It Feels Like Something is Haunting me

Can I still write about hauntings even though we are toward the tell end of the Samhain season? Flock it. Even if it's taboo, we ball; we are gonna do it. Please queue gratuitous airhorns, please. I feel like DJ Khaled in his prime. I also feel like I got some stuff nipping at my toes that I have to exorcize. I didn't realize I felt haunted until I listened to a recent episode of the Missing Witches podcast that was devoted to the topic of word witches. During the show, Sanyu Estelle noted how the idea for her current book The Cultural Roots of the Tarot she is working on was, " like a specter, you know, it like haunts you, you know, you're waking up with it, you're going to bed with it. It's like the creature on your back." Her words shimmered the minute that she spoke them. The words went right through my ear canal and dislodged some gunk that was blocking some gears in my brain from aligning. Bing, Bang, Boom: I could see more clearly. In a flash, I thought to myself, "I AM HAUNTED!" Indeed, I am trailed by pleasant and horrifying phantasms.

I have been hounded by THE BOOK that I want to write for ages. If I am honest, that haunting is rather pleasant. Sometimes it gets me down to think that I have been writing on the web for almost a decade and haven't set out a plan to write THE BOOK. That's just past me who wanted to be a theorist though. We let that buddy rest when we got our cozy little city job doing public sociology. Now, I could allow that part of myself fine-tuned in my quest to get a PhD come back and wreak havok, or I could tuck that little buddy back into his catacomb. Sweet dreams, little prince, you don't need to be angsty. You can just fall asleep while listening to Kid A. However, things have been happening that make me think that I am closer than ever to start writing that thing.

First, I wrote a couple thousand words describing how my mom echoes into everything that I do now without any plan of posting it anywhere on the web. That is extremely weird for me. I am always trying to post what I write the minute I finish it. However, I want to laze with the text and weave in some other threads from my friend Sharon's recent essays on story. I think this is an indicator that I am moving beyond the workflow of the self-contained saturday where I would write a story and publish it online. That was my workflow on Substack for the two previous years at least, and there is nothing wrong with that workflow. That Saturday-burst style of writing was a breathe of fresh air for me artistically, because my day job entails spending 3-6 month fine-tuning the analysis and text of technical, government reports. I purposely would use grammatical rules in those bursts of creativity that were contrary to the rules I employ in my day job and would drench my writing in personal experience and emotion. Both of those are completely absent from my day job work, so bringing them into my personal storytelling was so fulfilling.

Second, I am sort of figuring out how to slot my writing into different outlets with distinct types of storytelling for each outlet. This was prompted by my beginning forays into zines, which is still ongoing. Once I started thinking about how different publishing mediums (newsletter, zine, and book) offer unique strengths for different sorts of stories, I started to see a path forward into the process for writing THE BOOK. First, I really like sitting down for 4-5 hours and writing a story or a series of stories that I will press publish on and it immediately goes live. That's why I invested in my own little corner of the web on ghost to keep that work up. I am sitting here, drinking coffee, listening to Keith Jarrett's Hymns/Spheres feeling a level of contentment and bliss that I rarely find. After reading Seraglia's "Books as Art Practice: Notes from the Margins," I am extremely interested in using zines for telling the stories of my weavings, given his statement that he would rather make an art book documenting his work than have a gallery show. Considering that my art exists outside of a gallery economy in the relational/gift web, this will allow me to create a serialized storytelling vehicle that allows me to tell the story of each piece coming out of the studio. This leaves an entire third area of long form stories that weave together personal experience, theory, craft, and sociology into topics like death work, masculinity, craft, and magic that I do not want to be hounded to be done writing in an afternoon or that don't rely on me finishing a woven project to complete. THE BOOK happens by investing in my own ability to weave stories from the disparate influences and expertises I have picked up on this earth over the last almost 40 years.

As my Irish polytheist faith has taught me, new life only comes after death has occurred. This pathway forward only presented itself after I waddled around in the dark after ending my weekly substack essay series of two years with the birth of my son M. I was so wrapped up in fulfilling my responsibilities to my day job and channeling my remaining creativity through that medium that I didn't have time to step back and make space for THE BOOK. It took a cataclysmic change, like a new baby, to get me to step away from that lifeway and reflect how I want to use my precious free time for my creative pursuits. THE BOOK should really be the priority moving forward. I was putting the cart before the horse in thinking that writing a weekly newsletter on substack would get me the book. It certainly helped me prove to myself that I could stick to a writing project for multiple years. However, I wrote a dissertation, coauthored an academic journal article, and have contributed to 40-50 technical reports, so I really need to stop forcing myself to prove I can do it. I need to channel the parking lot-hating Mary Oliver when she said:

"You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let.."

