The Vessel
I left myself sometime in July. There was a person there, inside my corporal form, who had been some version of the same person since the day I was born. I had grown (physically), matured (not enough), but my core traits (passion, curiosity, extreme intensity) had a throughline all the way back to the beginning. I was even a colic baby. I knew myself well, even if I didn’t remotely like her.
Two months later, I’m hollowed out. A cavalcade of exceptionally disruptive events has yanked my spirit right out of me and left me with a brunette, bespectacled shell that I know will never be full of the same interiority I had eight, maybe nine weeks ago now. My physical form is even shrinking to the point where I know I look physically unwell. I lost my appetite along with everything else.
The most painful thing to have lost, though, is my creative drive. I haven’t written anything public other than (rare) feature assignments for months now. Maybe you’ve noticed that — especially those of you who pay to read my public writing. This has never happened to me before. Writing is a compulsion for me. It happens because nothing feels real to me until it is said out loud or on the page.
There are obvious explanations for this. I have been consumed with “logistics” and survival since July. I stopped having the ability or time to take in most of the forms of art and culture that propel my spirit forward. This enormous, essential part of my life fell into the recesses of my mind and calendar. Throughout these two months, I have woken up every day hoping that this will be the day I am inspired. It’s not.
That inspiration was absent. It chose to vacate my body and mind to make space for other, worse things. I longed for my creative drive — true, desperate longing — but the thoughts that took their place were panic, logistics, and panic over my need to work through a lot of significant logistics.
The list that I am willing to share is this: I spent early August in the hospital. I spent late August packing up my home to move. I moved my belongings to a new apartment. For two weeks, I was too physically exhausted to fully unpack my downsized belongings. A housemate (a stranger to me) had what I can only generously describe as an episode that targeted me in the crosshairs. During this incident, my dog fell from a fourth-floor window.
I left the apartment and my belongings two weeks after moving them in. I have lived out of a backpack through the generosity of my unrivaled friends and community. I am moving my belongings out of this place where I chose to recuperate. My dog is still in the hospital. I have no safe place to take him long-term and finding that for him (and to a lesser extent, myself) is my top priority. My mind will be preoccupied until my material needs are settled.
But, yesterday, I finally made time to spend time with my creativity and a packed schedule of various forms of art.
My day was a chase for inspiration. It was a chase to catch up to myself and grab her and pull her back where she belongs. It was a scavenger hunt to find thoughts on visual art and the emotions it provokes in me.
I started by seeing Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Conversation” at noon. His work doesn’t move me, but the screening was there on the theater’s calendar and it’s a significant movie that contextualizes his other movies and it was worth giving a try. My mind wandered. I wanted to reach for my phone and communicate with the outside world. The run time is 113 minutes.
It was a piece of art that someone (Coppola) had created through passion and ambition and the instinct to share his vision with the world. I think I will always love artists more than I love art. I’ve now seen it. I know how I feel about it. It helps me further orient and understand my interests and tastes.
I then wandered to my tattoo artist and asked him to design a piece for me that I’ll have done when I am physically and financially settled. I imagined revealing a new piece of body art to the friends who have propped me up for these two months and explaining that it was an essential financial expenditure. I set a date for late October. That’s when I hope some of this will be resolved: Three months after it began.
The drawing is a bundle of wheat tied with a bow. It portrays something that will never change. Without wheat, flour, bread, human survival is insecure and at risk. We’ve read stories of a war where civilians are shot and killed in their efforts to procure wheat for themselves. It’s also an essential commodity — eight bushels of wheat is an early example of value in Karl Marx’s “Capital.” I also hope that permanently altering my body will help confirm that it still belongs to me, that I am still in there, and that my values have survived this personal catastrophe.
I showed up at the Whitney Museum of American Art. I don’t know where my member card is. The last time I was at the Whitney — June 12! — the floor that houses its permanent collection was under construction. I was thrilled to hear that. Readers of my work know that I had a long-running one-sided conflict with the Whitney.
Pieces had been turned over (I still yearn for Willem de Kooning’s “Door to the River”) and the collection on display had become a hodgepodge of pieces that didn’t relate to one another. They weren’t in conversation with one another. They didn’t reveal the American artistic legacy. Seemingly half of the pieces were not even made by Americans — a comment that makes me feel like a xenophobe, but is the result of feeling like I pay money to see American art at this one specific museum.
I love the redesigned permanent collection. My psyche is suddenly unburdened of my embarrassing grudge.
They put a piece by Mark Rothko on display for the first time since I began going to the Whitney regularly. Photographs and sculptures and paintings created by lesser known artists (because museum curators had not prioritized them) introduced me to new artists and their visions. Lee Krasner’s “The Seasons” is no longer on display, but the first thing you see when you exit the elevators is Jasper Johns’ “Three Flags.” That piece, like ‘The Seasons,” feels like a visual home for me.
