The Loon
The Loon
The eerie call of the loon greeted me last Friday as I walked down to the chicken coop to let the flock roam. I’d noticed the return of our lake’s loon earlier in the week. Likely tired from migration, I hadn’t yet heard its song, so I paused and took in its mournful tune as I made my way down our dirt driveway. “Welcome back Loon!” I called to him. On Tuesday, I had spotted the loon’s sleek form in the lake and wondered aloud, “is the loon back?!” I was so stunned, I grabbed the binoculars to get a better look. Could it really be possible that the loon has returned? Not possible as in likely, because loons often return to the same bodies of water over their lifespans, but rather possible more as in probable... could it be time? Spring observations have become one of my favorite ways to mark time. The return of the red wing blackbirds known for their trills and for how they perch on tall, skinny, plants, the ways the aspen trees bud and throw weird caterpillar-like fuzzies that will soon line the sides of our driveway, the greening lawn we hold off on mowing until June, weather warm enough for the turtles to sun themselves on fallen logs around the pond. Glorious Spring! Sunday we enjoyed deck time, me with a book, Vaimo with her thoughts, and every once in a while when we heard the low rumble of a croaking frog (or maybe a toad) we chuckled because of the sounds we heard - an epic throat clearing after months underground.
I wish I felt like I was ready to sun myself after months of hibernation. Time lately has felt unrelenting. Every day the pile of dirty clothes in my bedroom grows into a new form. As I cannot seem to find the time to address what’s happening over there. It’s almost a marvel, the way the pile shifts and changes. The way I have mixed dirties with clean - wading through for something to wear becoming an exercise in persistence instead of something marked by orderly folded garments located safely and snugly in drawers or on hangers. I told Vaimo yesterday that ever since my Grandma died I just didn’t know why, but I couldn’t bear to tidy it. Maybe it’s an effigy for her.
Goodness knows I waded through piles and piles of her things from the house on Cromwell; only a fraction of piles of clothes, boxes collecting dust for decades, only a portion of the clutter. In another part of our bedroom my suitcase from the last trip to Kansas laid open in the path from hallway to bed. I’d kicked it out of the way so it technically wasn’t a tripping hazard, but the carryon size roller bag splayed and open helped me feel something. I wasn’t ready to put it back into storage under the stairs. The clamshell open, straps flung, pile of black funereal attire merging into the black lining in rumpled wads seemed to taunt, if you put me away it’s final. You have to move on.
I did finally empty it today. I’ll see if putting it under the steps will help it hold some of the complicated grief of the current moment. I find myself often wishing I was not learning the lesson that to be human is to grieve. I continue to find difficulties in accepting that this is the best we can do for the grieving. I’m more aware than ever before about the prevalence of grief; truly marveling the tragic weight of it all for those who have gone through the loss of someone they beloved. I’m not trying to make a hierarchy of losses, but rather to note I find myself both ill-equipped to navigate this and future losses, and remain disturbed by my inexperience in supporting others through theirs. It’s overcast today and I’m listening to Sylvan Esso as I write. At least I’m feeling something, not just the numb nihilism I know I’m capable of nearing too close. That oblivion of the abyss of nothingness, the feeling that nothing matters-- a tempting space in these times. I need not name them but I trust you know of the pains of which I speak; local and global, the horrors persist.
Did the loons feel the reverberations of bombs landing on other continents as they journeyed back from the the Gulf of Mexico? They can travel 600 miles a day by air. Can you imagine flapping your wings for 600 miles? I’m tired just by sitting on my butt for 700 miles driving between my home in Minnesota and family in Kansas. These birds coming back to the lake where we live have been my anchor. The irony is not lost on me that these beautiful hollow-boned light creatures taking flight are helping me ground, but tis my truth.
My main challenge right now is the perpetual one - is this the question of my life? Am I doing enough? Am I doing it right? Of course some of this is about my paintings, but also more so is the grappling with how to make room for the work to be done - that which needs to be born from the calls of the universe - alongside my life’s purpose that also insists I do something with the pile of clothes on my bedroom floor. Lately, I’ve been attending to neither in this season of grant application time. Instead I’m hanging by a thread and praying my Passion Planner can hold onto my troubles long enough for me to accomplish something in 2024.
