First published in 2024 by Cranbrook Academy of Art.
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Board of Editors: Carla Araneda, Abby Cipar, Kate Donoghue, Olivia Guterson, Sehrish Hussain, Michael Takahata, and Aubrey Theobald.
Special thank you to Theodore Prassinos and Judy Dyki.
Designed by Luis Quintanilla
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Dedicated to Cranbrook Academy of Art's graduates of 2024 & 2025.
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How queer everything is to-day! And yesterday things went on just as usual. I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think: *was* I the same when I got up this morning?
Lewis Carroll , Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Editor's Note
Making-do Immurement always been / his voice
For Nalo. Always.
Jillian Blackwell & Rachel Elise Thomas
Aleyah Austin
Izzy KrompegelAnliker
Ena Kantardžić
Casey Wheeler
Olivia Guterson
In Response
Pressing History
Shrunk Socks
In the Wake of Tragedy,
Blonde Pray
Blackberry Thicket Rebecca Pedley Madison Warp
Editor's Note
Jillian Blackwell & Rachel Elise Thomas
❦
This is the third volume of Fountainswimming, the student-led journal of Cranbrook Academy of Art. In these pages, thirteen student writers contend with the tides of our times, both within the walls of this institution and in the wider world, during the academic year of 2023/2024. We asked, what is in the wake?
What endures from a significant event in your life and how does it rock you? What are you being called to be aware of, awakened to, or even awake for? How might your writing foster empathy, solidarity, or speak to a resilience in the face of loss and grief? How might we gather for the wake of these times?
These writers have met these questions by finding hope in the ad hoc, by inspecting the personal, by questioning the stereotypical, and by witnessing. Their thoughts have taken the form of poetry, academic essays, and personal prose. We are honored to gather their words here in this journal, a reflection of our collective experience.
—Jillian Blackwell
Throughout exploring the theme of Wake, each student delved into their own interpretations of what it meant. Each contributor brought a unique perspective to the topic, and as we contemplated the aftermath and the new beginnings that come from Wake, we were able to connect our personal stories to a larger narrative of introspection, growth; and resilience. In our writing, we not only captured our individual lives and experiences, but also shared a collective journey of discovery and transformation—reminding us that despite the differences in our stories, we are all connected by the universal theme of waking up to a new reality.
Wake allowed us to realize the interconnectedness of our struggles and triumphs. Through sharing our vulnerabilities and insights, we found solace in the understanding that we are not alone in navigating the complexities of life's transitions. As we reflected on the various layers of Wake, from the literal act of waking up to the metaphorical awakenings in our lives, we embraced the power of resilience and the beauty that comes from embracing change. Our collaborative exploration of Wake served as a catalyst for personal growth and mutual support, emphasizing the importance of embracing the journey of self-discovery with open hearts and open minds. That being said, we are proud to present Fountainswimming’s third volume, Wake.
—Rachel Elise Thomas
Jillian Blackwell & Rachel Elise Thomas
Aleyah Austin
Traces of people, fragments of memory, embodied in objects.
Sacred tensions and their mirrors projected; the architecture of an image echoes in a shell.
Today, I am a doppelganger for a spirit. Side by side and split in two.
We play in the sand as the waves offer gifts to glean from. Each one a portal to the next.
By way of sequence, faces transform into stone. Wash and repeat.
The structure of my other half is lost underwater. I embrace calcification.
Attempts are made to rebuild; the earth refuses to carve the same figure twice.
I am left with the feminine urge to pierce through resistant surfaces. I choose reticence.
Making-do: Improvisational Assemblages as Acts of World Building
Izzy Krompegel-Anliker
“Look,” Christina grabs my arm, “making-do!” It’s a stack of books holding up an in-window air conditioning unit. The spines are turned away from us, and we can see that the pages have been waterlogged. The books are thick, hefty. Old encyclopedias maybe? The kind of books the internet has long since made obsolete. I’ve become enchanted by interventions like these. Simple, practical, informal solutions implemented by everyday people that are colloquially referred to as making-do.
Although making-do is often used interchangeably with the words ad hoc, provisional, and bricolage these terms are not synonyms so much as they describe circumstance and methods that making-do—as both a perspective and an action—requires. From the Latin “to this,” ad hoc establishes a necessity or need—it is the circumstance which elicits the action or intervention. Ad hoc provides the “why” of an intervention. It is conditional, situational, and circumstantial. The solution implemented ad hoc is usually provisional , something “arranged or existing for the present, possibly to be changed later.”1 Making-do has an urgency to its
temporality; as an action which occurs in response to something encountered in the built environment, it is fundamentally concerned with the present. This establishes that the “when” of the making-do action is always “now.” Bricolage describes the “how” of making-do; it is method and materials. These tend to be whatever is at hand. They are often unconventional and deeply subject to the circumstance, person, and place. They are the nearest common denominator between effective and accessible. Taken together, ad hoc, provisional, and bricolage, describe the set and setting of making-do. As a hyper-local, hyper-specific action, making-do is defined by these conditions, rather than the specifics of the intervention or outcome.
Because it is a physical intervention addressing or solving a problem encountered in the built environment, making-do necessarily occurs at a moment of slippage or failure. Something has broken; the formal structure necessary for repair or redress is absent or unavailable. Maybe it’s a pothole which routinely causes one to spill their coffee while driving to work. Or a door used regularly that inconveniently locks automatically as one passes through. Perhaps one’s desk isn’t high enough. These nuisances, inconveniences, are signs of systems breaking down, objects failing, the inevitable entropy of the universe. Indeed, consumerism tells us that broken things are worthless, that repair is the realm of professionals, that things will always become old, useless, and obsolete. We are meant to believe that the solution can only be found in the new, the linear progress defined by endless systems upgrades and planned obsolescence. In this context, we can understand making-do as a critical act. It is at once a spontaneous refusal of the cultural norms that shape our relationships to our things and spaces, as well as a taking on of the care and responsibility for finding a solution. Making-do is a thoughtless act. It comes naturally to us as we do the small tasks of making ourselves at home and comfortable in the world. We creatively inhabit and alter our environments to suit our needs all the time. Why, then, does making-do seem so rare? So notable?
The person who makes-do is someone who, after encountering the problem, takes upon themselves the responsibility of action.
This is crucial, as making-do necessarily occurs outside of formal structures—it’s not up to code, wouldn’t pass inspection. Rather, it is a gesture of care and maintenance. In this way, a discarded Christmas tree becomes road fill, a sad old broom turns out to be the perfect height to prop the door open, and cinder blocks become desk risers in the home-office. As design, making-do is characterized by the need for effectiveness and immediacy. Its methodologies are misuse and reuse. Making-do is an orientation towards the world, particularly the built environment—whether by choice, circumstance, or both.
When somebody uses a tool or a piece of equipment, a referential structure comes about in which the objects produced, the material out of which it is made, the future user, and the environment in which it has a place are related to each other. 2
Because making-do involves things, it necessarily has an effect on the referential structure all things exist within. Our relationship to a thing (or object, as I will make no distinction here) is a relation to all the people and materials involved in the making, as well as the myriad processes involved in getting the thing into our hands. All that, which is beyond us, becomes intimate to us through our things. In this way, we can see how things transcend themselves, and how any interaction within our built world is also an action within the rhizomatic network of symbolic relations that give meaning and value to a thing.
