September 5, 2009
Good evening from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts – the land of southern plantation, fireflies, swimming ponds, and a bat-filled sky. After the end of a hustly bustly three days of travel from Ragdale to DC to Harrisonburg and now over to Amherst, it’s good to be settling in for a satisfyingly sustained six weeks of work. The fireflies already serve as tiny lighthouses marking the route back to my room after some early hours of work in the studio.
After dinner, my beloved bats coalesced in ditzy, haphazard clots over my head. There is an element of hilarity to bat hijinks – they are so adorable. A clumsy little puppet-like apparatus of brown fuzz and leather, with that filagree of arm bones and impossible bat fingers, and their myopic eyes and endearing ears. Their grace is startling because it comes with such sweetness…tonight they tumbled through the air in the precise manner of puppies. Boisterous silly antics in the sky of catching matter, and games with pings of sound, a bumbly aerial exercise in being charming. The most unappreciated of all the cherubim.
Somehow, in traveling most continents and many corners of the earth, my own father’s hometown seems the most unexpectedly unfamiliar. The Blue Ridge Mountains here are replete with my ancestors, but perhaps the distance separating us is larger than I had anticipated, or they were perhaps not anticipating the arrival of this particular prodigal daughter.
There is a deep-seated quietude to this land that I can’t recall experiencing anywhere before. A sort of expansive silence that fills up all the space – despite frogs, despite crickets, the sweetness of nearby train tracks.
I don’t experience this silence when I am in remote western U.S. landscape – perhaps the tectonic plates are always chattering and groaning in a deafening subterranean dramatic production. Perhaps all the drama of Los Angeles productions actually pale in comparison to what is happening deep down below the surface.
It’s a ten minute walk from my apartment/bedroom through the farm to the studios in the barn – windy gravel paths, huge old white oak trees, a gazebo, a stretch of horse pasture where a brown stallion saw me coming through the hedge and raced up, bent his chest into the barbed wire, and lunged forward towards me in the moonlight with a whinny of ferocious greeting. He did that horse hoodoo where they expand to twice their apparent size as they measure up the creature in their midst.
They send out those lunatic tentacles of deduction that surround you – perhaps that’s what makes people frightened of horses. They scan us thoroughly, critically, judgmentally, and as humans we’re not used to other species doing that to us.
Once, when I was riding, someone told me that horses are carnivorous predators. It has become my favorite description of a horse: absolutely technically incorrect, and yet with an essential grain of truth that is somehow more truthy than the fact that they are herbivorous prey animals. I wonder what stories horses tell themselves.
For the remainder of the evening, I could hear that horse walking quietly behind me, but every time I turned around, he wasn’t there.
As it turns out, I am a few mere miles from the house in which my father was born, and within shouting distance of my grandmother’s office when she was a professor in the Mathematics Department at Sweet Briar College back before I was born.
I am also within eyeshot of the original plantation house, and the fields that are can no longer be farmed because – like everything else in that cycle – they became exhausted and depleted by plantation cultivation. Work work work, an infinite limitless multiverse of work, and then collapse, and for some death, then rest, somewhat disconcerted to be alive. Seasoned. Strong. Now that the land has survived slavery and war, and seen too much, it is in its rest cycle, and it has a muscular strength that accompanies its deep quiet.
A lot has happened here.
Appomatox is very nearby – I am planning a trip within the next week, I think. That’s a lot for the earth to support. Here I am for nearly two months, living on the ground, the soil (in all senses of soil) of a former plantation, writing it, photographing it. Will be interesting to feel out the battlefield too. What must that time have been like, for those living here, as the battle took place nearby.
Upon the rare occasions when I consider Emily Dickenson, she knocks me to her knees. Her poems that have somehow been relegated to a condescending ghetto of hackneyed ladywriter canon…well, they come hurtling at me like little textual velociraptors. This one dug its claws into my shoulders in the pasture today:
| After great pain a formal feeling comes– The nerves sit ceremonious like tombs; The stiff Heart questions–was it He that bore? And yesterday–or centuries before?The feet, mechanical, go round A wooden way Of ground, or air, or ought, Regardless grown, A quartz contentment, like a stone. This is the hour of lead |
This place has all the beauty of that poem.
My brother and I drove up through a small gaggle of cows, and a truly bucolic windy gravel farm road that is now the road towards artmaking and creative process…exquisite pastoral beauty. Actually breathtaking. Past the Monocan Indian Museum – they were enslaved here at Sweet Briar Plantation along with the Africans.
