Dissolving into Story

Nuggets of past livings feed future meanings of research

Quick note to my paying subscribers: While the entire text of this post is open access, at the very end you will find a sneak preview of a forthcoming microdoc, just for your viewing pleasure. xx

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Recently, I woke to the sight of a full Hunter’s supermoon watching me through my bedroom picture window. Squinting from under my sleep mask, I watched it back as it settled into the peach clouds on the horizon, taking wisps of dream with it through the interstices between day and night. I had been sleep-enacting a recurring story of being at my grandmother’s house, this time looking through old belongings I’d supposedly left there in a large duffel bag. The psychic sorting through mementos of my many lives lived is an ongoing task. This time, I found an old phone that no longer worked, and an old lover who’d learned to live without me (note: the lover was not in the bag, but outside).

I have frequently dreamed of visiting the Hunter Hill farmhouse, which I’ve known all my life—it exists in my subconscious like two-pass interlaced sequences representing the gateway to the afterlife. Through this deep psychic space, I enter vortices of stars to find and connect with missing loved ones on the other side. Since my grandmother (my Nan) died almost two years ago, when I dream visit, she is no longer there, no longer a fixed feature. For a while after her death, she still sat patiently in the kitchen, chuckling with my godmother, her younger sister Carol who’d passed on within mere months after she did. They were waiting together for my grandfather, keeping each other company as they always did while alive, but I think they have since retired from this afterlife post since he is so stubborn, he will live another hundred years (he’s now 92). I haven’t been back for a visit in waking life since before Nan died, as she left her body while I was on the other side of the planet in Australia. I’ve been very reluctant to go home to Hunter Hill, and solidify the sober realization that she won’t be there waiting.

As I contemplate my present dissemination of many of my possessions,¹ I am reminded of the way my grandmother prepared for her death at least a decade before she entered a phase of elderly life where she truly desired to leave her body. At the time she began to do her preliminary tidying of affairs, I was horrified and went into a dismissive form of denial, unprepared to conceive of a reality without her in it. Betty Jean was the family tree, and my sense of rootedness to the earth. True to her powerhouse character, she took charge of the way her life story would conclude long before it did, transcribing her own memories and transmuting her own materials. This was not a simple project, but a complex, kind intention to slowly ease her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, as well as younger siblings, into a reality absent of her.

Every Christmas, she gave me (and all her grandchildren) new transcriptions of her memories: recollections of the occasions and flavours of her life—narrative scripts and kitchen recipes. I have a binder full of these pages: molasses cookies, donuts, brown beans, mincemeat… with humorous interjections. For example, she wrote,

Even though I know none of you will ever use this recipe, it is one I used from the time we were first married… I would make it every time a deer was brought to the house… One fall, after we moved out to the hill Harry was away a lot trucking and did not get a deer. One of the neighbours… had lots of deer meat and offered to cook some and come over and we would make some together. So over she came with lots of meat. Lots and lots. We kept grinding and grinding, meat and apples. Finally, we had so much we did not have anything to mix it in when we got the rest of the ingredients added. What to do??… Why not get the wash tub?? Oh yes, we washed it out all good and poured boiling water in it to sterilize it. In went all the meat, apples, etc., and soon we were on our knees in the wash tub to our elbows mixing the tasty stuff. We did not admit to anyone else what we had done but it was sure good mincemeat and did not cause any problems.

This kitchen lab witchery with meat preparation was a sisterly conspiracy that was confessed only later in her life, to her grandchildren, through narrative recipe sharing. What do we leave behind of ourselves but stories, to be remembered by how we shape these cultural ephemera into more concrete truths, the record of waking dreams? But she, too, began to decumulate aspects of her material self at a certain point. Most impressive to me was the way she dealt with her jewellery collection. She had numerous jewellery boxes full of brightly coloured baubles: endless strands of large beaded necklaces, stacks of plastic bangles, piles of guady, dangly earrings and holiday brooches, almost a different trinket for every day. Any child who visited was obsessed with these treasures and sometimes items would go missing. More valuable jewelry was typically always worn: the flesh of her fingers was compressed into gold rings of every kind, until she was compelled by arthritic impetus to remove them all. The body no longer had use for such embellishment.

Rather than see these lifelong collection of things scattered to pawn shops or fought over after her death, she separated out the least valuable items and placed them in open jewellery boxes in her upstairs guest bedrooms. This was where kids played and could rifle through mismatched adornments to try them on, take them home, or lose them under the bed. The gold rings were not simply given away (though she did give me her 1949 graduation ring). Instead, she entrusted the pile of rings to a jeweller, to smelt them into four individual nuggets. The nuggets became locked away heirlooms for each of her granddaughters, suspended in time on delicate chains, meanings remade.

This activity of digging through my personal achives, and revisiting the book of life my grandmother gave me, is not only resonant with the season (as we approach Halloween and Day of the Dead), but also reflects the work I’ve been doing lately as a close to my exhibition at the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic. Arcanum Sanguinis: Occult Blood will close with the museum’s season close at the end of the month.² As a finissage event, I have been invited to deliver the inaugural Jake Stratton-Kent Memorial Lecture to museum patrons, and the attendees of my previous talk for Treadwell’s Books. This is a closed lecture, exclusive to patrons and my guests from the artist talk, and is a kick-off to the museum’s establishment of an archival research program for their occult library, a rich archive of materials dating from the 1600s onward. This new program is funded through a bequest from Scarlet Imprint, holders of the Stratton-Kent estate.³ I am honoured to be the first lecturer, and excited to speak a bit about my experiences of working with deeply spiritual archival materials, as well as to get spicy as I reveal some of what I’ve been writing these past few months. A curatorial monograph of the exhibition will be published later in November, through the museum’s own imprint, Harbour Witch Press. I’m thrilled to birth this new text into the world, as I present new ideas I’ve been percolating, about the sordid relations between blood, deviant sex/ queerness, pleasure and what I call, anorgasmic biotechevangelism.⁴ More to come about this very soon.

—> For my paying subscribers, whom I deeply appreciate, below is a preview of a brand new microdoc about my stem cell culture work in the Graça lab at the ULisboa’s Gulbenkian Institute for Molecular Medicine. I just received this today from my residency hosts at Cultivamos Cultura, and it will go public online in some weeks, but for now, you get to be first to see it. It begins with a snippet of the time lapse microscopic video I created from 44 hours of my menstrual stem cells cultured in neural growth factors. So, what you see is the cells starting to resemble neuronal types, forming dendritic structures. Enjoy! This was recently screened in Lisbon to a small group of visitors to Ectopia Lab, as part of the Metamorphosis exhibition curated by Anna Isaak-Ross.

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