And this is true of all human-made objects. They are the products of systems of production and consumption. In the given world they exist within a commodity structure, and, as such, they carry within them traces of all their interactions and relations. What complicates and enlivens the simple interventions of making-do is the way this small action inevitably causes ripples throughout the entanglements and structures which constitute the thing, our understanding of it, as well as systems of production and consumption. By examining making-do, I think we can unravel some of the thing’s entanglements, and in so doing we may
awaken to our own position and the agency we hold within these same structures.
World cities of commerce are formed by clusters of tall and densely packed buildings, built topographies that echo the natural cliffs, canyons, and plateaus that form the falcon’s indigenous habitats […] These raptors responded without prejudice or preconceptions to the physical conditions of vertical distance and craggy footholds; they perceived simple forms.3
Moving through the world as a being who sees, feels, and acts, is not very different from what birds do as they build their nests. In need of somewhere to lay eggs, they use whatever materials can be collected and carried. Bits of hair, mud, or trash will all suffice. Twigs and shiny wrappers are just as good. For the bird, the meanings of materials come from their formal qualities. Animals think not of what something is so much as what it does or can do; they are particularly adept at making-do with what happens to be available. Where a human may think that an overturned bucket is manifestly different from a stool, an animal may only encounter two objects of approximately the same height. A particularly poignant example of the animal’s propensity to react only to the physical qualities of its environment is seen in wildlife biologists’ successful efforts to save the peregrine falcon from extinction. The falcons, which had been all but wiped out by our use of DDT in the mid-20th century, were introduced into cities across North America. Offered a new, man-made habitat, to replace the original that we had ruined, the birds adapted to new skies and cliffs. 4
From the birds’ perspective, we start to see the formal and physical qualities of things as valuable assets. Anything that shares the physical qualities required is good enough. This is the perspective making-do requires. Ignoring the manufacturer’s warning, it becomes clear that “good enough” is more than sufficient as a guiding principle. Like the bird, the person who makes-do understands that whatever materials are available are,
in fact, exactly enough. Making-do asks us to relate to our things as carriers of potential, as opportunities to modify our ways of being in and relating to the built world. From this change in perspective and behavior, we begin to engage in the creation of malleable and unstable systems of temporary equivalencies and new, permeable relationships. Things can be continually defined and redefined. They take on unexpected and varied meanings. They are unmoored, drifting, and moving always on the brink of slipping away and/or becoming.
This way of interacting with things is notable because it stands in stark contrast to conventional approaches to things as sites for the production and condensation of value. Within capitalism, humans have come to understand objects as existing and having value within the commodity structure; they are “goods” which can be exchanged. Through this structure, our things become the manifestation of our social and political relations. They “can be partially understood as formalizations, i.e. as frozen moments, of the fluid social interactions constituting them.”5 In this way, the thing is a manifestation of the various relations which give it value as a commodity. When we only see the ways in which a thing is defined by its use and exchange value, or mistakenly think of these as fixed, inherent properties of the thing itself— rather than properties which are part of an abstracted system of symbolic equivalencies—we reify systems of commodification and existing value relationships.
Making-do presents the possibility to awaken us to the latent properties of the things we encounter every day. When makingdo, our interactions with the built environment displace and destabilize the thing’s relationship to other commodities (i.e., its use/exchange value). Insofar as making-do is a process of bricolage, it, following Hebdige, “appropriate[s] another range of commodities by placing them in a symbolic ensemble which [serves] to erase or subvert their original straight meanings.”6 From the bird’s eye view, we see beyond the thing as a commodity and notice its material properties—qualities inherent to the thing itself. As we step away from the thing-as-icon, away from our preconceptions, we make space for creativity, possibility, and all
that the thing could become; we begin to engage in speculation and world-building. The subversive element of making-do is expanded in that it necessarily implicates one in the reuse and misuse of things. Material improvisations—which, by definition, redefine the thing itself—serve as catalysts for change throughout the symbolic structure. When we place a stack of encyclopedias underneath an in-window air conditioning unit we are changing existing relationships, establishing new ones, responding to our material conditions, and making ourselves and others more comfortable and at home.
The boundary is permeable between tool and myth, instrument and concept, historical systems of social relations and historical anatomies of possible bodies, including objects of knowledge. Indeed, myth and tool mutually constitute each other.7
Making-do has unexpectedly profound consequences. It is an approach to one’s surroundings that occurs at the confluence of noticing, caring, and acting. It is an awakening to an understanding that the built environment presents an opportunity to materially complicate, disrupt, displace, and indeed, reconstitute commodity relations. It is a sign that someone, somewhere, is caring for the world we live in. And when we see evidence of this care, we must remember that it is also an act of world building. Small, simple interventions are also spaces of possibility to alter not only our immediate environments, but to make and remake, define, and redefine the things which shape our world.
The New Oxford American Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Stephen Graham & NJ Thrift, “Out of Order: Understanding Repair and Maintenance,” Theory, Culture & Society 24, no. 3 (2007): 1-25, https:// doi.org/10.1177/0263276407075954.
Jill Stoner, Toward a Minor Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012), 98. Stoner, Toward a Minor Architecture.
Donna Jeanne Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 82-83.
Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style. (London: Routledge, 1979), 104.
Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women .
3 Immurement–E an atnaKćiždr
Ena Kantardžić
3 Immurement
The Bosnian man flirts with me like I started it. I could care less.
I find you interesting in the way that I want to touch you, because you apologize when you do it by accident.
I sit closer.
I want to start a hellstorm on the day a tornado runs through.
All poetry ends in the trenches.
They would hang out at the river, down from the beach because the soldiers liked to shoot their guns there: the people from somewhere, made to be from nowhere, where your belief is your nation (your birth). A coalescence of radical nationalcentric views, what hurts more: the man or the movement?
What’s a log in a raging river?
The slav, an original Slave.
I go and dig in the heat, and rifles are going off. I wonder if anybody will come if I die, could it be quickly? Some parts of the earth are hard.
I find the bend and make it long and red.
A fisherman with a wooden cross hanging off his neck asks me politely if I’m married, and if maybe, we can get a coffee. I have a giant shovel. I’m covered in sweat and mud.
The butchers had asked if they’re going to be in the newspaper. I will send them a photo. I go and swim upstream.
All poetry ends in the trenches.
He squeezes my hand so hard that my pinkie bruises and swells, but I can’t feel a thing. I cut open my ring finger on the other hand, on the sofra jutting out into the water.
I feel the storm before it comes. I’m angry and impatient.
I carry the puppy across the river, up from the beach.
a lwaysbeen / hisvoi
Casey Wheeler
4 always been/ his voice
of course the first question is always, well, are you going to get… the surgery? Are you going to take hormones? Are you going to mutilate your body? the body that god created in his image so perfectly for you and only you?
There is something deeply uncomfortable about your father being so concerned about the health and state of your breasts. about the irreparable damage being done to them through the process of binding, as if that is even the part of my body that is being harmed. not the way that my ribcage has become deformed through the continuous compression. or the way that my lungs cannot expand fully and every breath that I take is shallow. but yes, of course, let’s talk about the way that the sacks of flesh that hang from my body, providing no use to me but discomfort, hang a little bit lower now than they did when i was a teenager.
I have been trying to bind less lately, not because I am not trans anymore, but because I want to be kind to my body. to my ribs and my lungs and the many pieces of me that allow me to stand up tall and walk around and engage with our physical world.
The concept of dysphoria is one that is tricky to me. I didn’t realize that I was trans through dysphoria, but through euphoria. It was only through discovering the things that made me feel like myself that I realized that up until then, I hadn’t.
“It’s my fault” my pappou said to my mother when she told him. “I should have held more family dinners.” as though the root of my transgenderism stemmed from a lack of male role models. If anything, I would argue there were too many.
