Apranihita, Aimlessness
In Mahayana Buddhism, the word “apranihita” means aimlessness or wishlessness. I set a goal for myself to paint a painting about apranihita. Even the most distracted among us can see the obvious contradiction that I quickly tripped over. How can I aim to show the concept of aimlessness in paint?
Just to set the mood on the large blank canvas, I started with a line drawing of a seated Buddha in a swirl of arcs and thin washes of color. I soon found myself gaining a desire to render the Buddha figure better. The painting was already anything but aimless. I broke up the figure of the Buddha and the swirling arcs with slashes of opaque color and then I had a basic landscape in front of me. I have spent decades searching for truth down this road, so again, the painting felt like anything but aimless. Some brighter colors and swoops up into the sky and down into the foreground were satisfying at first, but also somewhat “directional”. I put them in and immediately knew where they were going, both literally and also in terms of the painting process.
I was still stuck. How to show aimlessness? So, I obliterated the swoops with light opaque burnt sienna, but I kept the perspective of the landscape. Adding light opaque viridian deepened the illusion of a light-filed landscape. I thought I was on to something and I pressed forward with this approach. Clouds formed in the sky. Reflections emerged in the water. Adequate, formulaic and definitely not aimless. I felt stumped. Maybe this wasn’t such a clever idea.
My frustration the painting increased. I began to smear pastel mixes over the simplistic landscape, intentionally avoiding making anything that would look like something. Now I’ve gone from stuck on aimlessness to lost in chaos, which is not the same thing.
About this time a neighbor of mine became the perfect teacher for me. He started setting fireworks off from his boat dock. My dog is very sensitive to loud noises, and she was terrified. Once, she bolted from our backyard when someone set off fireworks nearby. That night I walked the neighborhood alone and in the dark calling for her for an hour and fearing her death until another neighbor brought her back.
A couple of weeks before my neighbor’s fireworks show, I was walking my dog on the road that winds through the neighborhood where I live. An elderly lady on her porch a few houses up asked me what was in the road. A hundred yards or so ahead of me there was a large dark shape in the middle of the road. As I approached, I recognized it as a dog that lived next to the park where I walk my dog. It was recently killed, struck and left in the middle of the road that has a 20 mile per hour speed limit. I don’t know the circumstances of its death, but I think that that the driver that struck it was likely very careless. If they were paying attention and going the speed limit they would have had plenty of time to slow down and get around the dog. If they were conscientious they would have stopped after they struck the dog and removed it from the middle of the road.
When I recognized the dead dog I felt very sad and I was angry about the carelessness of the driver, and I felt resentful that I was going to be the one to find the owner of the dog and tell them that their beloved pet was dead. I walked to the owner’s house and rang the doorbell and said hello and asked him if he knew where his dog was. I knew that he did not. I watch his expression change from puzzlement to shock. After he collected his dog, I saw him in grief.
And so all this was swirling around my head when my drunken neighbor was setting off fireworks a couple of weeks later and I got very angry with him. I walked over to his dock, used some foul language, and walked back to my house. Simple enough. I thought that I would be over it by the next day, or the day after, or the day after that, but I was not.
The experience lingered with me. Out of control people, doing thoughtless things that endangered other people and animals, and I got sucked into it. Why me? It was a familiar situation and a familiar set of feelings.
I compensated for my chaotic childhood by accomplishing things. I was good at getting good grades when I wanted to. I excelled in sports. I got accepted into prestigious schools. I sacrificed myself in my doing. I wouldn’t let myself rest or play in aimlessness for very long.
It took a long time to undo all my doing.
No wonder painting about aimlessness was so difficult for me. I struggled with it until I realized that painting about aimlessness was like writing a love-letter to myself. Lovingkindness after a lifetime of white-knuckle striving. The painting resolved itself in unexpected ways. It is soft and luminous. It meanders with no particular direction, it just is, and it is wonderful.
