A Plural Body

She had been warned about this, about the tiny fistfuls of hair she’d started pulling from her head and plastering to the white tile of the shower wall. Each time she carved out exactly eleven minutes to wash off the stench of sweat and sour milk, more loose strands. Like the other warnings—that there would be a moment during her unmedicated labor when she’d feel certain she was dying, that the sleep deprivation would make her feel like all her internal organs had turned to sawdust— this one had done little to temper the bite of the experience itself when it eventually came for her. 

In the four months since giving birth each shower had saved her, a secular baptism that brought her back to herself again and again. Now, rubbing the stray hairs together into a clump resembling a black hole (as satisfying as it was repulsive) she was again reminded that her body was no longer—would never again be—entirely her own. She understood now what she only knew in theory before: that the very organism of “mother” is plural and that in those moments of being split, one slips out of the skin of maidenhood like a selkie forsaking the sea.

She had spent the decade prior trying to create a layer of maidenhood thick enough to slough off without regret. Perpetually single or briefly in ill-advised love with men who in no way shared her desire for family, she decided to indulge in the things she’d likely forgo after her mattressence. Ambivalent one night stands, solo international travel, a job that spread her life across the country, two wildly impractical degrees. She practiced loving her own company and tried to savor each decision that was made for herself alone, firmly believing that a future self would be settled in, attached and codependent in the way she longed for but couldn’t possibly fathom.

Her desire to have a child had been constant, immune to doubt or second thought. She didn’t believe that a calling to maternity is paired with the possession of a womb. But with a proclivity for caretaking and a wide, soft, sturdy body, she felt that “mother” was an identity she had always carried somewhere within her, stored in a box for future use but seeping out through the cracks and seams. An unoriginal calling, perhaps even an embarrassing one: the world already teems with mothers and their offspring. Most of the greats— artists, writers, thinkers— choose childlessness and despite the “have it all” rhetoric she’d grown up hearing, it seemed clear to her that, more often than not, parenthood came at the price of this sort of greatness. There were exceptions to be sure but she did not possess the kind of magical thinking that would cast herself as one. And yet, sleeping alone in mediocre hotels across America, drinking alone in London bars, or sitting alone beside the Arctic Ocean, it was motherhood she dreamed of. 

Now the imaginings had given way to the reality, she had claimed this long-anticipated identity— and it was still what she wanted. More than anything. When she made it to the other side of the push that was somehow, impossibly, the last and they poured what felt like a bloody squid onto her abdomen, she looked into the eyes of the sea creature that was her son and she had never wanted anything more. She had never been more in awe or more in love or more relieved or more completely and utterly wrecked. In the photos from those first moments of becoming something new, images her partner lovingly described as “not flattering but beautiful,” her eyes look empty and her face looks bloated, blanched, something washed ashore. It was not flooded with the kind of post-birth euphoria she had read of but rather it was the face of someone who recently straddled two worlds. 

Her son was born with a thicket of dark brown hair at the nape of his neck and a layer of peach fuzz atop his head. “He has hair, we can see his hair,” the midwife had said to her while she was star-fished in the huge bath tub. But the pain was so white-hot that she could hardly hear the woman, let alone care. Later, as she gently rubbed the coat of bloody fluid from his grapefruit head with a wash cloth, they said that it would likely fall out, all this hair he’d grown inside her womb, and he’d start anew.

Yet at four months old, it was still there just below his bald spot, thick and dark as when he emerged. In the middle of the night when she sat awake nursing— his head, a moon orbiting the planet that is her massive breast— she’d softly stroke the strands while trying to lull him back to sleep. Often in these moments she was leaden with exhaustion, sometimes her nipples burned from blebs or vasospasms (two terms that she only discovered from panicked symptom googling) and her potent body odor subtly stung her nose. She’d lean down to instead breath in the smell of her son's goose-down head, feeling so connected to this warm, new creature and so estranged from herself. 

Early motherhood had stripped away the things that made her feel like a character, leaving her instead a nondescript animal, all flesh and instinct and fluids. There was a real, beautiful freedom in surrendering to this state. There was a shattering sense of loss too, the kind that is hard to pinpoint or articulate and is so clouded by the misty layer of joy all over everything it would be easy to ignore. 

