Red River

I dedicate this summer 2013 piece to Carolyn Sophi Weltman, a wild woman and uncompromising artist I have met here on FAA!... more

by Sora Neva

Buy the Original Painting

Price

$800

Dimensions

40.000 x 60.000 x 1.800 cm.

Title

Red River

Artist

Sora Neva

Medium

Painting - Oil On Canvas

Description

I dedicate this summer 2013 piece to Carolyn Sophi Weltman, a wild woman and uncompromising artist I have met here on FAA!

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The ancestral menstruant who crouched in a tree or on the ground in a bower of boughs, hiding from predatory teeth, was connected to darkness because her period was so often entrained with the dark of the moon. Darkness, death, fear, silence --- all remain connected in many cultures. The menstruant's many taboos not to see light also connected her to light, into which she emerged in triumph at the end of her period. Her blood was analogous as well to water, so that all water was comprehended in terms of menstrual flow, as we know from the myth of Rainbow Snake, which equates the collective sisterly vaginal snake to various waters in the sky and on the ground. The menstruant's blood flow must not mingle with the earth's "blood" flow lest Chaos, loss of consciousness in the form of a flood, annihilate human life. Her world-forming "waters" had to be separated from nature's "waters."

This separation of various liquids created them as distinct natural forms with the characteristics of the body --- bodies of water. Streams were understood as having a single source, like menstrual blood flowing from the vulva spring. Springs, pools, and mountain lakes were endowed with sacred character, dread, and taboo. To tribal people in what is now Oregon, Crater Lake was considered the most sacred spot, the center of the earth, and none but a select few were ever allowed to look upon it. (Even in modern times, Crater Lake retains a treacherous reputation.) In England, wells and springs still bear pagan female names such as "Maiden's Well" or "Bride's Spring."

Menstrual seclusion rite enacted the creation of the world and its elements, forming them as conscious ideas before there was language or sense of narrative enough to make them into a story; the rites themselves constituted the creation story. The menstruant was tabooed from seeing light, and then her emergence from dark seclusion was directly into the light, at dawn, thus bringing light into focus. She was separated from water, and her blood flow was believed to influence the flow of bodies of water. Her blood flow was the original comprehension of water, of water as a substance, of water as a moving force capable of causing chaos or death. Our simian ancestress began to perceive water as a mental, rather than an instinctual or strictly physical, reference. The animal perceives water primarily by smell, and though smell remained a part of the mythology of menstruation and water---in the Australian myth, the Rainbow Snake smells blood and causes a flood---gradually the sense of smell as a means of identification of water was replaced with sight, the visual perception of different kinds of water, and of bodies of water as entities, related to other kinds of water, yet distinctly themselves. These distinctions were enacted repeatedly through menstrual rite and the tabooed approaches of the menstruant toward forms of water.

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Expert from the book Blood, Bread, and Roses: How Menstruation Created the World, Chapter 2: Light Moved on the Water, pp. 24-25, by Judy Grahn (also available online at http://bailiwick.lib.uiowa.edu/wstudies/grahn/index.htm).



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Uploaded

July 8th, 2014