipping into not one but two place-settings in a book that he has on view. This gorgeous piece of eye candy not only possesses physical prowess, but he also has intellectual might. His other hand deftly assumes the quintessential Renaissance pose—his elbow breaking through planes of reality and jutting into the viewer’s space—showing that he has the authority to do just that.

Our young man’s clothes could be right out of the pages of a Bergdorf catalog. Akin to the likeness of 21st-century acid-washed jeans, this young man’s clothes are distressed by volition. The satin threads running through his shirt are intentionally plucked out to give it a splintered, carelessly shabby look. The fact of a perfectly styled expensive piece of couture being defaced (somewhat) speaks to the wealth of this individual: he has the money to look like the common person (sort of) while living in the excess of haute couture. He has arrived and he knows it.

This air of supreme contentment typifies sprezzatura, a feeling of high confidence, of being in grace under pressure. Our young man’s gaze holds the viewer steadily with one eye, while the other eye—a lazy one to behold—surveys the landscape to assess what dangers may lurk in the background. I wonder if this is indeed a physiological aberration or a psychological one, meant to unnerve the viewer so that they question the ground on which they stand. One thing is clear though: the viewer could never be on par with our young man here. There is so much to notice here. Is it ever possible to know another?

I keep wandering the galleries and come to the next person who calls my name. I see a young girl looking straight into my eyes. She is Mäda Primavesi, who lived during 1903-2000, and whose portrait was painted by Gustav Klimt in 1912-13. Mäda was barely nine years old when she was painted but her confidence and deportment belie her age. Where Bronzino’s young man is a picture of ideal beauty, Klimt’s Mäda is a real person. Her young but mature face looks just like her, as is evidenced by the photographs of Mäda that remain.

Prior to her death in 2000, Mäda visited the Met regularly and spent hours looking at her portrait—one that was commissioned by her industrialist father and her progressive mother. Both parents were known for hosting decadent salon-like gatherings at their country home and supporting the community of artists and architects called the Wiener Werkstätte. They were undoubtedly familiar with Klimt and his contemporaries.

Leading up to the years of the Second World War, the Primavesi family lost everything: their stature, their sense of belonging, their peace of mind. Mäda’s portrait was seized by the Nazis in 1938 but fortunately returned to the Pulitzer Steiner family in 1951. In 1964, it came to the Met by way of a gift of the Pulitzer Steiner children.

In terms of how the painting came to be, Otto—Mäda’s father—commissioned the seven-foot portrait as Klimt’s only major work featuring a child. To prepare, Klimt created numerous studies of Mäda perched atop a chair or leaning forward. The pose that made it to the final frame involves the girl staring directly at the artist, her legs firmly parted, completing a perfect triangle in the shape of her stance. Her arms hang behind her back, almost defiantly. Here is another sprezzatura moment highlighting the sitter’s extreme confidence. She will not be phased and she is here to tell you so.  In the portrait, Mäda is standing tall in a white dress surrounded by a sea of color and pattern. The picture testifies to the sophisticated taste of her parents, and the hand of designer Emily Flogge who was a master of color and floral prints.

How is it ever possible to be alone in the City when so many interesting characters exist in plain sight? So many stories are waiting to be told. So many insights await to make us come alive in the moment. As Gustav Klimt noted, we can often know the painter (or writer) through their work. If you are looking for a connection, look no further than in your immediate line of view.

“Whoever wants to know something about me… should look attentively at my paintings and there seek to recognize what I am and what I want.” Gustav Klimt

All Photos are Courtesy of Amy Karlen, New York City

One of the curious ways in which my mother dealt with her unresolved anger and grief was to categorize, endlessly. Often, she undid huge piles of folded laundry, the neat contents of closets and almirahs, the details of long-forgotten drawers. To this she would give her full attention—in increments of one to two hours daily. She arranged, rearranged, organized, archived, categorized, and saw new possibilities in how she was going to think about her world, a new world that had yawned into being in a split second before her very eyes. I was all of seven years old, and my mother was in her young 30s. She had a huge household to run—a smorgasbord of aunts and uncles, cousins real or assumed, my siblings who ranged in age from 7-13. The world spun around its own axis while we mourned the sudden death of my father at the age of 37.

As my mother arranged and rearranged her piles of clothes—blouses, petticoats, night clothes, daily wear saris, saris for special occasions, shawls which were separated by make and count and fineness of craftsmanship—something must have registered in my consciousness. This daily undoing and re-making, this Do-It Yourself foraging of a new pathway stuck with me. My mother’s daily unraveling of her world and making it anew spoke of a larger need within her as well as in the viewer of this performative act. She was searching for a new way forward, a way that was going to accommodate her new reality without her beloved husband, my father who was barely known to me. A new world awaited.

As I grew up, I couldn’t help but integrate this practice into my own visual vocabulary for making sense of my world. I too took to cataloging, archiving, listing, and organizing as a system for ordering my reality.

And that’s one of the reasons why the National Museum of Women in the Arts’ exhibition, New Worlds: Women to Watch, 2023-2024 spoke to me with full-on intensity. 

Staged in Ohio by the Ohio Arts Council’s Riffe Gallery and the Ohio Advisory Group, A New World: Ohio Women to Watch 2023-24 is a recurring exhibition featuring emerging and underrepresented women artists. As context, the exhibition has been held in Ohio for the 4^th time in this last decade and for the 7^th time at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (as New Worlds: Women to Watch 2024). Each time, artists are given a thematic focus which they address. Curators representing the museum’s outreach committees— volunteer affiliate groups which are instrumental in bringing the mission of the museum to their regions—pick a group of women artists who address the topic most eloquently. In 2023-24, 11 Ohio artists were chosen for the Ohio Women to Watch exhibition. Of this group, one artist was chosen to represent Ohio in NMWA’s Washington, DC space.