A friend who had passed the threshold into parenthood a few years before had warned her of this too: of the actual impossibility of “getting your body back” after pregnancy. Your uterus will shrink, you may lose the excess weight, you may resolve the diastasis recti, the linea nigra will fade, your fingers and feet may return to the size of all your rings and shoes. But, even if you eventually appear to the naked eye remarkably similar to your former self, your physical being is in fact forever altered by the experience of growing and birthing a child— and that is to say nothing of the transformation that extends beyond the corporal.

What struck her most though wasn’t all the ways her body had been impacted by carrying and birthing her son, even with the second degree tear, the horrible hemorrhoids, the extra puff that lingered on her neck and belly, the postpartum hair loss. Rather it was how entirely utilitarian and fully shared her body continued to be. He had left her womb but he was still a part of her and his needs and desires always overrode her own. It was her body but it was his food source. It was her body but it was his favorite bed. It was her body but it was his surest comfort. She dressed in simple, stained clothes that were always covered in spit up and drool, that worked well under a baby carrier, and that offered easy breast access. She stopped wearing jewelry that he could pull on or try to put in his mouth. She kept her long hair, which she rarely had enough time to wash, pulled back in a greasy ponytail or an unkept bun.

Even before the hormone drop caused the many strands to come loose, she knew that the curtain of straight dark hair reaching halfway down her spine was entirely impractical, a relic of a past self. It was exactly the same length it was at eighteen, when she chopped it all off as a surface-level gesture to suggest she was cutting loose her child-self (symbolically it had resonated but aesthetically it left something to be desired). Fifteen years later and it seemed she’d returned to a point that begged for such an act, this time as logical as it was performative. 

But something stopped her and it wasn’t just the memory of how long it took to grow out the mistake that was her bangs-forward pixie cut. Maybe it was that, rare as the occasion may be, when she did find the time to shower and it was washed, dried and brushed till gleaming, her hair felt less like a relic and more like a portal. When she pumped enough milk to leave the other half of her dyad at home with his father and she got to go sit alone at a bar for an hour, writing and sipping a half-pour, she could catch a glimpse of her reflection and feel like she had, momentarily, slipped back into singularity. Maybe she knew that to relish this feeling and simultaneously feel the magnetic pull of her child was part of the great contradiction she’d live with the rest of her life. And that even while embracing the body of the mother, she could still choose to keep the hair of the maiden.

At Conception

I said a prayer for you in the cathedral,
not to any god but
to the veined and ancient stone
to the arches of gold luster
to the flame of every candle.

I said a prayer in blue-black waves
to the dark feathered bird
presiding from his stone,
that for you, I could become a sea
watery and vast.

I said a prayer in earth brown sheets
that for you I could become a vessel
flexible and soft.
That for you, I could become the home
before all homes. 

Always and Always and Always

(from June 2024)

It was a dialogue of potentials
of what we might be able to make
transform,
grow, from seed, from thin air.

You asked if I wanted to go back to our most wild space
tall stringy weeds, the remains of a gutted rosebush, vines trimmed back and coiled like spaghetti on tines. 

You asked if I could see, not what was there but what it’s becoming might look like
at just this angle, you said.
in just this light, you said.

You used the vision as a distraction, my eyes to the southwest
to the future.

One knee on the grass,
on the clover,
in the weeds.

One question stripped of any ornament,
bare-bones language,
a pure inquiry. 

And yet still there was a thickness to it,
the levels on which it was a question of
desire and intention and devotion and fierceness of imagination.

At dusk, the second longest of the year,
warm glow emanating from the windows of home, you asked me of a potential
of a promise.
And the dim light of twilight, stretched like taffy, still caught on the ring
a white-gold glint.

The shimmer of a promise of a vow that floats out beyond us,
snaking its way through time with

always and always and always

as its gentle hiss
it’s refrain.

Ambitions

(from August, 2022)

I could spend my days weeding the garden. 

We all know that that could be an entire life’s work. 

Like days, weeds will keep coming back until I am gone and long after.

Where are the profitable, flashy ambitions to which I am entitled? 

That have been earned for me.

That I am expected to possess,

Like teeth or toes. 

To tend earth, to love children.

To have warm arms. 

To do the dishes and tidy up.

How many fought for otherwise?

I want only to surrender to my longing for it:

For all that “not enough” 

That just feels like absolutely everything. 

I want to drink too much wine on a Thursday

 and wake up mid-way through Friday to take a seaweed bath at 1:32pm.