It is interesting to me that the silence of the earth exists in a place where, compared to the West, many people have lived and walked upon.
There’s a peacefulness, but also a certain emotional severity in the land. I have never felt more accompanied in my whole life – more than Manhattan, or West Hollywood. Just a sense of never being alone, but being in utter silence. Ragdale, in all its faded Edwardian grandeur, was a place to ponder, muse, and waft, with an airy faerie feminine sustenance. The archetypal full-skirted lady mother, attending to needs, nurturing, supporting. Despite the fact that I slept for perhaps twelve hours of the fourteen days I was there, it had the atmosphere of an eternal afternoon nap. Thoughts were dust motes slowly meandering their way down through the air.
As a former slave-labor plantation, VCCA feels altogether different. We are living in newly constructed housing, and working in the grain silos, water towers (I think it’s a water tower), stables, and barns. This is not a leisure atmosphere. There can be no slacking here. No wafting. This is brass tacks. A place of heightened responsible diligence towards one’s labor.
I’m sure all the calvinist prayer humming in this area help heighten that particular vibe of obligation and austerity.
My studio is absolutely a dream. Eighteen feet by eighteen feet of stone barn with stone floor and stone ceiling, all whitewashed. A lovingly battered midcentury recliner in my adored hue of electric azure – the best kind of New Mexico turquoise – blue with a generous shot of lurid absinthe green. Also, a dandy little bed for naps, an expansive green aluminum midcentury worktable, and then a dreadful little desk rejected by the 1980s that serves just fine for its prosaic little paperwork purpose. It suggests that it’s quite busy pinching itself with delight that gets to spend its retirement living out its destiny with the cool kids – a bunch of quirky art furniture, and not succumbing to its ghastly fear of fate: the stanchion for a retired accountant’s basement stash of IBM punch cards.
Three clean white walls, and one wall of all windows with absurdly perfect natural light – that muddled east coast light that I haven’t seen in a million billion years, filtered through a teeming metropolis of gnat, humidity, pollen, mold, bee fuzz, moth wing, and gunpowder.
My brother drove me the scenic route down the Valley from Harrisonburg, and up across the mountains and down over into the Piedmont. I received a rare gift of good geological and geographical orientation, along with topographical maps of the area. Certainly added richness to my sense of where I am, with the spines and bones of granite making grooves here and there. It definitely looks like a body, this landscape. Soft and rich and plummy and very gentle, but with a hint of relentlessness. A landscape that perhaps could delight in being underestimated.
Like Emily Dickenson.
By the side of the road in the George Washington National Forest, we came upon a rather bloated old-young man with shaved head ensconced in sports cap, belt supporting a burden no strap should forcibly endure, poised with a truculent joy beneath the forest canopy. Gracious, said I. These were the reasons my mother disapproved of Southern parks. Too much unfiltered genuine draft humanity. My brother said, oh, yes, just around the corner will be his pickup truck with dog cages. He’s training bear hounds. Sure enough, right on point, the proverbial pickup with these little snout-holes cut into a plywood contraption the likes of which I have only elsewhere seen beneath the Roman gladiator colloseum in Africa.
Man trains dog. Dog chases bear. Bear climbs tree in terror. Dog barks. Man shoots trembling, screaming bear. Bear tumbles from tree in cascade of blood and pain and entrails.
Coors Light earns another dollar the easy way.
There are tulip poplar trees, oak trees, sumac trees, maple trees, sycamore trees, pine trees.
Tomorrow will be a day of exploring, and settling down to work. Cracking open the novel for the first time in some years, and it feels immensely exciting – I haven’t spent time with those people in several years now, and I want to see how we’ve changed. I shut out the lights in the studio and closed the doors behind me, and they know they are about to be photographically illustrated this trip. They are primping and considering outfits, chattering amongst themselves, and Whitey is most definitely concocting potions. The door to my studio opens into a little herb-filled glen at the corner of the horse pasture, a few hundred yards away from the railroad tracks. She is absolutely delighted.
I wish my grandmother was alive to see a Wikswo back in Amherst, and to know that I’ll be teaching a class at Sweet Briar sometime soon. After she died two years ago, I dreamed about her. She was out in it, and pointed through the fabric of the universe and said, look! I was right! Everything is math. I hope she sees me here, and is happily calculating the mathematics of the spiral that our DNA is making, as we circle back in a helix above this town she chose as the best place to bear live young and solve complex equations.
Gut shabbas!