December 31st, New Year’s Eve
A fog inbound is defacing the small city line that can be normally seen at this hour; it’s around three in the afternoon in Cleveland and I am approaching the wrong bridge. I am approaching the Detroit-Superior Bridge and can only tell because the Detroit-Superior Bridge is the bridge on Detroit Ave. If I have to drive into the city, usually I like to take the Hope Memorial Bridge where you pass the 43-feet-tall stone guardians who bring the people in the cars good luck. Where, after crossing, you stop at the Westside Market and order falafel from the fish stand. Where you pass through the livable parts of downtown, near the all-boys private catholic highschool that someone’s son I used to know had attended, St. Ignatius. (Jack took me on my first date to O’Malley’s.) Whereas, when taking the Detroit-Superior Bridge there are no pit stops, no “fun-times”, no living.
The Detroit-Superior Bridges’ real name is the Veterans Memorial Bridge, but none of us driving across would ever call it that. It wasn’t a bridge worth memorializing to us, the drivers. Today the sides of the bridge aren’t visible at all. The only thing I could see while driving through the fog was its overhead steel arch that had come out to greet me only as I entered. A great fog holds the same silence as a great snow. It engulfs the same way, we get scared of god-almighty things we know are there but can’t see. The opaqueness covers the sides of the bridge and there’s this idea that if I let go and let the car swerve into the fog maybe I won’t tumble off the road and fall down into “The Flats” and burned Cuyahoga. ‘Breathe.’ Telling myself I need to focus on my driving, I turn up “Lost in a Fog” by Eiji Kitamura to drown myself.
It is inescapable; the scratching of an itchy sweater, the crying and whining of a child that wants fed, “the probing thought skips after me, whining like a sibling that wants in. She trips and stumbles on the cracks of the sidewalk. Complaining”, the what-ifs that weigh down. All intrusive thought is stupid, and stupidity itself is an intrusive thought. Like tiredness stupidity– It creeps up on you slipping into the corners of your mind. To stay stupid is one thing but to be labeled as someone who is smart and then be downgraded to stupid is an entirely different form of shame. It’s like pissing your pants in the first grade, it’s embarrassing to go backwards. Somedays, I wish I could just stop thinking and become human rot. I feel sometimes as if I do not live this way– If I choose to think less that my life is less valuable. I want to go somewhere, do something where I can have a thought without having to first meet it in the lingering stages of conception, think with lack of physical exertion.
“Do you know which room has the Georgia O’Keeffe?” I ask the lady at the front desk. I had gone to the local museum for her. I had read an essay I like titled her name about her process, and the experience of viewing her work. I had enjoyed the essay greatly, and I was on holiday at home, and bored, so I went. I wanted to see if viewing her work would invoke a similaring experience in me as it had to the writer of the essay’s very young-at–the-time daughter.
“I know you are closing in 90 minutes, and I don’t want to leave finding it to chance,” I explained. I want to tell myself to ‘Shut up!’ That ‘You don’t have to explain to her why you need help. That, in fact– that is what she is there, at the desk for.”
“There are two by her, which one are you looking for?”
“The one of the flower.” They could have both been flowers. O’Keeffe painted lots of flowers, that’s what she’s known for, her white flower painting of Jimson Weed.
She’s typing, looking up only when it seems she has an answer for me.
“That one is located in room 222,” she takes out a pen and to circle the room on my paper map that I’ve offered up into the space between us.
“What room is the other in?”
“That one is also in room 222, opposite wall.” Why did she ask me to distinguish my choice, then?
I start to walk away. I walk back.
“Could you circle the room with the Water Lilies?”
“We rented those out.”
“Yeah, I saw them last year at school. I had hoped they were back.”
“I thought we gave them to ?” She says as if her and I had taken an Exacto knife, cut the work out, and shipped it ourselves. I looked into where “The Lilies” were. It turns out that there are around two-hundred-fifty “Water Lily” paintings, it’s a whole damn collection. I feel jipped, why talk about having one as if you are special when there’s over two-hundred copies? I leave the front desk and, taking the escalator in the lobby, less than ten minutes later I’m standing in front of a white flower entitled “Morning Glory with Black”(1926). Now, ‘With Black’ what?’ I don’t know.
“Although many critics interpreted O’Keeffe’s flower paintings as reflections of femininity in general and female sexuality in particular, the artist strongly opposed such readings. Throughout most of her career, she frequently attempted to persuade others to discuss her work without referring to her gender, writing on one occasion, “I have always been very annoyed at being referred to as a ‘woman artist’ rather than an ‘artist.’” Reads the plaque glued to the wall next to the painting. You know, the ones that give little synopsis for goers who don’t want to pay for the headphone’d tours.
