It is 9:04pm and I am sitting at my desk, in a space which is the essence of me, the wholeness of me, the light in me made manifest, concretized, inflected, made anew every day. It is 9:06 pm and there is a ring of sweet watermelon juice which has escaped from the cracked tupperware that I’ve been carrying around in my bicycle saddle bag all day which dried onto a plastic sewing kit bought from a friend who is now an acquaintance. It pooled over the time I have been here (11:05 am to now), and the mice will enjoy caressing their little mouse tongues over it when I am gone.
Lately, I have been rehearsing a genuflection. In my mind, I slide the keys of my studio front door into the recently wd-40’d slot, and turn them gently—the top one to the right, the bottom to the left—until I hear the familiar thunk. Since I am often the first one here, the alarm squeals its high-pitched scream and I use the code to disarm it. I am a practiced button-pusher, and I catch my grandfathers simple silver wedding band reflecting the light onto the keypad. I have begun to wear it, though it slides down my ring finger in the evenings—a symbol of so much that cannot be understood, echoing through space and time. It is an ouroboros that I once believed sank its teeth into endless pain, but which I now have come to realize represents infinitely more complex aspects of living—a circularity that is both a repetition, a rehearsal of what was, and an emergence of what is becoming. The outward radiating spirals of my healing and my art practice, inspired by the longing of my incarcerated father for beauty and creativity and life, muffled and stuffed down by a lifetime of terror, glint in my eyes as I brush my teeth in the morning. My hands are my grandmothers. My wide cheeks and flat heart-shaped chin belong to a long line of sharp tongued women, all with late onset essential tremors of the right hand who, like me, choose poorly and love hard until they die. I both am and am not any of these people. When I telephone my sister in London I am calling a friend.
Ah, but the alarm has just stopped pealing now, and I turn back towards the door, to lock the lock that E forgot to lock twice last week, to whom I sent a careful private message, and whose stoned and oblivious humanity I have come to have deep faith in. There is a peg-board by the front door and it has all our names on it, all of us who come here in our own version of genuflection, all of us who come here to pray and to cry and to pick up our feet and to make something of—and with—whatever this is again and again and again. I have a red plastic square marker, and beside that is my name in silver glittery sticker letters. I put myself in on the pegboard, not out. I put myself in on the pegboard today and every other day that god has the grace to give me in this body. There is a little red and green polka-dotted party hat sticker next to the last letter ‘A’ with a jaunty silver pom-pom on the top and it says pretty much all you need to know about who I am.
I walk down the stairs, past the long abandoned hair elastic I repeatedly throw in the garbage but which manages by magic alone to find its way back onto the fifth step every morning. The space creaks as if waking from a deep sleep, and my weight shifts from stair to stair. This is how 1889 Franklin opens.
I had a lover once whose touch I think of.
If I were 1889 Franklin, I’d like it if I, Ada, touched me like my old lover touched the human Ada. If I were 1889 Franklin, I’d want as many artists in me as I could get. I’d want them all to know me often and well, in the biblical sense.
The air is cooler in the basement. It’s darker here than upstairs, and I find the two switches—one for the left hand bank of fluorescent lights and one that corresponds to some unknown miasma of electricity somewhere in the building—both of which I flip on. There is a long tunnel, and there are curtains on either side. I walk past the bathroom. The fan gets left on sometimes, and the lights with it, and at times, this frightens me into thinking that someone is here when I am, in fact, always utterly alone. It is only ever me and 1889 Franklin in this procession I rehearse.
The curtains shield others’ spaces from my view, but I do see, through a glass door, the mug of someone who I thought mistakenly knew what it means to be together in our wholeness. It says ‘crabby ‘till I get my coffee’ in thick black writing, while a sweet red crab with a grumpy looking face and upturned pincers graces the side of the vessel.
I catch a glimpse of a burgundy dress form beyond the flutter of another curtain on the right out of the corner of my eye. The couple who share that space are a tall man with limp chin-length hair whose weed inflected puns on our slack channel make me laugh out loud, and his quiet sweet sick wife, a textile artist. I rejoice when I see their dusty gold van parked abruptly on an angle across the street.
On the right there is a purple curtain adorned with small black flowers. A potter works there, and there is a brass bell that will only sound at the end of all things. A brass kitten on a bath-tub chain serves as the clapper, its short arms coming together in anticipation of a raucous exuberance that never comes.
A sculptor works in the next studio, and often the air smells sweet like beeswax. She has a crooked wide grin, and her face looks older than her body, but in a way that only a handful of people to whom she confides her deeper truths would find charming. Then a curly-haired painter, her curtain pulled aside. A coy invitation to look at her neatly folded cloth, and her battalion of pristine paintbrushes standing on end. On the right, a hacked together wooden door is wedged in its frame, crooked like everything else in 1889 Franklin. The inhabitant has been attempting to fix his Honda CB350 for as long as I have ever been here. Once, we had a scintillating conversation about art preparation through our shared wall. He asked me to pause my sewing machine chatter so he could have an interview one day; I stopped and he got the job, and now that Honda might truly never be fixed. I can’t remember what his face looks like, since most of our conversations happen through matte white gypsum, but I think he’s handsome and unusual to look at, in the roguish way us artists often are.
I walk down this corridor, and at the end, the terminus, is me. My space. A dark brown wooden door with a blue hot-glued lego track on it, and a window through which one can barely make out a cacophony of colours and patterns on the opposing wall. The door is unlocked and I turn the slippery knob, and think of the gentle squeak of the hinge that K commented on in early January, back when we’d drive out to Spanish banks and giggle in the pickup for twenty minutes stealing furtive glances at each-other as we undressed. We’d open the other squeaking hinges and slam the cab doors shut so hard the whole truck shook and run screaming and barefoot into the freezing ocean. The sounds of us slipping together into the bay easily mistaken for two people’s ragged and halted mid-fuck gasps.
I turn the knob and I am greeted by a space that has saved me and held me and offered itself to me over and over again. I hike up my 80’s denim skirt and get down on my knees in the threshold, collapsing into a small ball. I have no words for the grace this space has brought into my life. I kiss the concrete floor over and over again. I prostrate myself on the doorstep. It has not been swept for weeks. I cannot stop crying tears of joy.
Then I get up, wipe the dust off my face and shins, put my apron on and begin to work.
***Hey you! The Duplex Group Show starts at 3pm today! There will be PWYC beer and I will be tabling some ceramics! Come out! Come out! Come out!