Dark Art of Selection
Don't avoid the Void
KOTATSU
Inauguration Day (Jan 20) squats on my mental calendar as a dark mark, a taunting chasm increasing with greater proximity. Into this black hole, anything may fall. Our sanity, our democracy, our civility. Who knows what will happen in Trump’s America 2.0 when the Gulf gets a new name, we wrangle Greenland from Vikings, and the dividing line between us and former friend Canada gets a Sharpie redraw. For now, we have for now. This time between. That possibly productive if sometimes eerie liminal word I’ve employed in this space. A sort of white-knuckle quiet before the storm where I’ve enjoyed a reprieve for a while from this “President’s” voice—knowing it’s soon—too soon—time to start stealing myself to more frequently hear his awful yawp on a maddening loop in my morning NPR news fix.
For now, it’s been possible to linger a little longer in this holiday mood and not up the ante to high anxiety stage, not yet, please. Only gently ease back into work and school and agendas and deadlines after the break. Consider a word of self-care: perhaps nurture (as recommended “word of the year” by my friend Dana). Nourish. In my house this smacks less of escapism than seeking: we continue to craft (paint ornaments for next year, make thank you cards for holiday gifts) surrounding our new Japanese “hot table” or Kotatsu, a low heater you pile blankets on, cover with a table top and then snuggle under in a shared space. This is our hot table moment. Come connect while we can, staving off the great basement frigidity at the boundaries. Under here is furnace-like with a very velvety darkness into which my daughter is a little afraid to insert her legs blindly. What if there’s a spider under there I can’t see, she worries. No matter, it will have been fried dry by now. Fire hazard? This is supposedly deemed safe.
Rather than be debilitated by the fear of empty spaces (i.e. horror vacui), there’s the desire to embrace them, dive in, and decorate. Don’t avoid the Void, but lean in, get used to it.
SOOT
So harshly this week is our willful padding disturbed, the false reverie broken by not a metaphorical Horseman of the Apocalypse but the real horses fleeing Eaton fires that decimate hundreds of homes in hours. Southern California is suddenly a steaming pile of scorched earth with all its well-heeled refugees; so rare when a cataclysmic climate change-induced event actually impacts all levels of society, need-blind, and not just the poorest and most vulnerable. Perhaps from this massive loss, some real policy might come? Too soon?
New year, new you? I don’t make specific resolutions for January as I am constantly dangling some new dream-carrots and ever-inventing myself no matter the season. I don’t much need a ball-drop to inspire that. But if we’re going to abide by Darwin’s Natural Selection plan—and we do believe in science, for now, yes?—then we have to get onboard for some exercises to train us for this sort of Olympian survival of the fittest. Personally, I often think—with my lifelong astigmatic eyes that always had glasses or contacts until I got artificially lasered to 20/20 some decades ago and only now circle back with everyone else in midlife to requiring readers—that I wouldn’t have survived as a nearsighted cavewoman, surely snatched up unawares by a lion. My insufficient mammary glands wouldn’t have been enough to feed a baby without supplementary formula. Or before me, my mom who also couldn’t supply enough, and, how various invented products propped us up historically and enabled our otherwise unlikely survival. So, the fittest or the ones who can best purchase fitness. The richest? The luckiest? The most insured?
And so it goes in our plutocracy now, that the wealthiest can declare the end of fact-checking, or maps, or body autonomy, or decency. Recolonize? Why not!
Be still my nervous heart. It’s a fine time, in this darkening space, this smokier moment, to try to meditate. Catch your clogging breath. The way I literally enact this while sitting still on my bed is I play this mix from my Brookstone sound machine (the option called “meditate”):
To me, this audio backdrop to my meditation strikes just the right mix of bizarre warbling alien with a scent called soothing lake. I hear the calm surface of the water ebbing, so I picture myself, eyes closed, paddling in a kayak toward a thin distant point in the water. There’s a white morning mist rising over the water and I breathe it in deep into my lungs. Take in the whiteness and let it absorb my organs as I integrate attempts at: positivity, good intentions, gratitude. And, oops, out comes the evil exhale of this sooty blackness which reminds me of the dust motes in Studio Ghibli films, the soot sprites (susuwatari) of “old abandoned houses that leave black dirt in their wake” in My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away. I breathe out the poison cloud of any negativity.
One might say “bless you” in the old timey sense of knowing that the toxins in me have been excised, leaving a vacuum ripe for saving. Instead of giving or receiving this weird greeting, I prefer, gesundheit. Good health.