...yourself write the flocking book, hoss. JFC. hehehe. Ok, I am gonna do it. No more excuses.

The terrifying haunting I am still afflicted by still is how to not replicate the mistakes my father made when I was young. This was the core storytelling I was engaged in a few years back when my daughter J was much younger. It's tough to become a parent when your mom is gone and your dad never really made an attempt to parent beyond making money. You might ask, "How is this a haunting?" Well, to be frank, I still have a constant internal monologue that asks me to compare my behavior in a situation, a decision, or a time period against the mistakes that my dad made. The number of times Lily has told me that I am not my father is startling. He feels like a demon on my back.

They do say that sometimes the best example someone can offer is in what not to do. I know that to be true, to some extent, in my case. I have made every critical decision in my life thinking about how it would affect my ability to be fully present with my family – a decision my dad never made. I have remained in therapy and stayed on lexapro well beyond the most acute phases of my generalized anxiety and One Cool Dude (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) were managed with the tools at my disposal, because I didn't want to pass down any intergenerational trauma that was passed down to me if I could avoid it. I try everyday to be a 50/50 partner with lily, making sure we split all labor and costs right down the middle (unless it makes sense for me to take on more of the cost). I refuse to be the man baby that was modeled for me in the home until my mom divorced his ass upon finding an incredible suspicious series of receipts for gifts for other women. I also vow to meet my kids where they are at and do things with them that they enjoy and we can all enjoy together. I won't put them through the pain of earning time with me by forcing them to be good at something that I am interested or invested in.

I live with that demon every day, but it feels a lot lighter now. Take today, for instance, I woke up at 4:45 AM, worked until 6:30 AM, got j ready and off to school by 8:45 AM, worked until the middle of the afternoon, ran errands for groceries and aquaphor on the bike, made dinner, got M down, folded laundry, made the formula batch, and now am sitting here at 7:30 PM to write. It took me 15 hours of work and tending to get to this art time, but I felt very light the whole day. I didn't have to question any of my decisions. I didn't feel the need to compare myself to my dad. I was just in the flow of the day being the dad I always hoped I could be. That's the best medicine for a haunting anyways.

Studio Update

I. Weaving

It's gonna sound odd for me to say that I relish the opportunity to make memorial keepsakes for people. Well, there I go already ceding ground to our dominant culture. It's certainly not odd within the death aware circles that I walk in. It's certainly not odd to see those sorts of keepsakes in the cemeteries I have walked through. I certainly would have been welcomed with open arms in the Victorian era when people would carry around lockets of their loved one's hair. Heck, it's still possible for folx to get those kind of keepsakes to carry a loved one's ashes around in a little vial. Yes, I just am just another in a long line of people who like to keep a connective thread available for folks to connect with their departed loved ones. I like to think it's small, slow, humble work toward building a different world – a world where we honor death and those we have lost.

Interestingly, I didn't ever solicit this sort of death work and, at first, didn't truly understand its depth. Very soon after I started to tell stories about my hand carding, spinning, and weaving honoring my mom folks would ask me if I could spin their dogs fur who was older or who had passed on. I didn't actually accept the work until my friend Vanessa asked me to do it for her. I suppose it's not surprising that I would need a connective thread of my own to ease into the work. Before that, I sort of dismissed those sorts of projects as not really death work. Boy, was I wrong. It's an incredibly humbling and powerful experience to be invited into anyone's grieving process. To be entrusted with keeping any connective thread alive for someone that a person loved is as important of a duty that I can take on, outside being a husband and father. It's a role that takes all my experience as a spiritual death worker, practitioner of magic, and weaver and spinner to bring to a successful completion. It's the handiwork where I feel the most alive and in my lane.

My current project is a series of weavings to honor dear, sweet Caroline. She left my friend Taryn a few months back after a long, difficult illness. I never got to meet Caroline in person, but you could feel how special of a dog she was just in the stories Taryn told about her. I mean Caroline was so cool that she would ride in a trailer behind Taryn as she rode her bike. I count myself so lucky as to help honor Caroline's memory and keep her alive in the fiber.

