Author’s note: The information cited about Ana Mendieta’s life and work in this essay comes from my recent visit to her Tate Modern retrospective, in addition to three secondary source materials (all recommended): Two 2026 articles about Mendieta, one by Rebecca Mead for The New Yorker and another by Melissa Denes for The Guardian, as well as the first season of the Death of an Artist podcast hosted by Helen Molesworth in 2022, which I recently binged. (Thank you to omniscient friend Adele Bertei for the recommendation.) I’m grateful for these women for furthering the reach of Ana’s voice.

I write today about madwomen.

As one myself, I believe madwomen deserve to be talked about and, most urgently, deserve the platform to do so for themselves.

Who are we so-called “madwomen”? In their book The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), a classic of feminist theory (though dated by its second-wave disregard for postcolonial perspectives and intersectionality more generally—I recommend Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens for a fuller way of seeing), scholars Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar characterize the madwoman of English literature as a catchall for everything woman ought not be. That semi-lucid dame who’s foaming at the mouth and locked in the attic of some man’s stately manor? She represents woman’s “id,” displaying the traits a more chaste protagonist simply could not be written to have—sexuality, anger, ambition. At the same time, she’s the consequence of society’s virgin-whore binary (Gilbert and Gubar term this the angel-monster binary): Women can only be either pure good or pure evil, each necessitating the other. Most compelling (to me), and central to the authors’ argument, the madwoman is a female author’s stand-in, embodying values and beliefs that can’t be made explicit on the page.

Having purloined a battered copy at age fourteen to read along to the dulcet tones of riot grrrl, I found The Madwoman in the Attic dissatisfying. The texts it examines are about two centuries old, their authors—the Brontë sisters, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, George Eliot—beyond the veil. Was I left to conclude that these women writers were mad, subsumed their madness into the madwomen in their books, and that’s that, because they’re not here to speak for themselves? Are we to accept that madness, though a “negative” quality (and that is certainly something we should question), was something even a feminist perspective must merely accept in its female figures, fictional or otherwise? I much prefer the conception of madness wrought by Emily Dickinson, another of the authors featured in Gilbert and Gubar’s book, in her poem no. 435:

Much Madness is divinest Sense –

To a discerning Eye –

Much Sense – the starkest Madness –

‘Tis the Majority

In this, as All, prevail –

Assent – and you are sane –

Demur – you’re straightaway dangerous –

And handled with a Chain –

Here, Dickinson elevates madness—that very feminine thing—to the status of virtue. Her poem is a gift, because for much of recorded history, the feminine has been seen as corrupt, us females simply mad. And the punishment for this is often imposed silence. Writing in the 15th century, the French theologian Jean Gerson cautioned that “the female sex is forbidden on apostolic authority...to teach in public, that is either by word or by writing...All women’s teaching, particularly formal teaching by word and by writing, is to be held suspect...The reason is clear: common law—and not any kind of common law, but that which comes from on high—forbids them. And why? Because they are easily seduced, and determined seducers; and because it is not proved that they are witnesses to divine grace”.1 All emotions and no rationality, we women—into the attic, we go! We deserve neither to be seen nor heard.

I’d argue this and other forms of misogyny and gendered discrimination over the centuries are grounds for women equating themselves with the abject; the result being some of the rawest art ever made. The abject is that which is “other” (e.g., the female to the male), that which is beyond the border of what society considers normal, that which disturbs the order of Gerson’s common law, the uncanny and unclean inconvenience of a corpse that mocks the living, the spilled blood that belongs inside the body. According to Julia Kristeva, a (the?) feminist theorist of abjection, one who identifies with the abject is one who “finds the impossible within…that the impossible constitutes its very being”, that an “inaugural loss…laid the foundations of its own being. There is nothing like the abjection of self to show that all abjection is in fact recognition of the want on which any being, meaning, language, or desire is founded”. (That “inaugural loss” is the self’s coming into being through separation from the mother’s womb, and this separation is accompanied by a longing to get back to this numinous place we come from.)2

I know of the feeling that Kristeva describes; I felt it for the first time in early childhood, after being subjected to a sexual trauma. What I felt was disgust, a disgust at myself and that which was of myself. I felt that I was unclean. It was a sensation similar to the feeling you get at the onset of lightheadedness, when the world around you becomes blurry and your nerve endings go fuzzy. It wasn’t quite an out-of-body experience, but nor did I feel I belonged to my body, either. I was in an in-between place. Indeed, I now see that I was occupying a space of abjection: No longer a subject who could act, yet objectified to an extent that I wasn’t something as substantial as an object. To feel as if one is a thing, yet no-thing—that is abjection. One may see how this is a particularly feminine way of feeling—being antithetical to the world of order (and power); not dead enough to belong to the underworld’s chaos and disorder, yet close enough to death to bring other lives into being.

I can only aspire to what Kristeva identifies as a “symptom” of such identification with the abject: “a language that gives up” on normality; a writer—an “unassimilable alien”—who casts themselves into the abject and therefore, to understand or even imagine this new universe, must pervert (subvert) language. Through “verbal play”, the writer of the abject refuses the rules of ordinary language and therefore creates something startling and surreal. The women writers whom I cherish most instill just such qualities in their work: Kathy Acker, Toni Morrison, Sylvia Plath, Djuna Barnes, Clarice Lispector, and I’d argue Violette Leduc, as well, who, in identifying as la bâtarde, literally becomes one with the abject. To me, these are writers who, through their rigorous explorations of unbelongingness and the obscene (from a uniquely female perspective), invoke the forbidden beyond. But if the abject is what we spring from when we burst forth from our mothers’ wombs—that inaugural loss Kristeva writes about—then is not the abject also divine in its other(worldli)ness? The works by these women were and remain strikingly modern yet timeless, evoking something ancient in nature. As if, by creating something new, they were uncovering what has been here all along.

Let’s not restrict ourselves to abjection as it has been expressed in the written word—the other mediums have their own languages in which the abject can be absorbed and deflected: in music, PJ Harvey, Diamanda Galás, Cosey Fanni Tutti, and Yoko Ono evoke it on the borderlines of their sonic spaces; in film, Věra Chytilová, Catherine Breillat, Germaine Dulac, and Vivienne Dick make us sit with it; and in the visual arts, Mona Hatoum, Kiki Smith, Carolee Schneemann, and Ana Mendieta are some of its greatest arbiters. It is no mistake that many of these women have also been portrayed as madwomen (see here, here, and here for references to myriad examples). My focus here is on Ana Mendieta, whose retrospective at Tate Modern I recently visited; her works of total abjection, as well as the context in which Mendieta herself was (posthumously) depicted as an abject madwoman—her murder trial—make her a deserving subject (abject?) for this essay.

~

The Tate Modern show begins with a section called “The Cave,” which contains photographs and recreations of earth and sculpture works Ana Mendieta made during return trips to her native Cuba between 1980 and 1982. The cover photo for this essay, the sheela na gig figure called Guanaroca (“First Woman”)—from Mendieta’s Esculturas Rupestres (“Rupestrian Sculptures”) series—is for me the most breathtaking work from this period, and a representative one. The sheela na gig figure, which depicts a woman with legs and labia spread wide, dates to the medieval period when Romanesque churches were built across Ireland and Britain; the figure’s “grotesquerie” is believed to be the Church’s way of scaring the devout into repressing their lust. (That obscene thing: lust; the action that brings desire and life into being and thus breaches that liminal space called the abject.) The piece’s title, however, suggests Mendieta was more interested in the figure as a fertility symbol: After all, in the sheela na gig, one also sees a mother cradling a baby in her arms or a heart-shaped womb.

Mendieta once described her exile from Cuba at age twelve—after her father, a political dissident, assisted in a coup attempt against Castro—as giving her “the feeling of having been cast out from the womb”.3 To be “cast out from the womb” is what Kristeva identified as the impetus of abjection, it’s the reason for the void we feel and our profound longing to fill it. She who is abject shares this feeling; she is counter to and displaced from. The maternal womb, the motherland—these are both our origins (“First Woman”) and our first voids. When Mendieta was sent to the midwestern U.S. as part of Operation Peter Pan (that was really the U.S. government’s name for it), she was simply rendered further abject. A friend of Mendieta’s says, “‘Ana was dark…Imagine Iowa, where everybody was blond. She always said, ‘I decided I was going to become an artist or a criminal’’”. (The criminal, too, has long been a patron saint of the abject—read Genet.)

As the exhibit twists along (it occupies a fittingly cavernous space in Tate Modern’s Blavatnik Building), Mendieta’s role in developing this deeply feminine sense of the abject I’ve been describing becomes undeniable. My friend Ngaire Ruth, a feminist writer and cultural critic, joined me that afternoon in London to journey through Mendieta’s body/ies of work. Ngaire pointed out the parallels between an untitled set of four photographs of Ana, wet hair flying, and a similar one of Harvey taken for the cover of her album Rid of Me (an album of pure and utter abjection) by photographer Maria Mochnacz. (Read my essay about Mochnacz’s work here.) There’s something vulnerable about the wet woman, isn’t there? Naked, unkempt, wild. It’s a beautiful distillation of the virgin-whore binary, too: We see at once the birth of Venus and the death of sullied Ophelia. Intentional or not, Mochnacz’s and Harvey’s homage to Mendieta points to a sisterhood as well as a fundamental (subconscious?) symbolic language between these women artists of the abject.

Situated near the quartet of photographs of a wet Mendieta is a catalogue for Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the United States, an exhibition co-curated by Ana for the female cooperative A.I.R. Gallery in 1980. In words written to introduce the show, Mendieta shares some of her artistic philosophy and, in doing so, I argue, conveys the roots of her interest in the female abject:

The white population of the United States, diverse, but of basic European stock, exterminated the indigenous civilization and put aside the Black as well as the other non-white cultures to create a homogenous male-dominated culture…Do we exist?…To question our culture is to question our own existence, our human reality. To confront this fact means to acquire an awareness of ourselves. This in turn becomes a search, a questioning of who we are and how we will realize ourselves. During the mid to late sixties as women in the United States politicized themselves and came together in the Feminist Movement with the purpose to end the domination and exploitation by the white male culture, they failed to remember us. American Feminism as it stands is basically a white middle class movement. As non-white women our struggles are two-fold. This exhibition points not necessarily to the injustice or incapacity of a society that has not been willing to include us, but more towards a personal will to continue being “other.”

The A.I.R. exhibit roughly coincided with other works anticipating third-wave feminism (which wouldn’t formally kick off until the 1990s, with Rebecca Walker’s essay, riot grrrl, and works by Kara Walker, Cheryl Dunye, Renée Cox, and others), including Howardena Pindell’s Free, White, and 21 (1980) and Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames (1983). These were works that, in drawing on and representing diverse identities and cultural perspectives, were able to speak to marginalized concerns which previous feminist work (which was overwhelmingly white and middle class) had overlooked. Mendieta herself was influenced by the cultures and myths of Cuba and the greater Afro-Caribbean sphere, ancient Egypt, and the Celtic peoples. These non-traditional or non-Western influences don’t lend an esoteric quality to her work but rather an archetypal one; taken together, they point to a collective consciousness we all share in which the feminine is, of course, a significant part.

The abject, in suggesting an Other, may therefore also be evoked by that which enters or leaves the body—for example, infection or blood. Deep red, viscous blood features in much of Mendieta’s work, particularly in her early work such as Moffitt Building Piece (1973), her film showing a series of passersby stepping over and ignoring a pool of blood trickling out onto the street from behind a closed door; in another piece, she covered herself in blood to stage a rape scene through which viewers could walk (and similarly ignore). In Body Tracks (1982), Mendieta uses her arms to smear blood across a white wall, while another film shows Ana using her hands to write the words “SHE GOT LOVE” in blood over a doorway; her shadow lingers as the blood dries.

While blood can be sacred, as Mendieta surely absorbed from her Catholic upbringing, it can also signify violence. As a force that desecrates and brings one from life to death, violence is certainly abject. Violence and the impermanence it causes pervade Mendieta’s work; it’s present not just in the form of blood but also in her use of the elements. For example, Mendieta’s earth-body works are inherently ephemeral, subject to being washed or eroded away over time. In one piece from the Siluetas series, fire eats away at the impression of Ana’s body left in the earth, suggesting her proximity to violent destruction. It’s because of this current that runs through Mendieta’s work that many say it is prescient, and this is where the disclosure must come if you aren’t already aware: Ana Mendieta was murdered by her husband Carl Andre, who pushed her out of the window of their 34th-floor apartment in 1985.

Ana Mendieta lost her life; Andre lost nothing. Frank Stella paid Andre’s $250,000 bail and Claes Oldenburg loaned him an apartment to stay in while Andre’s apartment—which he himself had turned into a crime scene—was closed off.4 There was a murder trial, if you could even call it that. Andre opted for a bench trial over a trial by jury; the presiding judge ruled in his favor, though the judge is purported by Robert Katz (who wrote a book about the trial) to have conceded in a private conversation that Andre was guilty. (Listen to the Death of an Artist podcast for a detailed breakdown of the trial.) No matter: Andre went on living in the apartment where he killed Mendieta, remarrying, showing and selling art for decades. The case is an example of a powerful member of the establishment (here, the art world establishment) exercising their will over an “Other” with no consequences.

During the trial, in an attempt to frame Mendieta’s death as a suicide, Andre’s lawyer painted her as a—wait for it—madwoman. A preoccupation with death, as evinced by her art, he argued, resulted in or perhaps reflected a death wish; he even outrageously suggested she intended her own death as the culmination of her life’s work. (Friends and family insisted she was not suicidal, pointing to the many future plans she had at the time of her death.) Intrigued by the Santería religion and drawing on it in her art, Mendieta was also portrayed by Andre’s lawyer as “‘a woman doing voodoo things’”. Sadly, this is old hat. For much of history, women have existed as the Other. We’ve been silenced for our “seductiveness,” immortalized as sheela na gigs, locked in attics, raped, starved, and murdered; that is to say, over the generations, we’ve been made into the abject. And, to be clear, we have not chosen silence: As suggested by Kristeva, we’ve broken language and with the pieces created incredibly potent art that is of the abject in a way that only art made by a woman can be. Mendieta’s work embodies it.

The Tate Modern exhibit does not include mention of Ana Mendieta’s murder. (Though it features one piece on which she and Andre collaborated, a book of lithographs, and that’s the only place where he turns up.) I’ve had conversations with a couple of friends who take offense at that choice, seeing it as either willful ignorance of a hard truth or a multiplication of the injustice done to Mendieta. I understand this reaction. We should all be outraged by the murder, the trial, and Andre’s abetters. Those in the art world (and beyond) who turned a blind eye or declined to stand up for Ana because of Andre’s influence were wrong and should be ashamed of it. At the same time, Mendieta’s estate is markedly resistant to mentioning her murder (which probably played some role in the Tate Modern’s own reticence), on the proclaimed basis that they want her work—rather than the crime—to be viewers’ focus. Respectfully, I disagree; an artist’s work is shaped by their context. Mendieta’s work was of the abject—dealing specifically in the themes of death, destruction, violence, and the feminine Other—and therefore her murder (devastatingly, queasily) reflects the patriarchal conditions of the society in which she lived. Andre imposed silence on Mendieta; the only way to remedy it is to bring her down from the proverbial attic and keep her here with us.

