Salt

Found glass, large format negative subjected to salt water, moss and beeswax

Water book

Silver gelatin prints

Purification of Vital Wholes-- found glass, large format negative, beeswax and wire

"There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, 'Consume me'."
 Virginia Woolf, The Waves

"Each sex has a relation to madness. Every desire has a relation to madness. But it would seem that one desire has been taken as wisdom, moderation, truth, leaving to the other sex the weight of a madness that cannot be acknowledged or accommodated."
— Luce Irigaray

FlowerEaters

Startled by the chime of metal against porcelain, the queen looks up from the book she is reading and notices a woman seated beside her.  The woman wears a necklace of gunmetal pearls and is leaning forward to collect the last of the soup from the bottom of a wide-mouthed white bowl.  Past seventy with a parched tumble of snowy hair,  her trembling hand releases the broth from the spoon back into the bowl before it reaches her lips.  She looks up and smiles apologetically at the younger woman who pretends not to notice.  The queen closes the small primer that fits neatly into the palm of her hand, and then her eyes, and allows the sensation of the soft velvet lining of the book between her fingers to lead her to a different place.

What she sees in the murky twilight behind her eyes is a room beside a garden. It appears to be something of a corridor rather than a room because of its elongated proportions.  Long white walls are rhythmically pierced by a row of high windows with opaque panes.  A light filled space without a view to the outside.  How she knows that there is a garden beyond those walls, she isn't sure. 

Perhaps it is the heavy smell of opened lilies, the pollen of which she can almost taste on her tongue.

 She recalls how her throat had all but closed up with the powdery emission.  A plain wooden table runs the length of the room and ten chairs are placed at an even distance from one another around the table. A single white bowl marks each setting.  It is clear that the room not been inhabited for a long time.  Cobwebs cling to the corners of the high walls and there is a thick layer of dust on the table.  She realizes it is most likely pollen from the lilies that she knew must be near.

She leans into the threshold of that space with hands on the door jam,  not knowing whether to flee or surge forward, when unexpectedly a group of women begin to file in through a door at the opposite end of the room.   The burst of activity punctures the hushed languor and the queen instinctively stands at attention as the women walk in procession in front of her.

 They are old women without garments to cover them, withered women whose flesh hangs on them like tattered curtains on their skeletal rods.  What the queen notices first, she remembers, are their fingers, which are long and loosely hinged by tendons that you could almost see beneath the sheath of skin; fingers fanned out, their hands project off the ends of their arms like dead starfish.  It is a display of bodies that are no longer supple and alive, but arid like something burnt by the sun.

 They appear tall and abnormally pale in the strange pallid light of the room and they have the air of a blustery orchard enduring a long cold season.  Trees wrapped in ragged silhouettes against a blank sky.

The presence of the lithe and lonely queen seems to go unnoticed by the women, and even though she feels the flush  of uncertainty, even fear,  she finds that she cannot move.  The muted stench of pollen in the room grows with intensity and the cumbersome air holds her firmly at the portal where she stands. For comfort, she begins to sing to herself a silent incantation, “there are nine women, nine…”

 As she muses over this tally, the women begin to seat themselves at the table, bowing their heads over the bowls. Without ceremony, or even a furtive glance between them, they begin to dip their fierce appendages into the white vessels.  Each pulls up a white flower, a tiny, exotic, lily-like flower, which promotes silvery layers of petals radiating from a blood red center. 

They bring the flowers up to their mouths and begin to chew.

 The queen parts her lips at the sight of the women eating flowers. They do not eat slowly or deliberately as one might expect an old woman to eat, instead they gobble them down, swallowing hard after each bite.  Their consumption of the petaled delicacies hastens with each mouthful and there appears to be a pleasurable desperation in the activity for them.  “Greedy women” the queen finds herself thinking, but she longed to know what the flowers tasted like. Were they salty or sweet? Dry like bread or quite viscous like a pudding?  Surely, they must be sweet like the small spun sugar confections her maids were forever temping her with.

 The queen feels her tongue move across her bottom lip and imagines there is a bit of nectar there.

The women begin to take the flowers into themselves in greater gulps and soon it is whole handfuls of the blossoms that they are forcing into their open mouths.   Rigidly they release themselves from their chairs so that they may place the flowers on one another's dry lips. What intrigues the queen most, who is beginning to feel dizzy in the dense air, is that the flowers keep bubbling up to the surface of the bowls, rising up toward the light so that they must be taken again and again without rest.  With increased haste, the women begin to cup both of their hands to retrieve them as they rise, and still, the flowers seethe over the sides of the bowl and spill out on to the table in cruel abundance.  Soon the table is laden with fallen blossoms.  Sepal, calyx and anther, they begin to quiver where they lay with a life force of their own sprouting great leafy vines from their ruby cores.  Tendrils rush down the table in a stream of verdigris as if a washwoman had thrown water from a bucket to clean the table after a raucous banquet.

The women, undaunted by the organic clamoring around them continue to pursue their sustenance with renewed hunger, indeed almost savagely.   Vines curl up around their faces and through their hair as they peer into the bowls. The queen moves a step closer, and as she does, she imagines for a moment that she can see her grandmother's face sitting across from her at the table of her youth. The old woman is seen the way the queen liked to remember her, smiling as the steam rose from her pot of tea and enveloped her in its warmth.  As she leans toward the table to greet this ghost, she realizes that she has lost her sight in what has become the vast wilderness of the room.

 A blizzard of light had consumed the women and their flowers. 

Without her eyes to distract her ears from their gift, she hears a distant fluttering within the luminous marrow of the memory, and she knows it to be a small buff colored moth throwing itself against the windowpane.

 

I have come to a still, but not a deep center,
A point outside the glittering current;
My eyes stare at the bottom of a river,
At the irregular stones, iridescent sandgrains,
My mind moves in more than one place,
In a country half-land, half-water.

I am renewed by death, thought of my death,
The dry scent of a dying garden in September,
The wind fanning the ash of a low fire.
What I love is near at hand,
Always, in earth and air. 

Theodore Roethke