Relatable? Or am I in a season of despair because of my neuro-chemical make up? Painting helps me feel less of the despair, I’m also trying my very best to do as my friend Cate White advised me just last month, to relish in the senses to get out of the numbness. This last week that has meant listening to more music (even as its trending into indie-emo territory). I’ve taken walks and spent time with my favorite oak tree. I’ve sniffed basil so hard as I freed it from the plastic casing and encouraged Vaimo to do the same. Fresh basil is such a deep delight of mine. All fresh herbs really, in another timeline my soul is regularly nourished by a walking path filled with herbs where I roam, meditate, smell the smells and harvest them by hand for the fresh pasta I’m making in my beautiful kitchen.
I’ve returned to my yoga mat and meditation cushion, I’m tending to my chronic pain weekly at the acupuncturist. I’m drinking my prescribed herbal concoctions. I just retrieved my package of beans shipped to me from the 2023 crop in Estancia, New Mexico. I also recently treated myself to a shopping spree of books I wasn’t able to access via the library. I’ve got three trips on the books in the coming months. I’m listing all of this out to remind myself that I’m alive. That this body and I are making it some how, like we always have. I am nothing if not endlessly persistent. I’m using my tools and I know I will not always feel like this. “Like this” hasn’t been a constant state of despair either. Fear not, I’m really ok, just not yet feeling the spring elation nature seems to be encouraging me to celebrate.
I started watching The Andy Warhol Diaries on Netflix the same day the Loon returned. The six-part documentary series follows Warhol’s thoughts and the broader impact of his work from the late sixties through his death (I’m assuming). I’m only four episodes in because Vaimo doesn’t like hearing his “sad and creepy” AI voice. “Is that what he sounded like?” she asks.
Oddly, the AI voice doesn’t bother me. I truly think that if any artist would be ok with AI recreating his voice by reading from his own diaries, Warhol would be the one. Warhol’s words pulled from the book by the same name edited by Pat Hackett who he dictated his daily diary to via phone calls guide the episodes. They're all rather sad, we the audience get a front row view of his insecurities, his doubts, his feelings of alienation and the documentarian framing by director Andrew Rossi grounds his angst in his Catholic guilt, the struggles of being queer, his Eastern European immigrant roots, his longing for true love, I could go on.
And yet, what I have found most compelling about the whole thing is this question about the methodologies of diary writing. Some have likened Warhol’s diaries to blog entires especially as he notes the different who's who of the NYC counter and mainstream cultural scenes. In the meme format going around it would read something like this: RIP Warhol, you would have loved Substack.
And the series is also spurring my thinking about artist community - the ways that Basquiat and Warhol’s collaborative paintings function as their own art objects beyond the works they made on their own, compel me. In fact, the series explores the ways that Warhol’s artistic life is the product of countless collaborations with others. Whether that be by the underpaid and often unnamed models for Warhol’s series “Ladies and Gentlemen,” the many photographer friends he kept, or even the actors and artists of The Factory, Warhol made compelling work not in this solitary studio existence where he went every day to paint alone, but rather through his collaborations with others. At least from the outside looking in he was living as the means to make connections to make his art.
It’s made me worried I’m not naming my collaborators enough in my letters; in my diaries. The trouble with someone who lurks in archival boxes is that I am more than aware of the silences, the gaps, and the missing information proliferating within an archive. Will the record know who I considered my friends, my enemies? In the Warhol Diaries an interviewee, maybe Pat Hackett herself, says that the reason why he dictated his diary entries is because he wanted an audience. I get the impulse. Probably all of us artists do at some level.
