silkidelic

In the weeds at my feet scattered exoskeletons shimmer, speaking of lives fattened and fled. Away, on wires, the bones of a mammal softly swallow light. Oil drips onto our centuries, no longer lighting the way. I seek my new place to fit as the world empties out, the armor to wear when I stand in the space between sea and shore.

I made a little mermaid crown from trash and craft stuff I had around the house. I felt like trashy Venus.

In making headdresses, selfies, and writing, I try to notice my inspirations. First, it’s often observations of place and the natural shapes that float from the depths of all cultures. 

Second, a lot of my visual dreams lately come from the upper-crust opulence of Renaissance and Pre-Raphaelite paintings and of course, classic showgirls like the Ziegfeld Girls, now all filtered through the mood boards of Pinterest and Instagram. But those aren’t really mine – they’re aspirational visions. 

What is mine? Any rope that tethered me to the folk traditions of Europe has disintegrated and blown away like so much sand. Today, no one would know that my great grandparents were from the Azores, even though my family stayed in the Portuguese hub of eastern Massachusetts.

There’s a Scottish Highlander name and an heirloom cup with the yellow-and-black tartan of MacLeod, and I know little else.

Of Poland, I know nothing – that erasure started early, in Russia.

Cultural signifiers have been blurred by various losses and gains. In the 1600s, a man who would have died the gasping death of a lime burner in England came here and breathed fresh air, and his blood, already poisoned by profit-seeking, can now be tied to mine. Centuries later, my migrant German-American forebear died in the wilderness under hushed circumstances – something to do, as always, with money. My only anchor to the past cuts heavy into the silt of stolen treasure.

A middle-class-trash brand of Americanism is my only culture. I pull stories from the garbage heap of capitalism, and from the polite rubbish of imperial waspism in the United States.

A lot of that trash today is plastic, and a lot of it is digital. It is atheist and amoral, yet shaped by the forges of Protestant industry and by Catholicism’s mutilation of the pagan, animistic outlooks that we dream up as children in a natural world. I am handed everything, and none of it nourishes.

I try to scavenge rather than steal, but theft is the shape of my world – we even build robots to do the thieving more efficiently.

I can’t say that I like this culture of extraction and waste, but it’s the culture in which I’m entangled. The creative process of pulling together trash and treasure is my way of stepping out and looking at it all from a bird’s eye view, before diving back into the ocean.