The 2023-24 exhibition title, A New World, was prompted by the reordering of our world as a direct result of the pandemic. The public health crisis was not the only catastrophe that was called into question, but also the breakdown of social structures such as the family unit. In cloistered spaces, domestic violence soared.  Brutal social injustices and hate-fueled crimes, which were largely race and class based, followed soon after. The national elections of 2020 also forced a re-consideration of current societal conditions that seemed to have unraveled before our very eyes. The world seemed on the brink of an impending catastrophe. How to unperch ourselves from this precipitous ledge became the brief that all 11 Ohio artists worked with as they re-imagined possibilities that bridged the gap between the global and the personal. 

Co-curators for the Ohio component of A New World, Sso-Rha Kang, Director of the Northern Kentucky University Art Galleries, and Matt Distell, Executive Director of The Carnegie in Northern Kentucky, offered a framework of questions as a starting point: How do artists document and archive their environment? How do artists re-order the world around them? How do artists use this information to imagine alternative ways of seeing the world? What do the new worlds that artists create offer in place of our existing reality? 

What emerged was sometimes optimistic, sometimes startling. The 11 artists operated between the physical and virtual world, between the logical and absurd, the abstract and the real. They approached these spaces with a range of materials, strategies, and techniques that challenged the way in which we see the world. As a result, several thematic, stylistic, and conceptual intersections emerged that allowed for points of comparison and departure. 

How is history revisited through slippages in records that reveal what is official versus what is off-script? This question is explored by Migiwa Orimo and Calista Lyon’s field research that results in installations and performances focusing on “ecological grief.” Orimo references “slippage” in her works, which she defines as the distance between language and image. Thus, a walk in the woods during the pandemic introduces her to plants which are classified as “invasive” or threatening. She notices a similar language usage pattern to describe immigrants, and resultantly, Orimo consciously uses the metaphorical value of her field research to make her point rather than its official scientific nomenclature.

Similarly, Lyon uses water as a referent to show collective care. While dams can burst and amniotic sacs can explode, Lyon’s circular installation takes a cathartic turn. How we create a more compassionate ethic of care as it applies to water conservation becomes a sub-text of her work. A first-generation Estonian American, Kristina Paabus is influenced by her familial history. Her work probes systems of control through architecture and the power of language to articulate both the structural and the abstract. Paabus’ work suggests that we are inevitably influenced by our own history, both shared and personal.

How do we navigate space in a new reality? Sharon Koelblinger explores this question through sculptural frames that intentionally fragment the viewing process, making the audience distort their body to view the work at awkward angles. Kat Burdine figuratively explores this question through a humorous exploration of astronaut Anne McClain—who allegedly checked her estranged lover’s bank account from the Space Station—using print, cast silicone, break-up lyrics, and found objects. Virtual spaces are explored by Kara Güt, who employs ethnographic techniques to inhabit and research them while utilizing tools of appropriation. 

What techniques do we use to archive and interpret the world around us? Cathrine Whited catalogs objects around her through reduced minimalist shapes until they become iconographic symbols of the objects they represent. Xia Zhang’s set of self-portraits paired with neon words allow the personal to materialize as a public examination of living in fear and avoidance. Mychaelyn Michalec manipulates traditional motifs of women in art history through craft and traditional rug-making techniques.

Lastly, how does our imagination match up with our reality? Erykah Townsend’s work embodies humorous and absurd realities as she spins images of popular children’s TV programming into fever-dream versions of characters that comfort us. The work of Thu Tran transforms objects, food, animals, and body parts into ever-evolving landscapes of GIFs, videos, drawings, and sculptures that result in multi-sensory experiences rooted in fantasy. 

The 11 artists of A New World: Ohio Women to Watch 2023-2024 offer portals into ideas and potential realities which allows the familiar to seem new and exciting, and the unfamiliar to seem compelling and possible. They explore alternative ways of thinking, making, and seeing the world to reimagine our existing world. These works possess an uncanny familiarity that challenges us to look closer and examine what we know but don’t quite comprehend about ourselves and our world. 

A New World: Ohio Women to Watch, 2023-24 was on view at the Weston Art Gallery, Cincinnati, April 5-June 9, 2024.

The Southern Ohio Museum and Cultural Center, Portsmouth, July 11-September 7, 2024.

Bottles. Jars. Watering cans with handles. Boxes. Funnels. Pans. Shallow pots. Their exteriors obliterated by paint so thick that they become uniform, even timeless, a forever memento of something that existed a long time ago. Green bottles lushly decorated from Alexandria, Egypt. Red and blue Ovaltine boxes, their labels now varnished with gesso, the O of Ovaltine barely visible. Arrangements and re-arrangements, obsessively done, by line and shape and form, by height and length and width, by volume and density, by tone and color. Who was this Italian artist and what in his imagination led him to paint almost 1300 canvasses and etch on copper plates, mostly still lifes and some landscapes, over five decades of his life?

My memory flashes back to 2009 like a neon traffic light blinking hopelessly on a dark side street in Washington, DC. And just as swiftly, it whiplashes back to Milan in February 2024. It is the spring of 2009, and I am at the Phillips Collection in DC encountering my first ever Morandi. My friend, Judy, plays a part then as she does now. She has forever been this sure-footed master strategist, tracking down rare finds like Morandi’s retrospective in Milan or the house museum of a lesser-known polymath in Turin who worked obsessively on architecture as he did erotica. She masterminds our annual art trips and has a knack of meeting people where they are, curating exquisite art experiences that have haunted our imagination much after they are over. Today, she recounts what we are going to see at the Palazzo Reall, the site of Morandi’s 2024 retrospective in center city Milan. And as a practice run, we see the 40 pieces of Morandi in the collection of the Boschi di Stefano House Museum. 

Judy Stein in Milan, 2024. Photo courtesy Anu Mitra

Judy is a hard taskmaster, making sure that we pay attention and take away from every situation what is rightfully ours. But she is as compassionate as she is terrifying. We talk through our thoughts, each person arguing and sometimes revising their point of view. And through this Socratic conversation, we get a better understanding of things. When we started art trips with Judy in the early 2000s, the group coalesced around art. But two decades later and with twentyish art trips under our belt, our friendship has become the funnel through which we understand life and art. Over the years, our heartaches and joys have become the point of change through which we have come to know and recognize our world.Ju

And so it is today. My memories of the Phillips retrospective of Morandi is steeped in a bleary vagueness. My three kids were young in 2009, I was clinging on to the shred of a teaching job at my Cincinnati university, and if I remembered Morandi—it was only through the posters of his jars and bottles that lined major Washington DC thoroughfares. 