I want the water to be cold and I want to grab the wooden salt grinder from the kitchen 

and ratchet it back and forth over the tub until its contents tastes like the sea.

Like I am pasta. Or a selkie. Or just a plain seal—nothing mythological or sacred.

I want to soak in it until I am uncomfortable and then stand up 

and take a boiling hot shower with an excess of soap. 

Like I am a crusty pot. Like I am a car covered in pigeon poop,

going through the carwash,

suds coming at me from all sides as if from the hand of god. 

My life means so much and so little

and it is only a fiction we’re fed

that this is not true for all that live. 

Your anonymity, your smallness,

is in no way contrary to

your robustness, poetics and depth. 

Things I've Been Thinking About

Lately it has made the most sense for me to write in the genre of “the list,” so here is a list….

Things I’ve been thinking about:

The sculptures of Cy Twombly

Images of connective tissues

Diagrams of the urinary tract

The work of Arlene Shechet

An article called “Cathy Wilkes’ care-full matter-scapes:
female affects of care, feminist materiality and vibrant things.” 

A reimagining of what the term “Still Life” means right now

The practice of rubbing one’s own shoulders before bed

The verbs “spread” “split” and “halt” as they relate to my travel patterns in the last three years 

The sculptures of Franz West

A photo I took 11 months ago of a marble statue’s hand on it’s own arm

  The Rilke quote: “Art too is just a way of living, and however one lives, one can, without knowing, prepare for it; in everything real one is closer to it, more its neighbor…”

Virginia Woolf’s A Room of Ones Own 

Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ Manifesto for Maintenance Art

The emotional labor required to let go of romantic love and reconcile with its traces

The work of Rebecca Warren

Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts 

The outline of a body in the fetal position

The way the line between cooking and making ones work starts to blur 

when your kitchen is used as a studio

The idea of nourishment, the idea of what is “essential.” 

The sensation of touching something through latex gloves; mediated touch. 

A quiet sense of resolve to be very gentle with oneself. 

I do not call this an explanation of the work, rather I think of it as a supportive creature that nuzzles its face against the leg of the work, grounding it. 

Giving Form to Feeling: Constructing a Microclimate of Hope

There is a certain irony in the fact that as I sit down to finally write this piece, which I have been skillfully putting off for weeks now, I am suddenly gripped with the very feeling I am meant to be intellectually approaching: anxiety. Every time that I have contemplated starting this assignment I have come up with something else that has felt more urgent. Among countless other domestic tasks, I have: made mushroom risotto, organized all the items in my bathroom, mended four pairs of pants, repotted a large houseplant, dusted every surface in my apartment, made fresh lemon curd, showered and moisturized daily, made granola, swept under all my furniture, sewed a face mask and a bathroom hand towel. The whole time I have assured myself that it hasn’t been procrastination, it’s been research. After all, my work and this text with which I am placing it in conversation, are about such seemingly-mundane processes and their unsung impact on the self.

Perhaps this text, “Utopia of Ordinary Habit: Crafting, Creativity and Spiritual Practice”, which is the final chapter in Ann Cvetkovich’s book Depression: A Public Feeling, has never been more relevant, not only to me and my artistic practice but also to countless people the world over who are currently homebound due to the social distancing measures put in place to curb the spread of COVID-19, an unprecedented global pandemic. Anxiety, depression, loneliness, aimlessness and uncertainty currently run rampant in households across the globe as this virus takes its toll, both directly and indirectly, on innumerable lives. Perhaps there is no better evidence for Cvetkovich’s overall thesis: that depression and anxiety can be thought of as “cultural and social phenomenon” not exclusively as a “medical disease” (Cvetkovich 1). Undoubtedly, many are currently experiencing myriad emotional states that align with no medical diagnosis. 

As we are all being told to “stay home, save lives,” the domestic sphere is getting an unordinary amount of attention. For many, the home has transitioned from being one of countless locations that life is divided up between to being the exclusive setting for all parts of existence. As we turn to technological forms of connecting, be that through social media, video chats or virtual meetings, the line between the public and private continues to blur. Cvetkovich emphasizes the significance of the relationship between depression and the domestic, referring to her colleague Katie Stewart’s work that “describes domestic comfort as a deceptive structure of feeling, the buffer that keeps bad feelings at bay, but, as the pervasiveness of depression suggests, an atmosphere that is also haunted by bad feelings, by the awareness that something is wrong, either inside or outside” (156). Hyper-aware as we are of the fact something outside is very “wrong” it seems unreasonable that all negative feelings will be kept from permeating the walls of home, mixing in with whatever small personal crises that may already be dwelling there.

