The third image of a woman is a girl — for there is no girl we are not always already making into a woman from the moment she is born — making a city in the dirt next to the boot of a man. It could be rage or love in his feet. The girl could be me or any other girl.
The third year I lived here is a double portrait, like a deformed reflection.
The left side is a girl with a wolf’s paw in place of a hand. She stands naked in a pool of her own blood, her head lifted upward as she laughs a whole sky filled with snow geese and song. The right side is the writer, her journal resting in her hands, the words filling the space so that her face, her hair, her mouth, her eyes are made of language. A mother and a girl who are separate but joined.
The fourth year is a painting at the bottom of the stairs, in the living room opposite the wall that wears the famous photo of me as a child. How strange to look at one of my paintings next to this photograph of. . is it of me? How?
My painting is different from the photo. In the photo, they say over and over again that the girl is a “victim of violence.” But in my painting, a young woman comes out of fire with a vengeance in her stare. Her stone blue eyes finding you.
The fifth and sixth years are animaclass="underline" wolves turning into girls, girls turning into fire.
The seventh year is now. The painting I am making now.
To make a small pool of blood to use with paint, place a bowl between your legs, not an artificially scented wad of cotton. You must move outside what you have been told.
I am painting the spread legs of a grown woman, the mouth of her opening up to the viewer, her breasts a terrain just before her face in the distant background.
With my hands.
On a six-feet-by-six-feet canvas.
In this room in a house they have given to me.
Inside her cleft will be hands.
Her hair will be woven with wolves.
The UPS truck is nearly at the house, and I am the only one here just now, so I will need to go to the door and sign for the delivery. I clean my hands with wipes, leaving the act of painting and moving into the act of looking.
I think of the canvas like a body. It is alive. It is a body and I am a body and my inner rhythms tell me how to move with this other body.
I have read about the history of painting.
There are things in my head that no one has taught me, that I have not read or seen or heard anywhere else. They come out from my hands.
For the fleshy inside of her thighs, then, I will use blood and indigo.
I turn and leave the room, making my way down the stairs of this house. The UPS truck’s little horn blows three times. My feet on each stair step look cartoonlike to me — little Nike symbols making their marks.
Are there more brands of shoes in America than there are children in the world?
Seven years I have lived with this small group of American artists. I know all their stories. The playwright’s story is the drama of a brother and sister; a family plot. The poet’s story is a relentless body. The filmmaker’s story is flex and light and speed: action and male. The writer’s journal crosses the terrain of loss and love like a great white tundra.
The painter shot his wife and the photographer shot me, to make art.
I think art is a place where all our stories collect.
They mean to keep me safe, to give me a story that will hold me. There are many kinds of love, but there is never a love, or a life, without pain.
I mean to paint my way home. I am ready.
The End. One
You must consider filmmaking. It is the dominant mode of artistic production in our time. You know more about filmmaking than most of what you were taught in school. You are the camera’s eye. You are in control of everything we see. Hear. How things are framed. What the shot-reverse-shot relationships are, what every cut is, you are shooting. You are, after all, American. Eternal superpower, the camera’s eye.
For the opening, you decide to move in slow motion and black-and-white. An excruciatingly beautiful girl gone to woman, walking. A girl who has toppled over into woman, her lips already in a pout between yes and no, her torso and ass breaking faith. Moving down a tree-lined city sidewalk. Fall. Her coat pulled up to the flush of her cheeks. Her hands stuffed down into pockets. Her hair making art in the wind.
Her eyes. .
Her eyes.
Think of actresses who could fill the screen with them.
It is a remarkable passage, a symphony of aesthetics, when a girl stops walking like a girl and begins to walk like a woman.
I’m not sure anyone has ever captured that before. Perhaps we are afraid to name it, that coming of age, that passage. We’ve one great story, I suppose: Lolita. Several painters come to mind. Perhaps a few photographers. And of course film stars. In any case, none of it, nothing in the history of art, is quite right for this particular moment, is it? For this simple reason: she is not the object of desire now in the ways we are used to, is she? I mean, from the point of view of the American male artist she is, and from the point of view of the photographer, and maybe all the artists, but from the point of view we’re inhabiting she’s new. A man desires her more than he can stand, to be sure, and everyone who peoples her life just now desires her in one way or another, but that is not what is propelling the action or creating this plot, is what I’m saying.
It is her and you.
This has not been narrated in a previous scene, and yet, you know that blood is what’s driving her.
Blood driving her down the tree-lined sidewalk.
Blood driving her to the door of the warehouse building where the artist’s studio sits wombed among other artists’ spaces.
Blood driving her sexualized body.
You wish I would stop speaking of all this blood, but I’m afraid it’s the point.
Stop wishing it wasn’t.
Just once, the story will keep its allegiance to the body of a single woman.
Not the object of her body, but her experience of her body.
With all of history deeply up and in her.
So then. You have kept the entire scene of her walking to the door of the building in black and white. As she approaches the door to the warehouse, you give color. You give the door and her lips Alizarin crimson. And as she enters the throat of the building, more things go to color, but you filter it with a kind of midnight blue bruise tone.
You can do that kind of thing.
You can manipulate everything.
You can make meaning no matter what the reality.
American.
As she enters the cargo elevator, floor by floor, you return from slow motion to regular time.
By the time she reaches his floor, lurchingly, the speed of things is how we think we experience it in reality (forgetting everything we know).
You know, you’ve so many choices here. A letch of a middle-aged man, about to meet the image of his dreams. A familiar story.
But that’s not this story, is it?
His desire has not driven, well, anything. It’s downright impotent.
It is her desire that has begun to set the entire building on fire.
It is her action.
It is her subjectivity that is taking its fullest form — and she is not doing what we’d hoped or wanted.
She has come there in a premeditated way from the belly of history itself.
She has come to make an image take form, to complete an image of a self.
She placed herself between violence and desire.
She has come from an atomized family.
From the slobbering violence of men.
From the lost youth of a girl.
From the foreign hopes born between women.