But today, I have come to Milan prepared to pay attention. Who is this enigmatic artist, I ask myself? What kind of legacy did he leave behind? Even though some artists resist a biographical reading of their art, I personally feel that one is almost impossible without the other. Both life and art are equal measures of a calculus meant to add up to a certain knowing of things. And I promise myself, I will try my hardest to stay away from easily begotten narrative truths. Clear-sightedly, I will try and absorb what the artist is trying to say to me. Right in the heart of Milan in the throb of a bustling city, I remember my heart standing still, my breath quietening and my awareness sinking to a deep place.

An Italian artist who was as interesting as his works, Morandi was born in 1890 in Bologna as the oldest of five boys and three girls. When his father died in 1909, Morandi became the official head of the household. He lived in the same house on Via Fondazza from 1909 to his death in 1964, with his mother and three sisters. He was unceremoniously tucked away in a small bedroom in the back of the house with his studio positioned adjacently by. He only needed to commute a few short steps to work and this intense, reclusive practice, repeated every day for years on end, made Morandi more like a monk. Disciplined and with a single-minded commitment to his craft, Morandi spoke very little but thought a lot more. He worked obsessively, playing with deeply mathematical enigmas that he thought would help unravel for him the philosophical ideas of impermanence, of loss and the elusive hold of memory on our sense of who we are. It was as if what Morandi could not reconcile in his rearrangements of pots and watering cans he could with his philosophical probing and questioning. He did this through his images which became a continuous commentary on the fleeting nature of life and on art’s own swift-footedness.  John Berger aptly comments, “Morandi’s project was to observe continuous change without the alibi of meaning.” Morandi shunned the public eye and is thought to have given only two media interviews in his lifetime. No wonder that he was nicknamed El Monaco or the Monk! 

Giorgio Morandi’s Bologna house has since become the Museo Morandi, and the Appenine town, Grizzana, where he visited most summers, renamed Grizzana Morandi. Such was his deep rootedness in home and geography that he rarely traveled outside Bologna. In his lifetime, he is known to have visited Florence, Rome, Venice and Milan, and toward the end of his life, Paris.

He came to be associated with various schools of art that sprouted in the early decades of the 20^th century: Cubism, Minimalism, Futurism, Metaphysics, and even Abstract art. But he resisted allegiance with any one specific narrative and wanted to exist on his own terms—painting again and again the bunches of still life posies and flowers in the beginning of his career, the Grizzana landscape, and then the bottles and pots and flowering cans till the end of his life. Over his lifetime, his paintings came to be known throughout Europe and the Americas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in their 2008 retrospective writes that in 1934, “in a public address by Roberto Longhi, then Professor of Renaissance Art at the University of Bologna and unofficial cultural czar of Italy, Morandi was recognized as perhaps the greatest living painter in his country.”  In 1949 Morandi was featured in the seminal exhibition Twentieth-Century Italian Art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and in 1957 he was awarded the Grand Prize for painting (ahead of Jackson Pollock and Marc Chagall) at the São Paulo Biennale in Brazil. Giorgio Morandi died at his home in Bologna on June 18, 1964.

Looking at Morandi’s work today—his lone self-portrait, his flowers, his Cezanne-like cubist landscape—I cannot help but be awestricken by the artist’s self-awareness. Morandi’s images are defined by its dailiness and for being unspectacular. Its focus lies on making the ordinary extraordinary and he is thought to have painted time itself, the slow gradual accumulation of dust settling on objects, of light falling slowly, consistently, predictably, and thereby marking the gradual passing of time itself.  Morandi designed his life to honor his artistry. He chose the simple and solitary life—working with clusters and mandalas of arrangements, all of which ultimately led to some sort of clarity that only he could ascertain. 

In the end, Morandi’s works are lessons in the complexity that underlies simplicity. His art defies interpretation, even though one can hardly ignore the tight self-restraint that guides his focus. In learning from Giotto and Caravaggio the lessons of volume and weight; the essence of light from Pierro della Francesca; and from Cezanne the glorification of the ordinary, he followed the path of thinking. As he thought through the process of capturing the dailiness of life,  Morandi freed up thought itself. His bottles and pots and watering cans transcend form and structure so that in them, and through them, he was able to see himself clearly.

“Humans matter only insomuch as they contribute to a historic process; outside of history, humans are nothing.” ~ Carlo Mollino

It is foggy outside, not the thin mist that simulates marine haze but the denser variety where visibility tends to destabilize objects, preventing them from ever coming into focus. And so it is today. We have made the 2-hour drive from Milano to Turino in Italy, a drive of 150 kms. Our bus driver is a cross-tempered, mean-mouthed young man who has long threatening harangues in Italian on his phone. We understand very little except the essence of it all. Either he seems to be leaving someone or he is fighting this outcome in the most desperate ways. But we are the sorry victims of his darkness. On the bus, all sixteen of us careen from one side of our seat to another even with our seatbelts buckled. We brace, we feel broadsided, we are squarely in the crosshairs of a relationship gone bad. At once I feel that we are living on the edge of a vast energy field, a limitless ocean of emotional and mental turmoil that is impossible to fathom. These thoughts persist as we pull into Turin around 11 a.m.

I am still fighting off the wine from last night’s dinner at Il Capestrano, a fancy restaurant in Milan specializing in the cuisine of Abruzzo. Our long-time friend and guide extraordinaire, Judy, has meticulously planned every aspect of our trip to view design and art in Milan. She has a sixth sense about things, curating every part of our 8-day adventure so that each one of us will have our deepest desires met. I don’t quite know it but today, at the Casa Mollino in Turin, Judy will have made sure that my insatiable thirst will be quenched, if for a minute. For the longest time, I’ve had an uncanny fascination with Carlo Mollino, an eclectic architect and designer who saw the world in broad swaths of connectedness. I’ve wanted to know him better. And in his apartment in Casa Mollino, under the tutelage of the curator, Napoleone Ferrari, I am about to receive a thorough grounding on who Carlo Mollino was and what he left behind. 

