It’s been a wild few days and I hope you, like I, caught yourself if you were scolding yourself for not being productive/focused/alive enough and practiced some self-compassion and allowed yourself a nap or two. Honestly, it took me until the end of Friday to be like, no it’s okay, there is literally an attempted coup that the police just let happen. You haven’t been able to focus on work because of that and that is FINE. No wonder you’re tired.

Before the absolute chaos, though, I was able to finish this illustration.

It went through a lot of changes so I thought a “process” gif might be interesting. It doesn’t even show the million different color pallettes I cycled through.

Writing the last one of these made me remember all the various blogs I had in high school. I’ve just checked and they still exist in the depths of the internet though I’ll never share! They are certainly a very interesting look at performative femininity as they were all fashion blogs and it has taken me a long time to really find my way in terms of identity and presentation. Do other people also look back at old photos and kind of chuckle at how uncomfortable the aesthetic you were trying on looks on you?

Anyway I’ll use this as a transition to this week’s love note which riffs on that idea. I don’t want to explain it too much but I will explain the format a bit. I have a collection of documents I have labeled “index cards” (based on the collection of essays by Moyra Davey by the same name) that explore topics I’m interested in by way of mixing my own ideas with a collection of references.

love note 02: a body as a haunted house

it's like you said:
a body is a private container,
a switchboard sending signals,
something to live through, not as,
not by.

This summer I got obsessed with a specific type of horror and devoured almost all of Shirley Jackon’s works. I read a biography on her and it deepened my understanding of her work. Jackson’s mother was a socialite and worked her whole life to try to mold her daughter into a certain idea. An idea of femininity passed onto her from the society around her and which she almost violently forced upon her daughter. Ruffled white dresses in childhood, letters always berating her lifestyle in adulthood, comments forever comparing Jackson to an ideal that she could never achieve. 

I wonder if Jackson’s house in adulthood was haunted by the whispers of what her mother had to say about it, about what her neighbors thought of how she lived, of what she called her “demons.”

In the story, “Louisa Please Come Home,” the rejection of the child by the mother may be the most apparent. A young girl perfectly executes a plan to run away from home and start a new life in a small city not far from her hometown. Each year on the anniversary of her disappearance, she hears her mother’s voice on the radio begging her to return. After a chance encounter with her old neighbor, she does return, only to have her mother look at her without a bit of recognition and tell her she’s not her daughter. The neighbor, it’s revealed, has brought two girls to them previously, claiming them to be her daughter in the hopes of collecting the reward and, jaded as they are, they tell her to go home to her own loving family, that they know she must not know the act of cruelty she is enacting upon them. 

The story shows the effects of inhabiting another identity or persona for too long. Do the parents not recognize her because she has grown and matured on her own, away from them or do they not recognize her because she has fallen into her new identity so thoroughly that she has lost some essential part of herself. It could be a little bit of both. “When I turned to follow him, [...] my father—excuse me, Mr. Tether—came up behind me and took my hand. ‘My daughter was younger than you are…’” After she accepts the fact that they will never recognize her, she fully embraces her new identity, no longer referring to her father as her father.

Are the identities that she has tried on haunting her or have they completely possessed her?

Looking in the mirror and not recognizing who’s looking back. Not feminine enough. Hair not long enough. There’s no smile like you’re meant to wear constantly. The you in the mirror looks tough. The shaved head perfectly matches the bags under your eyes that you’ve had for years. The ones that made people frequently ask you if you were sleeping enough. You would flinch, forgetting their presence. 

“Under this mask, another mask. I will never be finished removing all these faces.” –Claude Cahun

I’ll be interested to read a study looking at whether people’s locus of control changed from external to internal at all during this lockdown. How many people have found themselves and found comfort in themselves away from the prying eyes of “society”? There are jokes all over the internet to the tune of “Please don’t perceive me” but there is something resonant there. Gordon Hall wrote a beautiful essay in the wake of the transgender bathroom laws in North Carolina, in which they talk about how we are all needing to relearn how to see. “We understand what we are seeing at the same moment we see it; perception is identification. Understood in this way, changing our interpretations is literally synonymous with changing the functioning of our senses, initiating a pulling apart of the instantaneous act of assigning meaning to what we see.” We read cues from clothing, hair, body, etc. in forming an idea about someone and as soon as we form such an idea we suddenly become so attached to it that it can feel like a betrayal to be told that this idea that we have just cemented in our head is not true.

