The Haunting of the ChicFinn Cottage

We knew we had a problem when the floor board creaked and it sounded like someone stepped on a waterbed. As the sloshing came to a stop, recalibrating to an even level of liquid, Liz, my lovely wife (Vaimo) exclaimed, “wow, that didn’t sound good.” Minutes later we'd diagnosed the water was in fact sloshing under the floorboards, because as Vaimo went in search of a tool, I pried up the sticky linoleum tiles by wedging my nail in the seam and pulling upward. I’d created a new sticky foot path from toilet to sink as we tried to find where the water was pooling, saddened when we realized it was not a flood between the linoleum tiles and the wooden subfloor. The problem was deeply rooted.

Nobody really prepares you for this sort of joy of homeownership. Technically the bank still owns our home, but it’s the first home for which I’m on that bank note. Homeownership has always been a goal and a dream, especially as I have always longed to have a house wall I could paint without consequence. I grew up in a house my parents were paying off, a home they now own free and clear. There was not any doubt in my mind that I too would one day own a home. These are the middle-class equity assumptions. By equity here I mean the financial sort. How, me and Vaimo’s monetary investment in these boards screwed together, these intricate pathways of pipes under wooden boards, materials snuggled by insulation, kin to electrical wires passing from room to room mostly remain hidden from sight. That is, until one’s peace of mind is interrupted by something not working as it should. I don’t recall ever walking on a floor in my childhood home and hearing water slosh. No amount of rewatching Tom Hanks and Shelley Long in the Money Pit really prepares you for the situation at hand when you’re dealing with a plumbing problem. Should we liken the middle-class house to an aging body? Or is the metaphor of the haunted house more apropos?

Not like ghosts and haunting as in spirits, but more like the theoretical framing of the ghosts of racial capitalism in the sense that Avery Gordon theorizes. In her groundbreaking sociological text Ghostly Matters, originally published in the late 1990s and with a second edition released in 2008, Gordon weaves together a compelling case of attending to that which cannot be seen but is often felt. Her ideas of haunting as a means to make sense of racial capitalism provide a framework to connect our past to our present, and our present to the future. As she writes, “What’s distinctive about haunting is that it is an animated state in which a repressed or unresolved social violence is making itself known, sometimes very directly, sometimes more obliquely” (xvi). What if the water under our floor boards was the ghost of the former owners/builders of our home? Of course, the water was a material reality, it wasn’t invisible but it also wasn’t visible. Gordon uses “haunting” as a theoretical device because “specters or ghosts appear when the trouble they represent is no longer being contained or repressed or blocked from view” (xvi). What is once concealed (under layers of human-made materials, labor, permits, and formal structures of processes related to home dwellings in settler colonialism) “is very much alive and present, interfering precisely with those always incomplete forms of containment and repression ceaselessly directed toward us” (xvi). I’m drawn to Gordon’s theories because she sees “haunting” as a call to action. Haunting frightens us into action, and while Gordon is concerned with social violence and the scale of change needed to exorcise on the individual, social and political scale, I’m most drawn to the ways that haunting works because of its association in the domestic space of a house. Gordon herself links it as such, “I used the term haunting to describe those singular yet repetitive instances when home becomes unfamiliar, when your bearings on the world lose direction, when the over-and-done-with comes alive, when what’s been in your blind spot comes into view” (xvi). Water under the floorboard is certainly the unfamiliar that can no longer be ignored.

I’m writing about my plumbing problem, and I’m writing about the haunting of these pipes. I’m thinking about this on the individual level which absolutely requires me to fix the pipes. And, on a social level and even a political level; the pipes are haunted by what was sowed by the previous owners. We are the second caretakers of this home, the previous owners, let’s call them Don and Janet Mayerstein, built this home in the early 2000s. Their quirky home built to their specifications (I mean Janet had her own room for her extensive doll collection) was on the market for a long time after Don’s passing. As an aging widow, Janet could no longer serve as sole caretaker of this estate, which is how we found this weird house on a lake in the middle of somewhere. The presence of the Mayersteins haunt us in friendly ghost ways - their labor built the home in which our bodies and possessions are stored. Janet’s sponge painted walls she carefully stenciled remain to provide the ambiance of our living spaces while we work to get our financial equity in order to paint and remodel areas of the home. The Mayersteins have haunted our psyche as well… known in our community as the owners of our place, their name is the one we all name when we try to place ourselves for others. “Oh, did you know Don used to keep miniature ponies out there?” Asked Brian who dumped 30 truckloads of dirt on our driveway this summer. “Oh, I always wanted to see Janet’s doll room” said someone I met out on the census trail earlier this summer. The Mayersteins loom large over us as we continue to make this home “ours.”