1888 Villa Avondo—the street address of Casa Mollino–hides behind brambly rose bushes past a wrought-iron gate on a half-forgotten side street. Mollino owned three such apartments all over Turin—places where he could indulge his creative interests away from his controlling father. Casa Mollino was his escape room, the one spot that he endlessly worked on but hardly ever used and never quite lived in. This is the Warrior’s House of Rest that Mollino conceived as his final resting place. Like the ancient Egyptians whom he undoubtedly studied at the nearby Egyptian Museum, Mollino spent eight years preparing this house like an ancient tomb, filling it with everything that he thought he might need in the afterworld. He decorated the interior, remodeled furniture for the space, fashioned the wall coverings and mirror etchings, designed the photographic displays, and even hand-crafted an oval-shaped bed that resembled the Egyptian skiffs that ferried the dead into the afterlife. Mollino believed that the Egyptians had perfected the art of dying by preparing for their death for much of their life. Outside, the River Po flowed by, his Egyptian-influenced burial chamber overlooking the river of life. A desolate looking ankh—which opens the mouth through which the soul escapes the body—lay in wait on the apartment’s windowsill.

Interestingly, Mollino completed the interior of Casa Mollino and the design of the Regio Opera House and the Turin Chamber of Commerce at the same time. They are so markedly different one from the other that it seems that at least two different architects have designed them. In fact, Mollino considered architecture “a linguistic system that combined different styles and building techniques as a vocabulary to draw on” according to Ferrari. He drew on this extensive vocabulary to complete the final projects in the last decade of his life, 1960-73.

In life, Mollino developed himself to his fullest capacity.  An architect; sportsman; cultural historian; designer of motor cars, haute couture, furniture, interiors, and erotica; a photographer; writer of novels and an autobiography; a skier; acrobatic flight instructor; and a professor of architecture at the Polytechnic of Turin from 1949 to his death in 1973, Mollino more faithfully resembled a Renaissance polymath than an Egyptian royal aspiring for the afterlife.

Mollino, who was born, lived and died in Turin (1905-73), cultivated an everything, everywhere, all at once type of outlook. He was born in this famous city known for housing Jesus’ shroud and lived in the 19^th century neo-Gothic Casa Rivoli. An only child born into a wealthy family overrun by women, he was pampered by his mother, great aunts, and housekeepers. His father, Eugenio, provided the controls in his life. A strict disciplinarian and a renowned architect, Eugenio had 300 architectural buildings to Carlo’s 13. And this is what Carlo ultimately took away from his parents—Eugenio’s passion and rigor for architectural and foundational brilliance and his mother, Jolanda’s, ability for nurturing and spontaneous exploration.  

Stylistically, he fancied himself a Surrealist trending toward his own definition of a Modernist. He was one of the first to have arrived at a definition of what contemporary art meant. He meticulously formulated his ideas on the interconnectedness of all life, noticing the arabesque whiplashes of Art Nouvaeu paintings mirrored in the wide-open sinuous S’s of a skier forming patterns as he glided down hillsides. Or an aeronautical stunt pilot figure-skating in the skies. Beginning with the marble of the fireplace to the designs on the windowpanes, fabric designs of the recliners to the reflected images in multiple mirrors set up for self-reflexiveness, he left nothing to chance.

Taking nature as a source for both engineering and creative energy, Mollino synthesized. He interconnected, filled in the blanks, and formed a coherent universe that was hardly apparent to those with limited imagination. Even as he was creating, he was hypothesizing, theorizing, drawing out generalizations from the evidence that was provided for him. His 50,000 paged archival holdings at the University of Turin formulates detailed drawings on everything:  the scale and proportion of ski lifts and backless dresses, the seat of an ample chair resembling the fleshy buttocks of a seated woman, and stunts for airplanes that twisted past hairpin bends and death-defying turns. He fashioned race cars after turbines that referenced the bombs that fell during the blitz. Ultimately, he was interested in mirror images, of silhouettes repeating themselves, in how energies converged or diverged. His imprimatur was lightness and dynamism, of the quickness of joy and the swift movement of the passage of time. 

When we leave Napoleone Ferrari’s curated tour of the Casa Mollino, we are in tears. Napoleone is crying silently because Carlo has not received the recognition that he so richly deserves. Some of us are crying because we are humbled by the genius of a man who worked quietly to make the world a better place for all.

Only the fearless come to Antarctica. Our historian from Johns Hopkins University, Richard, tells us that at last count, only .002 percent of the world has visited Antarctica, ever. I imagine a barren, brutal landscape standing brilliantly at the bottom of the world. But what I see defies imagination. Antarctica is not only teeming with the possibilities of life, but it is thick with the fatness of the continent itself: a rich cornucopia of creation which is marked by human absence. Our research crew on the 200-passenger expedition ship, Silversea’s Cloud, carries us over the dreaded Drake Passage and into the mainland of Antarctica. Today, the Drake Passage is calm, and we pass effortlessly through it. We are not going as far as the Ross Sea and the McMurdo Research Center, which is truly at the bottom of the world. We are sailing the Weddell Sea across the Gerlasch Straits and into various points of the Antarctica Peninsula, a route that Shackleton himself crisscrossed more than a hundred years ago. Our route is not intended as a facsimile of Shackleton’s journey on the Endurance; we are firmly on the path of our expedition ship.

