1. A Disappointed Woman

I wanted to tell a story about devotion. I called it devotion because when I started to think about this story I sat on the couch and nursed and nursed a baby and stared at a wall, and I called that devotion. I made devotion when I made the baby, as if devotion was a little dog I trained to watch over it. I sat on the couch with my devotion and with our charge, the baby. Our trinity felt like a religion. I wanted to share it with others. For lack of a better word, I called this event of sitting a story. Although nothing happened in my story, there was a feeling of ecstasy and precision. When I tried to share the story of my devotion – I was compelled to share it – people expected a story. But it is not a story because there is no beginning or end.

Narrative is a structure of incidents, a line made of points, a line onto which we hang details and a line that we intend to sever. I could make this line a story with a beginning and end, and in the middle, there would be rising and then falling. The shape of a rigorous walk. A journey. A belly inhaling and exhaling.

There is no structure for the now. I mean there is no place to put it. The child sobbing in his bedroom, my hunger, or the day – the cloudy, disappointing day – its urgencies and their fast fading, the cold sky, the two people walking on the street below, and the amber-coloured dog pulling at its lead.

I am trying to find a beginning where there isn’t one. A point on which to place the churning details, the ones called conflict that must steer the story toward climax. Which shame was it? Which anxiety was the driver? What is the shape of despair? Once I imagined that by this point in my life, all conflict would be resolved. I would finally be good; I would be happy. The end.

But the present moves. Here it is, moving.

Now when I sit on the couch, and I stare at the wall, I am not staring at it, I am imagining a grid imposed upon it. In each box of the grid, I leave something. I pull something from the inside to the outside and place it in one box of the grid then move on, until I have filled the grid. Filling the grid is like building a wall where there already is one. I’m making the wall something more than a wall. I push out my breath. The first space is always filled with breath. Then a worry. Then another. Sometimes a sense of satisfaction. Or gratefulness. Then concern. Agitation. More breath. And it goes on like this. I’m done with the exercise when the grid is full. And somehow my body, the tightness in my chest or the shivering in my spine, accepts this.

But this is not revelation. It’s management. I am a bureaucrat of my thoughts.

Behind the grid is a wall and behind the wall a stairwell. I imagine that the stairwell with its aquarium-blue light and vaulted ceiling is infinite space. Where procedure turns into enlightenment. Will the grid, once full, become a plane of many windows, a porous film, a thatch to grow?

This is a story of my desire for more, a swelling. I will call it sight. I want more sight, to see more, to see through and more deeply, to see but not with my eyes. To come to the edge of my sight and to go beyond. I’m wrong to call it a story; it’s a practice, which is to say that I try. I keep trying, although I sit. I sit, but within my sitting is movement.

I wanted to call this kind of sight a showing, the word for revelation the fourteenth-century mystic Julian of Norwich used to describe the sixteen visions she received from the Lord, some of which were not images but understanding. But when she compares the vision of a small round ball, “all that is made,” lying in the palm of her hand, to a hazelnut, I cannot see past the striated husk of a real hazelnut to the vague ball.[1]Julian evokes the hazelnut only to communicate the size of the vision, and the vision communicates something about God – he is the Maker, the Keeper, the Lover – but I leap over the metaphor for the nut I wish to place, shell and all, in my mouth. Julian never mentions a wall, table, bed, dust, or even a window, although we know she had three. She occupies her cell for contemplation, so the fact that her revelations don’t involve the objects of her cell, of which there were likely few, or even the wall of her cell or even the window, out of which she was meant to view the adjoining church, suggests that her sight was so close to her own body that it turned inward.

This is how I know I do not want what I see to exist only in words, to merely serve the function of modifying the abstract concept, like the coin that shows scale. But I also don’t want to give meaning to what I see or for meaning to emerge from my psyche into objects as it did for the Surrealist Leonora Carrington, who, in her madness, built from her only possessions in the Spanish asylum (a few French coins, empty refill pencils, eau de cologne, powder, face cream, a boat-shaped nail buff, small mirror, and lipstick) a solar system to save the world.[2] I want “bare things, things in themselves,” as Bernard says at the end of The Waves.[3] (To receive the bareness of things, I think I must be a bare person.)