The big task I set out for myself was to use all the yarn I created using Caroline's fur. In the past, I would card and spin up what I thought I would need, which would always end being more than I would use in the one tapestry. Now, if I was ultra-organized and dialed-in like a master weaver, I would know the exact yardage that I would need to spin up for the project. Alas, I am but a humble little hobbit in his basement hermitage, so I spin up the special connective thread until it feels right. Yes, indeedy, I use a very scientific intuitive feeling where I look at the spindle, start nodding at the accumulated progress, and make the call to wind onto a niddy noddy. Unlike the past when I would just give the rest of the skein to my fren who received the memorial cloth, I decided this time to just keep making things until I ran out. After I made the big tapestry (if 9 in. x 9 in. can be considered big hehe), I made two slightly smaller sizes (4 x 5 and 5.5 x 5), which I will be making into an ultra secret project. You can see these two sizes in the picture below here.

I think my favorite thing about Caroline's connective thread is I built in an ombre, undulating effect into the yarn. I did this by SORCERY! hehe No, really, I varied how much of Caroline's fur that I put on the hand carders while keeping the amount of white shetland uniform across all rolags (lengths of carded fiber ready for handspinning) I created. When woven up, it gives an effect like Caroline is breathing gently through the section of her thread that is in each piece. Since each strand of Caroline's thread was spun by hand by a fiber wizard (i.e., by a person not trying to replicate anything from moment to moment), it allows Caroline the space to show out in each piece in unique ways in each cloth. This is exactly how it should be. We should just let Caroline tell her story the way she wants to. When all these ideas about Caroline's thread occurred to me throughout the process, I felt such a deep profound sense of contentment. I can only hope letting Caroline shine in this way for her people will only help her feel more at peace in the next one.

This places me in exactly the place I like to be: the background. I would much rather be the humble artisan keep folx' memories alive or keeping traditions alive than be the dude of the proverbial wheaties box of art. First, I could never be a hypebeast, because I am extremely sleepy and not ambitious. Secondly, I am much more interested in the friends and connections I can make by making things than I am networking with people seeking to make money off of "art." Take these jean jacket patches I made for Taryn (pictured above), for example. These are the sort of creation that says, "I want you to be able to wear your love for your friend on your heart at all times." That embeds me in the web of the gifts economy that is strictly concerned with trying to build friendships with people I respect and would like to be buddies with. That's a use value that is more important than any money anyone could give me for a weaving.

The other thing I did composition-wise with these weavings is incorporate a white border around the piece. I was inspired here by the legendary Jazz label Editions of Contemporary Music, who have released some of my favorite jazz records of all time. Many of those albums have cover art that includes a single photograph or piece of absract art surrounded by white borders. Take, for instance, the classic album by Pat Metheny Bright Size Life, which has cover art that features a single photo of a tree at the edge of a field with a rising/setting sun (seen below).

There is a certain calm this composition provides for me. Given that this whole practice of mine started nearly 10 years ago as a way to find peace in a turbulent world, I feel that it is only fitting that I make my composition a quiet place for weary travels to rest when it is fitting.

II. Spinning

I am still working on spinning on my dealgan, a Scottish-style, whorl-less spindle. I think this is skein two or three. I am still wobbly on it, and my yarn looks like beginner yarn. It's such a rich process to be using a spindle that my Scottish ancestors might have used. A glutton for a challenge, I decided that I also wanted to get used to spinning Galway, a native Irish sheep, fiber on that spindle. That sort of newness makes for a fun learning curve. I am not joking either. I am not really interested in making perfect yarn, so it is fun to throw myself into the deep-end to replicate what it was like when I first started spinning. I remember that Meg Kemp had to take my hands and specifically show me how to let the spin into the fiber and slowly draft yarn a little at a time. I was so beguiled and mystified by the sorcery that my hands were capable of that I spun everyday for a year, scared that if I missed a day that I would lose the skill. I appreciate Meg so much for teaching me that skill. I have lost touch with her, but I hope she is well wherever she is.

Some part of me just wants to rekindle that magic when I was just coming into my power as a craftsperson, when I was learning how much magic we are all capable of with simple tools in hand. I realized this to be the case while watching Meredith Graves' excellent lecture for Radio Free Golgotha on magic and hand spinning last weekend. They noted in their typically adroit-, composed-bard style that the links between magic and fiber spinning are ancient. Spinning in its most simple form, such as thigh spinning fiber where a person adds twist to a piece of fiber to make rope or thread, is practice that is likely over 54,000 years old. Graves noted that because spinning, carding wool, and other fiber arts are durational actives (i.e., activities that take a great deal of time and are done in the nooks and crevices of everyday life around a hearth or in a living room) they were drawn into the myths and folklore that after consistent retelling allow a culture to easily disseminate history, values, and social norms via oral history. In Graves' compelling lecture, they noted that it is no wonder that spinning has been associated with magic, the fates, and one's lifeline given the gripping correspondence that those ideas have with spinning, thread, and creating the conditions for safety and warmth and their proximity to storytelling the world over. One could easily transport themself around one such hearth fire, spindle in hand, and feel the power and selfless importance that would surge through your body as the bard, dancing to and fro, noted how deities solved seemingly insurmountable problems with ease via the power they wielded in plying arcane fiber arts. I choose to believe that the Bard knew what they were doing when they did this and it was done to only deepen the power of the oral history that they were transmitting.

