Lightbulbs signal ideas. Ideas birth more ideas, and shared, the light grows. Kiki Smith hangs lightbulbs above the drawings in her show currently at Brooklyn Museum entitled “Sojourn.” Lightbulbs find their way into her drawings of women. And lightbulbs are also the shape of wombs.
“I am now a woman old enough now to be considered a mentor,” I thought, on my 42nd birthday, walking through the museum’s exhibit rooms, through the landscape of the woman as an artist—a woman whose mother receives omens from birds, who looks out the window, who offers a gift of flowers for the person walking through the gallery, and who is tethered just slightly to another woman, possibly her mother, from whom her body stretches out, kite-string like.
The drawings are large, almost like murals, but they are more feminine than a mural in that they are tentative: the inked images float on thin sheets of Nepal paper that move a little with the room’s drafts, as doors open and close, as people walk by. Pieced together, the surfaces seem like cloth, something you might wrap yourself in, fashioned to hold a narrative, nearly a quilt, but fragile and translucent, more like a veil than a blanket.
Though I had never seen these images before, I felt at home in this sea of women, some young and tattooed, some older and dying, with paper eyelids fastened over eyes once drawn open. In each room I felt taken care of, even in the last room—a room filled with renderings of large black caskets surrounding a three-dimensional pine wood casket, slightly open, and in which were placed delicate, blooming glass flowers.
I said to myself, “this is political and feminist but it makes no statement about patriarchy or oppression.”
Last week I learned that a human egg can repair a damaged sperm. Having decided not to have children, I am not interested in fertility of this kind—but what a metaphor!
A message for any gender: intimacy, delicate surfaces, and repair are not only possible, but the chemistries of our bodies are equipped to show us the way. There are many ways a body can ask another body to change toward something productive, to make something new, to transform.
The desire for one body to help another—for mentoring—for comfort and advice—these desires abound in The Odyssey, a supremely domestic tale, where not only is Odysseus striving to return home, but where Penelope, the wife who never leaves home, opens up the narrative space for the entire epic by stalling time: she unravels her weaving at night.
The book also contains one of the first ideas of “mentor.” Athena, goddess of wisdom, shape-shifts into the figure of Mentor, the old Ithacan friend of Odysseus. In the form of Mentor, Athena is able to inspire Odysseus to fight off the suitors who have invaded his house. Hence, mentoring is about invention, change, and shifting identity.
But what a dance Athena must do: she somehow figures out that Odysseus will best take her advice if she appears familiar, and if she is male. I love this idea about just how difficult mentoring is and how sneaky Athena has to be in order to do it well.
And what about us? Without the magic of goddesses and gods, all we have is imagination, faith in this biological fact of repair, and language.
In one particularly moving work, Smith draws an older woman holding out her hand toward the head of a younger woman. Following this older woman’s hand and its trajectory into the white space next to her, my eye is lead to a jumbled mass of sticks hovering over the younger woman. The sticks are adorned with glitter. Shining, light-filled, gathering and emitting energy. These sticks, also realized elsewhere in the exhibit as three-dimensional sculptures that hover over the drawings, casting shadows and holding birds who may be about to nest, seemed to me to be like long lines of words, thoughts. They seem to me like hovering sentences, sentences as materials for a nest.
Five years ago I participated in a project conceived by Jennifer Firestone and Dana Lomax entitled Letters to Poets: Conversations about Poetics, Politics, and Community. I wrote letters to Cecilia Vicuña and, thrillingly, she wrote back. I admire Cecilia’s work and had studied with her for one week at Naropa. To be heard by someone I admired, and for her to engage my ideas and for me to have a chance to respond to her work was a privilege. I knew the intensity of the privilege in the hesitation and nervousness I felt, answering her letters, trying to throw some meaningful “sticks” or sentences back her way.
I think that this tension and nervousness of relationship is important to point out. The fabric of connection is not always sure and stable, thick and comforting. It is sometimes tenuous and delicate, more associated with a rapid heartbeat than a calm body.
When Cecilia wrote to me that she chose not to answer a question I had raised, I realized that there was a certain weight to being “the established” or “mentoring” poet. The flow of our relationship included moments like these, when I realized that mentoring can also mean saying “no” to certain thought pathways that the eager younger artist wants to travel down.
Jennifer and Dana put together fourteen pairs of poets. The book is courageous. It is a book like nothing else because it is not organized by any theme, but by relationship only. And the relationship happens in the encounter of writing, reading, and exchange. Not in conversation, not in a classroom, at a bar, through email, but through sentences, paragraphs, in attempts at as-complete-as-possible thoughts and responses.
Who knew that from the letter project, as if it had been my laboratory, I would go on to work at Goddard College where I write letters back to students who design their own programs and don’t attend class. This past spring, I came to use letter writing in my other work site, the more traditional classroom. I distributed occasional letters: dispatches from my writing desk to the group of earnest students who would gather each Friday to talk about poetry. Where the performative space of the classroom felt limiting and, frankly, exhausting, I placed inside of this space a letter, something almost personal, but not contingent on my performance in the moment. At the end of the semester, some students chose to write culminating poetics statements in the form of a letter back to me. I found their statements, fashioned in this way, less sure, more open to possibility, more ready to admit confusion and doubt.
At the Kiki Smith show, what came rushing in at me, was the impact—somewhere under my sternum, a pounding heart almost ready to explode with intense joy and emotion—of all the sentences about art and writing that I have written and received. In classrooms, emails, in letters, on the margins of a manuscript, in conversation.
It is a fact that artists and poets, and especially women, are spread thin. Artists make less money, on average, than other professionals. Women in all professions make less, on average, than men. How can a woman have time to make art, to be mentored? And even more outrageous: how can she possibly mentor others?
I remember my favorite childhood book: Harold and the Purple Crayon. Harold draws himself into scenes, in and out of adventure, into scenes of comfort and joy. And though Harold is a “he,” he is bald-headed, as any baby of any gender might be. And he drew with purple, a color I declared was my favorite, a color somewhere between blue and pink. A lesson from Harold: an artist draws her mentors toward her, maybe even creating her own self-fashioned mentor, at times.
Finally, from the world of printmaking: this week I learned that the base onto which paper is pressed in order to make an image is called “the matrix.” This glossary went on to say that “matrix” is from the Latin for “mother.” I thought of all of the possibility, then, for writing and art that comes from a nurturing energy of available surfaces. And I think about Bhanu Kapil's idea of the book as a space for envisioning and imagining, imprinting something that we can not exactly predict, but that we know has never existed before. A mentoring space, peopled with others and the selves we create.