I want to apprehend indiscriminately what is before me, the banal wall and its objects, and for knowledge, knowledge that is perhaps already within me and already within the world, to circulate through a room as atoms are probably doing right now, although I can’t see them. It is not that a wall has mystical properties, but that my attention first imbues the pause in which I look with significance and then penetrates beyond the pause, I hope, like light reveals its materiality by first illuminating that same wall. “The wall is a machine that won’t stop working,” Suzanne Doppelt writes of a wall with light on it.[4]

Just as for Doppelt the wall holds light so that it might be recognised as light and not merely the means by which an observer recognises the wall, I make the wall an instrument for seeing what is there and what is there an instrument for seeing what else is there. I see an object, and I see through the object. “Everything happens on a wall or through it,”[5] but because the wall is “a single point expanded,” as Kristen Kreider says,[6] vast and disorganised even when bisected by other walls, I need to add to the wall another machine, a grid.

The machine of this grid in my mind is Leon Battista Alberti’s veil, a weave of loosely-woven fine thread separating me from the wall I face and which provides a shape and the elegance of collapsed binaries. It is surface and window, restriction and abundance. It organises space and slows time. It frames and, thus, separates the objects on or in front of the wall from their ordinary milieu. I use the grid to see and through this sight provoke more, something for which I do not have a word, something on the edge of intelligibility. “Mystery is the content. Intractable expression. Deaf to rules of composition,” Susan Howe says. “What is writing but continuing?”[7]

 2. There Is Nowhere to Go in This House

I look into the horizon of my things for the seam where procedure becomes enlightenment.

I look into the middle distance and breathe.

I close my eyes and breathe into a square I have pulled with my mind from the grid into the space of my empty face.

I am sliding my hand between two folds of myself. The cold day with the family inside the house was such a loud day. My friend made a star from printer paper, scotch tape, and staples while the children cleaned their mess, crying and blabbering and acting like animals, like horses whinnying. I hung it from the ceiling in the corner of the room. It is in my grid, and so is the filbert branch, its lanugo-like dust, the television, the photo of us in the snow, the child’s map of the house, the bookshelves, the toothpick holders, the green thing in the shadow, the exquisite brass hardware from my grandfather’s house.

When I sit on the couch and face this wall, I think of the place I have been that is the most far from the place I am. I do not think of geographies. I think of my mind. I am a great distance from my own mind.

And yet other parts of my life feel perpetually at-hand, so familiar as to be transparent. When the baby was born, I perceived my home as strange, un-homely. It was as if the rooms rearranged themselves, the furniture imperceptibly shifted. But then I came to anticipate the house, again, with its new inhabitants, with the scraps of outside that cling to them. Now I take pictures of the sticks and rocks the children bring in from the backyard to make myself pay attention to this space. It is a way to notice the ambient debris, to compose the invisible objects. Through this documentation, I also remember that these people with whom I share this space are beings who find pleasure in shapes and texture, who handle and arrange objects, who are oriented toward me but revolve into their autonomy.

There is nowhere to go in this house. I am at an impasse – an aporia in physical space and understanding. There is nowhere to go, and yet passages open to me: to live the life of the anchorite and to live it with one’s children, to empty the self of the self and to not suffer, to have a name and to not know it, to attune to these sensations and to orient toward their object, to feel one’s self compelled to the vectors of flattened space and to grow something in the tensions of this taut net. This is what seems possible at the edge of a room.