I was heartened by the grassroots-style network that women in attendance at the Tate Modern exhibit formed in the absence of any information about Ana’s death, asking each other are-you-aware-and-if-not-this-is-what-you-should-know. As I left the exhibit, I thought about the centuries of silencing women have faced and my own experiences with being silenced; I marveled at the groundbreaking work women have made nonetheless. More silence is not the answer to silence; we must use our voices. And because our languages weren’t made by or for us, we must break them and make languages of our own. That’s why they call us madwomen. I embrace it.

Art for me has been a way to sublimate rage. In fact it has been necessary to have such rage to free myself from confinement and the fury of confinement. – Ana Mendieta

Enter an “Emotional Containment Day” of my youth. These were the special days that I, eleven years old, began to allot myself for feeling emotion in my body (for example, where did I hurt?) and with all of my body (a self-hatred that consumed me). Alone, I prepared myself feasts of otherwise verboten foods that—and this is very important, a most unbreakable rule—could be chewed down into a paste. Bread was to be avoided; it was too dense. When moistened by spit and stomach acid, bread sinks like an anchor into my deepest parts. Rice, though, was good, the grains help each other up like a cheer squad forming a pyramid in the pit of me, each one essential in regurgitating the others up the throat. Yogurt was good, too; its creaminess made it the easiest of foods to summon up. (A disease of excess? No, quite the opposite. My very poor single mother couldn’t afford much; that I wasted some of the food she worked hard to buy made me angry at and ashamed of myself. Yet, if she knew what I was up to, as I suspect she did, she’d approve, and want me to keep it up.)

Bingeing was an acknowledgement that my eyes were wider than my stomach, that I desired, that the negative sensations wrapped up in being meant it didn’t matter I was flooding my system with calories and purging myself of their volume. Again and again, I unearthed my emotions just so I could rebury them. I excelled at bulimia: Scrupulous to the core (almost like a George Eliot character), I possessed a hypersensitive gag reflex. One index finger down the throat worked for a while until it became ineffective from habituation. I advanced to two fingers, then three, then my whole hand—until my teeth started tearing the skin off my knuckles, leaving them red and raw, a “living” advertisement of my condition. In lieu of my own hand, I began to use toothbrushes and kitchen utensils with long handles—though the cheap plastic of my wretched retch-aids degraded over time with continuous exposure to my bile.

I’m not being visceral to dramatize my experience, but to convey that bulimia is a radically bodily state of being to occupy. The body becomes both implement and arena, taking in the world and so reflecting the world’s brutality. My mother (“does it always have to start with the mother?”, you may ask, and I answer yes, it always does start with the mother) inherited poverty and every kind of abuse—yet also devoutness—from a long line of Bohemian and Irish (translation: Catholic) women before her. Deprived of education (“not a girl’s concern”), her autonomy, and material resources, she developed a rigid focus on the one thing she thought she could control, that is, her outward appearance—“a woman’s most important tool for getting by.” The bruises on her body transmuted to mine, as they do. Beginning when I was a girl aged six or seven, and occurring regularly thereafter, she’d force me to take off my clothes and step onto her ever-infallible scale. If perfection was not achieved, and of course it never was, the weigh-in would be followed by her beating me and then delivering insults she’d clearly engineered to maximally wound (“fat ass”—though not necessarily the pièce de résistance of her repertoire—always featured prominently). Our eating disorders—my own and hers, as I’d later find out when she gave me a purging tutorial—developed as a way to reconcile the physical necessity of nourishment with our deeply internalized shame.

(Imagine my surprise when, in a scene from Todd Haynes’s 2023 film May December, the teenage daughter of Julianne Moore’s complicated mother figure shares that her mom gifted her a scale for her birthday. As it happens, my mother also gifted me a scale for my birthday, my twelfth birthday; she presented it to me in a box adorned with a little pink bow on top.)

At age thirteen, in an uncharacteristic attempt to help rather than harm myself, I disappeared into the night. Though I wouldn’t ever see my mother again, my descent into the horrors of the body remained unfinished. I ended up in a Catholic school in the vain hope a nun could do for me what my mother couldn’t. There, my scrupulous tendencies found a new expression in the form of anorexia. Starved of energy rather than glutted with it, the anorexic’s body puts itself on autopilot; bodily functions break down or pause if their operation isn’t essential to survival. If bulimia was Dionysus, emotional residue, and the grandiosity of filling oneself up with God, then anorexia—my newfound idol—was Apollo, nothingness, and transcendence into the cerebral to become one with God. The body floats on air.

Only Sylvia Plath has come close to articulating what anorexia feels like, in her poem “Tulips” (which, by the way, isn’t about anorexia, nor is there any evidence that Plath herself was anorexic):

I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted

To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.

How free it is, you have no idea how free—

The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,

And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.

It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them

Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.

Hmm, like a Communion tablet…

~

I mean for the above to be no catalogue of my achievements in (not) eating. I have made—and continue to make, through writing this—my peace with it. It’s all just to say that, from a young age, I spoke the language of the body; it was how I sent and received information to and from the world (an irony in the case of anorexia, which itself is a violent effort to negate—utterly annihilate—the body). My eating disorders primed me to see the aesthetics of bulimia and anorexia at every turn, and as a newly motherless Catholic school girl, I began to build a reliquary of female saints who I thought embodied those aesthetics. To be clear, I wasn’t (and am not) interested in finding “thinspo,” but rather an oracle who could reflect back to me what I felt. Art that could make me feel less alone by revealing my particular experience was a part of something much more universal than I knew. This is why art can save.

Now an adult many years removed from my illnesses, it’s apparent to me that the archetype through which I organized my youthful experience of the world was the Saint, specifically, the Female Saint. A recent rereading of Chris Kraus’s Aliens & Anorexia (2000) led me to Caroline Walker Bynum, whose work on gender and spirituality in the medieval period has been revelatory for me. One bookshop.org purchase and a chance bookshop find later, I’ve found myself living inside two of Bynum’s books, in particular, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (1987) and Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (1991). These texts, in spite of (or perhaps because of) their scholastic dryness, have suggested to me a new perspective on what my eating disorders were doing for me as a pious (to a fault, clearly) adolescent. I’ve begun to map out a so-called aesthetics of feast/famine, or bulimia/anorexia, and the elements of each which may be found in the music that saved me as a young girl. (I’m most assuredly not glamorizing either disorder here; I view these “aesthetics” as sympathetic reflections of the disordered eating experience, and hopefully also ones that help to give women and girls stuck in those hells the strength to escape.)

Before examining the aesthetics of bulimia (expect a second part on anorexia at some point), which I’m calling “feast,” a bit of theory from Bynum. My caveat is this: As a university professor, my instinct is to get heady. (Or was it this instinct that drove me into the job?) I like to engage with a new idea or piece of art intellectually before journeying to its emotional core. Truthfully, I believe the intellect is my heart’s defense mechanism, a hurdle that must be overcome. Yet I bristle at the opacity of a lot of academic work, as well as its tendency to exclude those who haven’t been drilled in its often-needlessly specialized jargon. I want to avoid that here, so please hold me accountable for distilling Bynum’s ideas in plain language.

Bynum’s interest is in how religious women in medieval Europe (i.e., Christian women) shaped and were shaped by their context, and specifically, why food and bodily illnesses were central to women’s devotional practices—but not men’s, at least not to the same degree. She notes that during the medieval period, miraculous abstinence—the practice of subsisting on just the Eucharist—is “told only of women”. Almost certainly related, women also began to report around this time “the wounds of Christ appearing on their bodies and bleeding”. Interestingly, these marks tended to appear cyclically—only on Fridays, for example. And, while “women account for only 17.5 percent of [saints] canonized in the later Middle Ages”, “they account for 53.2 percent of those saints” for whom “patient bearing of infirmity was the central factor…for sanctity”. This establishes a larger point, which is that, for women, “illness was [seen as something] ‘to be endured,’ not ‘cured’”, something “desirable” for women. Manipulation of both food and the body is now considered—by Bynum and others—integral in the devotional practices of medieval women.

As I suggested earlier, historical and material context is crucial for understanding why these patterns are observed. Ingrained misogyny and fear of women’s desires mean that women and their bodies have been, and still are, badly misunderstood. It was commonly believed in the medieval period, for instance, that heavy foods, particularly meat, were “aggravator[s] of lust” (congruent with the emotionality of bingeing?) and therefore only appropriate to be consumed by men. Women, meanwhile, were advised to eat lightly and, wouldn’t you know, by the nineteenth century, this quackery was responsible for clear nutritional disparities between women and men. There is also the evolutionary point that “[t]hrough lactation, woman is the essential food provider and preparer”. From the ancients onward, women have had, and have been widely perceived to have, some level of implicit control over the food supply. As society was corrupted by patriarchal tendencies, food became the only resource women could control:

To prepare food is to control food. Moreover, food is not merely a resource that women control; it is the resource that women control—both for themselves and for others. In the long course of Western history, economic resources were controlled by husbands, fathers, uncles, or brothers. Yet human beings can renounce, or deny themselves, only that which they control. Thus, in periods such as the later Middle Ages in which world-denial was a favorite religious response, women found it easier to renounce food than anything else…It was far more difficult to flee one’s family, to deny a father’s plans for betrothal, or to refuse sexual relations to a husband than it was to stop eating.

Is your blood boiling yet?

I should note that much of Bynum’s focus is on fasting, which is more analogous to anorexia than bulimia. In that case, what underpins holy feasting? Based on my reading of Bynum, I’d argue it’s the Eucharist—quite literally, consecrated food. For medieval women (and modern Catholics), to eat holy bread and drink holy wine was (is) to receive Christ. Bynum writes that, for women in the Middle Ages, “reception of Christ’s body and blood was a substitute for ecstasy…to receive was to become Christ—by eating, by devouring and being devoured”. Moreover, beyond ecstasy, the Eucharist offered women an “encounter with…humanitas Christi”, or the experience of “Christ’s physicality, his corporality, his being-in-the-bodyness”. Some women even experienced bodily swelling, as if they were pregnant with the infant Christ. (And again, these experiences seem to be unique to women: “even in accounts by male authors written for male audiences”, Eucharistic miracles are especially prevalent among female mystics.) Bulimia, like receiving the Eucharist, is an intense encounter with the body and that which we feel therein.

~

One artist who surely represents the aesthetics of feast—its defiance, its embrace of desire, its rawness—is Courtney Love. THE Courtney Love. I love Courtney Love. But to engage with Love’s work is not necessarily a pleasurable experience; a part of her artistry is her (refreshing) lack of self-consciousness about, say, her vocals or on-stage appearance, as well as her ability to challenge, provoke, even be grating (deliciously so, Courtney!). (I’m currently working on a few spoken word pieces set to music, and to induce anxiety before recording, I’ve been listening to Love’s episode of WTF with Marc Maron at 2x speed. To be honest, it’s probably because Love’s voice sounds exactly like my mother’s, and she speaks with a breathlessness just like hers, as well. It’s quite uncanny. Listening to it as many times as I now have, though, I’ve realized that Love is TRULY one of our great intellects and humorists, seamlessly blending high and low cultural references to confer on Maron radically profound wisdom, and to find out why for yourself, scroll to the very end of this post where I’ve compiled her best lines from the episode. You’re welcome!)

The title of a VICE web post I found while researching this essay helps to illustrate why Courtney Love embodies the extravagance of feast: “The Mother of ‘Messy’.” One quote from the piece, which focuses on Love’s style, is a wonderful distillation of what Love connotes in the culture: “Love’s style [in the 90s] was a little more devil-may-care. Call it grunge, call it kinderwhore, call it whatever you want: whether hurling candy at Kathleen Hanna at Lollapalooza or whipping a compact at Madonna at the MTV awards, there’s no denying that Love pioneered and perfected the stylistic art of what we would today call ‘being messy.’” Is bulimia “messy”? Yes, undoubtedly. So many times, I found myself cleaning vomit from my hair or from the floor, collapsing into an embrace of the toilet bowl after exhausting my electrolytes, gargling with heinous amounts of mouthwash to get the bitter taste of bile out of my mouth. (At twelve! It boggles the mind.)

Below are examples of Love’s visual aesthetics and music, with a particular focus on her 90s looks and oeuvre (the era that resonated with me most as a girl). I want to be clear, though: I’m not criticizing Love’s or anyone else’s appearance. I believe she created her look with intention, deliberate about every single styling choice made. Love seemingly never sought to look “pretty” or “perfect,” but instead wanted her appearance—her own aesthetics, artistic idiom—to convey the brutal power of the music she was making with Hole, the band she founded with Eric Erlandson. As such, consider this an exercise in thoughtful observation. I adore Love, I think she’s incredibly gifted and beyond beautiful—but so great at messy.

~

Exhibit No. 1: “WITCH”

The VICE piece kicks off with this image and…I have no notes. That is correct.

The most amazing detail in this look is Love’s deep berry lipstick, applied rather imperfectly, with the shade straying from her lips; using said lipstick, she has scrawled “WITCH” onto her right arm. (Bynum discusses how women’s customary role in presiding over the food supply caused men to harbor fears of being poisoned or bewitched by the food they were served.) There appear to be lipstick stains on her bicep—though those marks could actually be fledgling bruises. (In a 1996 SNL skit called “The Courtney Love Show,” Molly Shannon plays the eponymous icon who, dressed in a nightie and sporting her signature shag haircut, leads the audience through a segment called, “Top Ten Bruises on My Body.”) Splattered across Love’s lap are stains, possibly from makeup, food, blood, maybe all of the above. As a girl who was at once hyperaware of her appearance and uncomfortable with the idea of having a body, Love’s ease and lack of self-consciousness offered me a compelling model of what I could hope to be or, at least, the promise that I could budge in her direction.

From Love’s waist hangs a dirty, pilled sock monkey, evoking a sort of childhood innocence that, to me, is crucial in feast/famine aesthetics. There’s something child-like—girlish—about a young woman afflicted by an eating disorder. I say that with care, because I agree with Chris Kraus in Aliens & Anorexia that there’s a despicable tendency in society to wrest autonomy from young women with eating disorders by chalking up their problems to puerile motives. Yet, there’s a there there: Bulimics and anorexics have irregular periods (or lose them entirely), anorexics demonstrate low libido, development is stunted. My periods, which had barely begun, didn’t return until I was twenty-two years old and, by then, I’d lost so much bone density (which, in women, depends on estrogen) that I was (am) considered to have early-onset osteoporosis. What violence society does to us through our internalization of its odious strictures—the patriarchy wants to see us small. Yet there’s something transgressive about Love’s girlishness, about how she projects it alongside a more rebellious adult persona. On the one hand, holding on to childhood can mean stunted growth; on the other hand, tapping into one’s inner child—the dirty sock monkey—can be freeing.