On March 5, 2020, approximately nine days before my personal microcosm began feeling the reverberations that elsewhere were already causing lives to crumble, my partner and I ended our relationship. It was long-distance so initially this change had very little to do with the day-to-day. We had also come to the decision rationally and mutually so I immediately fixated on all the positive ramifications of this change. I continuously reiterated an internal “really all for the best” narrative. After all, I could see how the fervor with which I had previously clung to the idea of our relationship could be framed as “cruel optimism” or a form of “bad attachment” (166). Still, the heartbreak of it— the part where I looked back at every photo of the two of us, watched videos of him eating, hiking, working at his computer, sitting beside a campfire, sipping a drink at sunset, laughing and telling me that he loves me— came. This wave of feeling started after the isolation, usually at night, when all my routines started to change and I came face-to-face with the emotional reality of letting him go and living inside this moment, both global and personal, alone. 

“It can be hard to tell the difference between inside and outside—between what’s inside your body and what’s out there, between what’s inside the house and what’s outside in the neighborhood or on the other side of town, between your heartbreak and the misery in the world beyond,” Cvetkovich writes, once again emphasizing the relationship between interiority and exteriority (158). I am writing this candidly, perhaps because Cvetkovich has given me permission to, through the way she herself writes and through the way she speaks of "the turn to memoir and the personal in criticism as a sign of either the exhaustion of theory or its renewed life” (3). I also share these personal narratives because the stuff of life, and especially the emotions that are the byproducts of lived experiences, are ultimately the catalyst for and conceptual backbone of my work. 

My practice has always been about feeling, as the word pertains to both the haptic and the affective (5). It is materially rooted and the meaning of the work is embedded in the processes used: material as metaphor and process as practice. I only truly understand what a piece is doing or saying when I am inside the process of making it, participating in the “forms of practice that perform thinking by doing” (168). I start with an impulse, motivated by a feeling or a general need to get something out: externalize the internal. I think of materials as a language of their own and by employing them in abstract ways, I try to translate the intimate into something universal and visceral, experienced more through feeling than thinking. 

Taking a retrospective look at the work I have made over the last five years, repeatedly I see myself responding to and processing emotionally-charged experiences: break-ups, car accidents, unrequited love, moving, the death of loved ones. The works never illustrate such events and often the final product is abstracted to such a degree that the specificity of what fueled the work can become unclear to the viewer. Intentionally-leading titles can help provide a snippet of context. Pieces from the past such as Tireless Efforts of an Eternal Optimist, Second Best Alternative to Loneliness, and Weight in Your Gut (Impact Anxiety) all use these short bits of language to allude to the experiences that brought them into being. Yet for all of them the significance is in the act of making. In the first two pieces mentioned, I used the time-consuming process of hand embroidery as a method of repurposing energy and attention. I attempted to control feelings of romantic longing by channeling them into an object. In both cases the process allowed for a meditative reflection on the feelings that necessitated their making and brought about a sense of closure.

Weight in Your Gut (Impact Anxiety) similarly used a repetitive process, in which the “process and rhythm of the work is what matters” (182) as a coping mechanism but also used the materiality and history of the object for the purpose of meaning-making. Made in the aftermath of a severe car accident and a close friend's death in a separate accident, as a way of externalizing the weight I felt in my stomach, the residual fear of impact, the work is materially quite simple. It is a misshapen hunk of clay, slightly smaller than the 25 pound block that it was purchased as, that was left in my car for an extended period of time and present during the accident. I did not alter the form, meaning the impact itself played a part in sculpting it. The clay has been covered in many layers of graphite pigment. The pigment was applied by both scribbling vigorously onto the clay and by mixing graphite powder with water and painting it onto the form. When displayed, it sits on a large piece of white mat-board upon which the piece has been rolled, leaving graphite markings on its surface which are reminiscent of the marks left on cement barriers after collisions. Just as Cvetkovich links the process of knitting in Anne Auerbach’s work to an “act of mourning,” this work functioned as an outlet for grief and fear (174).