It’s my fault. I should have done more to prevent this. as if this were a thing that could have or should have been prevented.
“You’ve always been a girl” is what my father said to me when we finally were able to have a conversation about it. “I don’t understand where this is coming from. You’ve always been a girl.” I wonder every day what he meant by that.
It’s my fault. as though a horrible tragedy has struck. as though i have fallen ill and if only i had gotten the right medication at the right moment in my childhood development and i would still be the girl that i apparently have always been.
“It’s my fault” my mother told me these words that came from her father, as though we would laugh together at how selfish his worldview is. it didn’t occur to her how much weight those words would hold for me. The ridiculous part to her was that it could have possibly been HIS fault, not that anyone could have possibly been at fault. “Can you believe that?” she said. and I hope my mother never hears me say these words because I know she has never meant to hurt me. not when she taught me that a man wearing dresses and makeup and getting surgeries would never truly be a woman. not when she told me to stop being so sensitive about the media she enjoys. not when i finally came out and heard her being praised and congratulated on how well She was handling it.
I have to wonder how many people who I love have ever cared a single ounce about a queer person before I came out. how many of those people have voted against the rights of my community? how many still do?
Sometimes, I want surgeries and hormones and sometimes I worry that I only want those things because of social pressures
to receive them.
Gender dysphoria is listed as a symptom of transness. as though transness is an ailment that needs to be cured. I would argue that dysphoria is not a symptom of being trans, but rather a symptom of a broken society that tells its people that there is only one way to exist properly.
I look in the mirror at my body, the body that was assigned female, and I do not see gender. I see breasts, but I do not see a woman. What’s confusing to me is that other people do.
I prefer the way that my clothes fit when my chest is flat but is that because I truly like it better or because I am .3% less likely to be misgendered?
I am jealous of men who get to take their shirts off in public on a hot day, but would that jealousy still be there if we had true equality? if my breasts were not something shameful to begin with?
i made the decision to stop communicating with my father when he told me that he would never be able to see me as anything other than a woman, call me anything other than the name that he gave me, or support any decisions to permanently alter my body for fear that i would regret it one day when i move past this phase.
And now I have to wonder if the thing that is stopping me from taking these medical steps is not the noble pursuit of a broader definition of what it means to be trans, but rather his voice in my head telling me that I will one day regret it when I remember that I’ve “always been a girl.”
For Nalo. Always.
Olivia Guterson
kamauu: (Singing) I did jusfayu, I did it jusfayu, I did it jusfayu and u jus don’t care…
nalo: (Sing talking) I did jusfayu, I did it jusfayu, I did it jusfayu and dont care…
I smile at his voice rising up from his car seat in back and then quickly wonder if I should change the song. I think about how much he understands about this song. I think about him singing this song at daycare. Singing it or saying these words out of context. I am overly aware of how much he’s taking in these days and how wide the space between his world and mine is becoming. In this moment though, his eyes are closed and he’s singing as best he can in time, and he closes his eyes and lets the rhythm wash over him. I wonder, if like me, his spirit gets lulled and regulated and maybe even restored a bit when he gets taken by the music in this way. That’s the thing about being a parent, or at least for me, I know that I am constantly introducing this young person to things and to
a world, maybe my world, but also the world that I know we both have to navigate. A world that will see Nalo but might not give a damn about how Nalo sees himself.
nalo: Can you play the open shut song? Please?
olivia: It will play after a couple more songs, sweetie. Okay?
nalo: Nooo! Let’s listen to it now!
The open shut song is a catchy, learning song that he must have heard at daycare and eventually I found so we could listen to it together. It’s a lesson in “opposites,” and he lights up after the first note. He knows all the words and often checks me if I try to sing too. I love that he is joyful and pleased with himself when he sings this song, and I also wonder if I can start teaching him about the nuances and spectrum of things. I want him to understand it’s not just right and wrong and sometimes backwards is forward if you don’t know where you came from. Ultimately, I wonder if this push and pull of mine is just me wanting to honor and protect his childhood but also knowing I must prepare him.
nalo: NOOO! Mama! Just Nalo do it, okay?!
I feel like I’m constantly vigilant, guarding Nalo and his spirit. It feels like my primary responsibility is to ensure that no one, myself included, dims his light or squashes his magic. I often witness a beautiful softness in Nalo, and I know this is how it should be. He’s only three and yet I fear that that won’t serve him in this world. I’ve never prayed so much in my life until I found out I was going to have a child, and then COVID arrived, and then my child came earthside. The world was on fire and my body was on fire and it felt like, that summer, we all broke open. There are so many things people wanted to tell me and prepare me for, but the truth is, no one can prepare you for the specific type of death that birth is. No one can prepare you for the specific type of birth that giving birth is. I had Nalo at home in the early hours
of a Monday morning in August 2020. I didn’t know who I was having and, just like now, I am open to whoever Nalo decides he wants to be. All I knew is that if I was healthy enough, I wanted to give this child the best possible start and that was not in a hospital. Unmarried, Black birthing people die at a rate 5x their white counterparts. Being the first summer of COVID, I would have had to go into the hospital alone and masked. So, there we were, home with a midwife to welcome this child in the middle of what felt like the edge of the wild beyond.
There is so much I can say here, about this time in the threshold. There is even more for which there is not language. What I can say is “take root among the stars” was what the ancestors told me before the last push. I cried a cry that still feels like it’s falling from my eyes. The sense of the enormousness of the responsibility to nurture, guide, and honor another being took over my body along with the awareness of just how fragile and helpless this baby really was. I cried because the lines I would never cross were crystal clear, and just how committed I was to Nalo was so obvious, and I couldn’t understand how that wasn’t the case for those who had their hands in my upbringing. I cried for this moment but also all the moments that led to this.
I don’t tell Nalo it’s okay or even that it is going to be okay when he cries, I just hold him and listen. I’ll hold him as long as he needs. When he explodes with big feelings, I stay next to him, hold him if he allows, and get curious with him. I don’t want to make this child hard and, at the same time, I know he needs to be hard enough to survive this world. I want to nurture a connection to feeling, sensing, and softness in him and in me, too. Somewhere I’ve heard it said, “no one knows how hard I had to be to be this soft.”
Most mornings, Nalo makes a strong case as to why we shouldn’t go to school and instead play all day. Most days it’s something like, “you be a duck and I’ll be a goose and we could do that all day,” or “Mom, do you want to be garbage trucks with me and go around all day?” Honestly, I would! Maybe it’s just child’s play, but I encourage it. I try to fully step into the worlds he’s conjuring and, in that way, I am also getting a front row seat to all that he’s navigating, trying on, seeking to understand. I think back to my vision of
who I wanted to be and who I was trying to become and ultimately land in a place of just trying to be present. That’s the thing for me, that no one told me about becoming a parent: the world is going to seem so big and also so small. In the same vein, everything is so much scarier and also so much more precious. In the overwhelm of it all, all you can do is just be present. Just be present in these long, short days. And so, I dive headfirst into the invitation to pretend to be a purple garbage truck that makes pizzas.
