Kirsten Kaschock
THE URGENCY OF BEING
Louise Bourgeois, the artist, is no longer. She died in 2010 at the age of ninety-eight.
Louise Bourgeois is no longer, except.
I met Bourgeois’s work in 1999 when I was twenty-seven, just becoming an adult through motherhood (she and I both gave birth to three sons). Her art made me feel like a child on the cusp of unchildhood. I can’t tell you why exactly. Her line drawings are simple, witty, sometimes engaging in the visual equivalent of wordplay: a skyscraper with legs, a woman’s face echoed by a cat’s. They tend to hint at the types of darkness you can find in most houses: spiders and dark windows, mothers and scissors and hair. Maybe you knew a child like me, one who didn’t know why they hurt so much. I felt like Bourgeois knew, or was, a child like me—the way I was at eleven.
When I first saw her work, it was in a book filled with her drawings, though she was best known as a sculptor. I read the things she said about those drawings, words about art that was not her “main” art. Some of her words have burrowed into me.
These are maggots. It looks like a very negative subject. In fact, it is not a negative subject at all. In fact, if I were religious, I would say that it is the theme of the resurrection.
I met up with Bourgeois’s work again at an exhibition at MoMA, “Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait,” in late 2017 and felt twenty-seven again—the age I turned, because of motherhood, away from dance and into words.
Looking at her repetitive drawings (figures and structures both organic and architectural), at a single example of her immense welded spiders (I’ve met two before), and at a few of her “cells” (life-sized emotional microcosms, one-person rooms, psychological set pieces), I felt like a child again. Enraged, entranced, shot through, riddled with the needles of her lifelong practice (she began drawing to help her parents in their tapestry-repair business). That day, I felt like twenty-seven-year-old me re-feeling my own particular brand of eleven-year-old pain. In actuality I was forty-four, four times that age.
In a single body, there hide any number of childhoods. Maturity, I think, is a myth. And time—an illusion made impossible to treat as illusion by aging. The containment of our bodies in space is part of what creates the fantasy of space. Our bodies’ housing of other bodies (fetuses and tumors alike) fosters still other kinds of delusion: immortality, cessation. Bourgeois knew this. She refused to let her own work travel in only one direction. She redrew the same line drawings dozens of times over decades. A famous installation of her architectural sculptures at the Tate Modern was titled I do, I undo, I redo. Her spirals, whether enormous staircase or tiny shell, point out over and over again that time and growth do not move as we perceive them to.
Maggots know this also.
Mostly Bourgeois plumbs and replumbs distinctly domestic and bodily horrors. At least, that is how her work speaks to me—in dark fables that return me to a time when every word and object and gesture held magic, which is the illimitable potential for beauty and terror both. After childhood, every demon or angel that an artist seeks to manifest must be wrested from the ether, and because we are the creators, we know they are not real. And because we are the creators, what we make is more real to us than anything else could ever be.
*
My friend Sarah Jane is dying, has been living the end of her life for over two years now, but cancer is all through her and is not receding. Nothing stops her from savoring life. Recently, as she drank the heavy cream she imbibes to keep any kind of weight on her body, she said to me, “People wonder how I am still alive: I love living.” Then she turned her face to the sky, closed her eyes, and smiled like a cat. Suddenly, the sun was on my skin. I felt it. When I am in her presence, cancer is contagious. And it bestows not its pain but its only blessing: an urgency of being.
I arrived at the University of Iowa in the fall of 1996 with a shaved head. Ours was love at first sight: the flame-haired ballerina and me—the modern dance choreographer with the gymnast build—we were the only grad students entering the MFA program that August. We admired each other across the classroom. It didn’t take long before she adopted me, but then Sarah Jane adopted all the strays.
Strong, lithe, sparking: she seemed a creature who thought with her body. I soon learned she had a Master’s degree in math. She grew up in Buffalo, NY, but had relocated to Iowa from New Orleans. There was a sadness to her eyes that seemed a necessary corollary to her room-lighting smile. That first month, she asked me if I wanted to do acid on a Saturday when we didn’t have rehearsal (our schedule was grueling). I said yes.
