ART PIECE: Nataraja - By William Francis MacMillan

 

I have been many things but I've never been a quitter. I've done my best to remain independent despite some very obvious mental illness to literally everyone around me. I see things and hear things that aren't there at times. When I was in Catholic School (yes being catholic is terrible) they asked us to draw God which is a really weird question to ask teenagers but I think the purpose was to figure out who didn't belong.  I drew a blue entity with fire like tentacles for hair and the cosmos within its body. Most of the kids involved drew old men with beards and there was definitely a sense of dread I began to feel going through the ritual of becoming catholic after that.  I spent some time on a "retreat" with my "peers" in a cabin on the ocean. I didn't really interact with anyone the entire time but would just sit on the beach until I was asked to do a group activity. I left the faith soon after that. I was a Satanist, a Buddhist, I sifted through beliefs trying to find purpose . One of the few things that has made sense to me is Shivaya throughout all of this, my earlier drawing of God is so close to Shiva it astounds me. 

Nataraja, the cosmic dancer form of Shiva, exists outside of time. Hinduism views time in a nonlinear fashion . When Oppenheimer is quoted after the Trinity test. "“A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.'” There was something fundamentally mistranslated that may have lead to Oppenheimer's darkest days and depression. The translation is actually as follows "The World-Destroying, Time" The servitude of Arjuna and The work of Oppenheimer are almost identical. 

“If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one,”

OHM NAMATH SHIVAYA

William is an Artist based in Austin, Texas and is available for commissions, contact him at: wfmacmillan@gmail.com