I’m not sure what I have to offer Nalo that has meaning enough that’ll serve him beyond this moment and even beyond and after me, but maybe it’s art because that’s the only place I’ve found comfort and solace through it all. Truth is, I need healing and protecting too. And I’ve been working on that. How does one remove all that doesn’t serve them? I wonder if a lot of my mess is just the handme-downs of generations not only not having language, but not having time or the privilege to heal. I guess surviving does that, and with generations of fighting to survive, well, the body knows and remembers it all. My body knows. I’ve witnessed the fallout of all the bodies I share blood with. It’s this blood that made me question if I should become a parent ever. It’s also this blood that lets me know that I can do this. Nalo has my blood and breath, and, like me, he also is forming a love and interest in art. In his art. I hope art will always be a home for him. That’s the thing I’ve always loved about art. There’s room enough for everyone and it’s always there. It’s self-regulating, just as it’s self-reflecting. I want Nalo to always know that he is of this deep well of possibility, creativity, and love. I want him to know that he is love just as he is loved and loving. I want him to know and feel that he was, is, and will always be way more than enough just as he is. I want him to know that he can create worlds for himself when this one tries to dim his light. I want all our children to have that.
6 I n Response –R e acceb yeldeP ★
In Response to Sula by Toni Morrison
Rebecca Pedley
Sula, down
… down by her riverbed,
... had everythin, but nothin
... dar’nd grasses took Little away.
... Sula, big toes jus could’n keep’a hold.
... That boy, Little, whole village heard him giggle.
...
World only knows how
... how they found him, ... sack’a nothin, thas wha tha Bargeman said.
... Sula, ... only knew it was she ... she who took him; swingin n dancin n smilin n chirpin n kickin n’ never … a single soul, waded them waters
... happy ... as boy Chicken Little.
In Response to “Be Nobody’s Darling” by Alice Walker
Rebecca Pedley
On living, truth.
... Today, … the same ... as yesterday ... i see passing people, ... with no pulse ... i see you ... see me? ...
Normality, ... a quiet chaos.
... Tastes you ... spits yew out, ... moldy crust bread disgust.
... Sour ... a life ... only bitter ... as it jitters ... clouded through voice ... voice louder, than own.
… But let it be said, ... found ... is to be found again
... walk alone the bank of merry gathering.
... It is clear ...
it is brave to speak with words. in dedication to the stream of writings received from my dearest, Aunt Fidelis.
Shrunk Socks
Madison Warp
My alarm went off before his anger gone, replaced with Regret
Of breaking the unspoken rules the Knot that bound us
I knew that wanting more would untie it
That more care would tear it
That asking would leave me wanting
The vase would remain empty
Held in hollow space between my shoulders a glass vessel too heavy to carry I allowed to shatter the night before
I now wake in pieces
I try to stay in bed he would afford me so many sun-ups before kiss my forehead permit me to keep dreaming
A ritual
Honoring my nightshift occupations his early morning calls
I would not go back to sleep
His house would whisper into my open ears
The coffee maker’s electronic hum birds saying good morning workers drilling away next door
His voice rising from below
Sounds dancing with the warm light that slipped under my eyelids
This symphony of mundane musings lulling me into the covers
His soft stomach against mine his hair on the pillow
Death On The Nile in paperback water glass half full
A Security Blanket
I thought I had outgrown but then found fitting again
This morning
No symphony was playing only noise
The shower jerked on the blow-dryer screamed I lay paralyzed between the sheets
My eyes locked with the heavy leather chair
In the corner my only company in the white room
The dark leather Imposing Glossy Unnatural a lonely void staring back at me
The distance between never wanting to leave and the tightness in my stomach of having to
This morning the choice was not up to me
“Time To Wake Up!”
He enters the room with coffee camp counselor voice echoed into my chest cavity
Scalding hot water held above my head
I rise
Clinging to the covers for warmth the only warmth being offered
I grasp the cup
He walks off going about more important business
My feet are ice packs
Lips chapped
hands are shaking
Skin bumpy from the cold
Coffee drips
Stains the snow
White sheets
In the frigid white room
I look up and he’s there
An eye roll
The vase between my shoulders chips
I didn’t know something shattered could chip
He looks at me with no desire my naked body exposed
A trick he has seen too many times over
A lustful sight now
indecent
I shower washing the night off
A Fool’s Errand
chills fray my nerves not to be calmed by the water the goosebumps cannot be washed off
I return
The coffee drop gone viciously scrubbed a gray ring in its place
A benign blemish soon to be
Forgotten
The burn of chemicals overpowering the atmosphere of sex and cotton what used to warm the room
I go downstairs
Cool stone
Under my bare feet
He’s on a call
The back door unlocked
I go outside
Crossing the distance between not wanting to Stay
And dreading to Leave
A light layer of dew coats the stones
I climb atop a table
Knees come to my chin
steam warms my face curls my hair
I Breathe
For the first time this morning
I Inhale
The light quietly screaming through the tall bushes lining the wall
I Exhale
His voice from the kitchen, Important, Impatient
The silence drowning it, out from in
I Inhale
The green climbing the fence
Their vines strong
Their leaves radiant in
The first light
I Exhale
MAC AND CHEESE WITH IMPOSSIBLE MEAT
his hands on the small of my neck
PLAYING WITH MY dandelion hairs
I Inhale
THE IVY CLIMBING ATOP THE WALL Caging the green IN
birds playing in the growth
I Exhale
NEGRONI WITH AN ORANGE TWIST SCARY LSD TRIP BLOODY HANDPRINT ON A STARK WHITE WALL THE ONLY HUMANITY IN THE 65 DEGREE AIR CONDITIONING
I Inhale
THE SMALL BUG SOAKING UP THE MORNING’S TEARS NOURISHING THE LIFE IN CYCLE
IT GOES ON IT GOES ON
I Exhale
DINOSAUR JUNIOR MY ANGER BEING SILENCED DISMISSED AS BEING STORMY A WARNING
I Inhale
THE MOSS THRIVING IN THE CRACKS OF THE FOUNTAIN SKY WATER FILLING THE VOID KINTSUGI
I Exhale
HARD-SHELL PORSCHE PLANT WATERING RITUALS AWAITING TEXTS UNSURE OF ANSWERS CALLING OUT FOR HELP IN AN HOUR OF NEED AND TAKING SILENCE AS AN ANSWER
I Inhale
THE VINES GROWING OVER THE FENCE OUT OF THE YARD OUT OF SIGHT OUT TO THE ETHER OUT TO MY CAR OUT TO THE PLAINS INTO THE INFINITE
I Exhale TO THE UNKNOWN
The Vase Between My Shoulders Fills With What I Don’t Know A Truth I Do Not Want To Hear But One I Know All The Same
I go inside hurry to the door pull on my yellow boots
“Off to take over the art world?”
That camp counselor voice freezes my breath my teeth grind my hand turns to a fist and releases
“Wait I have something for you”
He hurries away I wait not knowing Why
Footsteps echo foyer walls are closing in on me the steel bars on the windows moving closer together
The glass bricks distorting the light coming in square cages
A womb I didn’t want to leave
Now a prison
An 18-month sentence almost discharged freedom is scary
He’s here holding out running socks
Pink pumas leaping
In the gray knit when I left them they were new shapely barely a step taken
Now
They are Tough Threadbare Laundered Starched Shrunken
When my alarm went off This Morning I could wear them
Now
I cannot I leave folding the socks in on each other the pieces now a whole
I placed them Carefully Tenderly
in the nearest garbage can Beach Barbie in the donation bin
The only farewell I could offer
Sorry, I’ve Outgrown You
Into the unknown the socks and me.
samoh
Pressing History
Rachel Elise Thomas
there’s healing in repetition this act is an exercise in letting go imperfection is the antidote pressing history, it’s set in stone. excavation reveals repetition conceals the vision is cloudy remind me, what did I unearth?