I know that same power surges through me as I think about plucking a little bit of Brighid's cloak off for weaving when starting a woven spell for someone. Here, I am riffing on Rachel Snack's most-excellent maxim that all our weaving is drawn from and contributes to one great woven web that we are all interconnected in and merging it with the story of how Bridghid was able to secure her monastery at Kildare and the associated practices surrounding the Brat Bridge (Thanks to Sharon for this connection during our weaving class). In the story of Brighid's cloak, Brighid asked the King of Leinster for as much land as her cloak would cover to house her monastery. Thinking Brighid daft, the king granted her request. Much to his horror, Brighid instructed four women to take one of each of the corners of her cloak and walk outwards away from the center. Magically, the cloak expanded until Brighid's land encompassed acre after acre. Here in Kildare, Ireland, she and followers were safe in their monastery, where they tended Brighid's flame. Whenever I am weaving a cloth, I can't help but think it has the same magical properties that Brighid's cloak displayed in the story – the power to rest power back from a incredulous patriarchal world that is ignorant to the magic of the cloth.

With the story of Brighid's cloak, you can understand my goal to steep my studio work in the myths, fiber, and tools of my ancestors. With this mythopoetic depth enchanting my work, I am able to transcend mundane readings of my craft and any connection to an art economy. With the aid of deities like Brighid, I am no longer just spinning uniform, tapestry-gauge single-plied yarn. No, I am literally spinning the foundational elements to build worlds, provide healing or protection, and ply portals open for folks to slip through. The spindle is not longer just a 20-something dollar piece of wood shaped on a lathe. No, it has transformed into a magical implement. Indeed, as I learned from Graves' lecture, it is today as it was depicted in the De Physiognomonia Libre manuscript where virgo was shown with a spindle and distaff. As a virgo some 500 years after this document was written, I can't help but giggle and see that I am but carrying out the work that was set out for me long before I was even born.

III. Teaching

Ok, I have to admit that I am like three people behind in teaching my people how to weave. It just takes a lot of work to put these kits together, and as I spoke about earlier, I am very sleepy. I also have no interest in turning the screws on myself by teaching people for money. If I charged, I would have to revive an old version of myself that had to bill ever 15 minute block of time I worked. That would be some form of hot, hot, hot hell that I could not tolerate, because I can certainly turn the screws on myself. Given that I know that about myself, I cut those past versions off at the pass, so they can just rest in the catacombs. So, when I finally put together a kit with a lost ponds loom, a Susan bates tapestry needle, a shed stick, and a variety of handspun, commercially-produced, and hand-dyed yarns and raffia, its a momentous occasion. HUZZAH, HOORAY!

With the loom having arrived this last week, I got to hang out with my buddy Sharon and talk to them while I provided very minimal guidance on how to weave yesterday. I always laugh because my teaching is about as haphazard and minimal as one could expect from a wee little hermit like myself. Maybe I am just selling myself short, but it was astounding at how quickly Sharon picked up weaving without any real guidance from me. There is a virtue to be learned in this experience though. If my dood William S. Copperthwaite's ideas in A Handmade Life hold any weight (I sure think they do), all teaching should be a gentle, non-violent act that is entered into voluntarily by student and teacher. Given that I am gifting my time, materials, and expertise in the teaching and the student is coming to the work with a genuine interest in this ancient craft, I should not be surprised to see little or no friction in the learning process. I am certainly repaid in spades with feeling useful and getting to experience community with my kinsfolk for some time (a real balm in this day and age).

I am not here to bad mouth anybody who teaches weaving for money. I am not much concerned with telling people what is right and wrong. There are enough people out there selling subscriptions for 4.99 a month on some platform to terraform your brain with their ideology. Nah, I will leave that up to you to decide what is right and wrong for yourself. I know I am not about to throw someone out in the garbage just because they might have a different set of ideas than me. I am more concerned with how they treat me and the people in my community. I am just here to share my experience. I, again, am here to tell you that I like to give my art away and teach people for free, because I have had to commodify almost every skill I have ever gained expertise in to eat, shelter, cloth, and secure vital services. Given such an experience, I just don't want to do it anymore.