The idea that craft “fosters ways of being in the world in which the body moves the mind rather than the other way around, or in which, echoing neurobiological views in another register, body and mind are deeply enmeshed or holistically connected” reinforces my own previously held belief in the significance of making (168). Cvetkovich’s framing of the positive feelings that are generated by acts of creation as an antidote to depression and anxiety, however, expanded my understanding of craft’s potential psychological implications. While I do not think it’s safe to claim universality to the relief found through certain processes, as I know for a fact that what is meditative and utopic for some is tedious and frustrating to others, I have experienced personally the affective results of using making as an “ordinary form of spiritual practice” (159).

The works I have produced during this period, the last three and a half weeks of isolation, are byproducts of constructing for myself a Utopia of Everyday Habit. I have titled the in-process overall body of work Soft Touches, a phrase with specific personal connotations as well as a connection to our current social moment, a moment when the sensory experience of touch has been put in the spotlight. The tactility of the forms and the physicality of the processes involved in their making were used as stand-ins for physical engagement with other people. Needle felting, like other traditional textile techniques, requires repetitive motion, the handling of the supple fibers of the wool as they are connecting to one another and little else. It is an activity easily done in bed, in the evening: a form of what I like to think of as “productive relaxation.” In the same way I turned to embroidery in the past as an outlet for the feelings that can creep in on lonely evenings after the active distractions of the day have disappeared, here I turned to needle felting. The work itself turned into a fuzzy, organic membrane where subtractive and additive processes cohabitate. The felted forms creeping through the positive space mimic the negative spaces that were cut into the fleshy-pink wool fabric. When I look at it I see connective tissue, I see the space between bodies in the fetal position, I see absence pushing up against presence, but most of all I see an externalization of something previously held in my own body. 

While formally they are clearly in relationship, the process of making the second work was quite contrary to the gentle, clean process of needle felting. Made entirely on the floor of my kitchen, this rigid structure is almost a foil to the fluid hangings. Into a deconstructed cardboard box that had played a part in both of my recent moves— first from Portland to Vancouver, then from the tiny, dark room on 7th to my current light-filled sanctuary— I cut large amorphous holes. I then used papier-mâché to coat one side of the cardboard and subsequently painted the surface white, using the same house paint and rollers I had just recently used to paint my entire apartment. After this priming step I painted the entire side a fleshy pink, using watered down acrylic, and covered select holes with a pink hexagonal mesh fabric. Standing the reinforced cardboard up, I attached both ends to create an overall footprint to the sculpture that would mimic the openings in it. To the exterior of the form I applied plaster cloth, made using the cotton from an old duvet cover and a used pillowcase. The result is a shell, open and penetrable, but with a distinct sense of interiority and exteriority. It makes reference to architecture, to the casts used to set broken bones, to the resourceful activities of children with too much time on their hands. Its scale makes reference to furniture, something belonging in the home, yet  its utility is hard to extrapolate.  

In both cases the choice and handling of materials is once again significant to the content of the work. The structural piece is much more transformed, materiality speaking, while the needle felted work seems to be more transparent about its make up. Yet both of them employ processes that are in some way associated with the “practice of feminist crafting that combines art, politics, and everyday life to rework debates about domesticity.” (159) Even subtle decisions, such to use cotton from bedding rather than pre-made plaster-cloth, bring these pieces further into dialogue with the stuff of home life and of a feminine instinct to “make something from nothing,” to use a phrase borrowed from the title of reference to Lucy Lippard’s 1978 essay on a “Definition of Women’s “Hobby Art” (Lippard, 97). 

Cvetkovich defines domestic spaces as the “humble material locations” where “depression can be transformed through practices that can become the microclimate of hope” (155). While working from home, I have felt the lines between my domestic practice and my studio practice blur. Materials are stored in cabinets beside the pots and pans. The mixing of plaster, the mixing of batter, the mending of a pair of linen pants, the stitching of a soft sculpture: each process is as valid and meaningful as the next, each with its own sensory responses. They all serve as part of this “art of daily living” that Cvetkovich cites in this text as one possible “cure” for negative feelings (161). My sculptural works have taken up residence with me, keeping my body and mind active, providing me company in a season of solitude. Inevitably, feelings of anxiety, sadness and fear, caused by what is happening in the world beyond, seep in. Yet in the microcosm of these three rooms, a Utopia of Everyday Habit of my own construction, I find solace in the processes that make something out of them, giving form to what is felt.