In the Wake of Tragedy, We Must Choose to Witness,
Yasmeen Nematt Alla
I am writing this at the start of a four-day ceasefire from the apartheid Israel regime’s continued genocide of and reign of terror over the Palestinian Peoples and their land. It is 12:30 AM on Friday, November 24, and it feels right that the first rest many Palestinians will experience in the past month will happen on a Friday. Friday is the day when Muslims congregate for prayer. When the sun is highest in the sky, they come together to sit and hear the Imam speak. Muslims come together ka wajib—because of an obligation to gather and to witness. An obligation to be in one another’s presence as we speak to our Creator about our bodies’ heartaches. My father used to tell me that God wants me to ask Him for everything. “Be selfish,” he would tell me. “No one wants to make your wishes true more than God does.” I’m older now, and my faith, like my prayers, has ebbed and flowed. Being selfish , even within the confines of my own self, is a difficult ask. I’ve spent the last six Fridays praying, hoping for a witnessing, hoping for a collective watching. For the past fifty-some days, I have read think pieces, Instagram infographics, watched video
essays, and jumped from TikTok to Tumblr posts . I have sat and read each name I can find of Palestinians who have been martyred on their own land, because I have been asked to. The making is only ever in the witnessing. I have been asked not to look away. I have been asked to watch. To look at the ugly thing and not blink. But we do anyway, don’t we? This is where the heartbreak lies, I think: in the wake of tragedy, the burden of witnessing feels both like not doing enough while also feeling too heavy to carry, too heavy to breathe through.
When I first began identifying with the label of artist, my grandmother, while looking over some images of my early work, told me that she was so happy I was making beautiful things for the world to see. I argued with her and said that I do not make things for the world, but for myself, to appease my selfish need to make. “The making is only ever in the witnessing,” she replied while shaking her head, her half-mooned smile in my mind’s eye. She’s right of course. It’s no surprise that I think often about the act of witnessing, about who we deem worthy of witnessing, who we deem worthy of archiving, and all the ways that I allow the world to witness me, all the ways I do not. Living is a horrifying act of vulnerability. Art making, in many ways, is an extension of that act. It feels like divine punishment that I continue to lead a life where I ask people to see me as often as I do.
When Tim Kreider released his essay, “I Know What You Think of Me,” he wrote a piece of text that has haunted me for far longer than I would like to admit . “If we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.”1 Do we really have to be witnessed in order to be loved? Must I bear my soul to be seen? When I speak about my work, even in passing, I am always questioning if the practice is too much, too self-centered, too vulnerable, whether I am too self-involved, but of course, of course, I am. There is no making without an obsession with the self. I often become mortified with the knowledge that for work to exist, the self must be witnessed. For my work to exist, I must be witnessed. However, to be mortified and be known is to be loved, right?
I’ve tried my best to build a logic around not needing a
witnessing in order to make. I’ve argued with myself back and forth about what it means to make freely. I have read Nietzsche, and I have read his arguments for an art that exists independently, free from the need of an audience. I get it, true artistic genius should exist for its own sake but I am no genius. Because I am no genius, I really do not know what it would mean for an artwork to exist without an audience—without witnessing.
When this onslaught started (not the first time, no, that was 75 years ago, or the second time, or the third time or ), I cried in a friend’s arms. My friend, tender-hearted in ways that are beyond me, asked me about witnessing, asked me whether I have let others witness my grief. (If the void stares at you, do you shut your eyes? Do you ask it questions? Will it deem you worthy of answering?) The answer is no. I am terrified of being seen, so how can I ask to be witnessed? (Don’t you know? The void never answers back.)
But in the last three months of 2023, Palestinians have asked for us to see them as they bare their souls to the world. From their videos, to their posts, to their captions, to us waiting with bated breath, hoping that the ones whose names we know live to the next day. We have become implicated in their survival. I am reminded that to bear witness is to dismantle our conviction that we are helpless in the happenings of the world. In the wake of tragedy, we have no choice but to become archivers. Central to the essence of bearing witness is the interconnection and interdependence between us. In watching a people move towards liberating themselves, move towards recording their grief, their deaths, their children, the rubble, I am asked to keep my eyes open. Without witnessing, even the most horrific events can go unspoken, leaving a void of denial and emptiness in both our minds and historical accounts. I ask myself, if we are not watching, then who is? Who is left to care? The stories of our people remain unarticulated and fragmented until we arrive and declare, “I am eager to understand. Let me watch you speak.” In that moment, the power of witnessing contributes to the emergence of the narrative: from a buried lead to highlighted text. If our work does not exist in the context of other people’s watching, then the work will not survive us.
Sometimes the act of witnessing begins with a flag, 2 with the drawing of a watermelon, even an abstract gesture towards the colors that have become synonymous with the revolution. To witness the image is to make it so. Holding the voice of my grandmother, always whispering, the making is only ever in the witnessing.
As we’ve seen the world call for the decolonization of Palestine, for a ceasefire, I’ve also watched members of my community, my friends, my studiomates, my artists, my people, participate in so much of the witnessing that I needed to survive myself. In their witnessing I was made, I was archived, and in their witnessing, we’ve built a holding for one another that I did not think was possible. A miracle, can you believe it? In the midst of witnessing the awakening to the colonial complex, amid witnessing a genocide, during witnessing one another, we argued for language, we called for the freedom of our communities. Because of our voices, there are ways in which the world will never be the same again. I know that we cannot help but feel the tragedy, yes, and we cannot understand how the world still turns despite the loss of so many, but, but, but, in all this witnessing, in all this waking up, and in all this watching, I have seen the world shift on its axis as it looks toward liberation, to Palestinian freedom (remember that the word gauze comes from Gaza , the first wrapping, the first healing, the first holding. Palestinians taught us how to hold down the bleeding so it can heal, gauze, Gaza).
As an Egyptian, as an Arab, as Yasmeen, no, no, as ياسمين, I was born into witnessing Palestinian joy and their unflinching belief in their own liberation. I believed in it because they have given me no other vision towards their future. I have witnessed it my whole life. To be Palestinian is to believe in the liberation of your people, to witness its future even if it is not in front of you yet, to be Arab is to have faith in this vision, in Palestinians. To be me is to see this future, to pray for it, to allow myself and my work to be witnessed too, regardless of the mortifying ordeal of being known. To know and know and know that Palestine will be free, forever, one day, from its river to its sea. Liberation and revolution have always existed. The least we can offer now is to witness it.
1. 2.
Tim Kreider, “I Know What You Think of Me,” New York Times, June 15, 2013, https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes. com/2013/06/15/i-know-what-you-think-of-me/?smid=pl-share.
This footnote exists as a small gesture of acknowledgement. Though the Fountainswimming Board of Editors were advised against presenting full documentation of the events that transpired during the 2023 Fall term, the concession made was this: a footnote in an essay that skims our critiques and demands. While it would take another piece of text to do justice to the series of confrontations and dismissals experienced by the graduate students, it is important to acknowledge that for the month of October and well into November 2023, the CAA student community existed in a perpetual state of uncertainty and fear.
In October of 2023, I hung a Palestinian flag out my dorm room, hoping to wave a Palestinian statehood symbol that is banned by the colonial apartheid of Israel. The Cranbrook Academy of Art’s censorship swiftly followed, and persisted for the ensuing month and beyond, marking a profound betrayal of the conversations and connections we as a community had cultivated. In many ways, the institution delivered
what it was created to invoke: a blanket of prohibitive and systemized machinations that punish those who speak truth to power.
Despite this attempt at silencing, the word “Palestine” was evoked in numerous discussions, sparking debates and reflections. I remain grateful for the uninterrupted weeks during which Palestine dominated our discourse. I remain grateful for the over 300 individuals who rallied in solidarity by signing their names in support of our letter calling out the institution.