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Exhibit No. 2: “Doll Parts”

Speaking of infantilization, Courtney Love is synonymous with the “babydoll,” the dress and the toy. “Doll Parts” by Hole is a superlative example—not just because of the song’s title but also because of the babydoll dress Love sports throughout the music video. The song is, quite simply, the epitome of feast/famine core: Love synecdochically equates her body to its parts, enacting her own objectification. “I am doll eyes, doll mouth, doll legs / I am doll arms, big veins, dog bait,” she sings. [Breaking the fourth wall here: Does she sing “dog beg” or “dog bait”? Jessica, when you read this, can you please enlighten me? Though I suppose lyrics can should be whatever we want them to be, right?] Note, also, Love’s messy environs in the video. She sits in a dirty, neglected, sparsely furnished room; all that matters here is her person, her body, she’s just a doll on display. This image is one I used—and still use—to inspire my anger at the injustice of disordered eating and its twisted step-father, objectification.

Most interesting to me about “Doll Parts” is the song’s intertwining of body, food, and sex. The song was inspired by Love’s jealousy of Kurt Cobain’s coterie of female admirers. She explains: “It [is] about a boy [Cobain], whose band had just left town, who I’d been sleeping with, who I heard was sleeping with two other girls, it was my way of saying ‘You’re a fucking idiot if you don’t choose me…’”. When Love sings, “I want to be the girl with the most cake”, one could also hear “I want to be the girl with the most K”—the most Kurt. Like witchiness and infantilization, the substitution of food for lover has historical, religiously coded roots, particularly in medieval women’s association of the Eucharist with ecstasy. “The humanity of Christ was often described as ‘being eaten’,” Bynum writes. She gives the example of a German nun from the 13th century, Anna Vorchtlin, who, “upon receiving a vision of the baby Jesus”, exclaimed, “‘If I had you, I would eat you up!’” (Just like cake!)

Indeed, medieval women often described the taste of Jesus as sweet. In the hagiography of Ida of Louvain, we read that “she tasted the Word on her tongue and felt flesh in her mouth; when she chewed it, it was like honey”. Similarly, Mary of Oignies’s hagiographer describes how Mary, in receiving the Eucharist, “felt all delectation and all savor of sweetness in receiving it”. In providing these examples, I’m not making the claim that bulimia is erotic. Instead, I’m making a hopefully more nuanced point that bulimia is more erotic when compared to anorexia. And that’s only because the bulimic opens herself up to sensation: Ceding control, she eats large amounts of high-reward foods which sets off neurochemical reactions and staves off satiety. Sugar goes from tongue to brain and, following an insulin spike, makes the bulimic more ravenous. Eventually, though, the bulimic runs out of food and her binge ends in a climactic—or orgasmic—purge.

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Exhibit No. 3: “Plump”

Love explicitly engages with bulimia in the lyrics to “Plump”: “They say I’m plump / But I throw up all the time”. The line invokes the hierarchy of eating disorders: In anorexia, weight loss takes the form of a simple math equation, that is, as one consumes fewer calories than she burns, her body effectively starts to eat itself; in bulimia, however, the calories of a binge begin to be absorbed by the body within minutes, meaning that purging only removes volume, basically water weight. As a result, bulimics tend to actually gain weight rather than lose it, and the guilt and shame this causes tends to set off another self-defeating binge-purge cycle. To the irrational, eating-disorder-addled brain, the anorexic gets to bask in the glory of her illness, while the bulimic’s efforts go unrewarded. In conversations with friends of mine who have had one or both disorders, this strange stratum of eating disorders is almost always acknowledged. Such marginalization of bulimia is the dark underbelly of the feast aesthetic, the painting of the bulimic as loud, the devil next to the anorexic’s angel.

Sonically, “Plump” highlights another aspect of Courtney Love’s feast-esque artistry, which is her courage to not sound pretty. On this song in particular, Love really screams; you can hear it in the way she spits out the words, “It makes me sick!” in the second verse and, in the refrain, “I’m eating you / I’m overfed”. A musician with a truly punk spirit, she’s not worried about what the listener thinks or expects of her. The point is that she feels deeply and is expressing just that, her feelings, rather than conjuring up mainstream society’s misogynistic strictures in the form of an overly controlled vocal. Instead, Love’s voice wavers, it cracks, it’s imperfect, and in it I found my own rage, confidence, but also my deep sadness. This—the embrace of emotion—is the beauty made possible by the aesthetic of feast. In its trappings, I feel no compulsion to contain my emotions.

Exit an “Emotional Containment Day” of my youth.

~

Courtney Love’s Best Lines From Her WTF with Marc Maron Episode

1. “In fourth form in New Zealand, I had a lisp…they sent me to a guy.”

2. “The body keeps the score, bitch!”

3. “No one in my family…like, they’re mean, they’re fat, they’re college-educated…and by that I mean, Vassar, Berkeley. My lawyer sister, she picked for herself: NYU, Stanford. But, you know, they’re all healthy though. They’re mean, no one talks to anyone. Well, I have one nice sister in La Jolla.”

4. “I’ve been doing therapy for, like, seven years now. I have a guy in LA, he’s Lacanian.” [“How does that work?”] “Incredibly.”

5. “I went on a date with Salman Rushdie to the Moth Festival.” [“How did that go?”] “Well, I was trying to stop Jonathan Franzen for my grandmother, having never read The Corrections to this day. (I don’t read modern fiction.)”

6. “I said to Julian Schnabel once, ‘yeah, Clement Greenberg is my great uncle.’”

7. “J.D. called it, like, ‘the other industry.’ He goes, ‘That shit’s like Bieber, that shit’s like pro tennis.’ And I’m like, ‘I think pro tennis has a little more integrity, maybe, like, pro wrestling?’”

8. “Rock does not stream.”

9. “I’m patient zero for gaslighting and getting some publishing off me, and now it’s tulip mania!”

10. “What’s that thing that Gaga said about Bradley Cooper? You know, ‘You’ll be in a room with 100 people and only one will see you.’ Me? It’s more like 10,000.”

11. “I dated a man named Edward Norton. Our class chasm was massive…He comes from a philanthropic family…He would not say it, but he’s Edward Seneca Norton…there’s Edward Harrison Norton (six of them)…all Yale.”

12. “Have you ever watched Succession? Well, there’s one episode called, ‘Tern Haven,’ where the Logan family—kinda hipster Murdochs—are going to buy the PBS, sort-of-NYT-owning Pierce family. I streamed it and I was like, ‘That would’ve been me! I would’ve been Nan Pierce!’ So, you know, I could’ve been the matriarch…”

13. “I made two new rules”: 1) “I get one dollar in physical energy a day. I am not giving you TWENTY THOUSAND for your madness or two hundred to present you an award. I’m going to give that money to me, to enrich my life, and to hopefully be in service of others.” 2) “If you wouldn’t ask Nick Cave, don’t ask me.”

14. “That man [Miloš Forman] filled father, uncle, boyfriend, brother…I once saw him, Baryshnikov, and Václav Havel having a cigar. OK?…He and Václav Havel were put in a gulag for two years hard labor—as lunatics—because they snuck into a KGB Ella Fitzgerald and they put on a slightly satirical play.”

15. “I had to Zoom with Brad [Pitt] because he wanted to produce [a biopic about] Kurt with Plan B. But I was like, if you don’t get me, you kind of don’t get Kurt. And I don’t feel like you do, Brad…[The biopic is] something that we are gonna do, but we’ll do it with Pam Abdy and Mike DeLuca because they know how to make a fucking movie.”

16. “This is Boomer, Bruce Springsteen, denim, rock male critic bullshit.”

17. “I’m offline. If Nick Cave isn’t doing it, I’m not doing it.”

18. “…when I was…doing Xanax all the time in LA, I just ate ice cream and cheese…yeah, I fucked up my colon, bro.”

19. “I killed ‘Violet’ because J.D.’s like, ‘You sure you want it? It’s kind of a hit.’ And I’m like, there’s two reasons…it doesn’t fit the brand anymore. And also, dude, if you want me to play Albert Hall and I sing ‘Violet,’ the show’s done. I’m old, my boy…when I sang it for the last time on film…my D.P. is Christopher Nolan’s second-unit guy. He’s incredible…we got all these kids and it looks better than Sofia’s place looks in Lost in Translation…And as I sang it for the final time, I was like, ‘Shit, no wonder I scared people. I’m scary.’”

20. “I said to my therapist, my Lacanian therapist, with four PhDs from Reed (which I know I completely make fun of him about that)…” [point not concluded]

21. “I’m going to Nick Cave. I’m like, ‘Oh god, Brad [Pitt], whatever, leave me alone.’”

22. “Lana [Del Rey], she’s got a magic thing. She’s not even fucked up…we had a day off, of course, in Portland, and she’d only listen to things on vinyl, and she described a record she wanted to make to me, and I’m like, ‘Oh, you mean Hissing of Summer Lawns?’ (which I don’t even like that record), but she’s like, ‘What’s that?’ I’m like, ‘It’s a Joni Mitchell record.’ She goes, ‘Who’s that?’…We’re in Portland, and this was my one contribution that I’m very excited that I was able to make. I went out in Portland, which is nothing but vinyl stores now that it’s Portlandia, I got her all the Joni. And you know what? Changed her whole fucking thing. And so then my Boomer rock critic friends are calling after Norman Rockwell, ‘Hey, she’s pretty good.’ And I said to her, ‘Welcome to the Thunderdome, Ms. Del Rey…’”

23. “I was in that movie [Joker] for a minute…I was the TV producer…[director Todd Phillips] casted great. You know, he took Starsky & Hutch off his IMDb and I was like, ‘Sullivan’s Travels motherfucker! That made me laugh when I was sad. Put it back on!’…So let me tell you my two favorite things about Todd Phillips, other than Starsky & Hutch. He should put the fuck back on his student film [Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies]…He had no reason to get off of that. I love that he was like, ‘Fuck it, I’m unsatisfied spiritually’…It wasn’t enough for him…But then my third favorite thing…is that he dated Paris Hilton way out loud when it wasn’t cool to date Paris Hilton. Like he is a fucking solid dude.”

One of humanity’s most ancient myths is the sacrifice of the virgin. In Aeschylus, Agamemnon offends the goddess Artemis and, to make amends for his mistake, offers to kill his daughter Iphigenia. The father brings his daughter to an altar where his men then gag her and stab her in the heart. (In a popular version of the story, it’s Artemis herself who intervenes and swaps Iphigenia for a sacred deer just before knife strikes flesh. In that version, though, Iphigenia’s rescue anticlimactically leads to marriage.) There’s the rape of Persephone, who’s seized by Hades, god of the underworld, to be his wife. Joseph Campbell and Erich Neumann spoke of Hainuwele, the girl in Southeast Asian myth whose death-by-live-burial at the hands of a gang of men makes way for the propagation of vegetation on their island. Here, the virgin is sacrificed for creation, fertility, the good of the world. Death, sex, gender, transcendence, and transgression—inextricable throughout all of recorded history.

Flash forward to modernity, and we’ve devised lots of theories about the subject. Georges Bataille’s theory of the relationship between sex and death, in his Erotism: Death and Sensuality (1957), is among the most cited. In a line, his theory is that eroticism “is assenting to life up to the point of death”. He argues that we, as “discontinuous beings”—i.e., you don’t die when I die and vice versa—“yearn for our lost continuity”. Here, continuity means more than just immortality; it’s universality—a connectedness with all there is, ever was, will be. According to Bataille, death destroys a discontinuous being, yet because existence goes on for all other living beings, death also reaffirms continuity. “Erotic activity, by dissolving the separate beings that participate in it, reveals their fundamental continuity”, he says. Eroticism, then, is at the threshold of (im)mortality.

Bataille manages to make the erotic even less so by getting headier:

“In the process of dissolution, the male partner has generally an active role, while the female partner is passive. The passive, female side is essentially the one that is dissolved as a separate entity. But for the male partner the dissolution of the passive partner means one thing only: it is paving the way for a fusion where both are mingled, attaining at length the same degree of dissolution. The whole business of eroticism is to destroy the self-contained character of the participators as they are in their normal lives. Stripping naked is the decisive action. Nakedness offers a contrast to self-possession, to discontinuous existence, in other words…Bodies open out to a state of continuity…”

I appreciate what Bataille’s doing: Rather than giving us a biological or psychological explanation of eroticism, he’s connecting sex and existence itself. Though in addition to limiting his analysis to heterosexual eroticism, he strips woman of any agency in the act he claims is fundamental to human experience. And that’s not exclusive to Bataille; rather, it’s ingrained (backwards) wisdom. The Greeks held that males run hot and females cold, so therefore it’s the male who supplies the driving force of impregnation; Hegel, that man is the active mover out in the world and woman is confined to the domestic sphere; Lévi-Strauss objectified women by comparing them to mere tokens of exchange between social groups; Sartre, in his preeminent work Being and Nothingness (1943), describes women as slimy traps or voids into which men fall (with all of the yonic meanings that implies); and Freud, I need only say “penis envy”. I say such “wisdom” is backwards because, of course, it’s woman who births man. But theory tells us otherwise…

Women have made alternative arguments, some in direct response to Bataille. For example, Beauvoir’s point that women’s ability to bear life has never been valued by men relative to the ability to risk (and take) life (though she’d wave off any suggestion that women’s fertility is empowering at all); Cixous’s questioning in Sorties (1975) of the very gender binary that underpins so much of Western thought; Suleiman’s assertion that Bataille imbues a traditional sexual politics into his conception of manhood throughout his body of work. And, of course, Kristeva’s Powers of Horror (1980), in which she undercuts Bataille’s point that the woman is dissolved during sex by stating that, because we “dissolve” our mothers to become discontinuous beings when we’re born, the continuity we long for is inherently maternal. The circle is thus complete.

It’s fair to ask why “theory” even matters. Well, just as theory is written by (wo)men, so too are the actions of (wo)men written by theory. But at a certain point, one must get out of their own head and commune with others in the world, to act and to feel. Art, especially music, is one way in which the abstract can be made personal. That’s the motivation for this essay: After revisiting Bataille on a whim and thinking myself into a state of numbness the other night, I put on Laura Nyro’s Christmas and the Beads of Sweat (1970). Nyro—who’s practically a saint to me, no mere philosopher—offers an alternative vision of the world Bataille describes but which doesn’t need a manuscript to be conveyed. Where theory fails us, music delivers.

Nyro is a fascinating figure in American music history. Born Laura Nigro, she changed her last name to Nyro and therefore birthed herself anew. A brilliant songwriter, much of Nyro’s earliest material became hits for other artists—Streisand and Peter, Paul and Mary, among others. But nobody sings Nyro’s songs like Nyro—at times, she’s so ecstatic and breathless and effervescently wry I start laughing because I have nowhere else to place my cumulative energy (such as when she sings “And when I die and when I’m gone” with great jubilance and accompanied by a marching band beat, or wails “TOM!” on New York Tendaberry’s (1969) “Tom Cat Goodby”). And, Nyro is among a select few whose music is sharply political without losing any of its poetry (e.g., “Poverty Train”).