But no, not grow but adapt, not adapt but exaptate tactics[8] – to co-opt a previous adaptation, maternal nurturance, to suit another function, my survival, or to co-opt this house as my lab. In her essay “Les Goddesses,” the photographer and writer Moyra Davey quotes Mary Wollstonecraft’s biographer who quotes Wollstonecraft’s friend and eventual partner William Godwin: “A disappointed woman,” Godwin told the suicidal Wollstonecraft, “should try to construct happiness ‘out of a set of materials within reach.’”[9] I hold happiness in an open hand, but, like Davey, I’m obsessed with Godwin’s counsel. To see, you need things to see, and thankfully I am surrounded by walls with so many things to see I will never need to stop seeing.

The artist Mary Kelly’s meticulous documentation of her son’s first six years of life, using his clothing, soiled diapers, and drawings, is a kind of exaptation even as it belongs to a more complex engagement with psychoanalytic theory. Kelly’s Post-Partum Document couples these objects with Lacanian diagrams printed directly on her infant son’s vests, diaries of his solid-food intake under the stained diaper liner, and pseudo-scientific language accompanying the child’s scribbles. Kelly co-opts the materials of daily mothering and its concomitant anxiety. I noticed immediately, without having to engage with the psychoanalytic framing, an aspect of the project I resist, how Kelly’s documents reveal the way culture conflates fear and obsession with so-called instinctual maternal care, in effect rewarding destructive behaviours and making mothers martyrs. These states of mind and the activities to which they attach consume energy one could spend on their art, unless, of course, these labours become the art. Kelly places these objects and the mother’s internalised oppression in the narrative of psychoanalytic theory, but the mother, rather than her child, is the protagonist of this story. These are the mother’s objects mediated by theory, as Margaret Iversen writes.[10] In light of Kelly’s feminist adoption of psychoanalysis, her relationship to the objects that compose Post-Partum Document should be read as fetishistic attachments: When the child can no longer serve as the mother’s phallus, she fixates on his objects. These objects memorialise the mother’s loss of status within patriarchy and compensate for it. Yet it’s not only that the mother has found an object to compensate for her deficiency; she has found a way to conscript this object, her object, into a powerful narrative that has not included her. The attachment, Iversen writes, “is sublimated in the pleasure of understanding psychoanalytic theory as well as, in Kelly's case, the mastery of her artistic materials.”[11]

When a mother keeps and displays these objects, they become cathected objects or, in the case of Kelly, intentional “fetishes”; when an artist keeps and displays these objects, they are “found.” The former marks out lack; the latter a seam between the perception of external nature and the unconscious. These objects show up by chance, like “visual residues” of the unconscious, as Andre Breton described.[12] When it comes to found art or by extension the “readymade,” seeing precedes designation. But what kind of seeing are we talking about? Or to what do we turn and with what intention? When I look online for “found art,” I notice that male artists are never finding dirty diapers. A person finds a urinal by peeing in it. A person finds a diaper by changing it. Are these art objects an emergence of the unconscious into the phenomenal world or things that share a residence with gendered bodies? The conceptual work of Kelly’s Post-Partum Document sits somewhere between found art and assemblage, but if not for Kelly’s explicit engagement with the unconscious, its repetitions and duration, its obsessive indexing and systemisation could be read as a conscious turn toward gendered labours of the house, as a performance of life, if not of keeping oneself alive, as an artist, as a sentient being, by immersing oneself in the material of one’s orientations.

In Queer Phenomenology, Sara Ahmed draws attention to the ways in which we orient toward things that mean something for us. Where we are located determines what we perceive, while what we perceive affects how we inhabit our locations. Ahmed writes that when reading Husserl, she longs for the “particularity of the objects” that share residence with the writer – like the paper on which Husserl writes of paper: “The paper is...‘in’ the writing, and hence the writing is ‘around’ the paper.”[13] There are other objects too, objects that constellate around the paper on which the event of writing occurs and that form the background of writing. Husserl “turns his back on” these objects, as well as on the rooms of the home in which he writes. The rooms, their objects, and their inhabitants, namely the children, are relegated to the background of Husserl’s writing. “A queer phenomenology,” Ahmed writes, “might be one that faces the back, which looks ‘behind’ phenomenology, which hesitates at the philosopher’s back.”[14] A queer phenomenology does not conceal these inhabitants nor the labours that make the writing possible, and it does not mystify the objects toward which we orient.