Johns’ unmistakably American work is commonly an annoyance to the people I know who find the American “brand” to be intolerable. The brand is intolerable, I agree. The flag belongs to all of us, though, and Johns played with its form (and covered it in gray paint) and brings out the radical in me — not the resentment.
I spun through the museum’s exhibit on Surrealism in the Sixties. I’ll return another time for that one. Surrealism is a perfect form for this cultural moment. It still doesn’t grab or inspire me. I’ll keep trying.
After a meal, I meandered to the fountain at Washington Square Park. I braved the busy streets of the West Village and watched the disturbing homogeneity of its inhabitants. I made the mistake of turning down Cornelia Street, where Taylor Swift used to live. I’m drawn to the pursuit of individuality like a moth to a lamp. The zeitgeist is alive in the West Village, and it seems to be complacency.
I made it to the refuge of the fountain. I observed the people around me. I observed my own choice on where to sit that would allow me to keep myself dry but close to the water. Someone ran into the water and stood atop the primary spigot in the middle of the fountain while holding a subway map that was covered with the phrase “New York or Nowhere.” We were all part of their performance art. How nice for them to utilize a public space to become a spectacle. They got the attention they wanted. This sounds like judgment, but I swear it is praise for the temerity to turn a public space into an individual space for a few, outrageous moments. The fountain returned to its geysers. Another day in New York City.
But this moment held particular salience to me as I was there to kill time before seeing a screening of “The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces” at the Anthology Film Archives. The hour-long program, created by the radically influential sociologist and urbanist William “Holly” Whyte, is a foundational piece of art about the design of public spaces and the habits of the people who occupy them. Sitting in the fountain before seeing that film for the first time was proof-of-concepting myself as a warm-up.
The theater was packed and Anthology is selling out every screening of Whyte’s film. The small cinema spent years searching for a print of the film that was in reasonable condition and dedicated resources and patience into restoring it and color correcting it to capture the full spirit of the film. The director of the theater — or whoever it was who introduced it — didn’t hide his astonishment at the public’s rush to see Whyte’s film in good condition and on the big screen.
Go see it, if you can get a ticket. People are very funny when they are congregating in public spaces and my mind began creating a list of all of the places I’ve sat down in the last few months. It’s a film about sitting down. It’s the most compelling piece of art I’ve seen in a long time — longer than my two months of misery.
We gather in specific ways without realizing it, but Whyte documented our tendencies and often amusing human behavior. He makes a joke about a group of “women-watchers” who, during many days of filming them, never once speak to the women they watch.
The filmmaker John Wilson, whose passion for “The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces” inspired Anthology to begin this hunt, showed up for a surprise performance of Whyte’s writing after the screening. His own cinematography is so clearly inspired by this film that it felt in many ways like watching a low-res version of his former HBO Show: “How To with John Wilson.”
Whyte and Wilson both embody a particular ethos. It comes to mind for me from one of the most irritating bands to ever exist. “People are strange, when you’re a stranger.”
That had been the ethos of my Day of Art, too. I was, for one day, myself again. My pretentious, voracious self. The vessel of creativity that had its contents poured down a storm drain (imagine John Wilson filming that, if you’d like) was given a slight but significant refill. It’s not a coincidence that I am writing today. Taking in other people’s work directly compels me to create my own.
This is not “The Conversation” or “Three Flags” or a strange urbanist film. But it’s something that came from my otherwise dormant creative spirit and is valuable to me for that. I think this is a horrific piece of writing. There’s no structure to it, other than chronologically. I reference art people haven’t — or cannot — see for themselves. It’s mostly a journal entry that I will publish online.
But inspiration actually picked up the phone this morning. This won’t be enough to sustain that feeling, but it was certainly nice to have a visit from it.
I have to go pack up my belongings now and find another new home that will hopefully let me feel safe and secure enough to become myself again. Putting things in boxes is the opposite of inspirational. My material needs will keep their grip on me. My creativity’s job now is to wait until I can once again ask it to return. I hope it is freed from exile before another two months have passed.
(On a separate note, my migration to Ghost is not going well. Their UX is a disaster and the expense of publishing there far outweighs the value of its platform. Sorry to all who hate Substack, but this is where I will be until there is a viable alternative.)
Thank you for being so honest, Lindsey.
It could not have been easy to share this but as always, the power of your writing, your courage, your resilience are clear.
Be well and stay safe.
At our lows, suffering can feel overwhelming. Both our own and how it seems to compound exponentially with a constant stream of grief around us. A comparison of grievances isn't all that helpful on its own. Yet, inevitably joined to that stream is a display of the human spirit's ability to endure. Witnessing another person's ability to press onward, even if just enough to get through each day—that can be enough to inspire others to keep going, too. Thank you for writing, I hope the amphora of temerity continues to refill.