So I promised you secrets, and I no longer know what one is.
I have been at Yaddo these past two weeks. This is my last day, and it has been magical for so many reasons, the kind where you break down and doubt your whole life some moments and still want to Live. Each morning I drew a Dickinson quotation to divine my creative direction that day. One I love most was “The absence of the Witch does not/Invalidate the spell—” from a poem in which regardless of time and distance, one moment can bring back the LIFE charge of ourselves and ourselves with others.
Beyond Emily always in my ear, I think it’s hearing about the processes and materials of others, in beyond language arts especially, that really changes me and brings me back from my own bubble of despairs. I’ll keep them anonymous here since I’m probably not quite accurately representing what they do but what I got from them.
A composer who makes songs without language, all mouth sounds. She says she has discovered 95 new sounds she can make just being here. And the idea is there is something beyond high emotion that song is for. How refreshing. And yet I felt full of feeling listening to her gifts.
A photographer who uses an old camera that looks like an accordion he must dial in and out, stand under a cape and look through to see the image upside down because it has no mirror. He tells us when to blink and when to be still. Remembering how long one must be still for in order for light to write us onto film has been humbling and liberating.
A historian who is writing about silence and doubt. The way we put sentences together and the high stakes this has for people’s lives, for history. She made me see connections between my life problems and my art problems, having experienced a temporary loss of language at a very early age much as my child did, and how making worlds of moss with her dog brought her home. She introduced me to this Fanny Howe essay that contains the line I am stealing for an epigraph: “Doubt is what allows a single gesture to have a heart.”
Or there is the extraordinary visual artist who uses dye to make paintings that make me feel totally alive on a psychic plane. She has this particular liquid ina squirt bottle that is often used, I think in a more typical dye process, to erase/diffuse, but she actually uses for the opposite purpose. She spoke of liking to use materials in ways they are not intended to be used. How felting wool made little sculptures that resembled flesh, earlier in her career. The color of her current work is so vibrant they feel otherworldly, and the way she corrals the water she pours on top puts control and chaos into conversation so beautifully that we can’t help seeing the color move elementally as flames or eyes, those soul-lit parts of our lives.
Sometimes I take in these processes or moments in other mediums as analogs to my own process, helpful insights I can apply, and other times they are not representative of my own work but metaphors for living, and sometimes they are more like a language I am trying to understand, which has more meaning as a language because I don’t understand it fluently, and therefore can’t take it for granted.
A question that came up here at my first dinner was “has a book ever saved your life” and I felt this pitch shift from the usual “change” to “save”—the stakes here felt higher but also necessitated more of a blurring between how I face my life and how I face the page. The conversation went on, “does returning a part of yourself to yourself mean saving your life?”
Sometimes, especially recently since having children, I’ve felt more focused on keeping these separate. My life seemed defined by boring requirements whereas my art was where I could think deeply, but being among many artists who do not have children, I remembered the joy and depth of waking up and falling asleep in one’s own thoughts and questions. My own mind the mind most pulling on me.
It has been a luxury, well a luxury to remember that this space needs to be kept open, the self finding moments to come up for air and be even in the most impossible contexts, not only by brief escapes like this one but also brief intense connections. Staying open, staying porous rather than closing off one self for another. How else to let what seems mundane or exhausting become interesting again and change me?
Another last little meditation for now is the experience of seeing ghosts. I think about ghosting as a word we use and how funny it is, feeling here in the presence of ghosts one way or another. How would the word for sudden and complete disappearance reflect anything about the sudden and complete appearance that is what ghosts are? There is an artist who makes exquisite landscapes out of yarn and uses time lapse to project the changing light across her tapestries to capture the experience of change. She asked me one day since I mentioned ghosts, what I mean by them? How do you see them or know they are there?
I felt suddenly full of doubt. I have never actually been SURE. I have never SEEN a ghost. I said I think it comes from within, often via voice, where I’ll have a thought I recognize as my own and then suddenly a response in a voice I clearly know the owner of, or at least clearly know is not my own, not my pattern of thought or speech.