VOIDS
I was partial to my black cat (RIP Poe) because she was black, not in spite of it. I am well aware of how many people do the opposite and purposely avoid them. Black cats don’t get adopted as much since people assume they are less friendly (not true!), not to mention they aren’t even supposed to cross your path for fear of eons of bad luck. I knew all this, but only just learned online in a “black cat” forum—for where else would I web-wander from the Kotatsu—that they are commonly referred to as Voids. Void because they blend right into your black blanket, or the nighttime. All you see is eyes. But my Poe also had a white spot on her chest to distinguish her, a supposed mark of God. She would have been spared from being exterminated by those who might have once thought a pure black cat communed with witches and Satan. She was spared genetically I believe, but then landed with me by chance, was chosen, and somehow kept choosing me in return again and again, staying on here in a series of households between Brooklyn and Sleepy Hollow for 18 years, innumerable lives, purring cheek to schadenfreude cheek.
BLACKENED BOSCH
Because I don’t avoid the darkness but jump right in, at least I’d like to have a little semblance of control. And so comes my latest art obsession of late, which is to buy a set of Hieronymous Bosch prints and blacken them, selectively. I take the dense chaos before,
zoom into certain details to highlight, black out the rest, and spit out something like this fish-flying couple over their little flame:
I busy myself at the hot table (and earn some extra cash for the treehouse distraction plan) by selling these on Facebook Marketplace. Twice someone has come along and bought the whole set of however many I had remaining. After each purge, I go buy another set of Bosch from some obscure German reseller and do it again, selecting slightly different weird scenes to contrast against the severe blankness each time. A sample gallery here:
EDGEWARD
My college friend Alma is among those who lost their homes and everything they own in the LA fires. She isn’t an actress, wealthy, or famous, just one of the best, brightest souls, whose existence (lifelong in Altadena as is her husband) abounds with music, art, animals, and her expansive connections to their unique community we are all now learning about. With this same incredible spirit and grace, she shares that she may be temporarily unhoused, but never homeless.
Alma writes:
Like so many others in Altadena and in Los Angeles, we lost our home in the fire. But we are well. My in-law’s house miraculously still stands and so we have a place to stay when the smoke clears. We got out safely with our most important musical instruments, Bigote the boa and our cat Squid. Dear Bishop is well and helpful. As strange as it may sound, I feel freed of so many things I was carrying—and now I can move forward with a blank page. We pray for strength and support for everyone who is suffering loss at this time. Thank you for all your thoughts, prayers and good wishes. God bless!
Home means so much to me, in word and (property) deed, that I was brought to tears by her message and shared it (along with a subsequent inspiring GoFundMe to rebuild that their student made on their behalf) with my girls, who have been known to complain lately about the winter chill beyond the hot table, and my heightened frugality temporarily as I try to trade up on our Catskill land. How lucky we are from this distance. What a luxury that we can play this game in the morning over oatmeal and yogurt: what would you save from the fire if you suddenly had to flee? Of course ourselves and any creatures (currently zero) but then what? Photos, phones, which is the same difference now. For me, although clunky, a whole small white curio cabinet of dead relative mementos, or better yet, perhaps just the words about them, which is all nicely packed already here on this platform.
Home|body was my proud title for my Substack for the first year and a half or so. Being home is my favorite place to be, tucked into my introversion. But now, mere moments away from my two-year anniversary writing weekly essays, I find myself increasingly venturing out: haunting these edges of the wise and weird, riding a fine line between sage and strange. I wanted to throw off my hermit shell (the self-consciousness) and like the stray pets more freely roam the night. The secret subtext of newly named Edge|wise is “can I get a word in?” but I’m not going to ask.
You have to admire Alma’s unflinching stance on the possibility of the blank page in such a dark moment. Truly, what she can demonstrate is as long as you have your art, your loved ones, your animals, the rest is immaterial. A mere matter of perspective. The art of selection. Who sits with us around the hot table. We can feel privileged from here, on the East Coast, to be so far away. But more miraculously, just imagine how someone like Alma, so deep into this tragedy, can find a way to feel lucky from within.
As we approach the darkness, it isn’t the white light at the end of the tunnel we seek, but the fact that our eyes themselves alight. Worse than any anger—natural, forgivable, useful—would be our apathy.
In tonglen meditation, you reverse it: breathe in the black, heavy, negative, sticky—the susuwartari soot—then exhale the light, positive, clear, and good. You eat the evil. You transmute it.
So much here as always but how necessary to have this burst of light and wonder before the darkness of who knows what comes. That table sounds delightful and bizarro, I need more pics pls. And thank you for the nurture shout out. I wish I had time and space and energy for creating but lately it seems all I can do is stay above water. Your blackened Bosch’s are incredible.