The biographical record on Nyro is slim, but one of the few things we do know about her is that she was born in New York City to an Eastern European mother and Italian-American father. Her upbringing wasn’t a particularly religious one, but the strong religious overtones in her music suggest she was exposed to the stories in some other way—perhaps through gospel music, which bears a strong mark on her work. She apparently had a difficult childhood, and her way of coping with it was music, playing and listening to it. She was a closeted bisexual for much of her life, as can be gleaned in songs such as “Emmie” and “Desiree.” In 1971, she married a Vietnam War veteran; the marriage was short, ending in 1975, indicating it might have been an unhappy one. The divorce coincided with the death of Nyro’s mother to ovarian cancer at age 49 (Nyro herself would die of ovarian cancer at age 49). That’s all to say, the subjects of myth, death, eroticism—they are all crucial for understanding her work.

In starkest contrast to Bataille’s eroticism on Nyro’s Christmas and the Beads of Sweat is the song “Beads of Sweat.” Nyro, of course, isn’t directly engaging with Bataille here, but she moves us to an alternative, equally compelling vision of eroticism. The song begins with text painting—suddenly it’s as if the “cold jade wind” Nyro sings of goes tearing through my room. I find that Nyro’s voice is not just waves of sound, but also, in a way, kindling for my own desire. And, I’d argue, she’s kindling a very feminine-coded desire. The wind of which she sings is a shade of green: Green, the color that Hildegard von Bingen, in her book of divine visions called Scivias, associates with holiness, it being the color of Edenic paradise. (Just as green brings to mind Mother Nature, the primordial Great Earth Mother.)

Green, too, is the color of desire, specifically, female desire and, more specifically, virginal female desire. Erin Maglaque in her book Presence: A Hidden History of the Female Body (2026), notes that people writing in the early modern era (1500-1800) depicted nascent female desire as “greensickness”, such that girls—“irritable” and “unwell”—became so overtaken by their innermost urges that their skin would turn “the color…‘of a dead leaf, or a yellow tending toward green’”. Doctors preferred the more opaque term, “chlorosis,” derived from the Greek chloros (roughly “green”), to describe a young woman’s desire and thus evoking more than just “the green of envy”, but also “the green of dew, of liquid [read: NOT male solidity]; more grassy than grass. A disease of ripeness without anywhere to go, without anyone to taste it.”

The green wind in “Beads of Sweat” acts as augury: “Something’s coming to devastate my soul.” The narrator tells us that that something is “Mariah.” The name might be a reference to the song “They Call the Wind Maria” from the Broadway musical Paint Your Wagon (1951), in which wind is personified as a woman who breaks hearts. Harkening back to myth, though: Mariah is a variant of Mary (of obvious biblical significance) and a homophone of Moriah, the place in Genesis where Isaac is nearly sacrificed. Before Isaac can be struck down at Moriah, he’s miraculously saved by an angel, who swaps him for a ram. The story of Isaac mirrors, then, the story of Iphigenia, though the genders become inverted. The male figure is the object to be acted upon, while the female figure, Mariah, is to be the actor. Unlike the story of the binding of Isaac, Nyro’s song presents us with “no angel in the sky” to save our narrator.

The song’s unnamed narrator speaks of sweat dripping down his neck; the ostensible Greek chorus that is Nyro’s ecstatic voice echoes him (“down his neck”) and thus assures us the narrator is a male figure. Nyro positions the male figure as the passive party, waiting for the wind to “beckon Mariah to match my soul.” Nyro is reversing Bataille’s configuration of eroticism within the opening lines: The female figure, personified by the “restless” wind, is the driving force of the song (very un-Greek!), the one doing the dissolving. It revives a matriarchal, Pagan view of the world that is much more ancient than that of the Greeks, the latter of which Western philosophy has drawn upon to develop our prevailing notions of eroticism. Nyro—through song, through feeling—characterizes woman as wind, as restless actor, and therefore goes further than intellectual Kristeva, who basically accepts woman as soluble object in humanity’s erotic quest for transcendence.

The figure who dissolves in the song is the male narrator—(rosary) “beads of sweat” roll down his neck, “matched” by the “wailing” of the “rain in the river”. Rainwater is swallowed up (to wrest back a yonic image) by the river’s current, and the narrator turns “the color of the wind”; that is, green with desire. While man-as-soluble is contrary to Bataille, it’s consistent with ancient depictions of man sitting in the lap of a woman on her earthen throne (see above for ancient representations): Woman is not to be mounted—and thus dominated—by man, nor is she simply lying below the most manly heavens, but rather taking man on her lap so that he must “[obtain] the earth from her”, Neumann writes in The Great Mother.

Despite the brilliant inversion of the world present in Nyro’s lyrics, man ignorantly expects otherwise from woman: She sings of “boys standing on the banks of the river”, “waiting for the virgin snow”, looking for the “pearl in an oyster”. The iniquitous categorization of woman as either virgin or whore predominates. We can thank theory, in part, for framing eroticism as a zero-sum contest between genders. Again, music points the way: Nyro’s song, which toggles between genders and hinges on the collapse, or fusion, of otherwise “discontinuous” beings, offers a more complete—consummate—rendering of what eroticism can, or ought to, be.

I was six, in the sitting room, and the Bunny Man was tapping on the window behind me. “Bunny Man” isn’t a cute nickname for anyone; this was a grown man in a pink, Donnie Darko-style bunny costume, with a painted face and drawn-on whiskers. Bunny Man had an elastic, knowing smile, one which conveyed he had the right to be there looking at me, his fingers carelessly poking at the glass. I opened my mouth to cry out, readied my body to flee—both futile gestures. Like a guppy in a tank, or a bacterium under a microscope, I was stuck there while Bunny Man’s eyes swept over me from his position on the other side of the windowpane. This is the only dream from my childhood I’ve carried with me into my adult years (what a pity), and it came to me after the Incident.

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An instinct of the photographer’s is to impose stillness, order, control—perhaps in an effort to tame their voyeurism, or to ward off death by granting immortality to a moment (yet ultimately just invoking it). From a Lacanian perspective, it could be said the photographer’s inner voyeur is attempting to manage the realization that they, too, are objects—that the world looks back at them—by taming that external gaze. In other words, the photographer is in a struggle with their subject: Who will be looked at, and who gets to do the looking? Photography, then, becomes intimidation, and the camera lens a contested barrier between subject and object. In my dream, it felt feels like Bunny Man is winning that contest, or so frustrated in his attempts to possess me that he would resort to the most drastic of measures to do so.

Throughout her childhood and teenage years, Marina Lutz’s father, a professional photographer, produced a hoard of 10,000 photographs and enough film and reel-to-reel audio tape to fill several boxes—all of it of her, her body, her parts. There are pictures of Marina as a toddler wearing stiff, pleated dresses, her eyes seeking a sanctuary from the man and his lens. In one picture, her back is turned to him as she stares out of a window; in others, Marina poses in a guillotine—multiple times, at various ages (smile for me now, Marina!). Then there are the ones of Marina bending over in her underwear (oh, look at this!); bending over with her pants down; as a naked teenager posing unwittingly for the camera. There are videos of Marina going to the bathroom (ah, that’s beautiful!); sleeping, night after night, unaware of the man and his camera hidden in the dark; jumping up and down, undressed, the camera pushing in on her developing breasts. In another, she’s a bikini-clad teenager on the beach, holding still as the camera focuses on her crotch and then her nipples, erect beneath wet fabric exposed to air.

The hoard is evidence of Lutz’s abuse at the hands of her controlling and perverted father who, when drunk, would come home, kiss his thirteen-year-old on the lips, and prop her on his lap to watch titillating TV (brought to you by the publisher of Screw magazine!). Putting her to bed, his hands wandered into her underwear; deeming her a bad girl, he’d bend her over his knees and spank her bare ass. To him, she was just a whore, and he said so. Given the nature of these deeply troubling transgressions, I’d understand if Lutz wanted every photo and reel of film or tape destroyed. Actually, I’d expect it. Destroy, though, she did not: Finding Abbot’s archive amongst the rest of his “property” years later when he died, Lutz set out to meticulously log each individual document of her own objectification. She described every photo and transcribed every piece of film and audio before assigning it a place in her filing system, essentially archiving it, ensuring it could be found later. She would be choosing creation over destruction, thus out-voyeuring the voyeur: She would be making a film.

The Marina Experiment (2009) is Lutz’s award-winning, 18-minute short about her abuse and the process of, quite literally, sorting through it as a traumatized adult. Besides glimpses of the scope of Abbot’s hoard, the film is made entirely from the contents therein: Pictures and videos of Marina are narrated by Abbot’s own breathy commentary (and set to a score by Mick Harvey made especially for the film). In this way, Experiment is singularly material in its method, handling with care physical evidence that documents the wrongs wrought on a body. Although the immense psychological effect her father’s perversions had on her is not pictured, Lutz conveys it through the film form itself: “[T]he accumulation and layering of images and sounds leave no doubts” of the abuse, wrote Thierry Méranger in his review of the film for Cahiers du Cinéma. “Rarely has found footage revealed so many intimate issues”. Indeed. To forcibly capture a young girl’s most intimate moments, to give her no choice in the important matter of documenting her body and its nakedness, to instill in her shame and the constant feeling of being watched—that’s objectification, and it’s abuse.

Lutz’s achievement with The Marina Experiment is to invert her father’s voyeurism and, in so doing, take back the power over her own narrative. Abbot Lutz came up in the 1940s by taking nude photos of sex workers. It is not this that causes me discomfort (I’ve no interest in perpetuating the stigma of sex work, to the extent that it’s voluntary and autonomous), but Abbot’s choice to apply the methods he honed in this overtly commercial milieu—in which models were posed to maximize titillation—to his own daughter. One can see overtones of the kind of stylized vintage pornography Abbot was influenced by (and of which he had a “vast collection”) in the footage he produced of Lutz, embracing pin-up girl posing conventions such as Marina bent over, glancing over her shoulder at the camera, lying in repose, in states of undress. “My father’s camera saw no difference between me or a hooker”, she has said. Abbot Lutz would place personal ads for models willing to pose nude; Marina, though, was better, she was a “model” who was freely available to him, no ad or outlay on his part required.

A photographer intuitive and compassionate in their craft creates the conditions under which their subjects speak for themselves; the images made by Nan Goldin, for example, are distinctive for showing queer voices as they are rather than masking or merely gesturing at them. The neurotic photographer, however—the one who seeks to impose control, order, stillness—denies their subjects any voice at all. In effect, the subject becomes just an object to serve the photographer’s needs. In the film, we hear Abbot explain to his daughter that he’s making a record of her young life so she can remember it in her older years. Actually, he’s attempting to write her history for her: He tells her how to pose, he asks guiding questions, and when she answers, he corrects her. “You know what I’d like you to do? Sing a song…stand up and sing like a lady…do it nice.”

There’s a lot of posturing by Abbot (of Marina) in his footage, making her presence more akin to a doll’s than a model’s. Interviewing her about a birthday party, he erupts in “no!”s when she suggests girls can ask boys to dance. In response, the girl corrects herself by saying, “you have to smile and be happy…or else they won’t dance with you”, to which he replies, “that’s right”. Insisting she recite the Pledge of Allegiance, Abbot makes her start over until she does it “nicely” enough for him. These exchanges, though brief, are fascinating to watch because of their juxtaposition with the suggestive, sexualized footage of Marina we see elsewhere in the film, reading almost as if Abbot is attempting not to give his daughter a record of her life “for posterity”, but to implant in her a false memory of how she was and how she ought to be. He, too, sought for himself a false record: We learn he’s a jealous type, voted “most modest (about the accomplishments of others)” in grade school. Anxious to advertise achievement, he wore an Oxford University patch sewed onto his blazer, despite his only diploma being from Ed Bell’s Barbecue College. Lutz’s montage reveals Abbot’s deep need to aestheticize his life, and also his daughter’s.

By turning her father’s voyeurism back on itself, through her pointed and shocking assemblage of his footage, Marina Lutz manages to wrest her power and voice back. Left alone, the photos, film, and audio tapes are gross and baffling records of a young girl, later a teenager, sleeping, undressing, simply trying to be. In the form of The Marina Experiment, though, the footage is transmuted into something much different, transcendent: A portrait of a man trying and failing—flailing—to make a real work of his own; that man’s thwarted attempts at imposing control and order; a young girl taking on the shame that objectification wrings out of girls, but also the resilience she’ll need to overcome it in the future. This will be Marina Lutz’s record for posterity. May it inspire me and others to face down our Bunny Men.

You can watch The Marina Experiment here.

Note: I’ve made a YouTube playlist if you’d like to hear the songs in sequence.

Months have passed since I’ve posted an annotated playlist. This particular one has been ready for a while—the songs on it being my personal favorites—but in the proverbial “queue” while I published a couple of longer form pieces.

In April, I wrote about Lorca’s concept of duende which, when I learned about it in my early twenties, helped me make sense of the art—particularly music—I’ve loved my entire life. Since that piece was published, several of you reached out about what exactly makes a song have duende. That’s the thing: There are no rules to duende, and there mustn’t be any. An artwork can’t be engineered to have duende because the spirit of duende lives in the spontaneity of performance.

In my earlier post, I gave some examples of songs that, to me, embody duende—songs by Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave, PJ Harvey, Dirty Three. I chose those artists because Cave included them in a talk he gave about duende in the nineties, the very talk which would serve as my epiphanic introduction to the concept when I discovered a transcript of Cave’s talk—reprinted as an essay—years later. The problem with this selection, though, is that it is inherently limited; Cave is giving a brief overview of a wide corpus. Harvey, for example, is the only woman included; that’s strange, because some of the most vivid examples of duende that Lorca gives us in his writings on the subject were wrought by female performers (such as the inimitable Pastora Pavón).

With that in mind, I put together a more diversified (but inexhaustive, of course!) list of songs I believe to be haunted by the spirit of duende. In doing so, I kept in mind those elements which some believe are characteristic of duende (irrationality, earthiness, morbidity). I didn’t hew too carefully to the rules, however, because identifying artworks borne out of an artist’s struggle with duende is a bit like a supercilious Supreme Court judge determining what counts as porn: “I know it when I see it.” I know it when I hear it, when my spine chills, when my jaw goes slack.

There is a mix of old and new, known and obscure here. I’ve thrown in a couple of live tracks, too, to reflect the importance of spontaneity in duende. Click on each song to listen to it on YouTube.

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1. “Dambala” (Live at Philharmonic Hall, NYC in July 1973) performed by Nina Simone, from It Is Finished

   I included this song in a previously published playlist, but I would consider myself most wretched for not putting it on this one, as well.

2. “Sister Morphine” performed by Marianne Faithfull, from her live album Blazing Away

   I’m a fan of Marianne Faithfull’s entire body of work, and one of my favorite collections ever is a set of her 45s from the sixties. Yet I’d argue that Faithfull’s first run-ins with duende really began in the 1970s with Broken English, when she was brandishing a voice “ravaged” by “life as a homeless junkie” (and simultaneously, a starved anorexic). Her work with the gravelly voice isn’t trauma-pornographic, but a real life lived deeply.

3. “Song to the Siren” performed by This Mortal Coil (Cocteau Twins), from It’ll End in Tears

   Is this choice too spot-on? Too predictable? David Lynch was so moved by Elizabeth Fraser’s rendition of this Tim Buckley song that he tried to license it for use in Blue Velvet. Unsuccessful, he would go on to use the track in Lost Highway (one of his under-loved films, in my opinion). Lynch also spoke about his attachment to the song in a dreary November installment of his beloved weather report series.