On board are a fierce group of marine biologists, historians, glaciologists, ethnographers and cartographers, artists, hydrologists, meteorologists, cetologists (those who study whales, dolphins, and porpoises), acousticians. They form a ruthless band of dreamers, a group of people who will give up everything that they own to travel the world and learn from its abundance. CK, for instance, is a Mandarin-speaking fiery lightning rod. Once centered in the fashion industry of Hong Kong, now he spends his life in the wilderness: summers in the Southern hemisphere in Antarctica, and summers in the Northern hemisphere in the northern most Arctic regions of the world. These are the dedicated dreamers, the full-time, all-in kind of wanderers who believe so much in the sanctity of our planet that they will unravel the fundamental design of their lives to live close to the earth. Global warming is real, CK tells me, his eyes over-flowing with tears. Unless we do something in our world, we will not exist any longer.  As if this is not a death warning enough, he tells me that if all the icebergs in Antarctica were to melt, sea levels would rise over 180 feet. Human extinction is almost assured, he reiterates, looking at us intently to make sure that we have heard.

The sentiment is jolting but in this brutally pristine landscape of Antarctica, it arrives with an uncommon expediency, an unnerving cadence. We are not professional dreamers, just the weekend variety. The ringleader of the group is perhaps me, an established wanderer of sorts.  Smitten by wanderlust from a very young age, I have a desire to travel to unknown destinations, to feel the world in my hair and to talk to complete strangers about what matters most to them. For this trip to the 7^th, I’ve gathered a motley crew of my husband, Shekhar; my sister, Oli; and our friends Natasha, Debjani and Karno—who enliven our days with energetic mother-son repartee. We have come here with hopes of embarking on a pilgrimage. But we find the experience way more immersive, exploring land and ocean for up to six hours a day in -8 degree temperature. In the afternoon, we sit shoulder to shoulder–students in an auditorium– and diligently take notes. The lectures are grounded in experience and take us to unknown ideas. On this continent, we are experiencing first-hand the overwhelming recognition that we have never been in control of our universe, only of our own responses to it.   

There are multiple entry points into Antarctica and each one of them merits at least a book. I ponder these ideas as I feel my presence/absence in this vast continent. I could engage with Antarctica by noting its diversity as the veritable United Nations of the world, owned by no one country, but its resources protected by the United States, the UK, Chile, Argentina, Norway, France, New Zealand. I could talk about how 98% of the continent is uninhabitable and largely unexplored. Or how the bird population—albatross, petrel, skuas. sheathbills– are distributed along cosmopolitan principles—or in diverse communities and societies, just like humans. How penguins have a strong site fidelity—or the tendency to return to their homes no matter what calls to them. How birds use stars and the magnetic force of the world to determine their GPS. How the sound of icebergs cracking at their joints match in intensity the sound of male whales, which can be heard from almost 60 nautical miles away according to Dr. Roger Payne‘s haunting recording, Songs of the Humpback Whale(1970). How icebergs are glaciers that have broken away and are made of pure water from 15,000 years ago. How Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton both had a common competitor in Roald Amundsen, who made it to the South Pole first. How the highly successful Antarctic Biennale of 2017 effectively brought together artists from all over the world to explore the artistry that is inherent in the science of the White Continent. 

In preparation for Antarctica, I read Alfred Lansing’s brilliant recounting of Shackleton’s story, Endurance (1959). Lansing spent a lifetime meticulously researching and imaginatively putting himself in Shackleton’s shoes. I noticed Lansing’s deep compassion for his subject as well as his imaginative over-reach in describing every battery, every misfortune that Shackleton and his men experienced on the high seas. Spoiler alert: the real-life exploration reads like a nail biter. Shackleton and his 27-member crew, each person chosen intentionally and a stowaway, voyaged to the end of the world in the hope of setting a record. They were thwarted from their goal by less than 100 miles when their ship, Endurance, became mired in ice floes and eventually sank. Shackleton and his men were able to retreat and landed on Elephant Island, named for the elephant seals that bask on solid ice. While Shackleton and five others went for help, 22 men lived on this open spit for more than 18 months between 1915-1917. It is a testimony to Shackleton’s greatness that he made it back to rescue his men and return to England with everyone accounted for. While Amundsen holds the record for being the first to the South Pole, Sir Ernest Shackleton’s story remains larger than life in the public imagination. Lansing’s account, which studies Shackleton’s persona, his leadership style, his planned and unplanned expeditions through those years between 1915 and early 1917 is a must-read for those wanting to experience Antarctica.  In fact, it’s on Shackleton’s account that Antarctica gets situated so dominantly in the public imagination in our time. 

Like Shackleton, I see that the scope and scale of this 7^th continent are almost incomprehensible. The defining themes that help me get a sense of the place are….

Time

Time is timeless here. Being in the Antarctic for a good ten days, I became enveloped in the sounds of stillness. Everything stood massively, monumentally, as if time had chosen to express its timelessness by standing still in real, temporal time. Seeing nature stand, I too followed along and practiced folding into my own silence until I could barely hear my own heartbeat. 

I witnessed paleologic time, of time deeply embedded in the underwater volcanoes and icebergs—a time that is deep and vast and reveals the biogeography of creation. This stands in contrast to temporal time—of time that belongs to a human life and which can be measured in cycles, seasons, phases, months and years. And unsure about how to focus on the shifting gauge between the finite and the endless, I became exclusively aware of the present moment. Nothing mattered except the sheer now, requiring a massive mind dump of past and future time.  

Light

In Antarctica, summer daylight persists like an unwelcome guest for 24 hours. The sun never sets although the light does a soft fadeout for a couple of hours every day.  Most other times, the light is in full focus as it spotlights, mirrors, reflects, and refracts everything in sight.  The light is sharp and piercing, reflecting the whiteness of land, refracting the double and triple image of sky in land and in water, so that the landscape from one’s window looks like a giant kaleidoscope. There is nothing to do except to immerse one’s self in the rawness of this beauty.

Absence of human presence 

In this landscape, the presence of humans is completely absent. For this reason alone, perhaps the 7^th is the last bastion of unspoiled nature, of an ecosystem devoid of human intervention. To become more attuned to sustainable practices, we were schooled in these ways of living:

• Attend a lecture (or read a book or listen to a podcast) on how to leave a smaller footprint on the planet;
• Shower for five minutes less every day;
• Write reflectively;
• Switch off lights when you leave a room;
• Take as much food on your plate as you will eat—don’t waste food;
• Become community-centered and less reliant on your car.