The people in my house are never really in the background. Even when they are absent, as they are now, my people are in my writing. I evoke them, intentionally, but how can I help it? Even when they are gone, they interrupt me. And when I look away from the screen on which I reproduce them, they are in the objects before me. I direct my consciousness toward them.[15] The children entered the world through me, and the world gathered around them, adhered. And now when I turn toward the children, I must address the world, and when I turn toward the world, I must address the children.

Davey’s photographic series Long Life Cool White documents the detritus of the house, framing it not as objects with psychic value but as the ambient rubble of domestic life that one either corrects or ignores, that consumes one’s time and attention. When I first encountered the book Long Life Cool White, which includes plates and two prose pieces by Davey, I was at home with a baby, whose presence in the house changed the house, changed the function of certain rooms, severed and reconfigured my connection to objects and space. Davey’s photographs affirmed this estrangement. The spaces in Davey’s photographs are different from my own, yet they functioned like a mirror, easing me into my own home and I suppose into motherhood. Davey’s images are often close-up shots of private spaces, “heightened absorption and suspended time,” to use Davey’s terms,[16] but the photographs are also an orientation toward what phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls the “body schema,” or habits of daily experience.[17] A still life of kitchen clutter, cereal and cracker boxes lined up on a refrigerator that is itself a surface for notes and children’s drawings  in the photograph Glad (1999), the more discordant and accidental of all the household debris, thrusts that clutter to the foreground, so that it must be tended to with new tactics.[18] The photograph is a way of consuming these items, “digging our way out,” Davey writes in the video transcript “Fifty Minutes,” “either from the contents of the fridge, or from the dust and grit and hair that clog the place; or sloughing our way through the never-ending, proliferating piles of paper, clothing, and toys.”[19] If, as Roland Barthes suggests, the photograph contains death, the “that-has-been,” Davey’s photographs of food, which must be replenished, also contain the future, the “that-will-be.”[20] Davey has called the Sisyphean cycle of consumption and replenishment “domestic survival,”[21] and the photographs of dusty surfaces a response to feeling blocked as a photographer.[22] This seems to me an exaptation, in which the camera’s so-called objectivity “cuts through the carapace of our habitual interest-laden perceptions,” as Margaret Iversen writes.[23]

In the way a photograph severs time, the grid brings the background forward by chopping up the domestic space. The grid makes the domestic scene difficult and prolongs perception (as Viktor Shklovtsky wrote of art). I can bracket a few objects while keeping the whole present. Attention excludes nothing.[24] The objects that the grid helps me to identify do not come into my consciousness by chance. They do not emerge from their backgrounds to fill an absence. They are not images of objects, or unconscious fantasies that promise wholeness. I could say the wall behind them pushes them toward me, and the grid offers resistance. And I am here too, with these objects, anticipating more, hoping that the rigid wall is one plane in a many-folded fabric. That my procedure – geometric – might unfold this plane.

3. Perception Machine

My husband tells me he is not sure what I mean when I talk about grids, and suddenly I wonder if I am in a dream or on my real couch. I wanted to write in and of the real world, not in and of a dream or heaven or even a shadow, but now I wonder if I am in the world I think I am in. Didn’t I put my children in the car this morning and move along the grid of my town’s streets? Didn’t we make a series of right-angled turns and then arrive at our destination? And didn’t I travel along this same route back to my origin, my green house?

I think I perceive a shape in the world, not in me. I assume others must perceive this shape. And now I wonder if when I think I see something holy and true, I am seeing the refractions of a shattered nerve or my desperation. Does my reader perceive the bee entering the penstemon? Entering in this drought and heat the sleeve of a purple bloom?