“You hung all your associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if you think and see what I think and see– and I don’t,”(The White Album, 1979). When I had pulled the garvey out of what I pretend is a persian silk scarf trying to get rid of the marking “two-dollars” I had ripped a hole. Leaving little long strings hanging out of the muted yellow paisley, I have three options now; I could leave the strings as they are, I could pick at them and finding a longer one unravel my scarf more, or I could try to find a color string to match and cover up what I have done. What choice would you pick? I picked the first, I didn’t want to ruin the scarf more but I was also too lazy, too broke to find more string. Whatever answer you choose, each answer is a fine way of living. The important part is to recognize you made a hole by being impatient, by not seeing the value in what “you”(I) had just bought, by only seeing things through the lens which we have commonly associated them with. The tag says “two-dollars” so I value this item at two-dollars, this makes the hole less upsetting. I view this flower as sentimental because that is what I have learned. I have been taught that flowers are always sentimental and feminine, but from what was this taught and why?
I look over at the opposite wall to “The Mountain, New Mexico” (1931). I don’t get any closer, simply looking over from “With Black” I can see it fine. Not feeling pulled to spend anymore time or distance with it; I tend to be pushed away from art that tells it like it is,when it feels objective and cold. I like to feel as if the maker had to strip themselves a little. Every artist has a centralized line that runs through their most notated works. Nagging them, a concept they are trying to make sense of, grasp onto and pull out of themselves. As if the inside of their stomach is a cantaloupe that has been scraped to the green unflavorful rhine but whoever did the scrapping just left it all there, and now it’s the owner of the cantaloupe’s job to get it all out, however they please. When you are able to get it all out, you feel as if you will never feel again. You are done with cantaloupes, this empty one will live within you forever. Then one day, maybe in a month, unknown to you, you will be given a new cantaloupe that lies in your stomach and over time it too will be scraped to the green unflavorful rhine and it too will be your job again to find a way to get it out. Sometime’s to get it out one has to paint over two-hundred flowers.
To me, O’Keeffe painted her flowers objectively to understand something about the object’s innate femininity of them. Paralleling the objective innate femininity she feels is linked to her artistry and her being a woman. She also may have just liked doing it that way, but I refuse to believe one paints over two-hundred paintings of flowers because they simply enjoy it. She only started painting landscapes of New Mexico, Santa Fe, after being told she couldn’t. There was an outside voice directing her, it was a different cantaloupe. Much like with the flowers, she had wanted to prove something. Only this time it was not to herself but to others.
My mother told me the next day that during her 25th Wedding Anniversary they were in Santa Fe and had gone to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum there, in-town. She told me they had lots of flowers and paintings of the desert.
My favorite painting I saw that day was “Blue Bathers” by Chris Ofili, a contemporary painter. It was a large canvas with different shades of blue reflecting. Ofili is most known for his work “The Holy Virgin Mary” (1996), a painting that rests on two pieces of elephant dung with a third placed on top of Mary’s breast. “Blue Bathers”(2014) is a part of a larger collection of blue paintings, the most prominent called “Blue Devils”. Ofili associated the shades of dark blue with the strong presence of night he found in his new home, Trinidad, and the “Blue Devil” a common Trinidadian Folklore. The blue devil, called the jab molassie, is an old character present during Carnival. With root’s tied to days of slavery, the jab molassie represents the spirit of a slave who died by falling into a bat of molasses at a sugar factory. I didn’t know this when I saw “Blue Bathers”. I didn’t know who Ofili was or of his mother “Mary”. Ofili was just able to make you feel the color blue. In viewing his work I could know nothing. An ability that made me feel indebted to learn of the work’s origins and of its painter’s.
I have extra time, so I go to sit in room 107. When I would visit as a child, it was my favorite room to sit in; in the middle of the room were(are) Bakenmut and Nesykhonsu.
I was eighteen when I went to see the three buried Magi in Cologne, Germany. The ones from the biblical story Gasper, Melichor, and Belthazar who gave frankincense, gold, and myrrh. I didn’t know they were real people, to me they were just a story. My mother wanted to go inside Kölner Dom that day to see them. She told my sister and I “It brings you good luck to see the remains of a saint.” There was a nun at the door that made my sister cover her shoulders. Thrusting the bucket of clothes towards her, she takes one and tries her best to cover herself. The triple sarcophagus built of gold and wood placed behind the high altar could be seen as we walked down the nave, approaching past pews of tourists. During WWII, there is a story of how the allies bombed the city fourteen times, somehow always missing the church. There are photographs of bridges and houses demolished with just this place upright. It’s said that the bombers purposefully missed the church because of the Magi. You go to visit a museum, you never see a saint on display. You never see people go into old churches and excavate the sarcophagus, the coffin, the human. Their culture isn’t sacred to the institution, they aren’t Jesus so they aren’t important. If you are not a white man, then you are fair game. If you are not a white man, then you don’t deserve eternal rest.