In the end, Antarctica left me with an urgent need to do practical things in the real world, action items that will privilege my comfort less and the planet, more. Science tells us that we are clearly at a tipping point. Unless we change our ways, we will most certainly lead to our own extinction. This is the only occasion—in real time—when we can reverse the narrative. We can choose how to respond to our world now or never. And then we will have to forever hold our peace.

(Some photos courtesy of fellow travelers not seeking acknowledgment for their work.)

It’s been four decades since I walked the streets of Kolkata during the Durga Pujas. But, in fact, I have returned to the city of my birth every year. Some years, I’ve even shown up twice or three times. And so I am inherently familiar with Kolkata. But it’s been some time and my brain is addled by this time warp, a condition that takes me backwards and forwards in time as I find myself recollecting the past while trying hard to not aggregate it with the present. My childhood friend, Kavita, is visiting from New Delhi and together with her sister, Pinky, we walk the bustling streets of Chorbagan (the garden of thieves) or Hathibagan (the garden of elephants), Tala (lake) or Shyam Bazaar (beautiful bazaar). The past seems palpably present, I can almost touch it and smell it.  And the present looks very much in need of a retrospective gaze. I size up these neighborhoods: far from being beautiful elephant grounds or verdant pastures for thieves as their names imply, they are grimy, gritty, throbbing parts of North Kolkata—sections of town famous for their interpretive images of the goddess Durga. 

I could write about what Durga Puja is. Who is Durga and why is she important to the Bengali imagination? What is the foundational basis for the worship of Durga? Who or what is a Bengali? How is Durga made from an artistic point of view? What is the cost of producing the 6,000 odd images that are housed in makeshift ‘pandals’ or pavilions choking an already overcrowded city? When is Durga Puja held? I could chat endlessly about any one of these topics or I could talk about the two Kolkatas—the one that the British ‘discovered’ in the 1680s and named Calcutta, that still maintains a certain colonial stronghold on the mental architecture of the city, or the one that is Instagram friendly, Taylor Swift loving, young and seemingly indestructible younger crowd. (At last count, 800 million of India’s population of 1.5 billion is under 30!). But I want to visit the Pujas in Kolkata today with my longest-standing friends and just take it all in.

A quick primer: Kolkata is the capital city; West Bengal is the name of the state where Kolkata serves as the capital, located on the eastern seaboard of India; Bengalis are culturally associated with the state of West Bengal; Bengali, Hindi and English are the primary languages spoken in this state. 

It is 5 a.m. on October 22, the day of Maha Ashtami—the high point of the Pujas– and I look around with surprised recognition. At once things look familiar and not quite recognizable. We see throngs of people walking the streets. In this city of 16 million (in Kolkata proper), it is only natural to see such a sight, and, of course, with the Pujas, the population has presumably doubled if not tripled. But it is early and already the crowds are as thick as molasses. People all around me look glittery and dewy eyed. Their radiance only accentuates my unmade-bed look. My daughter, Priyanka, is running the Sacramento Ironman today, a world away, and I have been up all night, tracking her on the real-time feed that our son-in-law, Chris, has set up for us. But the ambiance of happiness all around me is infectious and it grounds me in the present. I see people looking hopeful and optimistic, holding on to a slender-ish faith in the future. 

And this is when I realize that far from being a religious or even a spiritual practice, the worship of Durga—held over a ten-day period in India and in diasporic communities worldwide—is deeply personal and intimate. It is a celebration without any intercessors, marking the victory of good over evil, of us choosing our own angels in their death fight over our inner demons. Here in Kolkata, the intellectual center of India, the Pujas perform additional functions as well. They are social and celebratory, devotional and political all at once. This year, and because of the state of our world, issues of social relevance have become front and central in many interpretations. Where the central government appears to diminish the rights of women, the LGBTQ+ agenda, and those of other marginalized groups, the pujas bring on a full-hearted celebration of invisible themes existing in clear sight around us. What emerges is diverse belief heaped upon diverse belief that not even Narendra Modi’s politics can homogenize. In the end, the Pujas remain a highly artistic and creative endeavor, involving all sections of society. It is an and-and equation: social, political, artistic, consciousness-raising, and off-the-charts creative. 

Durga Puja (in Eastern India, where I am originally from), Dussehra (in North and Western India), and Navratri (in Western and Southern India) are essentially one and the same celebration. In impact and importance, it is akin to the Super Bowl, the World Series, the Grand Slams, the Masters’, the FIFA Football Cup, the Grammys, and Oscars– all rolled into one. Durga Puja directly affects more than a billion and a half people in India alone, and many more in diasporic communities throughout the world. For its artistic merit and brilliance, the Durga Pujas were declared an UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity Site in 2021. 

The Pujas are also a welcome infusion of hard-core cash into the local economy.  Many of the images and the ‘pandals’ in which they are housed run into millions of rupees. In the language of cold numbers, here are some statistics:

• 300,000 individuals are directly employed because of the Pujas in Kolkata, over a 6-month period every year, with many more experiencing an economic boost based on the industry. (The British Council, 2023, India)
• The Durga Puja is worth 7% of West Bengal’s total annual GDP. (The British Council, 2023, India).

Today I see the enormous range of human differences which are embedded in similarities. At the Mohammed Ali Park Durga Puja, which is located opposite a fully functional mosque, the Islamic afternoon prayer or azaan blares plaintively over loudspeakers. Meanwhile, the Durga pavilion simulates the Hindu Somnath, one of the holiest of Shiva Temples in Gujarat. The figures are Kehinde Wiley like, in their baroque robes and dramatic gestures. The Telegraph reports that in multiple puja pavilions like this one, Muslim community workers put the finishing touches to the Durga image while their Hindu assistants lend a hand. Mohammed Syed of the Mominpur Tarun Sangha, has been doing this for the last 20 years with his Hindu assistant, Satinath Adhya. The Telegraph reported that “Inclusiveness is ingrained in Indian culture. But the past decade has witnessed a full-fledged attack on this culture. That is why it is vitally important that we should preserve it.”  Adhya’s sentiments are echoed in different parts of the city. (The TelegraphOctober 20, 2023). 