Isn’t the better question what I mean by “holy” and “true”? Because in contrast the grid is simple: a series of parallel and perpendicular lines that form boxes and structure the void, define a space. And in defining that space make the void functional. The grid makes possible presence in empty space. It is a way of getting started ex nihilo, an affirmation, permission, precision, or a sense of it. I think you think the grid is a restriction, my husband says, then a child interjects a different question, about the neighbour or dinner or the location of some object. (I don’t remember.)

The grid enables our perception of infinity and isn’t infinity the opposite of restriction?

What are holy and true but my subjectivity and desire?

I have heard the grid described as a ghetto, a fortress, a ledger of incontrovertible evidence, as static, predictable, an efficient machine. Michel Serres discouraged “box thought, said to be rigorous, hard and rigid boxes,”[25] and Rosalind Krauss famously argued in her examination of modernism’s grids, like those by Mondrian, Johns, Malevich, Reinhardt, and Agnes Martin, that “the grid’s mythic power is that it makes us able to think we are dealing with materialism (or sometimes science, or logic) while at the same time it provides us with a release into belief (or illusion, or fiction).”[26] Only myth can hold the contradictions of matter and spirit (or the early twentieth century’s “indecision” about its connection to such things) in “some kind of para-logical suspension.”[27] At every turn, Krauss emphasises modern art’s grid as a way to mask and reveal the “shame” of “mention[ing] art and spirit in the same sentence.”[28] Understood this way, the grid represses contradiction in the very way Husserl turns his back on biographical interruptions. The paradox of art and spirit and the interruptions of family life interfere with the sanctity of conceptualised experience. In fact, in her critique of modern art’s use of the grid, Krauss’s language resembles the directional language of phenomenology: The grid is “what art looks like when it turns its back on nature.”[29] Must the contradiction of nature and spirit be resolved? Or is it simple enough to turn toward it, to move toward it, to breathe into it?

The grid is a shape and a pattern, and it shows up in other visual images besides those of modern art. If we do look behind the grid, Krauss points out, toward its historical past, we will see that grids were used in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in perspective studies. For Krauss, these perspective grids differ from the modernist grid that turns away from reality and toward itself, creating a kind of autotelic, hermetic cage. “Perspective was the demonstration of the way reality and its representation could be mapped onto the one another,” Krauss writes, “the way the painted image and its real-world referent did in fact relate to one another – the first being a form of knowledge about the second.”[30] Yet, Krauss calls the perspective grid, inscribed on the painting, an “armature of its organization,”[31] suggesting that the grid is not only the framework on which an artist depicts reality but also its protection from that reality or perhaps from the viewer who belongs to reality. Hannah B. Higgins, in her study of the grid in all its forms, The Grid Book, calls this perspective grid a transparent screen that creates a simultaneously continuous and interrupted illusion of reality.[32] Alberti called his grid of woven, coloured strings a veil and hung it in front of the object or scene he wished to depict.[33] Even in this more benign form, facilitating the depiction of reality, the grid served as a partition between the real viewer and the depicted reality.

Krauss considers the grid a participant in the early twentieth century’s drama, “where science did battle with God,”[34] yet this participation isn’t unique to the twentieth century. The grid, especially as a perspective tool, has always participated in a burgeoning secularism, which, “Oriented toward a single human viewer, even a single eye,”[35] privileged human subjectivity and reason. After all, one of the most well-known examples of one-point perspective, in which the grid is represented in the floor tiles and ceiling coffers, is Raphael’s early sixteenth-century fresco, The School of Athens, a pictorial attempt to wed Catholic theology with (pagan) classical philosophy. At relatively the same time that perspective was used to describe “the art of drawing solid objects on a plane surface so as to give the same impression of relative position, size, or distance, as the actual objects do when viewed from a particular point” (1563), so was it used to describe “the aspect of a subject or matter, as perceived from a particular mental point of view” (1605); nowadays, we consider perspective “a particular attitude towards or way of regarding something.”[36] Which is to say that a manner of seeing became synonymous with a manner of thinking.