Works Cited

Cvetkovich, Ann. Depression: a Public Feeling. Duke University Press, 2012.

Lippard, Lucy R. Get the Message?: a Decade of Art for Social Change. E.P. Dutton, 1984.

But How Long Can It Last

The expiration date belongs 
to the carton of questionable cream
or the plastic bag of freezer burnt shrimp

as warning
as deadline
as savior
(time can wield a wicked punch in the gut)

When we’re alone together 
we lose track of time
sometimes it’s hours of bodies 
exhausting prepositions—
inside, outside, above, below.

the clock, unwelcome in our bed
(we’re not seeking a third party)

The objective of pinball is to keep
the ball in motion as long as possible,
until intention and reflexes 
cease to hold gravity at bay.

Surface to surface,
circumstance to circumstance
How much can it withstand?

No predestination,
can player be playwright be god
of a small, brightly colored universe
that flashes and pings 
(a feat of engineering)

I have always been an advocate 
for the free-fall,
for the blind-faith, deep-breath
leap, off whatever edge, into whatever depths,
for however long.

Let cream and shrimp remain
the custodians of expiration dates
and let the clock remain a jealous outsider
looking in at our embrace
suspended between surfaces 
two bodies, entangled, afloat.

Living, Dying

The raccoon,
perfectly centered on the road’s
golden dividing lines,
is dead.

I know that its body has been there,
perfectly centered, unmoving,
for two days now
as I have driven past it twice,
coming and going.

When the man bit into the plum
the redness of its flesh
looked perfect beside the indigo of his shirt
and the golden light on the pair of them
(Man and Plum)
was as perfect as earthy things can be.

Inside the technology store I am writing
in pencil, on paper
while screens flash beside me,
proclaiming that the past is dead
and science-magic holds the future. 

My chunk of science-magic is failing,
(both the Science and the Magic)
I can see right through the vail,
Glitchy, fuzzy, discolored.
Can something that was never living die?

The lightbulb in my headlight was dead
but in my amateur ignorance
I replaced its living sister
Attempting to resurrect the undead,
Fixing the unbroken.

The leaves of the houseplant drop,
one per day,
in a valiant attempt to tell me
that it is unwell,
slowly suffering the raccoons fate 

Animal, Human, Fruit, Object, Plant—
all only vessels,
holding as much energy
as each can
until the time comes
to release.

Translucent Water

I Could Tell You

I could tell you of the hallow things,
the milky film that floats just on the surface
the belly, soft and full that can be kneaded like bread,
the sour stench of feet in leather loafers,
worn through like threadbare patches
on the inner thighs of expensive pants
that try as they might, could never make my body
less of a body.

I could tell you of the A that had a minus hanging
from one end, an unholy tail.
Almost a strike but one pin left standing.

Or the equation left unsolved,
the hole I ripped through my shirt,
infuriated by the way the numbers clogged the cogs
of a machine that I had built and maintained
to prove, through intellect, my validity. 

I could tell you of the patterns I perpetuate,
my body and being as pillow, as dish towel,
as comfort or clean up.

Or the ease with which the word “fine” drips off my tongue,
as flavorless as saliva
and far less purposeful.

I could tell you how I aspire to a perfection
I never achieve,
that sesame seeds from late-to-work bagels
are nestled in the seams of my car’s seat
and the laundry is never all finished.

And yet some distant point remains fixed in my mind
where perfection might be hiding,
not quite framed in the crosshairs
of my sloppy shot.

Opaque Water

Visual Language (Gertrude Stein)

I would like to think that I am making sculptural work the way Gertrude Stein wrote poetry—taking recognizable, concrete things extracting them from the context in which they are meant to be understood, thereby allowing them to be precisely what they are, but then re-contextualizing them in relationship to one another in a new, unexpected way that make’s formal and sensory, if not logical, sense.

-    WORDS ARE UTILITARIAN OBJECTS

We have certain expectations for what they are meant to do. In the same way that Stein could not extract the inherent meaning from the word “buttons” I cannot extract the meaning from the shells of pistachio or soap.

She wasn’t interested in creating a whole new language but more interested in re-presenting us with the English language, perhaps in an even more raw form than we are accustomed to.

