Knowing another human being is like looking through a microscope. What is placed directly under the lens defines our field of view and thus our understanding.
Today, in the midst of more snow and cold, away from the lesbian community I knew in Eugene, Ore., long gone from the radical dyke community of San Francisco, disconnected from a sense of what LGBT “means” and trying to navigate a landscape I don’t understand, I am just me, a complicated collection of experiences and their effects, more than any single lens can take in.
Behind me, on a desk just like the one this computer sits on, against a wall of photos of Oregon rivers, are the sculptures I make when I am overwhelmed with the impact of those experiences. They are the physical shape of my emotional world: a growing chorus, always singing.
The songs they sing are gospel: the music of my childhood. “Precious Lord.” “A Closer Walk,” “Blessed Assurance.” My connection to gospel music is admittedly uncomfortable for me, a heckler of religion, and unnerving to my friends. It doesn’t fit with what their lens perceives. I understand, but I see it a different way. While I find no “salvation” in the message, there is the soothing comfort of familiarity.
I came to sculpting as a way of releasing the maelstrom of responses I have to living in a world where I feel so dislocated. And oddly, gospel and clay make that possible.
My search for solace is the bass line of my adult life — a life that has played out in a time that revealed how brutal humanity can be and how easily we turn our backs, the suffering left to suffer.
There was a time when I did not believe that my country would leave its own to suffer. And it is a testament to how cynical I have become that my faith sounds so naive. In 1987, 41,027 people in the U.S. were dead of AIDS, 71,176 were diagnosed. The president, my president of my country, after years of silence, finally used the word “AIDS” in public. He sided with Education Secretary William Bennett, saying the government should not provide sex education. All around me, my community was dying, and my president said, “… let’s be honest with ourselves. AIDS information cannot be what some call ‘value neutral.’ After all, when it comes to preventing AIDS, don’t medicine and morality teach the same lesson.” We all knew what he meant. “Let the cocksuckers die. It’s what they deserve.”
In those years, I lost friends, but perhaps more devastating, I lost my sense of belonging. It has never fully returned. Which may be why my experience of being “queer” in America weaves its way through so much more than simply my sexuality.
My body, in its contradiction to my affect, has had me needing to use, but ordered out of women’s restrooms. My experience with drugs, short-lived but intense, has me tied inexorably to a circle of poor, emotionally brutalized dykes of color, most of whom were lost or buried by the time I caught a ticket out, because I had a place to go. My cousin’s murder by a serial killer, just one year after I returned to California to exorcise my demons, obliterated the last vestiges of security, as much a result of the random violence of her death as the culture’s nauseating fascination with the vicious murder of women. My past includes too many dead too young —of suicide, of overdose, of AIDS, of breast cancer, of murder— a mountain of losses to grieve. Experiences that, in part, make me who I am; a past that no one here, and so few others, can relate to.
Out here, in the middle of the pond, my past is out of the field of view. Here, I am just a middle-aged lesbian who looks too masculine for most people’s comfort. I teach journalism. I live in a 112-year-old Victorian with my partner and her two kids. I am a good cook. I am — according to the people who are in a position to assess — blunt, witty, and, at turns, cranky — even difficult. So much more pleasant than how I feel.
I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wandering awed about on a splintered wreck I’ve come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty bats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them. — Annie Dillard “Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek”
I find Dillard’s words reassuring. The idea that I can find beauty in this “splintered wreck.”
It is no wonder that sitting here in the flat, cold prairie and looking for solace, I squeeze a chorus of lament out of clay. It makes sense that the music of my childhood cuts through the political, social and spiritual complications that surround it and eases my sense of loss. If I did not know how to pull beauty out of cultural muck, I would have been finished long ago.
“There is a balm in Gilead.”