The story of Durga itself speaks to this truth: that what is unlikely ends up becoming the norm, that what we sometimes imagine can become our reality. The story itself is Joseph Campbellian, of epic proportions, where the goodness of Durga vanquishes even the thought of evil. 

As consort of Shiva, the head honcho in the Hindu pantheon, Durga is a force to be reckoned with. She is the Goddess figure and endowed with special powers, she confronts the demon, Mahishasura, often represented in the form of a buffalo. Evil, she observes (famously in Birendra Krishna Bhadra’s epic poem, Mahishasura Mardini), is chameleon like—it is often pleasing but its form is mercurial, almost enticing. In other words, while goodness is always available to us, in its predictability it becomes almost pedestrian and unexciting.  Evil, on the other hand, tends to be exhilarating, changing likeness and keeping us sufficiently involved and herein lies its allure and magnetic pull over ordinary mortals. 

But Durga knows the story line. Mounted on her lion, she pursues the buffalo demon and cuts through its skin. As the blood oozes, the demon can no longer contain its camouflage. This is the cue for Evil to reveal itself; he must out and this he does. In this way, we are rendered an annual homily, a continuous revelation– that goodness and evil can (and does) dwell in equal measure within and among us. The struggle is always painful, giving way to the clarity that it is only through the power of goodness that we can attain understanding and peace. A simple choice—that of loving our neighbor– allows us the bandwidth to become better than who we are, giving us a more expansive way of living with ourselves. 

The Durga story continues to captivate the public imagination. Of the 6000 neighborhood pandals or pavilions set up for worship, the one in Kashi Bose Lane is particularly thought provoking. A young child is trapped in a giant sandbag in a contemporary installation. Later, in the various rooms leading to the Durga, young children are paraded on a rotating lazy susan. They are violated by vultures who are seated at the table. Atop Durga, a young child, trapped in a bed, jumps to her death. Everywhere, posters of trafficked children line the pavilion including protest signs urging Death to Rapists and Save our Children as pathways to action. The effect is at once a bone-chilling reminder of the social injustices that exist all around us and a call to action.

Ultimately, Durga comes to us as an annual reminder of our own power to be good, to do good. By the time that the Pujas are over, she’s left behind communal harmony, an awareness of the injustices surrounding us, economic prosperity, and artistic masterpieces. What more could anybody desire from a single festive holiday where a lone mother is celebrated for her tough love as well as her ability to inspire change on an annual basis. 

The idea of home has always held special meaning for me. Ungrounded at an abysmally early age by the unexpected death of my father, I became rootless by temperament. I came to identify myself with wanderings, a certain discontentment, a specific directionless travel plan that took me from here to there but seemingly nowhere where I wanted to be. Or somewhere that was meaningless to me once I got there.  I became a professional asker of questions, someone who had more of them than answers. For instance, for the longest time, I grappled with the question, why—why was I doing what I was doing?  Scaling mountains? Reading Simone de Beauvoir?  Getting my Ph.D. in British Lit? Watching people wait for the bus?  There seemed to be no prioritizing in my relentless questioning. What held meaning for me? What was meaningless to me?  It was apparent that settling down would take the better part of my life and indeed it did. In fact, it took me several decades to come to terms with myself. Perhaps, even love myself for who I was. And that’s why the concept of home became a setting so profound that at once it symbolized a womb into which I could crawl and a porthole through which I could scan big dreams in the larger world. Home was a place where I could be myself, separate from my perpetual restlessness. My bed marked an architectural landscape that allowed for vertical uplift, grounding and releasing me simultaneously. Home, my home, created with decades of intentional care, held this special place for me: meticulously diagrammed but spontaneously free ranging all at the same time.

These thoughts lingered on my mind as I traveled down Avenida Antonio Lopez de Bello in downtown Santiago, Chile, to visit the home of Pablo Neruda. I had read his highly emotional slash erotic poems in high school and college, and many decades later, our friend, Ale, gifted me one of his books of love poems. When you learn to read Spanish, she had said, perhaps you will read the book and enjoy it as much as I do. I remembered Ale’s confidence in my abilities, the sheer force of her will in believing that one day I would be able to read Pablo Neruda in Spanish. And that’s why, even after moving homes three times in as many decades, I still hung on to the slender volume with the green cover. All I wanted to do today was to reconcile my impressions of Neruda—of how he presented himself versus how he really was. It made me think of how we construct a narrative of a person based on the coordinates of our own life—and it is this version of reality that we hold onto versus the thing that presents itself to us. For this reason alone, I love visiting the homes of artists, writers, and thinkers. Parsing through a curated home uncovers for me what the person was really like, how they spent their days, what ideas mattered most to them.

These ideas jostled in my head as we cut through the ruthless heat of a Santiago January afternoon. It was the height of summer and the sun bore through my thin cotton shirt and bleached it clean. I stopped to stare at two Santiago traffic police. It was north of 90 degrees, but these two looked like overstuffed penguins in their thick white shirts, skin-tight breeches, and sturdy waistcoats. Somehow, their clothes sat easily on the outer edges of their skin.  This afternoon, the traffic cops, perhaps simmering with an inner rage, were writing up tickets—in a street of 10 parked cars, just two escaped their fancy. I was fascinated by their choice-making: what led to their decision? Why the brutality? 

Past a trendy café at the corner, we turned into a quiet street that led to Neruda’s home. An industrial steel gate led into the complex. Pointing the way from the outside were two walls of murals that reminded me of Marc Chagall—at once funny, wistful, mystical, serious, lighthearted. 