My fascination with Jackson’s stories is related to how she plays with perception. The same goes with the horror films I have been drawn to: they frequently play with the dissonance between what we see and what is actually true. Her most famous story, The Lottery, directly undermines what you expect and envision when reading the word “lottery.” The excitement and congeniality among the townsfolk lead you to believe something joyous is coming when in actuality it’s a longheld tradition of incredible violence and cruelty. Even in its publishing, back in the days when The New Yorker didn’t explicitly distinguish between fiction and nonfiction, readers were left thinking that it was a true account somewhere in America. (Honestly, with the way of the world recently, I also wouldn’t be surprised.)

With Jackson, politeness is a flimsy mask for rancor, what appears to be luxury is a decay of the human spirit, memories and the present moment, delusions and reality blur.

In one of her short stories, A Visit, the protagonist visits the mansion of a college friend, in which the presence of the ancestors lingers in every room, either by one of the many tapestries a previous woman of the house had woven or by one of their many portraits. By the end of the story, after meeting what we come to realize is an elderly version of the protagonist herself who scolded the way events were playing out to the younger version, the protagonist seems like she is folding into the house, trapped, like a memory. I’ve read it several times now and even as I’ve picked up that one character turns out to be a figment of the protagonist’s imagination (maybe??) and the eeriness of the unending mansion where time is seemingly frozen, I’m still unsure as to what exactly was going on and for that, I love it.

What if our souls haunt our bodies? Feel trapped? Haunt us with whispers, urging us to do something. To step into the river, to turn away someone at the door. Scream in horror and try to kick out other people who try to take up residence? Why do we maim the body? Why do we let strangers drive by and critique it? If we are inside the house, why do we care what the outside looks like?

Carmen Maria Machado's collection of short stories Her Body and Other Parties explores body horror in a way so specific to bodies outside of the cis male ideal.  In The Husband Stitch, she reimagines the urban legend of the girl with the ribbon on her neck, which, when pulled, is revealed to have held her head in place as it topples to the ground. Of course, as the one part of the protagonist that she denies to her husband, he is obsessed with it, pushing her to her limits over and over again.

The ribbon in Machado’s version isn’t unique to the one woman but to all women. Tied on different parts of the body, to some it’s a burden, to others it just becomes part of them. The husband asks almost mockingly if the child will have a ribbon shortly after she tells him she’s pregnant. It seems to be an essential something that marks womanhood while at the same time symbolizing privacy and autonomy. The greatest violation is when he unties it and the worst part of it all? “He is not a bad man, and that, I realize suddenly, is the root of my hurt.” 

A reader familiar with the original story is waiting for the unraveling, waiting for the woman to turn into a mutilated body, to be decimated. This fascination with the destruction of women, with the destruction, more specifically, of the female body is weaved throughout the story, punctuated by urban legends that expand on this cultural obsession.

Definitions of “body horror” frequently include the descriptor “graphic.” Body horror, according to Collins dictionary, is “a horror film genre in which the main feature is the graphically depicted destruction or degeneration of a human body or bodies.” In “The Husband Stitch,” Machado makes it a point not to represent the beheading with any type of gore, the narrator addresses it outright, saying “you may be wondering if that place my ribbon protected was wet with blood and openings.” The subject of destruction cannot tell of its own destruction and, as a story of a woman of whom too much is asked, this is a moment of reflection for the reader to realize their own desire in seeing the destruction of a woman in full gory details. 

Whether you believe in ghosts or not, the story of the Fox sisters, the two young girls who brought on the Modern Spiritualism craze in the 19th century, truly makes you question our strong belief in our senses and wonder how we can know what we see is true. Their story also serves as evidence of how badly men want to take down powerful women who have stepped out of their set spheres of living.

