It has always seemed to me that what the Bible calls demon possession* looks a lot like mental illness. Because it runs deeply in my family, I have learned to live with cyclical depression, which periodically disorders my thinking like an inner demon that wants to drive me to ruin. After so many years, I have tried with varied success to ignore its whispered lies that I am unlovable and unloved, unworthy of all my successes and accomplishments, unable to do anything that matters to anyone. I have tried many times to medicate, meditate, and pray it away, and often I am free for a season or even a year. When it inevitably returns, it becomes my constant companion, staying with me when I lie down and when I rise up, when I go for a walk, when I talk with a friend, and when I sit down for a meal or a comforting, warm drink. I’ve spent a lot of my life dining with the demon named Depression.
Artist Rosemary Markowski’s evocative papier-mâché sculpture called “Tea With Kali” embodies this mundane familiarity with the demons that sometimes invade my mind and, I’m guessing, hers.† Two figures sit across a table from one another. At one end, a woman sits cradling a red teacup in her hands, her mouth a thin, taut line, her eyes slightly averted from the somewhat larger, blue-skinned figure who faces her. At the other end of the table sits the four-armed Kali, a Hindu goddess associated with death, time, and destruction, her appearance every bit as menacing as any medieval depiction of the devil, with its fiery horns, tail, and instruments of torture. Sticking out her tongue and rolling her eyes, wearing a necklace made of skulls, Kali brandishes a sword in one hand and a scimitar in another while raising a third hand ambiguously, either in threat or in greeting. Her fourth hand rests on a severed head, which is placed incongruously on the flowered tablecloth along with a red teapot, an empty cup, and a plate of cookies. The lifeless face looks towards the woman, its blank eyes and mustached upper lip somehow both ghastly and comical, like a Halloween mask that someone has forgotten to put away.
The more I look at this sculpture, the clearer it becomes that if I sit at the table long enough, simply drinking my tea and facing my tormentor, I might begin to see that the figure facing me across the table is neither demon nor goddess, but rather a puffed-up vision of myself, turning blue as I hold my breath in impotent rage. Eventually, the head on the table no longer speaks of gruesome, painful death, but rather suggests that I have lost my mind because I have allowed my thoughts to become disconnected from the reality of my body. As mind and body reconnect, the Spirit reminds me that I am merely human, no better or worse than anyone else. At last, I become able to see through the fake news of papier-mâché weapons, bad manners, and absurd disguises. Restored to myself, I am once again able to thank God for the good news of new life.
- What inner demons torment you?
- What keeps you at the table of self-discovery?
- What restores you to yourself?
–Deborah Sokolove, Seekers Church
†View photos of Rosemary Markowski’s “Tea with Kali ” and several other papier-mâché tableaus from her 2012 Dadian Gallery exhibition The Paper People.