4. “Something On Your Mind” performed by Karen Dalton, from In My Own Time

5. “I Lost Something in the Hills” by Sibylle Baier, from Colour Green

   Baier is one of the many women history has attempted to bury. An (extra)ordinary German woman, Baier wrote and recorded an album of songs in the 1970s that she stowed away to raise her children. It was released decades later and it’s incredibly affecting—I’ve just written about it here.

6. “Silver Stallion” performed by Cat Power, from Jukebox

   I linked to the album version of the song above, but I’m partial to this live version by Chan Marshall and Gregg Foreman (from Cat Power) on French TV.

7. “Byd Mewn Cysgod” by Tristwch Y Fenywod, from Tristwch Y Fenywod

8. “8 Good Reasons” by Sinéad O’Connor, from I’m Not Bossy, I’m the Boss

   O’Connor had four children. The songwriting here, in my view, is among the very best examples of demonstrating internal struggle through song. The lyrics are so personal, they incite one to feel.

9. “O Ignis Spiritus” performed by Heinali & Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko, from Гільдеґарда (Hildegard)

   Oleh Shpudeiko, the Ukrainian composer and sound artist known as Heinali, makes what he calls “historically informed electronic music” by experimenting upon the traditional. Saienko, on vocals, is also Ukrainian; with Heinali, she relates the debilitating visions that originally inspired Hildegard of Bingen to compose the song in the 12th century to the devastation done to her own country during the ongoing war there.

10. “Maria” by Patti Smith, from Banga

    I saw Patti last year for her Horses 50th Anniversary tour, and the entire night felt like a cage fight between her and duende, especially during “Birdland” (my favorite song from Horses, an absolute song of songs that changed what I thought the form could be from the moment I heard it), and the “Land” trilogy.

11. “Symphony No. 3: II. Lento e largo – Tranquillissimo” performed by Beth Gibbons and the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra (conducted by Krzysztof Penderecki), from Henryk Górecki: Symphony No. 3 (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs)

12. “England” by PJ Harvey, from Let England Shake

    Harvey, worried that a fuller, deeper voice would overwhelm the already-weighty nature of her subjects (war, its historical recurrence, and the atrocities therein), adopted a “high, simple”, and “characterless” voice for the songs on this album. It was a brilliant choice; I like to think of the narrator’s voice as that of the ghosts of war, telling their stories through Harvey as a conduit.

Author’s note: All quotes in the piece come from this set of rare interviews with Baier. Also, I’d like to thank my friend Domenic Hutchins, a de facto expert in all matters aesthetics, for his helpful feedback on an early draft.

As a child, my dictionary was always within reach—a necessity given my verbal precociousness and obsession with words. (Apologies to all of my friends, who know a text message from me is, in fact, a monograph.) Sometimes I’d look up definitions, but most of the time I flipped through its onion-skin pages for what I called “the perfect word”—one I could use to express how I felt in any situation. For instance, to describe my youthful disposition, “melancholy” was insufficient, and “sad” much too vague. At seven, though, I discovered the word “ennui” and finally felt understood—understood by myself, and therefore able to properly express myself to others. There was no better word to describe how I felt then than “ennui,” making it, for me, the inevitable word choice. Flaubert called this le mot juste; looking beyond language and thinking about other forms of expression, Coleridge posited an “organic” quality of certain artworks which generate—necessitate—their forms from within; Artaud, the refusal to separate form and content in the theater; Fried, that an artwork produces conviction in a viewer that the piece is compelling. No, “sad” would not do, I was and could only be described as feeling “ennui” at that moment in time.

This concept of “aesthetic inevitability” is perhaps most evident in art obscura, art made by marginalized artists which too often goes unseen. Lacking an audience, institutional support, or ways to make a living from their craft, these artists create because they must—their artistic choices are purely self-expressive. Here are some artists who, relatively unknown during their lifetimes, created for themselves: Claude Cahun, a queer, Jewish photographer and writer who narrowly escaped a death sentence during World War II and died in 1954 of health problems caused by her wartime imprisonment; her radical photographs weren’t exhibited until decades later. Emily Dickinson, who wrote over 1,700 poems (which Faber and Faber has thankfully collected into a single edition), only some of which were published before she died a recluse. Augusta Savage, a sculptor during the Harlem Renaissance who, due to lack of funds, was forced to cast her pieces in a cheap, less durable material, resulting in many of her works becoming lost to time. Hilma af Klint, who created her esoteric, abstract paintings years before the “pioneers” of abstraction Kandinsky or Mondrian did. (And the names we don’t know of are, to be certain, vast. Numberless.)

The gravity of these artists’ work derives, in part, from the possibility that it (or what’s left of it, in Savage’s case) may have remained hidden, if not for chance discoveries, dedicated scholars and curators, or shrewd loved ones (like Lavinia Dickinson, who published her sister’s poetry posthumously). These works further affect us because we’re made to think of what these marginalized artists could’ve left us if they had been more empowered to create. (If they had “rooms of their own,” maybe?) These profundities lurk in the back of my mind whenever I put on Sibylle Baier’s Colour Green album, written and recorded on her reel-to-reel tape recorder in the 1970s and quietly stowed away, only to be found decades later by her son and released by the Orange Twin label to quiet acclaim and a cult-following.

Sibylle Baier (pronounced suh-bee-luh buy-er) was born in Poland in 1946 before moving with her family to West Germany, where she “grew up in the most beautiful hills and dales”. The way she tells it, the West German countryside (occupied at that time by American troops) was Elysium: While parents carried out manual (and domestic) labor, children were left “alone” in nature. Days spent roaming the land seemingly led Baier to develop a deeply pastoral view of country life: “It was gruesome ecstasy in the wild…inclusive not only of bears and raccoons and fox[es], but of wind and seasons and the folly of men”, pleasures the city couldn’t provide. The freedoms of youth and yonder are themes Baier would return to as a young woman in her thirties, when she would make her own music after a childhood spent listening to jazz, blues, hymns (“because of the theater of it” all), and European folk songs on her family’s gramophone. Such beginnings are the makings of an artist whose blood teems with the earth.

By 1970, Sibylle Baier was a mother, a wife, and depressed. A friend proposed they take a trip to Genoa to relieve Baier’s “painful February mood”, as it’s called in perhaps the album’s most affecting song, “Remember the Day” (Baier’s lyrics have a mystifying way of using delicate language to both couch bleak truths and make them more cutting). Baier calls this Genoese escape a “strange, beautiful, life-saving occurrence”. Life-saving, because of what she lightly—oddly—asks of us in the song: “Did you ever drive in a moonstruck constitution / And find you reach a seaport / And down there’s a solution?” Yet, facing the Ligurian Sea and its waters, that timeless site of birth, baptism, death: Baier suddenly realized that “all was good.” She was so unnerved by how close she came to ending her own life that, upon returning home to Stuttgart, the song “just fell out” (to be followed by the other songs which make up the album). When asked by an interviewer to explain the album’s miraculous impetus, Baier deferred to the songs themselves. “The songs sweetly and truly just fell out, to save my life.” Made for no other reason except expressing something otherwise inarticulable, the songs on Colour Green are Baier’s aesthetic inevitabilities.

Those who create are familiar with the strange gestation of an aesthetic inevitability. An artistic impulse, like a biblical flood, appears out of nowhere but carries with it the cumulation of a whole lifetime’s worth of matter. There’s no willing it to materialize; one carries out their routine (either the creative or more quotidian kind) and waits for “it” to happen. The act of artistic creation presupposes experience, and for Baier, the requisite experience was how close she got to de-creation, her own destruction. Of how she began to create after such a personal nadir, Baier says she simply followed where a “sound want[ed] to go” until it “[felt] right somehow”. As the words surged out of her, Baier wrote them in notebooks scarred with cigarette burns and filled with dashed-out phone numbers, recorded them on a reel-to-reel propped up on a stack of books. No premeditation, no studio, no intended audience, the songs willed themselves into being.

While Baier was making the songs on Colour Green, she was living at home in Stuttgart with her husband and children. (She also made a small appearance in Wim Wenders’ 1974 film Alice in the Cities.) Yet much of the album exists in the world of her childhood. On the title track, Baier is a German girl who dreams of “summer in New York City / wearing a sweater colour green”. Time, however, is defiantly non-linear in Baier’s songs: Past, present, and future all commingle. The same sweater she dreamt of wearing as a child is the one she turns out to be knitting in the present (“so one night I sat down in a chair / and knitted there”). Did she fabricate a childhood memory? Or did a childhood memory motivate her behavior in the present? All Baier can say in retrospect is that she wasn’t thinking, simply knitting a sweater. I know nothing of Baier’s home life, but is it not plausible that, after being suicidal, it might have been a necessary—even existential—matter to turn an ordinary domestic task such as knitting into a time-bending, creative crucible?

Baier’s childhood was a pastoral one, and Colour Green is very much a pastoral album: There’s natural imagery throughout (e.g., riverbanks, lilies, “knee-high grass”); invocations of childhood, dreams, nostalgia—i.e., innocence and experience; contrasts drawn between country and city (“dear friend, I’m lonesome…How do you spell your name? / The city has changed me”). That the most pastoral song on the album is also my personal favorite probably says much more about me than Baier. “I Lost Something in the Hills” has held for me many meanings, those both eerie and comforting. Did Sibylle become traumatized out of innocence? Or did she manage to avoid the hyperconscious world-weariness that befalls city-dwellers? Of the song, Baier says, “I don’t know what I lost...maybe it was a prayer” or “I...finally lost myself”. Probably all of the above, but in any case, it’s her childhood “in the hills” that marks her as different: While “others grew up in cities”, “I grew up in declivities”; when back among those hills “what images return / I yearn for / the roots of the woods / that origin of all my strong and strange moods”.

Because Baier’s is a world of circular time, the innocence she longs for on “I Lost Something in the Hills” exists not just in her past but also her future. “I know farther west, these hills exist / marked by apple trees / marked by a straight brook / that leads me wherever I want it to”, she sings. These words, when written and recorded, were prophetic, because years later Baier would find herself in just such a land—one “marked by apple trees”—in Massachusetts, where she moved with her family and still resides. This was where, in 2006, her son Robby discovered his mother’s tapes in a box (Baier claims she forgot about the tapes after recording them). He transferred the tapes to CD, made copies, and distributed them to guests attending his mother’s birthday party. One of the guests at the party happened to be Dinosaur Jr. frontman J. Mascis, who shared the CD with Andrew Rieger, co-owner of the indie record label Orange Twin, which has since sold out multiple pressings of Colour Green. From mother to son to J., from J. to Orange Twin to millions of random listeners, an album which traverses time achieves unity of form and content: The songs have aged and humbly waited to tell their tales.

I wonder what music Baier might have created in the many interim years between Colour Green’s creation and its release—had she wanted to, of course, or had she not (ostensibly) set aside her tapes amidst raising a family. Nonetheless, like all aesthetic inevitabilities, the songs on the album both were foretold and foretell, of a land marked by apple trees and trouser legs rolled up. As promised by the young narrator of “Says Elliott”, the older Baier shared in an interview that she does indeed wear her pants rolled up these days. Like knitting, the cuffing of a pant leg is a mundane gesture that is given weight because, in the song, it represents a commitment to honor one’s past self in the future. It’s an act of agency—no matter how basic. And what does Sibylle Elliott vow? To “try to unlearn…he seeks for return and burns ancient love letters…let us go then…and put a record on the gramophone”.

You can visit Sibylle Baier’s website here.

I see her in front of me but I feel as if I’m inside her mind. She’s naked and ashamed, grabbing at her head—under which you can make out the outline of her skull—as if she’d rather tear it off. Next to her, an ailing tree; it’s the size of the woman and withered and skeletal. (Or does the woman feel giant?) From the tree’s branches hang five plump red fruits, the objects of my the woman’s desire. A red snake with a beady eye slithers away from her. This is an Edenic scene; perhaps the snake is Satan in a guise, having done the deed of tempting the woman by exposing her to the idea of want. But the snake also seems to be indifferent, a mere scapegoat of Myth’s demonizing of desire. When looked at from a distance, the snake might instead be a river of blood in a razed land stripped of youth and verdancy—a tributary to this tree of want. The painting, by the incredibly prolific English artist James F. Johnston, is called Eden (2025).

My first exposure to Johnston was through his band Gallon Drunk. It was not at a concert, nor was it at a record store or on television or anything like that. No, I first came across Gallon Drunk on YouTube, which, if not the ideal place to encounter music that changes your life, is probably fated for listeners like me who are drawn to the raw, unprocessed sounds of music predating their births at the dawn of the Internet age. The video is a live performance of the band’s song “Draggin’ Along,” filmed in 1991 at London’s T & C 2 (now called “The Garage”). I see the band onstage but, once again, I feel like I’m in someone’s mind. Nick Combe’s drumming sounds like a heartbeat racing in my ears, Mike Delanian on bass and Joe Byfield on maracas are the whirrings of a restless mind. And the voice of the restless belongs to Johnston (also on guitar), who in fits and starts so ably summons the ids of his narrators.

In deciphering the words to “Draggin’ Along,” I get as far as “I’ve been slowing it down / Trying to hold myself up”. In an interview with The Quietus, Johnston shares that his approach to lyric-writing is to save it for the very end, after making the music, without thinking of “the subject matter or anything”. As to the words, “it always starts with reams and reams and reams of pretty much automatic writing that I’ll have done on tour or wandering about…somehow these things suddenly present some sort of internal logic and then it almost presents its subject matter afterwards…and then once something’s there it’s almost as if someone else has written it.”

Both with Gallon Drunk and in his paintings (which, surprisingly, he only began making in 2017), James Johnston assembles his materials—whether sound or paint—into representations of complicated and chaotic inner lives. Especially on Gallon Drunk’s first two albums, You, The Night . . . and the Music (1992) and From the Heart of Town (1993), the interior depicted is one of shame, particularly the shame of addiction (“Look at the state you’re in / You should be ashamed”). Johnston’s vocals are hard to make out, intentionally so, conveying the narrator’s inability to make sense of their own inner dialogue, their failure to make it central in their consciousness. The narrator of a Gallon Drunk song seems to want out of their head, desperately groping outwards in need of sweet relief.¹

Johnston’s painting Krapp’s Last Tape (2025) is staged on the darkened field of a haunted mind. Inspired by seeing a production of the eponymous Beckett play on a night off from touring in Australia, Johnston is viewing his subject (Krapp) from the inside-out. In the play, Krapp is a literal curmudgeon destined to spend the rest of his days alone. On each of those days, Krapp allots himself bananas which he eats ever-so-gingerly to pass the time and indulge his sexual insecurity; on his birthday, his annual tradition is to listen to recordings of himself narrating memories from his more carnal youth. In Johnston’s painting, the tape deck on which Krapp listens to his narrations is the size of the table and anthropomorphized to wear a trance-like expression; the banana peel, too, is a mutantly large one. The chair in which Krapp must sit to review his life looms over the scene. In a “still life” of sorts, Johnston drags us inside the mind of a miserable, aging man with a phallic fixation Freud would relish.