“Why was saying nothing so damn hard? The answer returns us to her earlier discovery: the structure of language. Because words are always interconnected by syntax, they can never say nothing. Meaning is contextual and holistic, no word exists alone.

“Any human being putting down words had to make sense out of them.”- Gertrude Stein.  

While this is true can one not make sense out of something that is perhaps, illogical or absurd. What is the value in the work of trying to make sense out of something? Can it strengthen mental muscle?

Is it only affective when it makes sense or, on the contrary, is it most effective when it does not.

“a magpie in the sky on the sky can not cry if the pigeon on the
grass alas can alas and to pass the pigeon on the grass alas and the
magpie in the sky on the sky and to try and to try alas on the”

Conversation with Nash:

N: “I’m just not very familiar with her work. What’s the idea?”

M: “Well I always think about my sculptural assemblage work as a sort of visual language or a way to compose disparate objects in relation to one another so that they’re perhaps no longer sensical in a traditional sense but they still hold their own individual characteristics/stories or “definitions” of sorts. Gertrude Stein wrote poems that attempted to do something similar with language itself. She wrote poems based on this idea that words could be extracted from their original contexts and no longer have the kinds of contingent meaning we are used to them having but instead be abstracted so sound or symbol or something more formal and nonsensical. But the words still carry their own inherit meanings because as long as we know the language we will try to understand the word as a utilitarian object that does the work of being a vessel for that meaning we’ve ascribed to it.

N: That’s a cool idea. So if I understand correctly, an object or material is kind of like a visual morpheme?

Or the work is a visual phrase and each component loses it’s individual meaning.”

M: I had to look up morpheme (A morpheme is the smallest grammatical unit in a language. In other words, it is the smallest meaningful unit of a language. The linguistics field of study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. A morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word, by definition, is freestanding. When a morpheme stands by itself, it is considered as a root because it has a meaning of its own (e.g. the morpheme cat) and when it depends on another morpheme to express an idea, it is an affix because it has a grammatical function (e.g. the –s in cats to indicate that it is plural).[1] Every word comprises one or more morphemes.) which is, in and of itself, a great word. But I think what I am trying to get at is more of the latter.

But maybe not that each component loses its meaning—each component is more itself because the phrase itself looses its meaning.

M: Like a line from one of her poems (just a random one I found just now) says… “ a magpie in the sky on the sky can not cry if the pigeon on the grass alas and the magpie in the sky on the sky and to try and to try alas…” So, there are certain elements that make sense and we know and recognize (just as there are objects and materials in my work that are utilitarian and recognizable) but at the same time the statement makes no sense so we are asked to think more about each individual unit as meaningful. But there are loose formal relationships between the units that make the units feel like, despite their nonsensicality, they somehow belong with one another.”

Peaches Do Not Callous

How far must I travel
in order to come home to myself?
How many flights does it take
to bridge the gap between
the territory I was lost inside
and the region where my identity
is embedded in every inch of the terrain

                        fossils and roots.

When my feet are not bleeding
from newness and friction,
and sore spots become strong spots
I walk, as if walking could be a rare gift,
a small bite of chocolate to let dissolve
on the tongue.

When my heart expands,
far enough to let someone in,
It will never contract.
Somehow there is always space.

And when it is dropped to the floor,
bruised like soft summer peach,
fallen to the linoleum,
still it is growing

Every era of my life has
possessed its own texture,
except these moments,
of coming home to myself
which always feel the same to the touch:
pockets of feather down,
a handful of cattail fluff

How long does it take
to know in your bones,
that all is living and dying?
And that somewhere,
beyond a sense of self,
the world is growing bigger
and smaller
all at once.

                        (Peaches do not callous,
                                when they are hurt they become
                                                     only softer.)

In Smoke Smudged Sky

In smoke-smudged sky
moon asserts itself over sun.
A rare occurrence.
People take notice,
go out of their way
to see its dominance,
its decision to no longer ­­
sit quietly in the
shadowy corners of night,
hoping only for the attention
of the nocturnal.

Moon and sun share nothing
except the shape which is a circle
which is a cycle
which is no end, no beginning
which is matter
which is life.

In smoke-smudged sky
sun shines neon red
and milky,
an unlikely combination.
Below trees burn to black,
necessary destruction.
The mountain, a colossal phoenix.

