Medium Change

Daedalia: Chapter 26

Daedalia is a serialized novel, with a new chapter released every Monday morning. The story is designed to unfold slowly, the days in between, a space for it to settle into your imagination. Each chapter is a 10–15 minute read/listen. Check out the Table of Contents if you want to jump to a specific chapter. Want something to binge while you wait? Three novels, complete with audio narration are ready for you to dive in.

Previously…

Kelly wandered into a college campus and, after overhearing students debate Daedalia, unconsciously drew a portrait-like sketch of one young man and left it with him. Later in New York, she spoke with Lefty about the monster they had created, visited the World Trade Center site, and admitted she needed something new to believe in before she could move forward.

The following text is transcribed directly from Kelly Ann Mudd’s journals. There are fifty-three volumes in the collection that was donated to MoMA by her estate.

November 8, 2005

I’ve started working again. I need it. Without it, I’m a horrible, miserable, despicable person. I fooled myself into thinking that by abstaining from art, I would become a better person and be worthy of going back home. But nothing could be further from the truth.

All I am is more sad and more lonely. New York is not the place to be these things because it offers plenty of ways to treat the symptoms but not the disease.

A few days ago, Lefty and I got into a horrible fight. He’s fucking that Greta woman, which I kind of knew but didn’t want to know. What did I expect, is what he asked. I expected you to be a decent human being is what I said. From there things devolved rapidly. I hung up and haven’t talked to him in four days. In that time, I turned all my energy to doing whatever the fuck I wanted.

I’ve learned a few things. One, I’m not good at sex with people I don’t know. Two, drugs don’t help with that. Three, dancing is better than sex and drugs. The problem is it’s hard to separate these activities.

I was never really with anyone but Lefty. Being groped once or twice in high school doesn’t count. I’ve always felt like sex was this weird club I was never a part of. I get the appeal but also, I don’t and I want to.

It’s a part of the human experience so I went to seek it out. It wasn’t hard to find. You go to a place where the music’s really loud and people are moving close together, lubricated with alcohol, cocaine, or ecstasy.

After a few hours, I ended up at this guy Ricardo’s apartment. I was pretty out of it, but not so much that I didn’t know what I was doing and not so much that I couldn’t sit outside myself watching and judging the whole thing. I tried to see my body the way he was. I tried to go into that place I go when I work because I imagine that’s what sex is like for normal people, but I just couldn’t.

I let him do what he wanted with me and that seemed to be enough. He fell asleep after and I walked back to my hotel feeling empty and dumb and guilty, not because of Lefty but because of M. What if she saw me? I’m a lot of things, but mostly I’m her mother, or that’s what I should be. That should be enough. That should be everything but the truth is that it’s not. This other thing consumes me and the more I try to pretend it doesn’t, the worse I am at everything else.

So I’m going back to work. Right here, for now at least.

November 14, 2005

Lefty found a little private studio space for me in the Village where I’ve been working. We made up. I didn’t make any confessions and he didn’t ask. I don’t think he would really believe me anyway and it doesn’t matter. I missed the sound of his voice and his steadiness. We work as a unit and my art is the bridge between us. I understand that now. He asked if he could come see me and I said we could talk about it.

It seems the minute I made the decision to start working again, the door opened up inside me and I stepped through it. I’m not sure where I’m going yet, but that’s nothing new. My job is to show up and start paying attention again.

It’s a process of letting go for me, letting go of all the expectations I can’t meet. The more I accept that this is the weird animal I am and I can’t be something different, the freer I become and the better the art gets.

I have a new interest in faces lately. I’ve never been one for eye contact so the thought of staring at someone long enough to create a portrait is a little terrifying. The drawing I did of the college kid was a surprise. It’s not like I’m unconscious of what I’m doing when it’s happening, but it’s more of a collaboration than just me thinking, “I’m going to draw an eye shaped like this,” and then making my hand execute it. It’s like I know how to make the pen apply the pressure to create the trick of shadow and light, but the figure that emerges isn’t a part of my plan or if it is, I’m not aware of it.

I worked nonstop for the past few days, breaking only to sleep on the floor or to go out for a walk or to get some food. What I love about the city is it doesn’t matter what time of day it is, there’s always life happening.

Two days ago I woke up at four in the morning after only sleeping a couple of hours and I was starving. I found a little bakery and convinced the surly baker to open the door and sell me a couple of fresh croissants, which I devoured on the walk back.

I passed a woman huddled over a steam grate under a filthy sleeping bag. She was singing. Her voice was gravel and sand but she could soar into these high, flute-like notes. Her hair was thick and matted. I stood to listen to her for a while but she never opened her eyes. I felt her sadness like a deep cavern, and she was in there somewhere, singing from the bottom of it.