Heather Link-Bergmann - "all is yours when the morning comes"

The garage door to Rachel Ralph Gallery opened, and I flew in. Well, it was much less parent-trying-to-secure-TICKLEMEELMO-in-a-stampede than it was me shuffling in with my bike while exchanging pleasantries with Rachel. But, I want to build anticipation in the introductory sentence, don't I? Regardless, I was so grateful to finally getting a chance to see Heather's new show. Of course, life circumstances with a baby, a toddler, and a full-time job conspired to throw off my visit until the last day of its showing. But, as the saying goes, better late than never.

Upon entering the show, I was immediately enwrapped in two of my favorite things occulted meaning and tactile fibers. Many of the pieces included this framing in a wonderful purple textile that had this uniform, small-stitch definition that made you see its tactility. As a fiber artist myself, I could feel the fabric in my mind, even though it was behind glass. Heather used that fiber to foreground the cards associated with the arcana that she had conjured. She placed a silk ribbon down the center of the show, dyed with wine that she used to represent her blood. As a fiber artist interested in magic, I associated this with the typical need to make an offering to receive something in return. It's not out of the realm of feasibility to offer ones own blood in order to receive some wisdom in return.

The show feels like it was Heather's documentation of one late-night conjuring session for her arcana. Given that we don't know what Heather has received from the other nights of her process, much of the meaning of the full arcana is still occluded behind the veil. This is how I interpret the meaning of the photo above where a photograph of a veiled card takes up much of the gallery's west wall, whereas all the revealed cards are on the east wall (pictured below). All we are able to discern is the aspects of the wisdom that were rendered public with the documentation of the conjuring session that was offered for us to see.

One can imagine Heather doing several more shows of varying size building on the themes of offering/receiving and printing an oracle deck and associated guide book afterward. Yes, a fan ghoul like me can only wish. This sort of merging of fiber, zines, and magic is right up my wheelhouse. I am in the target audience for this (hehehehe using market research language for these topics makes me LAWL). I can just imagine the offerings getting more and more elaborate and the conjurings more and more byzantine and obscure. Ugh, just thinking about making the magic of the creation of such a print project visible into an intervention you can visit is so fun. It sure felt like I was seeing seeing the potential layouts of the flat lays for pages of the zine, which I dug a lot seeing as I found Heather's work through her writing of MisMerch'd.

However, maybe those sorts of dreams are all meant to be hidden behind the shroud on the west wall. As with all magic, much of the meaning is there for us to decipher for ourselves or participate in. We don't need to wait for Heather to explicate the meaning of the conjured tarot. I appreciate embracing the friction of this mortal coil by doing it myself. Maybe the whole point of documenting this moment of offering and receiving is to show us how that sort of process is available to us all. I walked away thinking about how I could build even more symbology into my woven work, meditate more systematically on the ogham, and visit my own personal underworld more for these sorts of conjuring sessions. Thank you Heather for all this to chew on. You are rad. Please keep creating.

As I was leaving the show, someone nicely asked me if they could see my art hanging anywhere after I talked to them. I smiled sheepishly and explained that no one has been interested in hanging my work in five or more years. I was a little embarrassed by my response. As I rode away, the beginnings of a poem came to the surface.

Art is not transactional.

You cannot sell

all that art is.

Art is relational,

finding kin in the

folds of a book,

a cast of silver into an arcane symbol,

or a handmade fiber good.

Art is finding yourself empowered

through an ancient process,

awestruck at your own capacity.

Art is magic,

seeing how something you made

spirals out into the world

inspiring others to create and

spiral out into the world,

ad infinitum,

creating new worlds,

opening new possibilities.

Art isn't critique.

It isn't the analytical mind.

Art is a gaping void, a mystery.

You can't critique a mystery

or amass a body of criticism on it.

Real Art is beyond critique.

Real art isn't hung up at ARTMIAMI

or any nonsense-commercial-hypebeast spetacle.

Real art is created by your neighbor

in the 20 minutes they save

at the end of the day

for a watercolor exploration

that they hang in a

seasonal exhibition in their alley.

No commercial artist can touch

the level of dedication your neighbor

puts into that work.

That is the mystery incarnate.

You made it! Yes, I am indeed a wild man, writing 5,300 word newsletter update just for the fun of it. hahaha Thanks for reading. Consider subscribing if you like my storytelling. I will only bother you if I feel like I have something to say.