Listen to “Make Space 40” on Spotify
And tell a friend!
A few weeks ago, we went to C and M’s cabin in the woods. It was misty and cool, and we all agreed that the weather felt appropriate. Autumnal. We drank Märzen. We listened to cold wave tunes and moody techno and synth pop, the sort of stuff on this week’s playlist. We read books, told stories. We made pasta sauce with the last cherry tomatoes from the garden.
Long before dark, we built a fire, and the smoke ran up through the peach-colored aspen leaves in swooping, grey tendrils. As day lurched into night, the girls found long sticks and placed them into the flames, burning the tips until they could whip hot embers through the air, circles and triangles carved in the dusk.
“Do you want to connect?” E asked L. They raised their burning spears to the sky, joining the ends in a single burst of flame. I took a picture and then left a note in my phone. “Girls at the fire” autocorrected to “Furies at the fire.” I like that.
I’ve often thought of L and N as witches, enchantresses, furies. Most linguists trace the word “witch” back to the Old English wicce, a female magician or sorceress. Others argue that the root is Proto-Germanic: to be strong, to be lively. Power and transgression. Energy. Unknowable but not evil. Maybe it’s why I’ve been so pulled to stories with opaque and ambiguous female figures, characters who tease us with their unknowability, who flirt with taboo, characters who subvert not only traditional gender norms, but all norms. Clare in Nella Larsen’s Passing. Scarlett Johansson’s “the female” in Under the Skin. The identical twin sisters in Kelly Link’s “The Specialist’s Hat.” Emily Dickinson in her life and work.
Last summer, I listened to a bunch of Marina Warner’s “Managing Monsters” lectures from 1994. I found myself taking notes.
“The she-monster is hardly a new phenomenon. The idea of a female untamed nature which must be leashed or else will wreak havoc closely reflects mythological heroes’ struggles against monsters. Greek myth alone offers a host—of Ceres, Harpies, Sirens, Moirae. Associated with fate and death in various ways, they move swiftly, sometimes on wings; birds of prey are their closest kin—the Greeks didn’t know about dinosaurs—and they seize as in the word raptor. But seizure also describes the effect of the passions on the body; inner forces, looser, madness, arte, folly, personified in Homer and the tragedies as feminine, snatch and grab the interior of the human creature and take possession.”
Maybe that’s it—like all children, L and N possess me, transform me. It’s a seizure. And what are children if not a reminder of fate? And what is fate if not a reminder of death?
Our neighborhood has recently transformed into a vision of the beyond: skeletons, ghosts, spiders, collapsing pumpkins, hallucinatory lights, plastic bodies with limbs akimbo, hanging figures who scream at passersby. In ten days, L and N will put on costumes, wait until sundown, and go for a walk. They’ll “move swiftly, sometimes on wings.” They’ll “snatch and grab.” They’ll feast.
Thanks for listening.
Your bud,
Ross
Art @ Manon de Boer