A recurring character in Johnston’s work is a silent film actress—a representation, perhaps, of his early interest in film, but also a universally potent image (the heavy-lidded eyes, dark hair parted down the middle, cupid’s-bow lips). Something happened to the body politic when cinema was loosed on us all, giving us a new language in which to distill our longings across mediums.² For me, artists whose work has a certain cinematic quality—suggesting both time and space or presenting images selectively, as an auteur might—are especially likely to evoke duende, that mighty spirit which battles artists to near-death, thus compelling them to make extraordinarily raw work. What’s so raw about Johnston’s film star is that she is freighted with audiences’ longings, fears, and miseries, and reflects those back to us. Johnston, you, myself—we cannot avoid empathizing with her. Jung noted this tendency of the human psyche by theorizing the masks we wear as our “personae,” and Goffman the self-as-performance with his concept of the “frontstage” self. Johnston, with his screen siren, has devised a visual language for this.

In the painting Personal Demons (2025), our silent heroine is seated amidst a pack of impish ghouls who she is, seemingly, keeping at bay. Depending on my mood, I lean one of two ways in reading this piece. Should I find myself feeling rather benevolent, I like to think of the ghouls as the tricks up her sleeve, the emotions and experiences an actor harnesses to move their audience. We watch her—and how can we not fixate on the expressive faces of actors like Lillian Gish, Theda Bara, Clara Bow—pivot from fear, sadness, and joy, but truthfully, these emotions coexist, always lingering in the background. Joy cannot be recognized as such without the knowledge that sadness is ever-present, ever-possible. Alternatively, finding myself in a state of broodiness, I think of this painting as the actor and her selves; hidden behind her guise are the identities she perhaps wishes—or isn’t even aware—she could be. As Didion once wrote about self-respect: “Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.” One wonders if a chameleonic actor’s inner self decays with each new character.

Among my favorites by Johnston is I Need to Have a Word (2025), a deranged piece of work featuring a human figure with a horse’s head, hands folded gently across their lap. The bars of the figure’s bedstead, along with the shadows they cast on the wall, connote an institutional setting—be it asylum, church, family home; the figure perches at the foot of the bed like a reproachful parent, wears red robes like vestments. I imagine an individual traumatized by their past experiences in such institutions and who has resorted to splitting themselves into multiple identities to manage the collateral damage of their intense inner life (lives).

It is commonplace to describe a painter’s work as dream-like, especially when they mine their dreams as method, as the Dadaists and Surrealists did. Johnston’s pictures are visionary enough that one could classify them as dream nightmare material, but I’d argue that that reading is incomplete: What we see on Johnston’s canvases are the “meta” mental processes of a self reflecting and working on itself: conscious desires and sorrows, but also the things one isn’t aware they are repressing in the first place. And as things repressed are wont to do, they will rear their heads eventually—and until then, Johnston makes us wait. His is a cinematic idiom of past, present, and future intermingling at once, what is being held secret, what is destined.

To see more of James F. Johnston’s work, please visit his pages on Instagram and Don’t Walk Walk gallery.

¹ On the first two albums, that “sweet relief” comes only in the form of “Silver Wings,” with its spaciness and slowness. Ironically, that’s a song about one’s lover leaving, and thus the listener is left to think that the sweet relief is the narrator’s realization they need to shape up because they now have nothing to lose.

² Dramatic artifice is omnipresent in Johnston’s work, which bears titles such as Stage Fright, Dress Rehearsal, and BRAVO!, and features skeletons pulling the strings of marionettes on a castelet, sad rabbits performing for an empty theatre, and femme monkeys in heels gripping stage curtains.

When I hear music, I see images. Patti Smith’s “Birdland” exists in a desolate, arctic landscape; Bartók’s folk dances bring forth a dusty bazaar where, around every corner, lurks the Winkie’s Diner bum; and X’s Los Angeles album is the Vegas strip viewed through a zoetrope. Maybe this peculiar tendency of mine is why I gravitate to the work of PJ Harvey, an artist whose music is so much more than just sound. Harvey describes her writing process as fundamentally visual: If a composition “is moving into song, it’ll have color or a shape,” she says, and “once…recorded, the songs present their own visuals.” Most know Harvey for her music, but I find it rather odd to think of her as simply a musician, precisely because her music is so sculptural.^¹ Seemingly, her songs are thin lines which she diligently pinches and pulls at to form elegant, emotional arcs, evincing her command of space, audience, listener, and, importantly, the presentation of her work. Harvey’s visuals aren’t accompaniments to her music; they’re symbiotic with it, acting on us and altering our response to what we hear.

Some of the most intriguing images of PJ Harvey have been made by Maria Mochnacz, an artist who works in photography and has been capturing Harvey on film for decades. “I first met Polly Harvey in the late 1980s when she joined Automatic Dlamini,” says Mochnacz. Their collaboration began before either had achieved major success: Harvey, who was just beginning her music career with the PJ Harvey Trio (alongside musicians Rob Ellis and Steve Vaughan), approached Mochnacz because “[w]e need some photographs” and Mochnacz was her “only friend…who had a camera”. Mochnacz, not having “done anything like that” before, accepted with a shrug (“‘I’ll have a go’”). This casual act epitomizes so much of Harvey’s career: Regardless of the immense acclaim she receives, her work remains exactly that, a labor, one which she and a small circle of trusted collaborators devote deep care to.

Yet Harvey was aware of the commercial imperatives imposed by the music industry from the very beginning. (“We need some photographs.”) To make a career out of music, one must not just make the music but also sell it, reluctantly or not. Mochnacz understands this reality as a fundamental aspect of her work with Harvey and, as such, has endeavored to create photographs that both are reflexive about their function—at least in some quarters—to “sell” the music and, most importantly, grant autonomy to the musician over how she and her body of work are perceived. Mochnacz’s photos of Harvey engage in a critique of commercialism, not condemning the marketization of Harvey’s music per se but knowingly winking at it, letting it be known that the pair are every bit self-aware of what they’re doing and how you, the onlooker, are perceiving it. (My friend Ngaire Ruth, a feminist music critic who gave Harvey her first review and interview, writes brilliantly about these subjects on her own Substack, Taking Control.)

~

Image No. 1: The Photographer in the Glass (see cover photo)

The author of the photo reveals herself, capturing her reflection in a mirror held up by her subject. This is the photographic equivalent of the characters in Breathless looking at Godard’s camera, Henry Hill walking the audience through his criminal exploits in Goodfellas. In film, these moments shock because they confront cinematic audiences with their own voyeuristic gaze. We, the viewers of these photos, are just as (implicitly) indicted. In 1991, Harvey was only 22 years old (she wears a baby on a chain) and about to face scrutiny from the English music press over her topless NME cover. (It’s a beautiful image and, FFS, her back is turned!)

Beyond the voyeurism, though, the photo gives insight into the tender and hand-hewn reality of Harvey’s ascent. The person behind the camera, Mochnacz, is a trusted friend; you can tell in the way Harvey appears in all of Mochnacz’s photos, that is, unguarded and willing to participate—play, even—as fully herself. One sees that the photographer herself is a young woman, Polly’s peer, rather than someone much older or male, which would alter the power dynamic. The two friends are ostensibly sitting in someone’s home in Dorset, not some impersonal, urban studio. Harvey, here and over the course of her career, is stunningly able to keep the spindly apparatus that is industry out of the making of her art.

Looking at this photo of Mochnacz in Harvey’s mirror, I’m deeply moved because I see my own relationship to Harvey as a long-time admirer of her work. You and I see ourselves reflected in Harvey’s music; in fact, she’s holding up the glass for us to peer into. It’s the fact that her music is so elegantly minimalistic—all the unneeded bits chiseled away—that we can imbue it with any number of meanings. Harvey herself is an enigma. For a public person, she’s an incredibly private person: she is circumspect in interviews, doesn’t talk politics or her personal life, and still lives in her home county of Dorset. I’m glad of Harvey’s privacy, for her own sake as well as ours—look at what it has yielded.

~

Image No. 2: Package Her in Plastic

The first thing I find striking about this photo is the contrast of Harvey’s dark, prominent features against a plain white background, Harvey’s expression reflecting bored indifference, detachment. With just one image, she and Mochnacz are acknowledging what the music industry (inclusive of labels, agencies, and the press) often does to artists, especially female artists, which is sexualize them to sell their work. The second thing my eye tracks, of course, is the sheet of plastic wrap in which Harvey is bound, her arms pinioned to her sides. If you’ve bought music, then you’re familiar with the plastic packaging stretched tautly across any record, CD, or cassette. Take, for instance, what you would see unwrapping PJ Harvey Trio’s April 1993 release, Rid of Me, the cover of which features a naked Harvey, right out of the bath, her hair soaked and soaring as she shakes it to dry off.

Context is especially important here: The photo was taken for Harvey’s late-1993 release, 4-Track Demos. At this point, after a couple years of being a “trio” with Ellis and Vaughan, Harvey separated from the band and began to make music as just herself.² 4-Track Demos, though recorded before this turning point, was produced entirely by Harvey herself using the eponymous four-track machine and is an important statement about Harvey’s musical autonomy. Mochnacz’s cover shot for 4-Track Demos is Harvey stripped down to black underwear, a camera hanging around her neck and cat-eye sunglasses obscuring her gaze. Footage of that shoot is included in Mochnacz’s film documenting the Rid of Me tour, Reeling with PJ Harvey (1994). In it, the women stuff dollar bills in Harvey’s bra, an echo of commercialism’s plastic-wrap-residue.

~

Image No. 3: Is This Rock ‘N Roll?

If Harvey was going to be treated like a product by the music industrial complex, then she and Mochnacz figured they could use her as a vehicle for subverting the typical lines of communication between artist and audience. In this image, Mochnacz has scrawled “ROCK ‘N ROLL” across Harvey’s face in black marker; the subject smudges the letters as she wipes the sweat from her face. Mochnacz and Harvey have created here an elegant send-up of industry norms about what rock music is and should be. An exec may be happy sending their clients out to give audiences the impression that they’re “ROCK ‘N ROLL,” but there’s a difference between performing “rock” (as if it’s a reified ideal) and truly embodying it. I don’t know what rock is, but whatever it is, it has something to do with rebellion and, like its blues forebears, reckoning with life’s hardships. Blood sheds and sweat drips off the brow. Indeed, if you listen carefully to many of Harvey’s albums, you can hear the creaking of chairs and handling of instruments. Real labor went into the making of this music.

In another photo from this shoot, “ROCK ‘N ROLL” is swapped for “MARIA MOCHNACZ,” commenting on the scant attention paid to not just the work that goes into making a thing but also its makers. Inevitably, these images of Harvey will be used and reused in the marketing of her music, sometimes without credit, and contribute to listeners’ conception of who PJ Harvey “is.” In that case, why not make attribution a non-negotiable part of accessing and using Harvey’s image? The photo literally shows Harvey endorsing the work of a dear friend and collaborator. It makes sense to me, then, that the “MARIA MOCHNACZ” photo was used as the cover for Harvey’s 2022 release, B-Sides, Demos & Rarities, a collection of musical rough drafts and rejects that reflect the rigor of Harvey’s creative process and the labors that go into it.

~

Image No. 4: This Is Rock ‘n Roll

Twelve years or so into her career as “PJ Harvey,” Harvey seems aware her image had become alienated from her true self, insofar as it was used by others to sow speculation or drum up business.³ In 2004, Harvey released Uh Huh Her, an album that feels especially personal and handmade compared to her others. Harvey produced, played every instrument on, and recorded the album (on a four-track home studio), in addition to writing for it some of her most tender and self-exposing lyrics (“I’ll follow you into heaven or hell / and I’ll become as a girl / in the desperate kingdom of love”). Certainly, it was her most intimate and bare since 4-Track Demos, the self-aware photos which she and Mochnacz would innovate upon for Uh Huh Her.

In this image, Mochnacz captures Harvey wearing a dress made out of what appears to be a size XXL T-shirt from Harvey’s own merch table. Notice that Mochnacz is quoting her own work: The photograph of Harvey printed on the shirt is the “ROCK ‘N ROLL” image from 1992. If Mochnacz is quoting her earlier photograph, then Harvey is quoting the various representations of herself which exist. Harvey has always experimented with image and persona (see the pink catsuit from her “Joan Crawford on acid” period in the V&A archives), but what makes the pictured image’s statement so remarkable is that it announces the artist’s exploration of the image-making process. By wearing her own image throughout the promotion of Uh Huh Her, such a personal and immediate work, Harvey is contrasting who we think she is with who she really is.

Mochnacz’s photographs of Harvey make us think deeply, about the woman in the frame—what she might be trying to show us, what we’re actually seeing—and the woman behind the lens. They also, amazingly, achieve both the particular and universal: These are images of Harvey in her bedroom, dressing up, and undressing; these are images of the industry in which Harvey operates, pop culture and fandom writ large, the need for musicians in a capitalist music industry to sell the images of themselves they’ve helped to create. Of course, those images, once commercialized, become detached from the persons they represent. Mochnacz’s are among the few photographs in which PJ Harvey the person may really be glimpsed.

You can see more of Mochnacz’s work on her website.

^¹ One of Harvey’s first mediums was sculpture, which she had planned to study at art school before deciding to pursue music full-time.

² Also born of the 4-Track Demos period was Harvey’s performance of “Rid of Me” on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. According to lore, this was her first appearance after the disbandment of the Trio. Whereas before the song was a three-pronged sneak attack on the listener, in this presentation, a solo Harvey puts herself on wrought display in front of millions on mainstream TV. The point is, and this is getting back to Harvey’s expression of indifference in the photos: She’s not explicitly commenting on what happens to the music after she puts it out into the world; she simply lets the music speak for itself.

³ In 1995, Harvey told NME that “[p]eople think I’m some kind of axe-wielding, bitch cow from Hell who’s angst-ridden and hates all men on the planet, and I think that’s the biggest joke of all. It’s so, so wrong!” Even as early as 1992, when PJ Harvey Trio’s debut Dry was released, Harvey faced daft interviewers who expressed surprise that music of aggression—aggression toward men—could come from a woman. (Harvey’s expression during that interview suggested her exasperation with this tired line of questioning, and rightfully so.)

Author’s note: I lost a friend this week. Gregg Foreman (AKA Mr. Pharmacist) was an immensely talented musician and beautiful human full of soul, love, and light, and he is greatly loved and missed by many. Something he and I shared was a love for In Search of Duende, a book of Lorca’s writings. (Amazingly, gifted to him by Lydia Lunch.) It’s a tiny volume; it bruises though, and I highly recommend it. All quotes, unless otherwise noted, come from this essential text. Gregg lives on in his music, which itself bursts with duende. (One of my first observations of him was, “The duende runs strong in you.”)