The grid is a spatial device – it organises space and imposes order on domestic chaos – but it is also a perspective machine. It creates a screen that interrupts the domestic milieu. When I focus on a single box of the grid, the objects within that box appear to me fragmented. The obstruction of the continuous visual field slows my perception. But sight is not enough to achieve the work of shifting perspective. Breath lubricates the perception machine. Like liquid wax, it finds a way through the abscissas and ordinates, like a needle, it punctures the hard surface.

“When we experience pain for the world, the world is feeling through us,” Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone write in Active Hope.[37] They suggest a practice of “Breathing Through” when “feelings flow into us from the world.”[38] Like other breathing practices, Breathing Through requires a passive alertness. It’s an attention that, even with eyes closed, resembles watchfulness. You decide the invisible can be seen so that you can watch your breathing and note how it happens on its own. You visualise it as “a stream or ribbon of air,” Macy and Johnstone instruct, weaving in, through, and out your body. Then you breathe in the pain of the world and let that pass through you. This pain is like a needle threaded by red yarn from the skein of pain. I simultaneously breathe into my body and through the grid, up and through and down and through. As if puncturing cloth. My breath is a needle is the pain of the world. My body is the grid is the machine that helps me see. This is a grief practice. It shows me how breath can complement the grid, can plumb what the grid makes strange.

The breath sutures the objects of my house to the world outside my house and to me, my body. It seems impossible to heft this embroidered weight. The structure tears, and in the house a hole opens. In this hole is absence, but more specifically (and more tritely) death. I am sometimes slipping at its edge, but mostly I am just breathing with it. When you breathe in the pain of the world, then there is the pain of the world, you dwell with it. But the breath circulates, loosens the boundaries, makes them soft and the moment continuous. The paradox of matter and spirit dissolves with the breath. In her encounter with Eastern yogic practice, Between East and West, Luce Irigaray connects the breath specifically to the mother, who gives life, makes matter.[39] This is breath that begins with the family. It is a breath of the home, where corporeal life takes place. But, Irigaray posits, when understood through Eastern spirituality, the mother need not only share the breath of life, but also the breath of spirit. “From the beginning,” Irigaray writes, “she passes on physical and metaphysical existence to the other.”[40] This exaptation of the home is one that always-already existed.

The people in my house are never in the background. Even when they are absent, my people are in my writing. Even when they are silent, they interrupt me. My thoughts slalom around them until their presence snags, and I direct the line of my attention toward them. You don’t really need me, I scold their crusty dishes. Get a life, I tell their unmade beds.

The day was like a bleating lamb. I could hardly stand it or the way I complied with its entreaties. I couldn’t tell what made me angrier – the demands or my acquiescence. You could call the latter devotion, but really it was a frictionless slip into duty. The devotion I want integrates my obstacles rather than appeases them, but it is so much harder to be devoted this way. It is so much harder not just to not disperse into a million fragments for the lambs to eat but to experience in the interruption an opening, what filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky says is devotion: “to experience what is hidden, and to accept with our hearts our given situation.”[41] For Dorsky, film has a special power to “[subvert] our absorption in the temporal and [reveal] the depths of our own reality, it opens us to a fuller sense of ourselves and our world.”[42] I like this idea, but film is something made; it isn’t accidental, not in the way another person’s subjectivity is accidental, spontaneous, always emerging into the shared world. I am talking about being interrupted into the temporal from the abstract. It is like thinking, idling, imagining, and then choking.

The grid is a practice toward integrating the interruption. The grid is a way to make things harder. I may be the only person in the twenty-first century trying to make things harder, the process slower. The grid is an obstacle, a texture, a thatch that stalls erosion, that makes possible presence in empty space, an inefficient machine. When joined with breath, the grid transforms the house into a space of slow, unfolding mystery.