La Chascona, or the one with the wild hair, was the house that Neruda built for his secret lover, Matilde Urrutia, who eventually became his third wife. They met in Mexico in 1949—she was a Chilean singer who was hired to take care of him when he came down with phlebitis. He was still married at the time but he quietly built this house for their secret love. This is where she lived until they married in 1953. Eventually, La Chascona became a home for both of them —one where Neruda could manifest his various selves and learn to live with his numerous legacies.  In this unlikely nest, Neruda was able to integrate his artistic and creative life with his radical politics and diplomatic work. 

As a refresher, Neruda was a Chilean poet, politician and diplomat who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971. Born in 1904, his mother died when he was just 2 months old and one can sense that abandonment, the aching nostalgia surrounding a permanent loss. Neruda became a poet at age 13 and wrote in a wide variety of genres: surrealist poems, epics, political manifestos, an autobiography, and passionate love poems, such as Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair(1924). What surprised his readers was the intensity and graphic details of his erotic poems written while he was still in his teens.

Neruda occupied many diplomatic positions in Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Singapore, Spain and Argentina and served as a senator for the Chilean Communist Party.  He consorted with Lenin, Mao Tse Tung, Stalin, and Castro, and was forced to walk back his views when he witnessed the debilitating effects of communism and dictatorship. He continued to create prolifically during his diplomatic career, addressing in his writing the hardship and brutal living conditions of exploited farm workers in Chile. He never stopped fighting for the commoner and for Chile’s “collective obligation.”  

In terms of his personal life, Neruda married a Dutch bank employee, Maruca Hagenaar, in Indonesia, and had his only child, Maria Malva Reyes, who was born with hydrocephalus and lived to be only 9. He abandoned both when he met his second wife, thus reducing his first family to a life of poverty. From these details, I could surmise that Neruda was expert at running from the present into the future. It seemed that he was also adept at compartmentalizing, at keeping aspects of his life air-tight and separate so that they made logical sense to him. In time, he learned to craft a whole of who he was meant to be. 

Neruda moved on to his second wife, Delia del Carii, an Argentinian aristocrat twenty years older. This too didn’t last as he met his third wife, Matilde Urrutia, soon after. Matilde and Neruda were together for almost 25 years, 20 of those as a married couple. 

Neruda died of suspicious conditions in Santiago in September 1973. There are murmurings of the state’s responsibility in Neruda’s death because of his passionate opposition to the dictator Pinochet. The state denies this claim emphatically.

Neruda began work on La Chascona in the early 1950s for his then secret lover, Matilde, whose curly red hair inspired the house’s name. Chascona is a Chilean Spanish word referring to a wild mane of hair. In the house, one can view Diego Rivera’s 1955 painting, Matilde, which hints at the secrecy of their love affair. The image depicts a two-faced Urrutia, one face depicting the public persona of the singer, and the other her private role as Neruda’s lover. A profile of Neruda’s distinct face is artfully hidden in her wild tresses. 

Together, Matilde and Neruda made the house a meeting place for poets, artists, thinkers, and politicians.  Matilde also took on the gargantuan task of restoring the house after Neruda’s unexpected death in 1973. During the military coup that ensued, La Chascona suffered heavy damage and she took it upon herself to restore it back to good health. She was a master strategist in the way in which she used La Chascona as a theater for Neruda’s public wake. Matilde welcomed thousands of mourners into her home to evoke national sympathy, preserve public memory and rectify the historical record. By staging this multi-day event, Matilde ensured the public support of Neruda in his resistance of Pinochet.  After Neruda’s death, Matilde moved into her own bedroom in La Chascona, never sleeping on their marriage bed again. 

La Chascona, itself, is magically suspended in mid-air, neither belonging to earth nor sky but inhabiting both spaces. The home was developed in phases—organically, one could say, in a manner that was eccentric and contrary to the best practices of architecture.  It was crafted room by room and designed according to the placement of specific furniture and art objects that Neruda had gathered from his international travels. “In one occasion he had a window, a picture and an armchair he liked a lot, and he wanted to create a corner where they were included,” reports La Chascona’swebsite. “Then, the poet conditioned the space to the object, the whole to the part.”

The small courtyard with tall trees forms the axial from which clusters of rooms radiate in every direction. Neruda had a grand plan in his mind, and he used this as a template revealing every room section by section and allowing for the element of surprise at every turn. Thus, the flow of the house evolves like water, finding its own path. The whole is quirky, comfortable, tasteful—where stainless steel Parisian bars coexist happily with leather stools from Indonesia, English Wedgewood services sit alongside colorful Portuguese glassware.  

The Catalan architect German Rodriguez Arias, who was hired for the project, witnessed Neruda flip the orientation of the house, haul cypress logs from the south, and modify every detail of the architectural plan. The house began modestly as a living room and a bedroom for Matilde. A kitchen and dining room, two bars—one for each floor– and a library soon began to evolve. Past the dining room and through the kitchen was a small escape route that Neruda could use if he lost interest in the dinner company. No detail was left unattended and all of it was created in service of Neruda’s life. 

La Chascona showcases paintings by Chilean and international artists, an African carved wood collection, and furniture from the Italian designer Piero Fornasetti. Built up maximally, the house reflects a rich inner life borne of distant travels, conversations with the likes of Malraux and Hemingway, and the friendship of political shapers of Latin American destiny. Matilde continued living in La Chascona until her death in 1985.  After her death, it was reborn as a house museum to provide a window into the life and times of Neruda.

It is only too natural to deify individuals who are no longer with us. Sometimes, it becomes useful to interrogate the vast inconsistencies contained within a single life. La Chascona contains the ghosts of Neruda’s many pasts. But its wandering path up three levels of outdoor wooden steps suggests an upward climb, a constant searching and looking. By the time that I climbed to the top of the tree line myself, I could look further afield. I came to understand that Neruda’s home presented a life that was at once creative and capacious. I saw a life that held many co-existing but conflicting truths. I came to understand that La Chascona provided Neruda multiple ways of being: he could at once roam freely in wide open spaces while upholding his obligation toward his Chilean compatriots. Both pathways were fundamentally important to Neruda and in the end, he chose both.