Bakenmut and Nesykhonsu were found buried together during excavations in Thebes, modernly known as Deir el-Bahri. In the hills near the river where Pharaohs used to lay, now in the Third Intermediate Period (between the Late Dynasty 21 – Early 22) they’ve been moved to rest in the Delta. These hills are for others like Bakenmut and Nesykhonsu. Bakenmut’s, painted with the old Pharaoh Tutmose the Third in the center holding a crook and flail, wearing a divine headdress with the crown of Oasiris and a sun disk, symbolizes the connection he wishes to have with him in the afterlife. Nesykhonsu’s shows the story of her funeral at her feet. A relationship to the gods in the center, her hieroglyphs don’t tell you anything about her but rather are all prayers. The prayers tabulated tell the story of the Sun God, Ra-Horakhty, and Osiris, God of the Dead. (They play with the other.) To be with the sun, you rise with him in the east and sail with him into the west. At night, he meets Oasiris to help travel back to the east to rise again. Of the funeral at her feet, Nesykhonsu can be seen as she was in life dressed in linen cloth, holding an offering jar she stands in front of her own resting place: the hills of western Thebes, with a cow who has another sun disk on their head. Bakenmut held importance in power; Nesykhonsu held importance in life.
As I sit on the floor in front of Nesykhonsu, two boys talk about her, sitting down farther away. They look clean as if they wash their faces with bar soap and drink their coffee with packets of Splenda. Clean and fake, trying to rid themselves of their vulnerabilities. ‘Why do they try to hide themselves away?’ I want to sit inside the skull of a man and find the boy. I want the chance to live inside the male narration from youth to old age, and see this stranger looking at Nesykhonsu. The thought of sharing myself overtakes me, with it a hope that he shares back. That maybe within him I can find the vulnerabilities, and make them unshameful. I want to trace my fingertips along either side of his face through the front strands of hair and place them behind his ears, having the four out of five rest there. Let my thumbs fan across his cheeks, similar to how wipers of a car’s window move when they’re cleaning as you drive through a blizzard. For my right thumb, holding a sterling-silver ring, to migrate like a monarch or goose from his cheek to the middle line of the lower lip, guiding his jaw open ‘There just like that,’ he would become a mouth breather, and I would have him looking like a carp or trout. I would have him with a fish face and pinball eyes darting into mine and across my forehead, looking for something to say “Go!” Instead, I wish to just hold him there in fish-faced silence. I want to know that I can do that. That as their eyes search I can reposition hands on either side of their face, kiss both cheeks, and walk away. I want something that’s good now, and that in the long-run doesn’t matter when it ends.
Two women show up, asking to be taught and the one boy says “We’re talking about how this is such a relationship to death,” gesturing to Nesykhonsu. I want to slap him; the sound similar to the beads from a bracelet, tiny unrhythmic hits, breaking, scattering on the ground. (They would be purple.) ‘Try again,’ I was to hiss at him as if I am still holding his face. The face now morphing into some else’s. ‘Use her name,’ I’ve taken up a likeness to a banshee yelling of his mistakes. He could’ve been smarter, she had asked him too. ‘Nesykhonsu.’ I hear her agreeing, throat noises and nods, she can only agree or disagree. If she disagrees, she ruins what she has spent her time cultivating. As a woman, I used to give a part of myself to be wanted. I thought it’s better to be perceived as less and be more, than to be perceived as more and be less. But it is a fool’s errand to try to make a certain person want you. So lately, I am trying to sit with my own mediocrity. Simply to be where I am in terms of knowledge and skill. Never make throat noises to apologize. Disagree only if I disagree, and agree only if I do. In the past, I would just nod my head. I would try to become a reflection because what person doesn’t like to look at those? When a woman shows an intellect differing from that of a weak man’s oftentimes he turns her away. He is used to the comfort of agreement. If you can be told you’ve done enough, you’re the best of us, why would you ever seek change or correction? He has become an accomplice in his own weakness’. Weak men want weak women, but I refuse to continue to allow myself to be weak in the vain of a want. “It is as if when I am viewed as woman—when I am given, when I am blessed with that humanity from you; my man, my boy— I am stripped of another integral one all at the same. I can be woman or I can be everything else.” I say this to no one but myself.
