Suicide Blonde

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My husband’s face, when mask-less, interacts with my face. I can read the movement of his mouth, his eyes and, in turn, he reads mine. At times, my husband recedes from my face, pulling his animating forces inside of himself. He is focused on a problem I cannot see. At these moments his face is inert, mask-like. The most powerful member and opinion-leader of the congregation, Mulhoffer -- a well-to-do furniture tycoon and lover of the TV advertising that made his fortune -- wants the church to become a TV ministry and open health spas and such to serve the members. To paraphrase him: people who don't watch enough TV are troublemakers. Darcey Steinke: I identify with what you’re asking in this question. As a clergy child, you’ve seen your father preaching in the pulpit, but have also heard his complaints, so you can’t just throw yourself into the community of the church and think that it is some perfect holy thing.

The aging face is an anti-face. It does not receive the automatic empathy Levinas claimed for the face. In The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rilke writes of faces he sees on the streets of Paris. He is particularly disturbed by an old women’s face. “When they are barely forty years old they come to their last one… it is worn… has many holes in it, is in many places as thin as paper, and then little by little the lining shows through, the non-face and they walk around with that one.” a b c "Darcey Steinke". The Media Briefing. Archived from the original on February 4, 2013 . Retrieved July 15, 2012. I do think Jesse in Suicide Blonde is in the haze of her mother’s chaotic, unlived life. She does not understand that is part of her acting out, but it is what drives her, just as much as sexual desire, the unfulfilled inchoate desires of her mother haunting her and moving through her. Agnes Martin was born in Maklin, Saskatchewan, Canada, in 1912, and moved to the US in 1932, studying at universities in Oregon, California, New Mexico and New York. In the early 1950s she developed a biomorphic style influenced by Abstract Expressionism. Her first solo exhibition was held at the Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, in 1958. From around 1960?61 she began to work with the grids of horizontal and vertical lines for which she has become renowned. In 1967 she moved from New York to New Mexico, where she lived until her death in 2004.Last summer, when it was released, I read Flash Count Diary in a kind of ecstatic fury, and by the time I’d finished it, I wanted to hand-deliver a copy to every person I know. As I noted in my reflection on the book, reading it made me feel as if I’d spent the day “watching words explode like fireworks inside my own head.” Steinke’s intimate and honest interrogation of her own faith and spirituality, her relationship with her body and the larger world, and her creative drive and process tore me open in exactly the way the best art does. I couldn’t wait to speak with Steinke directly about the book’s foundations and creation. A Wished-For House With a Hideaway Nook". The New York Times. May 13, 2007 . Retrieved July 14, 2012.

Complicating things further is the reality that clergy families are held up as an impossible model, which, as a child, is a difficult responsibility to hold. I remember once—I can’t remember if I was misbehaving, or was being wild—but my dad said, “I wish this wasn’t true, but your behavior affects my job.” I’d also like to write something about my family history. As we’ve discussed, on my father’s side, I’m Lutheran; however, on my mother’s side I’m a direct descendent of William Miller, who was the founder of the Seventh Day Adventist Church. My grandfather was actually born in the Miller church. That history is on my mind right now. I’d like to write about people who are world builders—artists, writers, the better theologians—versus people who are world destroyers. Those two forces are so dominant. We’re in a moment when it seems possible that so many people will be given more rights and more justice, and that’s exciting. But we also have this very destructive and dark killing force in the world happening at the same time. I’d like to write about that. It’s what I’m thinking about.After I end my zoom class, freezing my students and me mid-expression, I pull off my head phones, put my laptop to sleep and sit in my chair staring at the dark screen. Sadness blooms in my chest. The small electronic simulacrum of my students’ faces never comes close to their living features enlivened by questions, ideas and what some people call the soul. Rail: Could you talk a little more about your personal ideas about it? I mean, did aging ever trouble you as a writer? There’s a part in the book where Jesse muses about how Bell used to tell her she looked like a student and compared her to women he thought looked better and more desirable. DS: I do. Questions about my relationship to the universal force, or God, or how we’re supposed to be oriented to this life, or how we’re meant to live with the fragility of the human body—these questions are central to me. These are the questions that drive my work. I’ve found myself, through my writing, moving even farther away from doctrine and deeper into to the idea that the world itself is divine. People, animals, every plant—it’s all a manifestation of God. It’s just not very worthwhile to me to get bound up in confining ideas of God anymore.