In 1848, a media craze followed reports of a spirit in the home the Fox family was renting in Hydesville, NY. After a terrifying few nights of ruckus, the “spirit” began knocking as a way to answer questions about those deceased as well as more philosophical questions about the afterlife. It was soon found to be following the two young daughters, Kate, 11, and Maggie, 14, wherever they went.

This rocketed them to fame and infamy. While they were able to support themselves quite well by performing and holding seances, they were also constantly tested by skeptics in tests that were frequently humiliating and degrading (i.e. being forced to strip in front of a group of women, having their ankles bound by men, etc.) It was unceasing and the “reputations” the now young women were acquiring made it difficult for them to find happiness. One of Maggie’s suitors, a famous arctic explorer named Dr. Elisha Kent Kane, was so emotionally manipulative and controlling, constantly trying to distance her from her family and get her to renounce spiritualism. In a letter to her, trying to win her back by pointing out their similarities as public figures of fascination, he said: “My brain and your body are each the sources of attraction, and I confess that there is not so much difference.” His death and the total renunciation by his family who wouldn’t recognize their relationship started Maggie off on a path that would lead her to denounce spiritualism, confess to it all being fake before then recanting her previous statement, due to pressures both financially and from the Spiritualist movement.

Reading some of the accounts of what happened during the seances is pretty extraordinary, including some from skeptics who turned believers after witnessing incredible feats. I vacillate between “Well maybe…” and “Okay they were good performers.”

If nothing else, spiritualism was firmly rooted in empathy and bringing comfort to those who had experienced loss. I don’t think we will ever know all the answers to what happened in the mid-1800s that allowed the craze to proliferate so widely. The belief that stood firmly even after the confession of the founder of the movement that it was a trick of her unseen body, the cracking of hidden joints and knuckles trained at a young age to somehow be able to be heard in huge theaters.

What it must have been like to live in a time where we allowed for mystery, okay with not knowing exactly how everything worked and able to be overcome by such incredible hope from knocking sounds that claimed to tell us our loved ones were doing okay, even in death, or tell us that there’s more to life than what we can see readily, and the stories that color the people sitting next to us, also full of hope, can connect us in that brief moment.

Readings

Poetry Nook

Bipolar is bored and renames itself
by Jacqui Germain

I have recently come to the realization
that I will be writing “the bipolar disorder poem”
for the rest of my life.
                                There are hundreds of ways
to say I am wrapped in my own bees nest.
or My body is a haunted house that I am lost in.
         There are no doors but there are knives and a hundred windows.
or My body has apologized to my body.
        My body is not sure if it accepts.
or I am a river with a dam at its neck
        that has begun to drown its own fish.
or I am a field setting itself on fire
         just to become the sun.
or I am a newborn so obsessed with the birth,
         I throttle my own throat and hope for a repeat.
or I am a ball of melted wax burying my own wick.
or I am the flame melting my body down into a hard mess.
or My eyes have learned not to believe themselves.
or My eyes have learned the sky will be
         a red sea of winged teeth if you believe it to be so.
or I am trapped behind eyes
         that recognize the demon in everything.
or There is a demon in everything; I know this.
or My brain is my own cracked windshield,
        my own bug-splattered glass mirror
        and I am driving towards the sunrise.
or I am still driving towards the sunrise.

Currently reading:

Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism by Barbara Weisberg

Picked this up for an ultra nerdy reason (research for a new D&D character) and as you can see from above, I have found it fascinating and very interesting in its links to certain themes I’ve been exploring.

Blurbed to Death by Lila Shapiro

If you wondered how to articulate the problematic nature of American Dirt around this time last year or had no clue about what was happening, this was a really in-depth and fascinating article that charts all the missteps the publishing house made and why it matters.

Soundscapes

Hey do you have a playlist full of songs that you just can’t help wiggling to? I cannot recommend enough making a dance playlist for moments when you need to lift your spirit, celebrate by yourself, or just infuse yourself with some energy. Mine is a mishmash of genres, all that was important to me was that it consistently compelled me to dance and it has been a real comfort these last few weeks. Really can't wait until i can dance with friends again but for now I will content myself to dancing in the kitchen with Koda.

Thanks for sticking with me. Hope you’re staying sane in these wild times.

x,
k