After that, I was a constant staple at her place—the House Dubuque—an ex-dentist’s office now three-bedroom apartment on the street that led to the university. When the growing bunch of us, all misfits, hung out late nights on the porch, we could count on undergraduates passing by in affable stumble. My dorm was a mile and a half up the river, the walk cold and lonely, so I slept on the couch of House D often, then moved on to the carpeted bedroom floor of my future husband, Danny. He was one of Sarah Jane’s housemates, another adoptee, a cell geneticist.
Two years ago, Sarah arrived at our house in Philly on the way to upstate New York to see her parents. We have visited each other so sporadically in the decades since Iowa, you might think it’d be awkward. With SJ, nothing is. She showed me the chest port recently installed for her chemotherapy. At her insistence, she and I went dancing to Balkan music by the river while Danny watched the kids.
Sarah is dying. This past July she turned fifty-one. I doubted she would see this birthday—I was wrong. For two decades she seemed to age neither in physique nor demeanor, remaining the age she was when I fell in love with her. I think now, like the title character of her favorite childhood book, The Little Prince, that she was loaned to us.
*
In October of 2017, I climbed onto an early morning bargain bus from Philadelphia to New York.
The bus ride was a spontaneous decision. I didn’t teach that day and I’d found out about the Bourgeois exhibition at MoMA from a friend on social media. I desperately wanted to go. My sister Taryn was in New York. We planned a lunch date.
I had too much coffee that morning. As a result, I had to use the bus toilet. A sudden stop made us lurch, and the underwear I’d pulled down below my knees got splashed. Soaked. For a few moments I had no idea what to do. Then I yanked them off, threw them away, and cleaned my legs with a startling amount of hand sanitizer. I walked around the city all day in a knee-length skirt sans drawers.
I tell you this because they are important—bodily facts.
My body exists in the midst of chaos, and the way it encounters the world affects my functioning within it. Undoubtedly. But nothing was going to stop me from seeing my favorite artist’s work. Not uncomfortable travel, not the difficulty of reorganizing my children’s schedules (their father Danny spends half the week in an apartment in DC), not assault by the BoltBus’s blue water. Not shame.
Despite the traffic, the bus arrived early, so I decided to walk the thirty blocks uptown. My crotch was cold. My sister and I met up in the lobby and entered the museum. She didn’t know Bourgeois’s work but she knew I did. It was crowded, and as we moved through the rooms, we read, we looked, we spoke, and we took pictures of each other beside the pieces. Taryn said she felt like she was walking around inside my brain. I felt like that too. So familiar yet un-. I have never documented a trip through art so thoroughly. I knew I wanted to be able to go back, to revisit the drawings: simple lines depicting boxes and buildings, faces and figures, organic shapes and scissors, threaded knots and bodies bent in half. I am not a fine artist, and I’ve never wanted to buy a catalogue of one’s work, but I wanted documentation of this. All of it. An archive. Are such desires a function of my increasing age? A developing sense of mortality? Is this why all museums feel old—not because of what is in them, but because of the curators’ desires to contain and catalogue, to prove by sheer quantity that a life matters? That art does?
Luckily, I found an interactive listing of Bourgeois’s drawings and prints online that contains more art, even some of her words. So after I returned from the show, I dug further into Bourgeois’s themes and variations: what I like to think of as her near-century-long barre work.
*
In ballet, a barre is a stationary handrail, often attached to a wall, where dancers go to perform the repetitive daily exercises that keep them strong and flexible, aiding them in perfecting a bodily technique that is anything but natural.
I grew up at the barre. So did my sister Taryn. So did Sarah Jane.
During college, it became difficult for me to square my developing feminism with my love of ballet. I should never have liked ballet—its strict gender roles, its hierarchical ranks, its imposition of impossible and unhealthy body ideals upon (mostly) young women. And in fact, I did hate it, for a time. And then I met Sarah Jane.
The feminists took me as a role model, as a mother. It bothers me. I am not interested in being a mother. I am still a girl trying to understand myself.—L.B.
With her, from her, in class beside her for two years, I learned that there was a way to get beneath the horror of a thing and to its beauty (always intertwined). And that the path was an obsessive dedication to understanding form: both the human form and its desire to direct itself through chosen (not compulsory) behavior. To become something else, to do something else other than what is expected, to grow in a different way than the given.