I swayed on my feet, freezing but unable to move away. I wanted to save her but then I thought, who am I to think she needs saving? I left her all the money I had in my pocket, which was maybe fifty bucks and some change. When I got back into the studio, she was still with me and I worked on transferring her to the canvas for the rest of the day.

I’ve been working with paint and it’s so much faster but so much harder to get right. It flows thick and viscous and you just keep smearing and pushing and scraping to try to make something emerge. I kind of hate it, but I’m embracing that feeling, the chaos of it. After a full day, I stood back and was stunned to find I had made a swirling, steaming pile of shit. It was just complete trash and I was so tired that I just collapsed on the floor and wept. I was too exhausted to do something dramatic like take a knife to it.

I’m glad I didn’t because this afternoon, when I went back to the studio after taking the night to sleep and the morning to just walk in the park, I found there was something to the piece I had not seen. It was hidden there between the thick slabs of paint that were still wet because the studio is so damp. I got a palette knife and started cutting through the paint, kind of etching out negative space, and discovered the woman I’d seen singing on the street was there, just below the surface.

It took all afternoon and into the evening to excavate her, but when I did, it was glorious. All that goddamned paint was still there but carved up in a million little strokes that are my jam. I cried again, but this time they were tears of relief. I felt like I had tunneled out of a collapsed mineshaft. I looked like it too! You should have seen the look I got from the concierge when I walked through the lobby of the hotel with bright blue and orange smears of paint on my face and in my hair.

November 18, 2005

Lefty is here in the bed next to me sleeping. His flight was delayed and he got in really late last night. There was apparently some bogus threat that kept the plane grounded for hours while they combed through all the baggage. I was really nervous about seeing him again and I tried to wait up, but fell asleep and woke to the smell of him, his lips on my neck.

We didn’t speak, but made love in the darkness with only the light from the city coming through the window. Our bodies reclaimed each other, which I think would’ve been a lot harder if we sat down to talk face-to-face first.

Love doesn’t make any sense. As I watch him sleeping with the late morning sun slanting in across his face, I’m struck by the mystery of it all, how we found one another. I don’t think anyone would have picked us out for each other and we certainly didn’t see it in the beginning. But it’s that strangeness that makes it so special.

He looks older to me this morning and that’s scary. I never gave too much thought to our age difference but it’s obvious to me now that I will lose him one day. I will be alone without my guide, my protector, my champion. I don’t want to think about it.

Today I’ll take him down to the studio space to show him the new paintings. It’s funny they don’t seem real until he’s seen them. I’m convinced they’re just in my head until he tells me what he thinks. I’ll savor the feeling of him absorbing them for the first time when it’s just us and no Daedalia, no talk of where they might best be shown or who’s in line to buy them.

It always hurts to give them up, every single time. I pretend to get used to it, mostly for Lefty’s sake, but it’s really fucking hard. It’s like this hollowness, this vacuum they leave behind.

I’ve tried different things to make it sting less, like having Lefty take them out of the studio immediately when I’m done. I even tried to do this mindful thing like a ceremony where I sat alone with the piece and made an intention to let it go. It’s always the same the day after they’re gone though. I ache for a while and act bitchy and mopey and then one morning I decide to work again and the minute I touch a new canvas, the ache is gone. I don’t think anyone can really understand it and the shitty thing is, I can’t really even talk to other artists about it because, you know.

I’ve decided since I can’t commune with other living artists, I’ll study the dead ones. I’m reading a book about this woman, Hildegard of Bingen. I had no idea there were even women artists in the Middle Ages. She was a German Benedictine abbess, visionary, and polymath who created these mystical paintings. She had visions and believed God worked through her. She wasn’t just an artist but a writer and a healer, and she tried with her paintings to quell the rampant fear at the time that the world was coming to an end. People were terrified that they were living in the end of days. She was a saint, literally.

Reading about her life makes me feel strange. There’s a comfort in knowing there have been other people, women in history who are possessed like I am, but I also feel this tremendous weight now, like a responsibility. After what happened with Fiodor, I was running from it, but I don’t think I can run anymore. My work must be about more than what it will fetch at auction. There must be some reason for why it consumes me and keeps me apart from my daughter and Lefty and really everyone else. This all sounds crazy, delusional. But what if it’s not?

« Previous | Table of Contents | Next »

Did this chapter take you in? Leave a ❤️ below to help fellow travelers find it. Speaking of fellow travelers, a lot of friendships have started in the comments of my serials.