I’ve had a wild day for someone who’s been home sick with a cold.

The cold hit me a yesterday, which makes a lot of sense. Yesterday marked a week since my Mom’s week-long visit came to an end, and I think I finally let my guard down. In this week since she left, I’ve been pretty useless. Apart from spending time beautifying my garden, I’ve done nothing productive. I now think this time wasn’t a waste.

First, a bit about my Mom.

It was very hard to get her here to Regina from Vancouver. She required a team to prepare her both practically and psychologically. I knew this challenge was taking place, but I assumed it was for the reason that I’ve known all my life — that my Mom is the laziest person I’ll ever know, that she’s allowed herself to become completely institutionalized, dependent on her care home staff to take care of many things for her that she’s been physically capable of doing herself. Until the last time I saw her, she was actually able to take care of her daily needs, but feigned incapacity because having someone else do these things was easier.

On this visit, however, I realized that she’s now reached the point of actually incapacity. Covid isolation in her small care-home room has done her in. She hasn’t returned to eating in the dining room or going to play bingo and such in the activity hall. She never leaves her room. She’s become both obese and weak. So, now she actually needs help doing everything, and this came as a shock to me. I had no idea she’d let herself slide this much. This meant that her visit took a greater toll on my than I’d expected, both physically and emotionally.

My Mom’s life is a train-wreck. OCD runs in her family. At six she would worry whenever she heard an ambulance that they were coming to take her away. On top of the illness, her first husband offed himself during a weekend leave from a mental institution when my sister was two years old, my Dad was/is a schmuck who left her when I was seven to save himself (“Amy, if I stayed, it would kill me”), and then her boyfriend died suddenly of a bad cold (combined with diabetes) when I was 13. Because of her OCD, she’s never been able to work or participate in society in any enjoyable way at all. My point is, I feel so incredibly sad for her, especially when I see her taking such intense joy from things like listening to the birds in my backyard or going out for an ice cream, and at the same time, I’m furious with her for her absolute weakness and lack of dignity and drive. Of course, this stirs up feelings I had as a child living alone with her in a slummy apartment, caring really badly for the two of us. I’ll never have an answer to questions about both my parents. For my Mom, it’s this: did she have had any control over her life at all, or is my anger at her unfair?

So, I guess it makes sense that I needed some down time after she left. Everything I’ve been doing to recover some sense of equilibrium in my life was just gone.

I was lying in bed this morning, trying really hard to sleep or at least relax. I was hyper-aware of the many small things I needed to get done, but too sick to get out of bed and do any of them.

I shamefully started scrolling Facebook on my phone, where I encountered a post by Jeannie Mah that changed everything. It was a section of pasted text from another Facebook post by Velones In Action introducing the artist Jannick Deslauriers.” According to this post, Deslauriers describes her work as:

Made of translucent fabrics and threads, my sculptures are intentionally left unfinished and sometimes even visibly damaged, torn or frayed, as if the object has frozen in a moment of destruction. The transparent textile materials and the partial obliteration of my pieces give them a ghostly character that suggests a certain humanity. Like ghosts that have come to haunt us, the objects I make wander and are abandoned. Although light and elegant, their disturbing presence implies something tragic.

This is totally up my alley, and the images of her pieces really spoke to me. (Images are from Velones In Action’s Facebook Post. Here’s info on what Velones In Action is about).

I wish I could see Deslaurier’s work in person and then take her out for lunch.

What’s really neat is that just before giving up on verticality and going to bed, I’d tried sitting and reading a book I’d slid off my shelf when I was feeling shitty yesterday. What’s Next? Eco Materialism and Contemporary introduced me to New Materialism, which is a field of inquiry I believe Deslauriers’ work responds to, and I would love to chat with her about, hence the lunch invite.

This is yet another book I owe thanks to my husband, Michael Trussler, for bringing into our home (this one as a gift to me a few years ago, one I flipped through at the time and then shelved — I wasn’t ready for it).

