The space you leave behind

They should invent a way to text your ex-boyfriend “I’m pretty sure I had a spiritually significant dream about you” that doesn’t read as “I want you back.” I’d like to let him know that I saw a shadow of his psyche in a far-off dimension. I’d like to believe that the experience has given me insight into his internal world rather than my own.

I don’t think of him very often. It was a surprise to me that I dreamed about him a few nights ago, as I almost never have before. It wouldn’t be right to say that I miss him. Only that I will probably never forget about him and thus every year that passes without speaking becomes more space I have to make up on my own. Because while I won’t forget about him entirely, I have forgotten him. I can’t recall the sound of his laugh or remember where any of his moles are or the name of his favorite movie. And so while I feel quite certain that something, somewhere had the possibility of energetically transpiring between the two of us in dreamspace, the clearer explanation is that he has become a shadow in my psyche, utilized by the subconscious mind to communicate back to consciousness. Once a full person, now a symbol I have trained my brain to decode.

Was there a way to tell my twenty-year-old self who was sitting at that Los Feliz restaurant, “hey, by the way, one day you will know this person primarily as a collection of your own convenient facts, which may or may not align with base reality, and remember them solely in light of how they fit into your own narratives about yourself and your life? Hey, by the way, that kind of feels like losing someone forever. Plus, it makes you think about all the people that you actually, currently know, and whether there is a way to love them without seeing so much of yourself in the process. I think that we need people badly, which prevents us from acknowledging their wholeness. You’ll start having trouble with this later. Did you know that’s going to happen to you?”

But even if there were a way to tell her that I’m pretty sure she would be like bitch WHAT are you talking about.

Ana Mendieta, Silueta Sangrieta, 1975

Kate invited me to the Ana Mendieta exhibit in Tribeca the other day¹. I had heard of Mendieta — usually I know something or other about women who died under “mysterious circumstances” — but I was mostly unfamiliar with her work.

The collection is called Back to the Source and features silhouettes Mendieta built into the earth, their shapes mediated by the pliabile, natural world. The museum’s curator calls it a “negative dialectic of exile,” a way of staying through leaving. Mendieta’s impressions are not meant to last forever, as they take form through the manipulation of natural materials that will undoubtedly manipulate themselves further across time, making different shapes, other impressions. I was struck immediately by her focus, how each image seemed to say, simply: I was here.

I was struck also by how each silhouette looks like a woman who had just fallen from a great height. In the 911 call Mendieta’s husband made after her death, he is quoted as saying "My wife is an artist, and I'm an artist, and we had a quarrel about the fact that I was more, eh, exposed to the public than she was. And she went to the bedroom, and I went after her, and she went out the window." Her husband had scratches up and down his face. He was acquitted after a nonjury trial.

Ana Mendieta, Untitled: Silueta Series, 1979

I mean to make no crass insinuation about Mendieta’s work being some sort of omen, though of course it’s comforting to imagine it as such. The idea that one could have drawn a line through the middle of her work to the tactile end of her life, artist as prophet. It’s just to say that this is what the figures reminded me of, their absence conjuring another kind of presence, another space where Ana Mendieta’s body had once been. Both a physical impression and a psychic one.

Even apart from this connection, the photos are eerie. They remind me of my death, but also my belonging. The fact that my death is my belonging, that I wouldn’t feel so tethered to this earth if I didn’t know that I would one day decompose back into it. They remind me that anytime I leave something, I’ve left something behind. That my body is more than a concrete form I can grasp; that my body is also a shape which creates other shapes.

Ana Mendieta, La Venus Negra, 1981

I don’t feel the need to fill in Mendieta’s shapes. There is already someone there. The body is the form which leaves an impression; the body is everywhere it has been.

Memory will always hurt me, but it hurts me most when I believe in it. Is it true that I must let everything pass through my hands like sand in the river? I think so. But it’s not as though I am the person holding the sand which is the other person and the river is something bigger, like God. I have chosen to see the shape, so I take the shape. Somewhere else, I am the sand. Someday soon, I am the river.

still from Mendieta’s film Silueta de Arena, 1978

1. It’s very nice of Kate to be as chill as they are about me blowing up the spot of their esoteric interests. I learn a lot from them, and I process my love of things through talking and writing. If you think I’m interesting, you should be reading kyote world . They’re the real deal