And, their presence haunts our mailbox. We routinely get mail addressed to both Don and Janet. During election season, the mailers sent out by Trump-supporting PACs were certainly illuminating. In the most recent election, similar to the ones before, two thirds of our community supported Trump. So, it doesn’t surprise us the former owners of this house would have been registered Republicans. This story isn’t about Don and Janet’s political affiliation, nor am I interested in bashing registered Republicans even as our polarized political landscape almost demands that of us. Political differences in approaches to polices related to our common goods are welcome, debates on human rights however, are not mere political differences. I am much more interested in making some sense of these hauntings in the way that Gordon would appreciate. These mailers that used racist rhetoric and sexist frames to warn Don and Janet about the dangers of MN CD5 congressional member Ilhan Omar coming for their rights, do deserve our attention. I’m no republican strategist, but linking the party to Trump whose rhetoric and actions amplify division, publicly embrace white-supremacy, and endorse hate to drive policies of oppression do haunt me. That I live in community with people who would rather destroy the foundations of this nation’s liberties if it meant keeping these rights from immigrants, Black people, queer folk, women… haunts me. The pipe is leaking, actually, the pipe has burst and we have much work ahead.

I’m willing to spend a bit of time celebrating the outcomes of this most recent election and know that it is not enough to fix this haunted leaking pipe. What do we make of the fact that two thirds of my community believe the pipe to be operating as it should? Or that Democrats broke it. Just like the pipe under the guest bathroom sink that I wrapped some weird plastic tape around to ebb the flow, this election does not fundamentally alter the systems in place the work to uplift a few and harm many. There is no plastic, gummy tape we can wrap around the broken pipe, because it’s haunted. Even if we repaired the pipe, the specter of white supremacy remains unless we replace the plumbing. Vaimo and I have contained our leak to one drop that squeezes through the tape job we have installed. The drop is captured in a plastic bucket we empty three times a day. That drip is no longer backing up under the floorboards, the waterbed slosh is gone. But, the problem is still there. I fear I’m losing my metaphorical thread here… my house is haunted, not by a real ghost, but by the realities of the systems that have shaped my experience up until now. Yours, is too.
 

What I’m Reading

Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency by Olivia Laing

A collection of short accessible essays reviewing diverse mediums all bound together by the theme of making the case for art in times of emergency. Whether that be visual art, literature, music, Laing brings a keen eye and fabulous writerly attention to the ways that art moves us. It has been the collection by my bedside table these last few months and I am feeling sad that I’m almost through the last section of Laing’s writings. The book has helped connect me to the deeper purpose of the humanities, that we create art to not only have beautiful things, but to heal, to call to action, to inspire, to feel.

What I’m Watching

While working on my most recent cross-stitch project to be sewn onto my almost completed painting I binged Awkwafina is Nora from Queens. I was excited to watch the show when it came to HBO in March, and right around that same time my HBO app wouldn’t work on my AppleTV so I couldn’t access the show beyond my computer and life did not allow for me to watch it at the beginning of the pandemic. I wonder if because of the timing of its release if it did not get the full treatment of the attention it warrants, or if the show isn’t that great. Awkwafina, playing the titular Nora, is a physical comedian and is mesmerizing to watch as this review agrees. I would be super interested to read more Asian feminist takes of the show, given Black criticism of Awkwafina’s cultural appropriation and her ground-breaking golden globe win as the first Asian actor to snag this award for her dramatic role in The Farewell. If you’ve seen any, please send them my way! I enjoyed the show, in the way that struggling millennial women getting their shit together is the genre of our time.

Artistic Offerings

Wow, given the last two weeks felt both like no time and a hundred years, I don’t have a lot here, but please enjoy:

• This essay by Michelle Boyd which she reminded me of in her newsletter, Don’t Give Up, Give in: What to do when you just can’t even. 
• Or this long read by Lyra D. Monteiro on the hauntings of colonial architecture, public US monuments and white supremacy
• This compelling round up of Dawoud Bey’s photography of “Black subjects in everyday life” the other profiles are also great!
• This came out a while ago but it also haunts me - Emily Ratajkowski asks who owns their image and when?
• A feast for the eyes - check out this magical, colorful abstract and whimsical figurative work by Luisa Fernanda Garcia-Gomez
• And this lovely folkloric figurative work via this profile on Angelica Contreras on her social justice oriented mixed media art

Creative Ritual

I have been the busiest I have been in my most recent memory working on finalizing this series of paintings that will be up at the MacRostie Gallery in January has been taking up a lot of my time. I’ve also begun this food project that I will speak about (virtually) this week, The Taste of Community: Foodways of Otter Tail County there’s still time to register for this free event if you’re interested! The universe has been giving me reminders to slow down and taking drastic action to ensure I do, this week that came in ripping two pieces of canvas so I couldn’t complete the stretcher for my next painting, and realizing I ordered the wrong size and weight of canvas resulting in a new waiting game for the proper materials to arrive. I hope you’re listening when the universe reminds you to slow down!

Questions to Ponder

• What specter is trying to get your attention?
• How is your house “haunted?”
• What is haunting you?
• What are you doing to exorcize that which haunts us?

Thanks for journeying with me. I hope, as always, that you take what you need and leave the rest for someone else, or for another time. 

-KCF

PS: Thanks for reading all the way to the end! My 39th birthday is tomorrow, yippee! If you’d like to support this work through a birthday tip please feel free to CashApp or PayPal me @kjcfalcon. Not accessible for you at this time? No problem, share this newsletter with someone you think could use my musings! Helping me spread the word is a beautiful gift. Thank you.