When I was eighteen I saw the incorrupt body of Saint Catherine. Known as the Saint of Silence, she would say “I know nothing.” Her mother died when she was nine years old, the little girl finding a statue of the Madonna declared her as her mother. After joining the convent when twenty-four, she would have multiple talks with Mary at night, her presence resembling the “sound of swishing silks” I read. She said she believed the Mother of God chose her because “(she) knew nothing, (she) was nothing.” We stumbled on the church she was housed in on our way to go see the reworking of “Napoleon Crossing the Alps” done by Banksy. One with a woman riding whose head is wrapped in cloth, he used the well-known piece to comment on the injustice of the 2010 ban of face coverings in public. The cloth symbolizing a niqab worn by Muslim women highlights the ban’s infringement on the people’s right to practice their religious faith. It’s a need of separation between church and state. We had passed the church and my mother had said “It brings you good luck to see the remains of a saint,” pulling me in. I stared at her incorrupt body, displayed in a more public way than the Magi. Untouched by time, it’s said divinity interferes to keep them this way, lucky to not age.
I have always been a lucky person in the ways that count and unlucky in the ways I want to. Maybe I have dreamed so harshly that I have choked them to death. I have given such an unnecessary amount of space to those certain rooms of life. I have taken the room and have made it uninhabitable. I have chopped the head of the duck off, metaphorically saying “Yes the duck can breathe now, but now the duck is also dead.” The xylophone plays, and a voice over the loud-speker tells us it is time to make our ways out. I let the boys and their respective couples walk in front of me, arms linked, his sneaker’s laces untied. I hold myself back, unfolding and pressing my palms into the cold tile to pick me up. I walk slowly behind them, staring at Nesykhonsu for a minute to give room. I didn’t want to hear them talk. If I had wanted to hear them I would’ve, in places like these a cough has an echo.
On the way home, my family calls. First my dad then my mom, They want to know where I am. “I’m driving home,” I say. They wanted to know what I was doing. “I told you I wanted to go see that painting before I left, and it was on the east side of town and there was that fog today mom.” They told me that they had picked up an order of Chinese food, and would put mine in the fridge for later. I say I’m probably going to eat the egg rolls now but save the lo-mein for the next day.
“I didn’t get you any egg rolls, sorry,”
“Why not?”
“Because you don’t like them, the cabbage, the duck sauce. Your sister likes them and you don’t.”
“Yes, I do. I like the cabbage and duck sauce.”
It frustrates me that she views me as the opposite of my younger sister so much that she thinks I don’t like egg rolls. It’s a stupid frustration that will pass in a few hours. We’ve been ordering the same thing from the same place, “King Wah” owned by the Hahn Family, the same thing my whole life and it had frustrated me that my mother didn’t remember this about me and had just thought I would want “different”.
Later on in the week, I would get a call from my father telling me I had to call a Sergeant who had called him. He had picked up the phone, then gotten off the phone and called me to pick up the phone since I was no longer nearby. In the fog, on New Years Eve, I had been involved in a Hit ‘n Skip and had not realized it. I call the Sergeant.
“If you’re unaware that you hit them, then it’s not a Hit ‘n Skip. Just let the insurance company handle the damages, and focus on your schoolwork ma’am,” says the Sergeant on the call.
“Thank you, and Happy New Year!” I responded.
“Happy New Year,” he hangs up first.
After the hangup, I find myself pulling at a string ‘Why is it a Hit ‘n Skip is only charged that way if you are aware of the hit?’ The driver of the car in the fog ahead of me claimed a young white woman in a Subaru rear ended them slightly, looked shocked, switched lanes and sped away on Brookpark Rd. at 5 p.m, December 31st. They followed after the car, and copied down the license plate and gave it to the Sergeant who called my father, the owner of the vehicle, who called me. My license plate number, my vehicle, my location, my depiction. I did it. I Hit ‘n Skipped unaware or not.
‘So Why was I not charged?’ The idea that even if you hit someone unintentionally you still damage their vehicle. Quite frankly, I don’t think anyone goes out onto the road with the intention to cause an accident. If you do cause an accident most people will pull over, exchange telephone numbers, offer to pay for any repairs. Sometimes it’s foggy and you don’t see what you have done. In those cases, the person in the vehicle accidentally jostled may take down your license plate and call the local authorities. They may call up their friends and family, talking of the exchange, asking for legal advice on how to proceed. It may get back to you that you, unintentionally, have hurt someone. When that happens it’s best to admit unawareness and apologize for the damage of the faltering action. Many times that’s what the wronged party wants to hear: Accountability for the situation.
Why did admitting my unawareness of my actions to the Sergeant suddenly change the course of my reprimand? Is it that when we take accountability, when I agreed that I had rear ended them, we make the other party’s view of the collision feel heard? Everyone wants their opinions to hold value, and in telling someone that you hear them, maybe then, they can stop talking? That in verbally confirming my ownership of the ideotic action is equal to any monetarily valued number I would’ve had to pay out of pocket in the form of a fine?
This form of accountability worked on call with the Sergeant that afternoon, and is my normal method of apology. I don’t know if it will work the next time, though. All Hit ‘n Skips are not the same, some require a different response.
On January 1st, my mother bought me two egg rolls.