While various narratives of the events have circulated online, what’s crucial to recognize is this: when I went to my friends heartbroken that I’d been told there were complaints made over my flag, their reaction was anger. I had assumed they would shrug it all off, dismiss it as unsurprising. Instead, we became accomplices in wanting more from our administrations. When they rejected us, our artisthood, and our voices, we returned with gestures of opposition and larger asks. See, “In Solidarity with Palestine: An Open Letter from the Student Body at Cranbrook Academy of Art,” “CAA Student Demands,” and “Update on Censorship Issues at Cranbrook,” https://linktr.ee/cranbrook.graduate.students.
I know that this institution is now waiting for us to graduate, waiting for us to leave, so they can pretend that this was a blip or a mishap. But let it be known: we will not forget. We will remember that when we said Palestine, this institution sought to harm us. When twenty, thirty, or a hundred years from now, they start making memorials to this genocide, to the murder of my peoples, we will be a living proof for how they contributed to it.
Eel Costello
there is no silence anymore, a barrier of trees built into a barn, now I can hear for miles
londe – Sam S vokpilhci
Blonde: A Lamentation
written by a blonde1 woman2
Occasionally, I catch glimpses of light reflecting off the pale head tops of blonde-haired people. Glorious are those who forge ahead past brass hues into the yellowy white tones of sunlight-colored hair. Bleach blonde hair, as I mean to specify over naturally blonde colored hair. I say this to recognize it as a process of becoming, as distinguished from something simply given or grown. I find bleach blondeness a ridiculous notion, yet I have participated in it every year of my adult life. I think that is why I do it, for its ridiculousness. It is like a reset to a false neutral. Easy to become colored, easy to let be, easy to transform back into a damaged version of the color one held previously. It is both a stage of becoming and a place of being.
I am not naturally blonde. My mother’s hair, once red, is now pale white streaked with pink. My father’s hair, once deep brown, is now fading softly and evenly into grey. My hair is deep brown naturally as well, now streaked with blonde on either end of my forehead, transformed by my hand. I also have a rat tail streaked intermittently with pale blonde hair. This resemblance to my
parents through my hair is not entirely intentional, in the sense that I did not do it to look like my parents, but affirmative in the sense that I do look like them. This notion of likeness to my parents became one of the found aspirations in the image of my hair. The other aspiration is the image of Galadriel’s hair, described by Tolkein as golden, “touched by some memory of the starlike silver of her mother.”3 Blonde hair holds a frenetic energy that is unlike that of its companion hues, differently affecting those people with it. Blondeness moves beyond simply a phase of historical simulation and into a mode of subliming the self, a physical and emotional transformative process that is an action insistent on survival.
It is difficult to praise blonde hair without recognizing it as a paragon of Aryanism, white supremacy by other names. Light blonde hair, pale skin, and blue eyes were hallmark standards enforced by genocidal hegemonies such as Nazi Aryanism. Those who lacked these features would be considered less-than and othered, would be enslaved, or killed. To bleach one’s hair and to become blonde in some scenarios was an attempt at survival, converting to the mode prescribed by the hegemon. Notably, some of the Kashariyot 4 would bleach their hair in order to better pass between the borders of Jewish Ghettos and German-occupied eastern European countries during WWII. I believe this can be aligned to an extent with the recent centuries’ standards of beauty, standards that particularly affect women. Blondeness serves as a modality of replication of the image enforced by societal standards, a hegemony in question, in order to survive and, in some cases, in order to thrive.
It is also hard to represent blonde hair. Through mode of replication, of simulation, it only serves to highlight the farcity of bleached blonde hair. In the film rendition of Joyce Carol Oates’s fictionalized novel portraying Marilyn Monroe’s life, love, and death, these ideas are highlighted fairly acutely. Blonde (2022) by Andrew Dominik is a film that exists as a romantically fictionalized portrayal of a dead woman demonstrated through the male gaze.5 I say this because it is also a particularly white portrayal and representation of a blonde person. Circumstantial or not,
Marilyn is literally a very white person. Her6 and her conscientiously pale skin were symbols co-opted to support racist beliefs held in white supremacy.7 White historically stood out in black and white filming, and in technicolor, pure white appeared as if it was glowing, tricks utilized by Hollywood filmmakers. Dominik’s Blonde is a series of gorgeously composed and shot, yet often painful, moving images sequenced one after the other, unexpectedly transitioning between monochrome and full color Armas, are subjected to his gaze.
This fictionalization and further film portrayal speak to the mythology formed around Marilyn that has stripped her of the successes and agency she afforded herself during her life. This movie lends itself to derogatory representations of Marilyn Monroe and broadly of blonde people the image of blonde as someone beautiful, without power, frequently displayed as someone vapid, unintelligent, and often a hypersexualized object. In archetypal blonde representations, the connotated image does not carry the same positive implications or esoteric weight as other hair colors despite the abundance of values it holds. Representations of blondeness lack seriousness, often insulted as “dumb blondes.”8
Rita Hayworth, a predecessor and role model to Marilyn, briefly made blonde hair famous and causally aligned it with working class women and sex workers of the 1940s, film roles for which she was typecast in Hollywood.9 Before even the fashionable notion, pale blonde hair was known as something freakish and irregular, blonde-haired individuals represented in fiction as primordially sexual and wildly mystical.
This is not the image and the story of blonde I am interested in drawing upon, but this is some of the history that it bears. This modality of replication is what I am interested in moving away from, instead gesturing towards blonde’s ability to transform and generate. I disagree with these historical conventions for their insistence on denigrating and fetishizing blonde hair. I believe blondeness can be represented positively.
Blonde is difficult to have and maintain and it is hard to elegantly move on from. Blonde is a commitment to self. I believe being blonde can hold so much for each person. Blonde acts as
a false neutral, like a blank canvas or liminal state. Perhaps it is just a plain light color in the same way that people have light colored walls in their homes, because they like how it looks. I like it because it is preceded by a phase of transformation. Bleaching. Becoming blonde is an alchemical process of personal sublimation, and bleach is the tool of subliming. The action itself is violent and damaging. Often formed from a variety of chemical mixtures, bleach violently oxidizes hair, breaking down the melanin pigments that color the hair, leaving depigmented strands. This process often degrades the integrity of hair, leaving it drier and more brittle than before. The sublimation of self allows an individual to become something changed or new. Sublimation refers to the transformation of the self as an act separate from the physical process, a personal rarefaction.
Bleaching is a chemical process, the physical process of stripping hair of its vitality in order to become lighter. It is the lightening of the self. I envision this as something like “The Dark Night of The Soul,” but for becoming blonde.10 The Pale Night of the Soul, the night my friends and I turned myself blonde, self-impositions of light where given colors were incorrect at that time. Blonde is a state and being in and of itself, but as a state of potentiality for something new, like a blank canvas. Like alchemical albedo, it is a process of finding light, light that distinguishes shadow.11 Bleach acts as a medium for the transformation of self into the blond(ed) self.12
There is additional preciousness in comparing blonded hair to gold in this scenario. Creation of gold is the penultimate goal13 in traditional alchemy—to sublime any base material into gold, the least reactive metal. There is a freedom in viewing a chemical reaction in this way. Most anyone, given time and materials, is able to become blonde by this definition with varying degrees of damage sustained to oneself and perhaps with varying levels of ease.14 Blondeness has the potential for democratic capacity. Bleaching has the ability to rarefy oneself into a newly found “neutral” state, like a primer.