“Photographs state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading toward their own destruction,” Susan Sontag wrote in On Photography. Her point is that human lives immortalized in photographs are oblivious to their inevitable demise. Literally, death is not in the picture. It makes sense, then, that writer and poet Federico García Lorca wouldn’t count photography as one of the artistic forms most capable of conjuring the demonic spirit of duende from which, through an artist’s battling it, emerges a “‘blush of all that is truly alive’”, manifesting “‘principally among musicians and poets of the spoken word, rather than among painters and architects, for it needs the trembling of a moment and then a long silence’”. In other words, the coming of the spirit of duende requires the presence of an artist’s body, situated in a specific place and moment in time. The musician produces a song on the stage, but once that form emerges, it dies, its “‘contours [open] against an exact present’”. No audience will ever witness that particular form again.

Duende’s rootedness in the body poses a challenge for me. One of the great struggles of my young life was against my body, as I sought to overcome the constraints it imposed and achieve “mind over matter.” Duende refutes that latter wish, too: The art that emerges from duende is irrational, anathema to intellectualization; it’s not of the mind, but of the heart. It seems, then, that the concept of duende was diabolically designed by the gods to defy my anal retentiveness; indeed, the “‘the duende enjoys fighting the creator on the very rim of the well . . . the duende wounds’”. However, it’s “‘[i]n the healing of that wound’”, (“‘which never closes’”), where “‘lie[s] the strange, invented qualities of a man’s work’”. That must be why I’m so deeply drawn to the unique artworks, specifically in music, which tremble with duende: Like Sylvia Plath Plath says of the tulips in her poem of the same name, “[t]heir redness talks to my wound”.¹

I first learned about duende from Nick Cave, who delivered a lecture on its relation to the “Love Song” in Vienna in 1999. (Reader, I sadly was not present for the lecture, as I was but two. Instead, I discovered a transcript of it here, in AnOther magazine.) In the lecture, Cave says that his wounds, like Plath’s illness, correspond to duende: “A great gaping hole was blasted out of my world by the unexpected death of my father when I was 19 years old. The way I learned to fill this hole, this void, was to write”. In this way, the fight with duende has the potential to become intensely spiritual: “To write allowed me direct access to my imagination, to inspiration and ultimately to God”, Cave says. “I found through the use of language, that I wrote God into existence”. This is an apt time to return to Lorca:

In all Arabic music . . . the duende’s arrival is greeted with energetic cries of Allah! Allah!, which is so close to the Olé of the bullfight that who knows if it is not the same thing? And in all the songs of the south of Spain the duende is greeted with sincere cries of ¡Viva Dios!—deep and tender human cry of communication with God by the means of the five senses, thanks to the duende . . . It is a real and poetic evasion of this world.

So, duende is not just irrational, such that it “helps the artist see the limitations of intelligence” and create art which must be experienced “‘without depending on critical apparatus or intelligence’”, but also mortal: It neither denies nor flees from death but rather insists upon it. “‘The duende does not come at all unless he sees that death is possible,’” Lorca tells us. Importantly, and paradoxically, it is through the invocation of death that duende allows the artist—and their audience—to experience life in its fullness. Similarly paradoxical, duende is ephemeral, in that it is rooted in the body yet spiritual in its effect (“Allah! Allah!”). Cave pulls on this thread of paradox in his lecture:

The Love Song is never truly happy. It must first embrace the potential for pain . . . The writer who refuses to explore the darker regions of the heart will never be able to write convincingly about the wonder, the magic and the joy of love, for just as goodness cannot be trusted unless it has breathed the same air as evil . . . In Psalm 137 the poet finds himself captive in “a strange land” and is forced to sing a song of Zion. He swears his love to his homeland and dreams of revenge. The Psalm is ghastly in its violent sentiments, as he sings for love of his homeland and his God and that he may be made happy by murdering the children of his enemies . . . verses of rapture, of ecstasy and love could hold within them apparently opposite sentiments—hate, revenge, bloody-mindedness, etc. . . .

The paradox of duende is what Lorca is referring to when he calls it a “‘blush of all that is truly alive’”. Duende is life writ large, spanning the range of dialectics of life and death, love and loss, good and evil, pain and pleasure. Cave’s desire “to become God-like, to rise up and above the earthbound” and Plath’s “redness [which] talks to my wound” are both evident of that: The limits of Cave’s earthly existence gave rise to the desire to see what lies beyond; the bright red vitality of the tulips offended the hospitalized, bed-ridden Plath yet eventually offered her (temporary) salvation from her brush with illness.² The deepest truths lie in paradoxical tensions, with concepts like goodness only making sense because of the wickedness we compare it to. Duende, then, is truth—“‘all that is truly alive’”.

The complexities underlying duende make it rather difficult to describe, especially in writing. Ultimately, the only way to know the duende spirit is to feel it, to witness an artist struggling with it. Cave points us in some potential directions:

Bob Dylan has always had it. Leonard Cohen deals specifically in it. It pursues Van Morrison like a black dog and though he tries to he cannot escape it. Tom Waits and Neil Young can summon it. It haunts Polly Harvey. My friends in the Dirty Three have it by the bucket load. The band Spiritualized are excited by it. Tindersticks desperately want it, but all in all it would appear that duende is too fragile to survive the brutality of technology and the ever increasing acceleration of the music industry. Perhaps there is just no money in sadness, no dollars in duende. Sadness or duende needs space to breathe. Melancholy hates haste and floats in silence. It must be handled with care.

As Cave makes clear, duende is averse to the artificial, commercial, institutional. Lorca, for example, praised cante jando music—as opposed to “commercially adulterated professional ‘flamenco’”—for being “a strictly rural phenomenon, an intimate and anonymous cry of pain and longing, a folk music, best sung by amateurs [emphasis added]”. Rather than being slick and over-produced, duende music bears its imperfections. Voices crack, chairs creak, analog electronics fail—duende is the punk who can’t play their instrument, only writes songs with three barre chords, and assaults their audience with a mere 12-minute set. The alternative—elaborate, digital productions with all flaws removed—lacks duende because it lacks struggle. An artist must “‘rob herself of skill and security, send away her muse and become helpless, that her duende might come and deign to fight her hand-to-hand’”.

Ultimately, duende can’t be explained in words; it must be felt. Here, I use Cave’s list as a starting point for my own playlist of songs that are, to me, fully alive with duende. There are so, so many more to highlight, and that will come with time.

1. “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” by Bob Dylan, from Blonde On Blonde

2. “Love Calls You by Your Name” by Leonard Cohen, from Songs of Love and Hate

3. “Bulbs” by Van Morrison, from Veedon Fleece

4. “That Feel” by Tom Waits, from Bone Machine

5. “Cortez the Killer” by Neil Young & Crazy Horse, from Zuma

6. “April” by PJ Harvey & John Parish, from A Woman A Man Walked By

7. “I Really Should’ve Gone Out Last Night” by Dirty Three, from Whatever You Love, You Are

8. “Sad Waters” by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, from Your Funeral . . . My Trial

~

The duende . . . where is the duende? Through the empty arch comes a wind, a mental wind blowing relentlessly over the heads of the dead, in search of new landscapes and unknown accents; a wind that smells of baby’s spittle, crushed grass, and jellyfish veil, announcing the constant baptism of newly created things.

¹ Lorca emphasizes the power of the spoken word to conjure duende, so I urge you to listen to this recording of Plath reading “Tulips.” One may doubt whether “Tulips” truly conjures duende, but there is no doubt that this particular reading conjures Plath herself, her clipped, Mid-Atlantic, affected tones manifesting the poet right before you.

² The reader is encouraged to read Virginia Woolf’s “On Being Ill” and the aforementioned Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor for fascinating explorations of the aesthetics of the ailing body.

When Sue Webster moved out of her childhood home, her father bestowed on her three cardboard boxes chock-full of her life up to that point. Webster writes in I Was a Teenage Banshee (2019) that, after a chaotic youth, she “dragged with me through life those three little boxes the painful way, the way of suffering the same way that Jesus Christ carried his own wooden cross through the old city of Jerusalem and on to the path of crucifixion”. Woah, I thought as I read that, that’s me, I could’ve written that. What an image of the baggage of childhood, young-woman-as-Christ bearing the burden of her early years, packed up in boxes on her back.

My first encounter with Sue Webster’s art was in 2012, when I was fifteen years old and in a bedroom probably just like hers. I’d come across pictures online of the works Youngman and The Individual (both 2012), created by Webster and her former partner Tim Noble. The pieces are representative of the pair’s “shadow works,” careful constructions of detritus (in this case, wooden scraps) that, when backlit with a projector, cast imposing shadow portraits of the artists on an adjacent wall. I didn’t realize it at the time but, having now swallowed I Was a Teenage Banshee whole, it’s apparent those wooden scraps are Webster’s cross.

I’ve followed Sue Webster’s work with zeal in the years since that fateful rainy night in my childhood bedroom. I was and remain greatly moved by Webster’s works with Tim Noble, but what positively overwhelms me with feeling are her solo works, those she has created since her separation from Noble. At the center of these works lies Webster’s namesake, Siouxsie Sioux, the force behind the potent, fearsome post-punk band Siouxsie and the Banshees. Siouxsie appears throughout Webster’s Full Leather Jackets series (2019-2020), eighteen leather jackets hand-painted with iconography from the artist’s adolescent years spent under the tutelage of the Banshees: Siouxsie’s spiky hair, heavy-lidded eyes, and lined lips; badges and passes from Webster’s travels following the band on tour; Banshees members Kenny Norris, Peter Fenton, and Steven Severin in profile.

Looking at a photograph of young Sue Webster in a similarly bespoke leather jacket, I begin to imagine just what these jackets mean to her now. Siouxsie Sioux became “the surrogate mother I’d long been searching for”, Webster writes, standing in for the lack of attachment she felt to her own mother. To Webster, the jackets serve as both aspirations and markers of her journey toward the fully realized self; when in one, Webster’s in the arms of Siouxsie’s embrace. I think of how I feel wearing my PJ Harvey and, for that matter, “Teenage Banshee” T-shirts: Harvey and Webster (who are, incidentally, friends) are my surrogate mothers. Wearing those shirts, I’m pronouncing myself as not just in kinship with them, but also in pursuit of the self I want to become.

I achieved just such a feeling when looking upon one of Sue Webster’s “spidergraphs” for the first time. Starting from the premise that Webster learned everything she knows from the first four Siouxsie and the Banshees records, each spidergraph is a chaotic web linking the landmarks of her personal history with The Scream (1978), Join Hands (1979), Kaleidoscope (1980), and Juju (1981). Chaos is, indeed, central to Webster’s work for me. Chaos characterizes the spidergraphs, yes, but also works such as Chaos Paintings (2016); her early, conjured-from-the-trash-heap shadow works with Tim Noble (1997-2014); and her recent work, The Crime Scene (2017-2026), in which she has finally, it seems, cast the cross off her back, unpacked the boxes containing the remnants of her childhood, and connected them—clues from her chaotic early days—with a barely-visible thread.

What I see Sue doing across her body of work is the paradoxical achievement of bringing order to an internal chaos and, at the same time, accepting that chaos as an inextricable part of herself. Hospitalized as a teen (for, one could say, her “chaos”), the daily routine of ward life became for her “a safety net, a comfort among the chaos, something to hold on to in order to help let the imagination spiral out of control”. Every day contained three meals, three doses of pills, timed visits from doctors on their rounds; every week contained three group therapy sessions.

Like Sue Webster, I, too, spent part of my adolescence in a hospital—let’s just say for a touch of consumption. In my experience, the routine Webster writes about passes the time and prevents one from slipping inside an inner “chaos.” One’s tendency, though, is to try to make sense of the chaos lurking beneath. I’m reminded of Webster’s and Noble’s Blindfolded paintings (2013-2014), which resemble Rorschach tests. When considered in relation to Webster’s early years of weathering her personal chaos, the idea of a self-portrait-as-a-Rorschach-test feels charged: What do you see in me? What do I see in myself?

Let me suggest that Sue Webster has catalogued her struggle with these questions throughout her oeuvre, perhaps no more so than in a recent series of painted self-portraits with titles such as Birth of an Icon (2024), Self Portrait with Gloves On (2024), and The Epiphany (2026). The paintings (which, sadly for me, hang thousands of miles away at Firstsite in Colchester, a part of Webster’s first major solo show, Sue Webster: Birth of an Icon) are undeniably portraits of the self Webster has discovered—or is discovering—herself to be. Waldemar Januszczak, art critic for The Sunday Times, compared them to “the countesses painted by Gainsborough”, marking a decisive contribution “not just to [Webster’s] art but to British portraiture”.

Between the woman in the Birth of an Icon portraits and the young girl in the hospital ward can be traced a long, winding line. With Sue’s encouragement, I’m beginning to eke out a similarly jagged line to my own girlhood self. How could two young girls, decades and an ocean apart, have such similar experiences? In Siouxsie Sioux, Sue Webster found a surrogate mother, a missing part of her chaotic identity and guiding light for the self she sought to become. In Sue Webster, if I may be so bold, I’ve found the same. Her art tells the story of her full realization, the bringing of order to acceptance of her inner chaos. In her recent self-portraits, Webster looks a bit like Siouxsie Sioux. She’s beautiful.

In these times of mindless, megalomaniacal warmongering, I turn to songs such as these to (try to) make sense of all that is happening. Choosing these songs, I wanted to avoid any overly obvious selections such as Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War” or Neil Young’s Living with War album, great as they may be. Instead, reflected here is my predilection for punk, post-punk, blues-inspired rock, and the avant-garde. These songs capture the human experience of war: For example, the despairing confusion of we (seemingly) powerless masses (“Who the hell makes those missiles?”, as sung by Adrian Borland of The Sound) and the fractured feeling of everyday life abstracted from a distant war (Throbbing Gristle’s “Six Six Sixties,” but also Bowie’s post-9/11 masterpiece “New Killer Star”). Importantly, the playlist ends with two songs that capture the consequences of war: Suicide’s “Frankie Teardrop” tells the story of a Vietnam War veteran who, suffering from PTSD, murders his family; PJ Harvey’s “Written on the Forehead” conjures for us the refugees of Middle Eastern conflicts whose fates are written for them by the blood-money aspirations of the war-industrial complex.

1. “Missiles” by The Sound, from Jeopardy

2. “Six Six Sixties” by Throbbing Gristle, from 20 Jazz Funk Greats

3. “Song In the Blood” by Joan Baez, from Baptism

4. “Broken English” by Marianne Faithfull, from Broken English

5. “New Killer Star” (Live at Sessions@AOL in September 2003) by David Bowie

6. “Further Down the Line” by Mick Harvey and Christopher Barker, from The Fall and Rise of Edgar Bourchier and the Horrors of War

7. “Broken Flag” by Patti Smith, from Wave

8. “Frankie Teardrop” by Suicide, from Suicide

9. “Written on the Forehead” by PJ Harvey, from Let England Shake

Author’s note: I’ve been writing long-form letters to the musician Nick Cave for a while now—outpourings about my troubles, longings, and the impact his work has had on me. This is the first letter I’m publishing here; Cave featured an abridged version of it on The Red Hand Files last year. In it, I discuss Flannery O’Connor, an important influence on Cave’s work. It appears Nick has read many of my letters; onstage in Kansas City last year, he made mention of my “unbelievably long” correspondences. Although he might take issue with their length, he did indeed call the letters “beautiful,” too. Thank you, Nick, for putting up with my unbelievably long letters.

Dear Nick,

I write my fifty-ninth letter to you on Thursday the twelfth of June.