What could be more feminist than that?
*
Louise Bourgeois, like Sarah Jane, first went to school as a mathematician before turning her attention to her art. I can feel a mathematician’s sensibility in her work. The rationality is visceral. It is procedural. It is balletic. One tries the most nuanced permutations, algorithms painstakingly designed to unlock the way forward. One goes away and one returns, again and again, to the scene of the crime. Which is always, already, and again childhood. First position, second. Fifth. Every day of a dancer’s life is in some ways the day she began her training—the same exercises: plié, tendu, rond de jambe.
Ballet can be a home that resembles a prison, and the only way to escape its claustrophobic form is to inhabit it so fully that you pupate, and so are transformed.
This is the dream, I think.
I think Bourgeois dreamt it too. I have heard her reproductions of her childhood residence and its formative scenes of infidelity and illness called obsessive. I think of it simply as the work. In the work, you can find beauty and horror, meaning and purpose. But the work does not give any answer other than this one: you must keep at it.
*
So it means that however hard things are, there is still hope if you believe in maggots. Something has decomposed, and it is from that decomposition that hope comes again.
—L.B.
Sarah Jane is dying. Her body would not be directed by her to heal—and yet. She is not dying in the way anyone expected. Over the past year, I have traveled down to see her in New Orleans half a dozen times. Each time there is less of her, and still there is all of her.
I stayed with her for ten days this summer, allowing her sister Julia to take a week in Buffalo with her son and husband before returning to care for her sister. Sarah Jane and Julia are teaching me about what a sister is and sometimes has to be. The horror is not something they shirk from; their gallows humor walks hand-in-hand with the most tender expressions I have ever seen exchanged between non-lovers. I am grateful for these lessons. While I was there, SJ taught ballet in the front room of her house, as she has been doing for the past few years, to four adult students and me, and by Skype to our old housemate from Iowa, Amy. The way she moves her arms and back is still a miracle, though now you can watch each tendon ripple across her deltoids when she demonstrates. SJ is near skeletal and wears a colostomy bag because tumors have gathered in her lungs and abdomen. At last imaging, the largest of the thirty or so was the size of a grapefruit. When she made poop jokes, all the women in the room laughed. Throughout the week, SJ and I talked bedsores and front-farts and hemorrhoids and droopy, chafed vulvas.
I tell you this because they are inescapable and brutal and hilarious and she lists hers without shame—bodily facts.
We also binged Netflix and ate paleo cookies. Sometimes there were tears. Sometimes rage. Love, always.
*
Our body is a home we traverse and decorate and renovate until we can’t. One of Bourgeois’s most iconic images is called Femme Maison. In it, the bottom half of a woman protrudes from what appears a large dollhouse. Two arms extend from the walls. The arms are doll-sized and one is waving.
When my sister saw that particular drawing at MoMA, she said: “I get it.”
I think she meant me—that she gets me. And she does. But what is there to get? That I feel trapped in my domesticity? In my childhood? That I think my hips are too big for the front door? Or that I will never not view everything in my world as a metaphor for everything else?
After our visit to Bourgeois, Taryn and I went to sit and have lunch and talk about lives that seem to keep spiraling beyond our control. We are both teachers and mothers. We both hate the direction our country seems committed to. We both take solace in the students we see daily—dancers and writers, scientists and mathematicians—and we are committed to them and to our own art.
She asked me then—because she asks me every time we speak, because she is my sister, because she gets me—how Sarah Jane was doing. I gave her the same answer on that October day that I give today: “She is dying. So are you. So am I.”
Every day that Taryn goes to the barre, each day I sit down with pen and paper, each day SJ lifts her face to the sun—is a day to construct, deconstruct, reconstruct.
We do, we undo, we redo.
KIRSTEN KASCHOCK is the author of four poetry books and a chapbook: Unfathoms (Slope Editions), A Beautiful Name for a Girl (Ahsahta), WindowBoxing (Bloof), The Dottery (University of Pittsburgh Press/winner of AWP Donald Hall Prize), and Confessional Sci-Fi: A Primer (Subito Press). Coffee House Press published her debut speculative novel, Sleight. She teaches at Drexel University.