New Materialists, in a nutshell, are interested in the world’s materiality and see value and wonder in every object that exists. According to Linda Weintraub’s description of it,

New Materialists construct conscious relationships with all forms of matter, including such common objects as paperclips, coffee mugs, pennies, zippers, napkins, shampoo containers, paper cups, birthday candles, junk mail, pencils and plastic spoons. […] These every day, manufactured objects acquire the capacity to enthrall when attention is paid to the elaborate network of professionals whose skills were invested in their production. […] New Materialists are equally inclined to revel in acorns, moss, nail clippings, banana peels, apple cores, chicken bones, peanuts, and egg shells, because each of these items encapsulates ongoing evolutionary struggles and genetic experimentations that originated in primeval times. (5)

Eco Materialists use this attention to every material and sense of wonder at the world to remind us of our own integral connection to Earth, one which industrialization/colonialism has caused many of us to forget. Weintraub invites readers to consider this connection, sharing that we are each in fact physically comprised of so much more than the human, as

approximately one hundred million non-human cells occupy the human body. This is ten times greater than the cells that share the person’s DNA. Human existence, therefore, is not independent and self-determined; it is an ongoing, multispecies drama in which opportunity and emergency are continually being negotiated with myriad microscopic entities. (13)

Wait a second. I’m terrible at math, but does this mean that only one tenth of my body is genetically “me”?

@!#&%

Back to being in bed now, I was lying there looking at Jeannie’s post of Jannick Deslauriers, thinking about material, shifting perceptions of commonplace objects, and the multitudinous lifeforms in my body. Unable to sleep.

I decided there was no point, so I got up and made a quick trip to my studio to pick up a few of my super-fragile unfired local-clay cups and see what I could do with them via documentation. (I threw on some hand sanitizer and an N95 to protect others).

I got home just in time, though I knew not for what. Upon getting in the door, the sky went from Saskatchewan-sunny to overcast in a way that spelled rain. I threw on my rain jacket, grabbed my phone and an umbrella, and took these cups to my backyard to capture them dissolving in the rain, which I knew would happen just from my knowledge of this clay.

I was curled up under said umbrella, my back-end and feet getting wet, while this took place in front of me:

The sky cleared in minutes, before I was ready! There were other cups to try, other angles! Rain is a fickle collaborator. Though, the sun is nice, too.

I then realized I was chilled. My nose dripped onto the grass. Sniffling and sneezing, I wondered about what I was expelling—what inorganic materials and what microscopic animals were leaving me for good? How much of my own preciously limited DNA was in that mix? Where would those atoms end up in the future? They wouldn’t just disappear. What may they become? Would a few of them enter into this backyard’s clay?

Maybe the virus taking over my sinuses made me do it, I don’t know, but I decided to see if I could blow apart a cup by sneezing on it, on video. It turns out that it’s very hard to will yourself to sneeze. I took off my long-sleeved shirt and stood there waiting. I went in and out of the house, hoping for a big chill down my spine, but nothing worked until I stuck a large blade of grass up my left nostril. Three violent expulsions then occurred. And what does the force of the CO2 and these materials traveling at 100mph and hitting a super-thin clay cup look like? The result was anticlimactic.

At the same time as all this was going on, I had a song stuck in my head thanks to a conversation I’d had the day after my Mom left last week. I had the pleasure of meeting Robert Shay, a Kentucky artist who’s visiting Regina to spend time wood-firing with Martin Tagseth. One of the first things Bob said to me, randomly, was, “you must love Leonard Cohen.” I said something like, “yeah, I do?” to which he replied that I must listen to a cover of his songs by some artists I hadn’t heard of. I reciprocated by asking if he knew of Antony’s cover of “If It Be Your Will.” He didn’t. So, among other things I did today while not sleeping as I should have been, I emailed Bob as I’d told him I would to share a link to this song. Hence, I’ve had it in my head all day.

And today, while watching the video I sent to Bob in this email, one I’ve seen many times, I heard Cohen come in (the video cuts to an interview clip) and say something at minutes 1:36 that I’d never really paid enough attention to in the past, as if again, it was waiting for me to find today (which I don’t believe):

A lot of those songs are just the response to what struck me as beauty whatever that curious emanation from a being or an object or a situation or a landscape, you know. That had a very powerful effect on me as it does on everyone, and I prayed to have some response to the things that are so clearly beautiful to me and they are alive.

Leonard Cohen, “Antony singing If It Be Your Will“

I’ve appreciated this synchronicity today. It was a gift from the gods I don’t believe in. Or a sign of everything’s interconnectedness? No, I believe these seeming-coincidences are all in our head. Still, I think I’m now ready to move on from mother-visit exhaustion and the creative block I’ve had recently and get back to the self-care I’ve been focused on lately as part of my recovery. But still, I find it meaningful that this cold I have a result of being worn down from her visit played a part in how all of this happened today, from being forced to slow down, to considering my biofluid discharges as an artistic medium. Thanks, Mom.