Huckleberries spill from plastic bags,
plump with purple,
round and firm
born to fill pies, stain lips,
harvested from mountains
where they have been fed
by last years ashes,
sustenance from destruction.

Like Clay in Her Hands

I pound clay onto the table
to say what I don’t have the words for
and what remains is neither beautiful
nor silent.

I pound clay onto the table to feel my body
impact a body
to feel soft flesh in my grip
and what remains is neither human
nor object
but the act of touch, solidified.

I stand in the dark on the shoulder of a highway
inside a fog of impact
and in the blackness, I can see nothing
but the passing headlights tell me
it is destruction I am looking at.

I walk in the dark along a hill
of submerged caskets
to the foot of a landslide
and in the blackness I can see nothing
but I know it is destruction I am looking at.

I let tiny, sharp teeth gnaw at my hands
and bite at my hair
hoping that this is affection I am receiving.
And collect little slips of yellow,
as artifacts of a love that is not yet
and may never be.

I breath in the softness of her face,
then breath in the scent of uncountable roses
as I walk in the late night, early morning
towards my own bed.
Neither rejected nor chosen.

I listen to her voice as she tells me it is language
that she cannot give me,
the container in which a “we” could exist.
I listen to her words,
seeing her past on their glassy surface,
knowing that the body is flesh
but the self is built from stories.

I look at myself in a round mirror
and I know that it is mortality I am looking at.
I ask myself if I already carry enough language.
If outside of the words I contain,
I could be a body,

like clay in her hands.

On Beige

    By the time we reached the deserts of West Texas, the skin which I had burnt red raw, carelessly floating down a river in the North Carolina sun, had turned to a translucent beige. As he drove the roads that bisected great swaths of tan sand that seemed to stretch on eternally beneath blue sky, I stared out the window. Every few moments I would glance back to assure myself that he was still there, illogical as it would be for him to have disappeared from behind the wheel of a moving car. In the silence of the passenger seat I was falling in love with him. In the silence of the driver’s seat he was gaining resolve to leave me sooner rather than later. 

    On the morning we visited Marfa, the great minimalist mecca to which I was eager to make pilgrimage, we drove more than an hour across the sprawling national park where we were camping to find a quarter-operated shower. It had been days since we had showered. No more than three, I am sure but for someone who sees this as a daily spiritual practice, going so long without showering felt like starving my skin. When my body felt clean again I put on a raw silk shirt that I had made myself while in art school and a soft beige pencil skirt I had found at the Goodwill that was slightly too big in the waist and wrinkled easily. It was the nicest outfit I had packed for our trip which was planned to involve camping, swimming and mostly driving. 

    He preferred to drive. I preferred to sit in the passenger seat and brush my hair, for the sensation of the bristles on my scalp is one of my favorites. When I wasn’t brushing my hair or listening to a gruff voice telling the story of a man stuck on Mars, I would examine the damaged skin on my thighs and chest. The little blisters dried and broke open to look like constellations on a clear night. Or like the cluster of foamy bubbles that cling to the shore when a wave dissipates. The larger patches of skin peeled off in sheets that flapped, partially connected to my body like the bound pages of a book. What remained beneath was a pinky-tan color, flushed like newborn. I rolled down the window, letting in the oppressive heat, and threw the dead skin into the desert. I liked the idea of leaving little pieces of my DNA out into the landscape, to be absorbed by the sands.

I grew up with snakes, my brother being a passionate herpetologist. They never scared me but they also didn’t interest me much except for when they shed. Sometimes I would watch them, in their sandy terrariums, slowly exiting their own skin. If it was a clean shed, what would remain was a perfect shadow of the creature’s form, translucent and ghostlike. But even if the discarded skin was broken, the purpose of the act would remain intact; the snake would be, in part, reborn. 

    That June in Texas I imagined that I was shedding for the sake of exposure, to make myself vulnerable to him and to become a new iteration of myself in his presence. Soon enough I realized I was shedding to become a new iteration of myself for myself, to gain a thicker skin, more resilient although still soft and creamy. And I was shedding in offering to the desert, to leave behind the part of me I felt I owed it. He has since settled, like a fine layer of sand, into the strata of my personal history. But my skin retains the reality of the story, the beige of my chest remaining just a shade darker than the beige of the rest.

*originally written in response to a question posed by Lula Japan but was never published.