Lugubrious bastards, who are we to judge our respective forms of subliming? Refrain, those trapped in the reigns of natural hair
coloring. There is a tone of blonde for each individual, and there is democracy in chemical reactions. A shade of light for each person; blonde is camp, blonde is failure, blonde is death, and blonde gives life.
I used to lie and tell people that blonde was my natural hair color. Many people believed me. I used to tell people I would wake up early in the morning every day, take my sharpie marker, and color in my roots. I envisioned this as a form of enforcing my personal humility as a natural blonde, much like the religious self-flagellation of Catholic clergy. Blonde is not a lack thereof; it is an abundance of potential. Blonde is the defiance of the given self and a mundane personal anarchy, a gesture outwardly pronouncing the individuality of one’s self. Even more broadly, it could be considered transhumanist in a very primitive sense, the augmentation of one’s self.
There are many people who have radically chosen to be blonde, purposefully, inconsequentially, or perhaps in a fugue state. Specifically in entertainment, we see blonde people like Beyonce, RuPaul, and Lady Gaga who have made this radical and sudden declaration of self. The statement to be known as a blonde. There are many famous blonde women eligible for idolatry as an icon of blondeness, but I would like to specifically highlight Taylor Armstrong, one the original members of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.
Taylor is also known as the blonde woman from the meme of the woman pointing at a cat.15 Originating from Twitter user @MISSINGEGIRL in 2019, the post combined a screenshot from a 2011 episode of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills with a reaction meme of a cat, originally posted on Tumblr in 2018. It is a framework meme, allowing for multitudinous interpretations and interpolations. This allowed for some enduring popularity.
During seasons 1 and 2 of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills in 2010, Taylor's husband Russel Armstrong left visible evidence of his physical abuse on Taylor, which was subsequently exposed and aired on the show. Bravo16 and Russel Armstrong were heavily criticized by the fanbase and broader audiences for their complicity and exploitation of Taylor. In between seasons 2 and 3 of The
Real Housewives, Taylor filed for divorce from Russel. Amid public scrutiny and the imminent split, Russel Armstrong killed himself, leaving his wife and his young child in enormous debt. Taylor remained on the show in season 3 and publicly stated her intentions to settle her debts and provide for her child with the money she would earn from the show and the book she was then writing.
The image of Taylor featured in the prevalent meme was taken from a moment in season 2 when she drunkenly fought with an acquaintance, a friend of another housewife, at a dinner party. The fight was provoked prior to the dinner when the housewife outed that Taylor was being abused by her husband while filming. This was true, but Taylor had only spoken about it privately until this moment. The acquaintance accused Taylor of acting vengefully and not communicating with this other housewife after exposing her abuse. Taylor was visibly upset, angry, and concerned for the safety of her daughter in anticipation of her husband’s reaction to this debacle.
I find it bitter and ironic, and honestly a bit too saccharine, that this particular moment was disseminated around the world in a memetic conveyance of general frustration. I think many of the people that interact with this meme don’t know the troubling context of the situation from the show. They simply see the meme for what it presents: a fight between a woman and a cat. Despite the circumstances, Taylor has reacted positively by getting to know the owner of the cat and bonding over the situation.
Taylor Armstrong is in some ways similar to Marilyn Monroe, not an actress or singer by profession, but a blonde woman frequently imposed into the lives of many people by way of media and the internet. In the case of Marilyn and Taylor, I believe blonde functions as a mode of survival. Being blonde is part of their world constructions and image identity, identities that have the potential to outlast the lives of their origins. These images of identity do not present the wholeness or the executor of these actions always, but the identity is an aspect of them. They choose actively to live and be identified as a blonde person. This is a choice amongst many in the construction of one’s image, something which is often a reflection or refraction of identity.
For Taylor, she chose to maintain the image of her constructed self, and in turn, her blondeness, in an effort to remove both her daughter and herself from the sudden tragedy and debt thrusted upon her, incidentally becoming a widely distributed meme. Blonde, in these worlds, is both the echoing and continuity of the constructed image of oneself, and it is also an engagement with the enforcement of histories of oppressive hegemonies; mutable,17 yet inextricable.
Taylor Armstrong returned again for season 3 of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, remained as a guest on the show for two more seasons, and then left for a number of years. More recently, she has again returned to the show on Ultimate Girls Trip (2021)18 and joined the neighboring Orange County cast. This time in a better place in her life and her family, and still blonde. Being blonde is an aim towards authenticity, allowing for joy. For Taylor it has meant remaining blonde, but this is not exclusively the truth. Blonde is fragile and dry, susceptible to breakage. It is hard to maintain at long lengths and hard on the scalp after repeated bleaching. It does not have to be forever. Authenticity is mercurial, it changes with time, and it facilitates continuous new visions of aspiration.
Perhaps the first impetus of bleaching one's hair is an effort to mimic those who were initially born with blonde hair, but I believe this gesture of bleaching and action of changing oneself becomes much more than just a refinement of self. Beyond replication and into sublimation, such modes allow for new personal representation, for both preservation and also survival.
The soul of a blonde is purple in tone to condition the piss patina yellow fade of reality. This is my elegy for dead hair, to understand its respective sublimity as it is, too, a process of survival. Allow a prayer for the suspension of disbelief for those around us. To such a point that God will hold their breath. Being blonde.
When I was admitted to the psych ward in 2021, I was identified as a “blonde woman.” The intake nurse asked me whether I preferred to identify as a brunette or a blonde. At the time, my hair was longer and naturally dark at the top of my head, and either side of my hair was blonde from root to tip. I waved the nurse off in my fugue state, failing to care for minor clerical details. She then announced me as a “blonde woman” as she finished filling out my form. The ‘woman’ part still confounds me. I identify more along the lines of the he/they variety, and I had hairy legs at the time of entry, hairy in a way that didn’t feel like a feminist celebration of my body.
Prescriptive notions of gender are funny to me. I have not been made to be gendered too often in my life. I have this fortune because I think I come across most overtly as a cisgendered man—a faggot—but a man. That is fine. I don’t necessarily believe in it, but I participate in it as I am insisted upon culturally. This was one of the few times I have been gendered significantly, but this was also one of the few times I found myself deep in a gender and identity I do not actively claim. I remained like this for my duration in the psych ward, failing to correct any of the nurses or paperwork, and exiting as a “blonde woman” per my outpatient papers. The first thing I did once out was eat a cigarette.
J.R.R. Tolkien, Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-Earth (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020).
Jewish women couriers
Blonde, directed by Andrew Dominik (2022; Los Angeles, CA: Netflix).
This movie fucking sucks. I could not finish it. My review could be considered biased.
The Seven Year Itch, directed by Billy Wilder (1955; New York, NY: 20th Century Fox)
Lois W. Banner, “The Creature from the Black Lagoon: Marilyn Monroe and Whiteness” Cinema Journal 47, no. 4 (2008), 4–29.
The phrase emerged from a satirized rendition of 18th century French courtesan Rosalie Duthé. Making fun of her habit of long pauses before speaking, people referred to her as dumb, simultaneously referring to her ‘stupidity’ and her pauses. The stereotype evolved from this specific reference to blondes more generally.
Banner, “The Creature from the Black Lagoon.”
St John of the Cross, “The Dark Night of the Soul,” trans. David Lewis, Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/157984/ the-dark-night-of-the-soul. The poem is commonly referred to as a passive phase of purification in mystical development. Darkness, in this case, is analogous with unknowingness.
Alchemical phase of finding light in darkness. Distinguishing and releasing portions of shadow.
@blonded.