There is the work and then there’s the way the work lives in the world that requires others’ interaction with it. And I also get Warhol’s insecurities. The human element of being a creative in the world makes for the development of certain sensitivities. For me, these sensitivities can be attended to because I operate some portion of my life as a hermit. Unlike Warhol I am not at Studio 54 nightly for both the temporal and geographic realities. And even if I could be at Studio 54, would I be? Maybe, if I was 22 again, but I’m 42, the queer clubbing days are definitely behind me. Ahhh something else to grieve. Where was I again? Ah yes, bemoaning if the archive will know that I knew cool people and I did cool things. Wondering if the archive will make note of what I did mattered, or maybe it didn’t.
I doubt the Loon had those thoughts when she reunited with her mate a few days after the first Loon sighting. And anyways, she still some how made it to High Island Lake, just like I did. With the guidance of the universe, the confluence of events that brought me and her here. It’s most likely more attributable to luck, fate, and things beyond my actual control. So, I’ve just got to hope that like the loon, someone will hear my call and sing back. Just make sure it’s my voice, and not a computer generated AI monstrosity please.
What I’m Reading
Trans History in 99 Objects, edited by David Evan Frantz, Christina Linden, and Chris E. Vargas
Chris E. Vargas, the founder and self-appointed Executive Director of the Museum of Trans History & Art (MOTHA) has released, in partnership with others, a fantastic collection of 99 objects tracing the history of trans life and culture in a beautiful and well done book. Instead of a typical (?) Art history canon approach that is chronological and linear, Vargas and team group the art objects across themes - creating interesting conversations amongst the objects themselves and the very ways that we might otherwise access history when the object no longer (or maybe didn’t even ever) exists. Perhaps my favorite part of the book is this important and fascinating turn, the speculative and utopic possibility of capturing moments in history through objects not able to be in archives. Vargas illustrates the “doughnut thrown in the riot at Cooper Do-Nuts, May 1959” in this new archive (in book form) through oral history, other research points, and though not named, in the powerful legacy of critical fabulation like that which emerges from Saidiya Hartman’s groundbreaking work. I am truly savoring this book, it’s the kind of exploration I will be coming back to again and again - the coffee table book I’ll place on my coffee table in the living room after I get my flooring replaced and finally buy that couch.
Artist Offerings
Enthralled by Mary Lovelace O’Neal’s new paintings - wondering if I need a series of black grounds too?
Also really into these paintings by Joe Bradley, and thinking maybe taking years to make a painting isn’t such a bad thing lol
Related to this issue’s book review - this is the sort of writing I would assign to my WGS students who I no longer get to see in the classroom - for those of you who are in that camp, consider this required reading. Please ponder and let's discuss!
Creative Ritual
I submitted a grant application for serious dollars and a three year award that would be the equivalent of winning the lottery if chosen. But, as they say you can’t win big unless you're playing big… is that it? I also applied for a residency - wouldn’t it be great if that worked out? Light candles for me y’all. I’ve also been doing a lot of work preparing and getting the word out about my billboard project on Guaranteed Income. I am about 16 books behind schedule for my reading goal for the year, likely because I’m savoring books and being very picky with what I allow into my mental space. So, the fact that paintings are moving very slowly in the studio is not a matter of me reading too much! (Insert upside down emoji face here!)
Opportunities to connect!
Thursday April 18 3:00-5:00pm at Springboard for the Arts, Fergus Falls Office join me for my second Stitch In Event
Save the date Thursday May 2 at Blue Nose Gopher for an Artist Reception in Granite Falls, MN (time tbd)
Artist talk about my Guaranteed Income Billboard Project at the Billboard Site (Highway 210 & Wilkin Co. 19) Saturday May 4 at 10:00am
Mostly weekly on Sundays, all of my Ko-Fi Monthly Subscribers have access to the zoom Paper Planner, sketching or journaling meet up from 5-6pm CT sign in there for the zoom link, me and my hermanitas would love to see you there@
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
Questions to ponder
How are you persisting?
If you're in the Northern Hemisphere, what Spring sights are you observing?
Do you have an actual or metaphorical pile of clothes getting you down? What is your "pile of clothes?"
Do you have a diary practice? What does it feel like?