Today I finished reading Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor once more. Can one take pleasure in reading the prosecutorial exploits of a self-loathing, masochistic preacher who yearns for his own sanctification and vows asceticism to get it? The experience of reading it is rather like a bad dream from which, upon waking, you can’t rid yourself of its vivid, eviscerated imagery and emotional residue. For me, Wise Blood is a piece of work—one of those rare works of art which give me a new way to articulate myself, the language and symbols to finally understand why I do what I do, why I did what I did. Unquestioningly, albeit a bit reluctantly, I see myself reflected in O’Connor’s protagonist Haze (you know, the self-loathing, masochistic preacher who yearns for his own sanctification and vows asceticism to get it . . .).

Haze has “a deep black wordless conviction in him that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin.” For Haze, the very existence of Jesus necessitates sin—one couldn’t understand that the immortal, pure Jesus was good if it weren’t for Jesus’ opposite, that is, mortal, impure sin. I recognize this sort of black-and-white thinking because it’s my own; Haze’s splitting of that which is impure and inferior from the pure and perfect creates for himself an impossible end, purity. “‘I AM clean . . . I AM clean . . . If Jesus existed, I wouldn’t be clean . . .’”. Haze wants to become Jesus so he can finally achieve the purity he has long yearned for.

This pursuit of perfection, however, often involves renouncing our “natures.” Nick, I relate to Haze when he preaches, “‘ . . . there was no Fall because there was nothing to fall from and no Redemption because there was no Fall and no Judgment because there wasn’t the first two’”. To Haze, to be mortal is to be a sinner, impure. To punish himself for what he feels is his inherent inadequacy, Haze fills his shoes “with stones and small rocks”, “laced them up tight and walked in them through the woods for what he knew to be a mile”. I think of a painting at the Nelson-Atkins called, “Penitent Saint Jerome in Landscape.” Jerome is shown kneeling and praying and self-abnegating in a mere corner of this glorious landscape; it’s all piteousness and bashfulness and smallness and shame, but nonetheless, awesome. The saint is both devoting and debasing himself; through punishment comes transcendence. This is yearning at its worst.

Haze’s final act of self-punishment is to blind himself. We’re left to wonder as Haze’s landlady does: “‘Who’s he doing this for? . . . What’s he getting out of doing it?’” She notices Haze “had the look of seeing something. His face had a peculiar pushing look, as if it were going forward after something it could just distinguish in the distance. Even when he was sitting motionless in a chair, his face had the look of straining toward something. But she knew he was totally blind . . .” Haze’s explanation? “‘If there’s no bottom in your eyes, they hold more.’” His blind gaze is full of yearning.

Nick, long ago, I wrote to you about Franz Kafka’s “The Hunger Artist” and how that work speaks to me about yearning, that feeling deep inside oneself there’s something out there and you aren’t complete until you’ve got it or become it. It’s a yearning that singes you from under your skin: Haze’s abstract ideals are so rigid, so absolute, that his earthly, bodily self can’t live up to them. He yearns for the world of spirit and virtue to rain down on him, but it seems out of reach. Of course, he has to die to get it. What he doesn’t realize is that spirit and body are intertwined. Through O’Connor, through Kafka, I’ve come to see yearning as inevitable, perhaps the human condition.

O’Connor’s Haze and Kafka’s hunger artist are both attempting to overcome their bodies. I understand why they’d want to; one may think of the body as corrupted, “a two hundred pound bag of blood and bone / leaking on your favorite chair”. Yet I look upon those authors’ words with my very own eyes, listen to your song with my ears. I’m coming to understand the reality—that practical thing—of transcendence, which I have historically associated with the mind and renunciation of the body, being only possible through the body. It’s through this bag of blood and bone that the sacred enters, and it only becomes apparent to me as I write to you about the effect these works have on me. The body as crucible: turning pain and suffering into meaning, sound waves into love, colors into love.

Sure, art is a “mirror,” but more than that, art is real. The experience of reading Wise Blood, of experiencing Haze’s attempt at transcendence via self-harm, was the experience of reliving my own struggles from another’s point of view, with the benefit of hindsight. What a gift.

L

These songs summon something for me that is spiritual, a third presence, and they do so by using space or creating an atmosphere that envelops me when I listen (e.g., stretching the music as far as it can possibly go so that it becomes the only horizon I can see and feel). Any silence in these songs is in fact pregnant with meaning.¹ Minimalist lyrics, through repetition, leave a deep impression; vocals made seemingly hieroglyphic through the transmogrification of words into sounds or syllables communicate their meanings emotionally, through feeling, rather than intellectually.² A higher power emerges from the silence, the noise, the chants. Words fail us. When I listen to these songs, I feel I am in a celestial space of the musician’s making, alone with myself and some entity beyond my understanding.

1. “Opening” by Morton Feldman, from Three Voices For Joan La Barbara

2. “Dambala” (Live at Philharmonic Hall, NYC in July 1973) by Nina Simone, from It Is Finished

3. “Prayer at the Gate” by PJ Harvey, from I Inside the Old Year Dying

4. “Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten” by Arvo Pärt, performed by the Hungarian State Opera Orchestra under conductor Tamás Benedek

5. “Phrasing” by Scott Walker, from Bisch Bosch

6. “Amor, dicea” (Lamento della Ninfa, SV 163) by Claudio Monteverdi, performed by Christina Pluhar

7. “Spinning Song” by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, from Ghosteen

8. “Lullaby” by Low, from I Could Live in Hope

¹ Morton Feldman is especially masterful at this. Listen to the rest of his incredible body of work and take time to appreciate the silences and ask why they’re there and what they’re doing for you and to you. Another artist who is exceptional at working with space is Éliane Radigue, who sadly passed away within days of my writing this. I would’ve included her works on this list, but they are exceptionally long and seem better suited to stand alone, on their own, than on a playlist of this kind.

² I believe PJ Harvey is one of our finest minimalist songwriters. Her lyrics are skeletal; anything unnecessary is shorn away. The skeleton we’re left with, though, seems to me to be the truth. Emotion is wrought through the least words possible, and she makes every word and line work for her.

Mothers and children are abundant in the work of PJ Harvey. But these ghostly figures—in my reading of Harvey’s work, at least—are not merely mothers and their children or children and their mothers, but children who mother themselves and, necessarily, mothers who themselves are children. My interpretation is perhaps nothing to do with the artist herself and possibly everything to do with me, but I like to think Harvey intended mine to be one of many possible readings of her vast and differentiated body of work.¹ Art is never solely autobiographical, nor is it only a reflection of the listener, viewer, reader. It’s an active engaging of and by both parties, artist and audience. And lately, my “engagements” with Polly have been multi-layered ones wholly evocative of the maternal. Polly Jean Harvey has done it, she’s had me thinking of my mother and, indeed, myself the mother.

“Nina in Ecstasy” is where I should start. Although never released (Harvey released a demo version of the song in her 2022 collection, B-Sides, Demos & Rarities), the song has been praised by Harvey’s collaborators and fans as among her very best.² Not to deal too heavily in the idiom of the modern music critic (before proceeding to do so…), but “Nina” is a bird’s wing of a song: Just Harvey and what I think is a synth pad; her words sung in short, staccato fragments, like breaths cut short (“I feel love / I’ll be safe / I’ll be yours / I’ll be safe…”, reassurances sung waveringly); Polly’s voice at or near its highest register. “Where’s your mama gone?” is the refrain (repurposed from a much peppier Middle of the Road song): At once the lament of a concerned Greek chorus and perhaps also a prayer of the titular Nina, it’s clear the protagonist is alone.

I’ll abstain from making this piece an experiment in self-pity, for the reader’s sake and my own, so let me just say my mother is absent. This apparently offhand caveat, of course, belies an agglomeration of pain, and has done for all of history and myth (cf. Hagar and Jezebel, Clytemnestra and Medea), and that is entirely the point. The point of departure for some of the most powerful works of art is the absent or errant mother. “Where’s your mama gone?” Nina’s admonishing herself: The pain inflicted upon one by the parent is shamefully turned inward. (I suppose I’m projecting myself onto Harvey’s song.) I imagine Nina facing a great void—one as cavernous as a womb—and steeling herself to sit in her pain and confront the uncertainty and irresoluteness of a life to be lived without a maternal source of guidance and care. A mother, if she’s no longer around, can become a ghostly presence, making one unsure if she was ever there in the first place, a flickering light in the recesses of the brain which never vanishes but never fully illuminates, either.

Not coincidentally, the hours I’ve spent with “Nina in Ecstasy” have moved me to seek out Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers, a film I’ve seen before but never could place into any understandable framework.³ In the film (which features vivid red sets, as in a womb), a character called Agnes lies on her deathbed and dreams of her late, unyielding mother, who clearly favored Agnes’s sister and frequently conveyed disappointment in Agnes. But alas, as Agnes stares into the void on the other side of the veil, she’s reminded of her life and inevitably, the one who gave life unto her. “Where’s your mama gone?” could very well be Agnes’s refrain, too.

Unlike Agnes, what I’m facing now is not (yet) my earthly demise, but the death of a prior self. I’ve catalogued such an immense cascade of changes in my personal life over the past half-year that I feel as if that prior iteration of myself, the self who lived my old life, must be dead and buried. And maybe that likens me to Nina, who “grew older,” “cold,” and “lost her way,” whose inner child simply died. “Where’s your mama gone?” And who do we think of in death but our mothers? The thought that I might have better-weathered the recent tumult of my life under a mother’s protection, someone to assure me I’m good, has frequently crossed my mind. Without one, it feels like I’m staring into a motherless—Godless—void, just as I imagine Nina to be. But I have something Nina doesn’t, and that’s the music of Polly Jean Harvey.⁴ Through my listening, I’ve come to realize that my void is, in fact, occupied by a presence, one I’ve deduced is actually myself.

Who else brought me to this realization but Joy, the girl who lives a Southern Gothic life in a Blakean lyric in the world wrought by PJ Harvey on her fourth album, Is This Desire?. In Joy’s void, she confronts the horror of facing who she is or, more precisely, who she never was. “I’ve been believing in nothing since I was born—it never was a question!” I think the nothing, no-thing, that obsesses Joy is the very void she believes herself to be: “She looked away into a hollow sky” and “came face-to-face with her own innocence surrounding her.” Where’s your mama gone, Joy? Even if Joy does indeed have a living mother, a prim, bird-like Southern Gothic matron, Joy hasn’t become a mother to herself. She hasn’t embraced her inner child, she hasn’t attempted to nurture her inner child into the woman she is now. She’s stuck.

Jung (jump scare) once spoke of a girl never fully born, who existed in a liminal space between worlds, a bardo. She maintained the innocence of a child newly sprung yet was marked by the experience of the corporeal world. A psychoanalyst called Wilfred Bion (Samuel Beckett was his patient), inspired by Jung, compared the unborn girl to the psychoanalytic situation: On the couch is a person waiting—struggling, if they’re doing it right—to be born. In this way, we perhaps “give birth” to the selves we want to be. The image that comes to mind is that of a Russian nesting doll: Our outer, performative self giving way to an inner, inevitable core. Or perhaps the rings of a tree, to account for the element of time: The older, outer rings cloaking the pith that is our first year. We’re continuously birthing and dying, our youngest selves remaining inside for us to nurture, yes, but also to renew. We must move forward, incorporating our oldest, most primitive parts, to become whole individuals.

As mothers to ourselves, we can be derelict or downright foul—this is what we must be wary of. In PJ Harvey’s “Down By the Water,” the narrator tells us it was the water where she “took her hand / my lovely daughter / won’t see her again.” On its face, the song is a murder ballad: A mother drowns her unchaste daughter and now, with the “blue-eyed whore” dead, the “lovely daughter” is the one she’ll remember. But lately I can’t shake a more self-reflexive reading of the song, that is, of a woman whose own innocence was lost “under the bridge,” by her own hand. Slipping her former self under the water, the woman “had to lose her / to do her harm.” This amounts to renouncing—rather than nurturing—the former self.

As mothers to ourselves, we can also be sanguine. “White Chalk” and “When Under Ether,” two songs from Harvey’s 2007 album of which the former song is the title track, deal with the unborn, the selves we might or might not have become. Our life changes—we move away from a place, we part ways with a lover—and suddenly the self we could’ve been in that iteration of our life departs. When Harvey’s narrator sings of, “Dorset’s cliffs…where I walked / our unborn child in me,” the unborn self is made conditional upon a particular place and time with a particular person. On “When Under Ether,” when I hear the thing “inside me / unborn and unblessed… disappears in the ether / this world to the next,” I hear words of sorrow tinged with possibility. The song ends as a eulogy: “Human kindness.” In a moment of vulnerability (a loss of the self), to be treated with kindness and to treat yourself with kindness seems to be the first step toward renewal.

I think Polly’s latest album, I Inside the Old Year Dying, shows us what mothering ourselves could look like—through not just the songs on the album, but also the very act of releasing it. Harvey, speaking to Amanda Petrusich, said the album’s title is intended to evoke the “transformation of both person and year into something else.” This is the album when Harvey’s unborn children who mother are loosed on the world. The song perhaps most evocative of self-transformation is the appropriately titled, “I Inside the Old I Dying,” in which she sings, “Slip from my childhood skin…” Her narrator’s child self is among the “chalky children” (ghost children) who haunt the album. If this is Harvey’s peacemaking with her youth, if only partly so, then it’s very clearly not an abandoning of it, it’s an embrace of it: Her child self will remain with her. As she sings in “Prayer at the Gate,” “all souls…made passage for the born again.” Her self unborn on White Chalk has finally been birthed.

¹ Perhaps “intended” is too angular a word. I’ve come to experience Harvey’s work as quite a capacious thing, teeming with ambiguity and paradoxical tensions which invite us to bear witness to an idea and its opposite. It’s this capaciousness that appears to be of Harvey’s design, an achievement considering her aesthetic minimalism.

² John Parish, who has been collaborating with Harvey for about forty years (since a determined young Harvey joined his band, of which she was a fan), said this about the song to The Quietus: “I think [‘Nina in Ecstasy’] is one of Polly’s best songs. . .I can see it was pointing to where she was going to end up, using that high, fragile voice that she’d deliberately not considered using until that time—everything had been quite powerful and confident and in control. That was the first time she’d sounded vulnerable on a record—you have to have confidence to open up like that.” Rolling Stone also included the song on a list of Harvey’s best deep cuts, a list titled, “15 Insanely Great PJ Harvey Songs Only Hardcore Fans Know (And Everyone Else Should Too).”

³ Harvey’s music is cinematic. The visuals created through her songs are not just visions themselves but appear to be visually inspired: The artist has cited filmmakers such as Steve McQueen, Jonathan Glazer, Paul Thomas Anderson, Céline Sciamma, Joanna Hogg, and Stanley Kubrick as influences. These are rather unusual citations for a musician to make, but entirely not surprising to someone who has hallucinated ecstatically while listening to a PJ Harvey album.

⁴ In the PJ Harvey extended musical universe, does the presence of Polly herself haunt the lives of Joe, Elise, Nina, Ira-Abel, and Mr. Badmouth himself, the characters who wander her works?