Among the ultimate goals of Alchemists is discovering the medium of eternal youth, spiritual development, and the transmutation of metals. Dryness, brittleness, change of curl pattern, burning of scalp, loss of ability to retain moisture.
In an effort to better describe this image: this woman is blonde. She is distraught and enraged, being held back by another woman with dark hair, who is Kyle Richards. She is lunging forward pointing her finger, she is teary eyed, and her mouth is open as if to scream at someone. The image is frequently opposed to a white cat who is smuggishly sitting at a table or perhaps startled. There is a plate of vegetables placed in front of the cat. The cat’s mouth is also open as if to say something back to the person they are sitting opposed to. As if to say something back to Taylor, https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/woman-yelling-at-a-cat.
The network that hosted The Real Housewives series that are individually hosted by Andy Cohen.
History can only change as it moves forward.
They stayed in Great Barrington, MA during this trip.
lavleB rak
12 Pray
Nirmohee Belvalkar
Move, the Ganesha pawn around the parents, move, Shiva and Parvati to the top spot. Move, the gods around the world we create, move, your body for the sun salutation routine. Move, to a calmer state. Am I religious?
Occasionally traditional for festivals and family, I pray sometimes to please my grandmother, and I pray
to the sunflowers for just another spring day. I pray
to my womb for dark skinned babies to prevent sunburns. I pray
out of fear, not because I’m religious. So you won’t tell on me today, I pray.
Whenever I pray something goes wrong. As if I prayed to Yama. The flowers droop to stop me from praying too loud. As the snow melts from the Himalayas, Shiva strays. As though I never prayed for him to stay.
lackberry Thicket –aihpoS nesraL
Blackberry Thicket
Sophia Larsen
When I started graduate school, my father was in California receiving specialized inner cranial radiation treatment for a set of small brain tumors. By October, I received news that the cancer had spread, and any treatment would simply be prolonging the inevitable. In the face of an estimated six months to one year left on this earth, he elected to forgo any further treatment. Instead, he chose to spend his days with my mother, eating sandwiches in the sun at the beach, sitting with my uncle on Sundays (his older brother from whom he was once estranged), and drinking tea on the hillside where he married my mother over thirty years ago. On a Saturday late that same month, my father turned seventy-three. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, seventy-three has become the average life expectancy for the American male.
I find myself wondering if this will be his last birthday. I wonder if the day we spent together at the beach last November will be the last day we spend alone together on this earth. I wonder what the next sixty years of my life will be like without him. I wonder what will happen to all my half-remembered childhood
experiences—will they dry up when the other half who remembers is gone?
I close my eyes and see my first bicycle in the front yard of a house I haven’t lived in since 2004. Irises and daffodils bloom in the dirt down the street. Dad lights a candle; Dad snuffs out a candle. My mother fills paper grocery bags with overripe pears from the tree next to the carport, the sweet green skins crawling with wasps. I think hard and see the thin strips of iridescent purple plastic streaming from my handlebars and soft purple polka dots marking a white leather banana seat. The white bike, a scrubbed-clean Craigslist find, leans against an oak tree in our front yard. I am six and it’s my birthday. Dad and I ride up and down our short narrow street in the June sunshine. Just as we think I’m getting the hang of it, I realize I haven’t quite grasped how to use the brakes. I careen off the road, flying into a bramble of blackberries sprouting from the dirt next to the creek.
Mom and Dad loved to tell this story, of them shouting at me to turn, to brake, to stop, to do something! My small child’s body headed straight for the sticky unripe fruit and wall of snagging pointed thorns. I was learning to bike so that by the end of summer Dad and I could ride the two miles of back roads to school. From ages five to fourteen, Dad would wake me up every morning, get me out of the house, and off to school. In the afternoons, he would pick me up or I would bike home. I had tried taking the school bus, which stopped at the junction near our house, but like many things at the time, the school bus was too scary for me.
In truth I don’t remember all this, my birthday, the crash, or pulling the thorns out one by one. We haven’t lived in that house in almost twenty years, and I don’t know if there are any blackberries left. What I do remember is the bike, the banana seat with polka dots and the shining streamers. I remember riding to school for the next few years, following Dad up and down the big hill. I remember picking blackberries with Mom, filling old yogurt containers with berry after berry, heavy buckets of sweet black clusters coated in dust. She’d spend summer afternoons making berry pies—Dad’s favorite that I never liked.
As I recall these moments, I remember my father has begun
to lose his memory. He can no longer remember how to use his computer or the television remote. He no longer knows the story of how he and my mother met (It was in the evenings at the local community college. Her friend was taking his extended education ceramics class, and soon going by to pick up her friend became just an excuse to go and talk to him. Their first date he took her down to explore the creek. Their second date was margaritas. It was 1982. My mother was younger than I am as I write this). Growing up, Dad knew everything, could fix anything, define any word, do any math problem. He would repair our toaster, fridge, microwave, replace the washing machine, or single-handedly install a new wood stove while Mom and I were at school. He would never hire a plumber or an electrician, painted the house each year, and repaired the roof himself. When it was time for me to take the SAT, there was no thought of tutors or classes. When I scored in the top ten percent, he made me take it again, saying he knew I could do better if only I would let him help. When I write him letters now, Mom reads them to him. When I text him now, I know it’s Mom who types the reply. How am I so easily engulfed in memories when my father can’t hold on to them anymore? Am I picking up the strings he’s losing track of?
In many ways my parents were my closest friends growing up. I was a shy and precocious only child who spent a lot of time around adults or alone in the backyard. I had trouble relating to other kids in my small school. Dad and I would sit on the porch eating walnuts after school, watching cartoons on Friday nights, and opting for the beach on hot days with soft serve and leftover pizza. We’ve since grown far apart and back together again, but never again as close as we were in my childhood. The transition into adolescence and ultimately adulthood was painful, and it took him becoming sick in my mid-twenties for the scabs to finally scar over.
Since moving to Michigan, I find myself fantasizing about Dad visiting my studio. Sitting on the wooden chair with the checkered cushion I found at a thrift store, mechanical pencil in hand, frowning through his glasses at the Sudoku booklet he inevitably pulls out of his back pocket. He leans back, book in hand, while I
draw at my desk. We talk about my art. He gives insight on what I’m working on and talks about what it was like when he got an MFA in 1978. We listen to The Doors on CD and eat potato chips. When it’s quitting time, we go on a walk and share yellow curry and sticky rice like we did when I was in high school. In my imagination we’re able to have the adult relationship we’ve never had, will never have.
In an effort to better understand him, I recently re-watched my father’s favorite movie, Groundhog Day. In the film, the protagonist Phil Connors is trapped in a single day, reliving it until he learns to get it right, until he learns to become a better person. The producers of the film say that he was trapped in that day for anywhere from ten to ten thousand years. I think about all the missteps in our relationship—all the ways we’ve picked at each other over the years, all the time we spent not talking. How many lifetimes could we spend before figuring those missteps out?
As my father approaches the end of his life, I feel like my sixyear-old self again, careening toward a wall of blackberries, unable to stop. I am riding my bike in the June sunshine, the sun on my hair, and just ahead of me is a wall of barbs. This time I know it’s coming, but I still don’t know how to stop. I keep trying to turn, trying to avoid the approaching pain, but the vines have encircled me. Sticky berries and sharp thorns lay ahead no matter where I go, and I still haven’t figured out how to use the brakes. I can only hope Dad and I keep meeting again and again in our own Groundhog Day. Even if it takes ten thousand years, maybe next time we’ll get it right. He’ll get to me before I hit the bramble and I’ll get to him before the cancer reaches his bloodstream.
