Itinerantdaughter's Blog

… which has been driving me and those I know a little wacky in the past ten days.  Tonight is the last night it has its hold on us.  Prepare to return to “normal.”  In honor, here’s a hate poem to the moon by Brenda Shaughnessy.

“I’m Over the Moon”

I don’t like what the moon is supposed to do.

Confuse me, ovulate me,

spoon-feed me longing. A kind of ancient

date-rape drug. So I’ll howl at you, moon,

I’m angry. I’ll take back the night. Using me to

swoon at your questionable light,

you had me chasing you,

the world’s worst lover, over and over

hoping for a mirror, a whisper, insight.

But you disappear for nights on end

with all my erotic mysteries

and my entire unconscious mind.

How long do I try to get water from a stone?

It’s like having a bad boyfriend in a good band.

Better off alone. I’m going to write hard

and fast into you moon, face-fucking.

Something you wouldn’t understand.

You with no swampy sexual

promise but what we glue onto you.

That’s not real. You have no begging

cunt. No panties ripped off and the crotch

sucked. No lacerating spasms

sending electrical sparks through the toes.

Stars have those.

What do you have? You’re a tool, moon.

Now, noon. There’s a hero.

The obvious sun, no bulls hit, the enemy

of poets and lovers, sleepers and creatures.

But my lovers have never been able to read

my mind. I’ve had to learn to be direct.

It’s hard to learn that, hard to do.

The sun is worth ten of you.

You don’t hold a candle

to that complexity, that solid craze.

Like an animal carcass on the road at night,

picked at by crows,

haunting walkers and drivers. Your face

regularly sliced up by the moving

frames of car windows. Your light is drawn,

quartered, your dreams are stolen.

You change shape and turn away,

letting night solve all night’s problems alone.

This is from Shulamith’s second and final book Airless Spaces, which is basically comprised of tiny portraits of “losers,” many of whom meet in mental hospitals.    Followers of the sad prodigal ladies and the art they make will recognize Diane instantly despite Shulamith’s use of a pseudonym.  This is from a title, btw, entitled “Suicides I’ve Known,” which I’m pissed I never thought of first (although I haven’t actually known any suicides so…)

YVONNE TREE

Before I ever met Yvonne Tree I met her in her work: square, straightforward compositions on the grotesque.  I was a young art student then, and I had a Yashica 2 1/4 camera and I enjoyed composing on it.  She had a strong influence on me, though I stopped short of getting into actual carnival grotesquerie as too sensationalistic.  But the static posed quality of some of her frames affected my own photography –– I am thinking now of her famous twin girls staring at the camera.

When I came to New York and began organizing women’s liberation groups, we were to do publicity for a major piece in the New York Times.  We were offered a choice of photographers and she was one of them.  I was flattered to have such a great photographer assigned to us, and convinced the others that we should go for her.  So we got her.

She was delicate-boned, thin and pretty, if in a mousy sort of way.  What I mean is she did not stand out as strong among the rest of us strapping girls.  One night she accompanied us on  an “action” to retrieve my pay from a withholding boss.  (I was working as a waitress at McGregor’s Garage on St. Mark’s Place.) We ganged up on the boss and I threw a glass of water in his face.  We got the pay.  But Yvonne had stayed outside the whole time, quaking for possible damage to her expensive camera.

When the piece for the Times finally came out, the women were outraged at her photographs, which were of zombielike dykes all alone in a room.  She had used one or two women from another group (who were not even typical) and distanced them in the space.  I guess you could tell they were photos by Yvonne Tree.

I realized my poor judgment in swaying others in her favor when she apologized for the strangeness of the photographs, pleading that this was her “eye” and she was incapable of shooting a normal journalistic picture.  I had rather thought she was doing this assignment for commercial reasons and that she would adapt her style accordingly, but I was wrong.  Anyway, I believed her that she couldn’t help it.

Later she destroyed a whole roll and only that which had been printed with the article on women’s liberation remained with the New York Times.  She, however, gave me as a casual gift one unused print that remained, ruined for any practical use by a large crease across the left corner.  “You’re not a beautiful girl,” she said, “but somehow in this picture…”  And it was true, I looked stunning in the picture, a whole aura surrounded me; I was circled by other women who looked supplementary.  I was wearing a long silver ring on the first finger of my right hand, my “Jupiter” finger –– when I seldom wore a ring –– and generally I read as the leader of the group.

In a taxicab once she had talked a little about the breakup of her long marriage –– she seemed to be about forty at the time –– to a young guy who had launched her on her career as one of the few significant female artists of that era.  Otherwise I had no clue that she was deeply depressed, other than her tearing up the roll of women’s lib shots which were neither fish nor fowl –– neither her usual strong grotesques, nor a good journalistic visual account of what was developing in women’s liberation.

Anyhow, a month and a half later we heard a shocking story: her body had been found in the bathtub, drained of blood.  She had apparently chosen to go by cutting her wrists and then hastening the flow of blood by letting it seep into warm water.  It all sounded gruesome.  I had had no idea she was in such a desperate state.

I held on to the picture as exceedingly valuable.  I hid it in some newspapers behind an old trunk, and then later decided to put it in a cardboard roll in another place I had.  When I came out of the hospital, I had no money, so I called a curator at the Museum of MOdern Art to see if they might not want to buy the picture, one of her last good shots.  But they were content to settle for the New York Times shots, in which I had (gratefully) not been included.  In any case, I checked for the roll of cardboard, and it had been thrown out in my absence.

~Shulamith Firestone, OBM