Tag: age

wilding

to go forth, into seed, carrying on

If one day when finally tone-deaf I should walk guffawing into the solemn halls, swishing gauze skirts to knock stolid bishops over wooden kings while laughing too loud and blowing smoke rings, it may be observed, by anyone still living who knew me when I was more mild in manner and patient in my time, that she had been a patient woman, once.

But, as these things go, by the time the cork is good and gone, so are the ones with any memory of milder times. So, I will have to be ready when I finally go, to enter with full conviction into the role, because patience, however much a virtue, will only do until the time for waiting has run out, and after so much of that one has to decide to give up the temporary shelter that comes of waiting and dive in full and fast to what certain strangers will describe as the antics of an eccentric elder at fashionable parties, who, after all was just relentless with her offhand remarks, head back and laughing the whole time.

Reparations of a Body

Old woman, new art.

Past, present, future: body. It’s a reaching place, this blood house, this mother’s form––out, out, she paints balloon bodies bursting with anxieties of desire, washing together in tides of pink, crimson, vermillion. She paints the sound and the fury of the gaping mouth, wild eyes; body like a net, like a sac, flower petal breasts like octopus arms: reach.  

The images shock. The nerve, to dare production beyond her reproductive years. With a nod to decorum, might she not try creeping around the flesh?

Given her advanced age, wasn’t she supposed to have floated into something ethereal by now? Suffusions of light, passive serenity, reflections on a lake? Flowers would be appropriate. Ripe fruit, perhaps. 

With flamboyant irony, she rejects easy ripeness, preferring instead to quarrel with time, to paint within her bodies the unresolved contradictions of her still-becoming self.

I am about to find the past, she says. I feel it, she says.  I own it forever. 

Her mornings continue in this manner, her mourning still undone.

***

Inspired by Louise Bourgeois, whose life and works are of deep interest to me lately. This morning, I was reading Rosemary Betterton’s article, Louise Bourgeois, ageing, and maternal bodies, published in a 2009 issue of Feminist Review.

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