Louise Erdrich, “Future Home of the Living God”
A cold white winter sky is visible through the blinds as I stretch out in my studio. I lie on the bed with the current painting on the easel. Am I really looking at it or am I letting my thoughts drift? My current series of prints has had several working titles. Genius Loci is one, The Rose Garden, another. The basic theme is of women who have magically emerged on the other side of disaster. The incipit was Roberto Bolaño’s novel, 2666; all those women murdered in Mexico. Indeed the continuing femicide throughout the world has become part of the story. In my screenprints there is this one woman and that one, and yet another; they are still present and they are in hiding. It’s all in the blink of an eye. Some are in future places; some in the cracks of this world. They are momentarily visible. The human face as we find it. They mostly seem free from the stresses of possible attack. That is because death is behind them. This is what we can do in our art. Tell stories. Find the woman in each print; she is in there, inhabiting a complex, collage-like composition. As I am saying – she manifests a moment of survival. Sometimes she resides in a future place, that impossible year of Bolaño’s 2666, looking down on us in our present time; sometimes she is in the past, deep in the late 1400’s. That is when Hieronymus Bosch painted his amazing triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights. These screenprints are black ink on 300 wt soft white paper. They are incorporating a vocabulary I’ve developed over the years. In the early 1970’s I made strange black and white designs that were like collages. They were for Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds. One can see a direct line from that moment to this present time. Those were not actual collages though. I would paint them that way. And I would pick ready made images and adjust them to my needs. My paintings from the early 1970’s onwards were very much built on chosen images from the outside world. And so with my limited edition prints. Yes, from the beginning of my life in art, I have been pulling characters out from their specific worlds, and incorporating them into my compositions. I was taught to “appropriate”.
That might not have been the word that was used then. To “steal” from earlier artists, more like. It was about having imaginary conversations with other artists. And then I wonder about writers like Louise Erdrich. Did she have imaginary conversations with previous writers as she was honing her craft? Somehow she seems to have arrived on the scene fully engaged with her material. She inhabits the special world of Ojibwe/Chippewa and at the same time she is a perfect observer of present day America. She lives in Minnesota. The two worlds, they combine in her work. The revelations of her Ojibwe world fascinated me from the start. I first read The Antelope Wife (1998), but it’s The Future Home of the Living God (2017) that I look to now. Early in the book as the protagonist Cedar/Mary was on a road part way between her two worlds, she sees a sign in an empty field – “Future Home of the Living God”. That becomes the title of her diary. She records her changing life as she moves through a world of rightwing closures, a world that wants to seize her and the unborn child she carries. There are echoes of Margaret Attwood’s Handmaid’s Tale (1985). But there happens to be another written input in this story. It comes from Eddy who is the husband of her birth mother. Not her actual father, though. Eddy, the tribal elder, working at a gas station. We first meet him with his head in a book. Somehow with Eddy’s presence you know there is going to be magic. He and Hildegard of Bingen. Her words stand as the epigraph at the front of the book: “The Word is living, being, spirit, all verdant greening, all creativity…” Eddy has written a huge manuscript and he writes letters. We learn that he has managed to turn the outside world collapse to advantage for the tribe, refocusing their tribal life and taking back stolen territories. And he manages secret manoeuvers when all seems lost. He has tales to tell. There’s the story of his intended suicide; the pebbles that saved him. He was walking towards the tree from which he would hang himself. He was wearing some sort of inadequate shoes that let in stones as he walked. The first stone was made of ferric oxide, earthy banded hematite. This had been laid down in the precambrian period and was possibly 2.6 billion years old. The next stone was a shard of balsaltic lava that was shoved to earlth’s surface maybe 3.5 billion years ago. The third stone was a dime sized circle of basalt that had been shaped by waves over time and it was the youngest of the stones, maybe only several million years old. Then there’s the last rock. It was sharp and cut. It was an agate, inexplicably shattered, showing the grain of fossilized wood and alge that it had once been. It was beautiful and he knew he should be respectful of the old world and not leave it quite yet. On his way back to the gas station there was not one rock slipped under foot. It felt like the novel could have ended just there, but of course the baby had to be born and there had to be a conclusion about the lack of snow in the world. For me one gorgeous moment that lingers in the mind, happened half way through the book. Cedar in her diary “.. the wind is whipping past us. We are so brief. A one-day dandelion. A seedpod skittering across the ice. We are a feather falling from the wing of a bird. I don’t know why it is given to us to be so mortal and to feel so much. It is a cruel trick, and glorious.”