Sometimes from that voice I look outward at my environment and there’s a sensory presence too, the smell of cigarettes or a moth at the window, but often these are the parts I doubt. I look for signs to prove what I already know, but are those coincidence? I don’t know. The voices are real though. Whether it’s another layer of my own consciousness, or a visit from another world. I call it a ghost. If it occupies a body it is mine. It fills and makes more space inside me, simultaneously. I thank them ritually. I invite them, beckon, beg. And when I do they never come just then. The timing is up to them, as is it is with major change I guess, even when we think we make the choices.
I’ve been thinking about this with seasons here, how it’s such a treat to get to feel hot hot humid summer break into thunderstorms and rainbows and then into that first cool evening and then that first crisp morning breeze, also how sunrise here is as sunsets are back west, the drama of color and light waking me up rather than the footsteps or screams of others! Or how the wind makes pine needles shed all over (even though we know pines won’t lose their leaves, even though they stay they change, they lose they remain) and the light seems to move through the trees and around the statues. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever experience that cusp of the season again. I’ve been back to NY in the fall of course, but two weeks on the east coast and I have been remembering what brought me in the first place into TIME.
It’s only over the past six years that time has been felt as something to get through. There are weather changes etc. but they feel quick and subtle and unpredictable though many I love (like fog and santa ana winds). With pregnancy I learned to endure time, to try to get through it one week at a time as if there were a finish line and then what. It felt like living not back in life but in some aftermath.
Here, new Fall weather remind me of my first 27 years of school years from nursery to elementary to high school to college and graduate school, the way it feels like change is about to happen to you and you don’t have to steer it. Whether or not you want to hold onto the leaf color, the leaf, the snow, the heat, the blossom, you can’t you can’t and that powerlessness is powerful! It’s what I think of as freedom, and I am alive to it again now. Freedom that is not defined by choosing, having choices, but also by surrendering.
There is a rose garden here at the end of its rope. Four statues of the four seasons give me side-eye and remind me as I bemoan my various failures that I want to be changed. There are fountains signalling rebirth. There is a sundial that reminds us time is cosmic and also the inscription gives power to perception. It is not an objective art, time: “Watch Slower, Watch Faster” the sundial says. “The Natural Equation of Days.”
The seasons link themselves so time doesn’t have to be linear but circular. Measuring it becomes more natural and so you don’t have to do it at all. You just have to be in the Day and the day will change you.
The way you can stare at a mirror and not see the change but you trust your body is in it, in the beautiful and terrifying ways, time changes our surfaces. And, as with the mirror, the seasons remind me we are in time and also outside it, the self dimensional and multiple in a way one lifetime cannot get to the depths of. I guess that is why we have art.
When my curtain blows toward my desk here or toward my bed, I think of the word ghost again. The word shares a root with breath but I also hear the word host and the word guest, which I know in Latin are one in the same or at least related (stranger, enemy as well). So look at that lesson in language, the word for hospitality and hospital, our language of care, may be a clue that we are never each other’s strangers or enemies, that the “other” is a guest we must take in.
And even when otherness feels frightening, and the season turns from abundance toward death, remember to harvest yourself, I tell myself! That death is not the end but a rest between lives. I say, have as many as you can muster—the mentors and wise people I’ve always looked toward always seem to have lived many lives. Wherever it is you feel stuck, I hope you remember (as I’m lucky this gift of time at Yaddo has reminded me) that you are not living in an aftermath. The is the middle of things. And so the end. And so the beginning.
Even when we are uncertain of what or who we are with, we are discovering who and what we ARE. The ghost is to be let in. Let in the ghosts. And maybe spend the day becoming one for another, for the world. Who says you need to be dead to be a ghost? Who says you can’t be in a body? I think of Linda Gregg’s Let Birds.
Let Ghosts. They are not only past. They are the past returned. So they could also be the present moving forward, right? It’s all a circle. Here are some words that have helped me question these time boundaries this week and saved me or “returned part of myself to myself” this week. Yes, they’re all by women:
Yiyun Li’s Where Reasons End
Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick
Agua Viva by Clarice Lispector
Fanny Howe’s Doubt
Aracelis Girmay’s Black Maria
Danusha Lameris’s Bonfire Opera
Anne Carson’s Putting Her in Her Place: Woman, Dirt, and Desire
Mary Ruefle’s The Book
Diane Williams’ I Hear You’re Rich
CD Wright’s Deepstep Come Shining
This is beautiful, one of those essays I will save and come back to read again. And it reminded me of a poem about ghosts I’ve wanted to write! Thank you.