I was chased from my bed this morning by the hounds of love. Kam and I made plans to go see Hamnet today, a movie we have been trying to see for months but never finding the right time to go. We rushed to get there on time and barely made it. I’ve been very tired recently, ultimately wrung-out and sick: feeling fatigued from antibiotics, my sleep hot and restless, sticky ooze of nightmare chasing me ‘round my dreams. I’d wake up in the night kicking off my covers and checking my watch, each bout of wakefulness landing on the hour, to the dot.
My boss called me on Friday asking me what my plans were this weekend, something quite unusual for her to do. Some part of my mind made me feel like she was holding me accountable since I’ve been so exhausted, even though she had no way of knowing my inner world. I was booked this weekend: spending time with my mother and sister on Saturday, and watching Hamnet with Kam and Sinners with Lilliana on Sunday.
I’m so tired, I’m so scared of my future, I have no idea how to do what I want to do. It feels ephemeral; I fear that I am unable to catch myself when I take a leap. I feel a quiet, constant dread that I can only distract myself from, so much that it courses through my blood; a cold iron shrapnel of dread poking me like a splinter stuck in my heart, something I can avoid the discomfort from if I sit in a certain pose, but am painfully reminded of when shifting the wrong way.
I have been crying a lot at movies; I’ve been crying a lot at how unfair things are. I have been grieving the end of this chapter of my life, knowing it is dead and I am running off borrowed time. It is time to move on, something I’ve been desperately yearning for, yet now desperately grasping on to as it slips between my fingers. I guess the right word for it is grieving.
I wrote a few months ago about Orpheus and Eurydice, and named a painting in my art show “Eurydice” after it. I toiled over this painting only to be unhappy with the final product; it is not my best work and definitely the piece that received the least amount of attention–it has been too difficult to explain thoroughly to anyone, but I feel now is the time to do so.
My coworker, a mother of 3, asked me to take her to my art exhibit on our lunch break since she missed the reception–I found it incredibly sweet of her to want to go see it.
She is a frantic woman with a giant heart and contains a vast wealth of emotion and kindness.
I stood quietly as she buzzed about my exhibit, vocalizing her unfiltered first impressions of my paintings in real time. She is the kind of person who loudly wears her feelings on her sleeve, so I felt privileged to experience this with her. I didn’t say anything to her about this, but it meant a lot to me.
She gushed and quipped over each painting, but when she got to Eurydice, she bluntly stated something to the effect of “I don’t want to look at that” and quickly moved on, never returning to it. We have bonded over our shared struggle of coming off as occasionally tactless, so her comment didn’t bother me at all; I know her heart.
I couldn’t help but find it a little funny, and instead felt impressed. What an incredibly interesting thing to say about a painting titled Eurydice; the entire premise of the tragedy hinges on looking back at her. I never told her about the myth that inspired the painting.
I put my feelings and inner turmoil into my art; my only goal is to express myself even if it is at the detriment of being understood by an audience. I marvel when people do understand what I make even without explanation, though. It feels magical, for lack of a better word.
At the end of Hamnet, Agnes, Hamnet’s mother, reaches out to Hamlet as he speaks to the audience, soliloquizing before his death. While he does this, she grabs his hand. The rest of the audience, weeping, reach out their hands as well to comfort Hamlet, transcending the barrier between audience and performance. It was so beautiful, I wept.
We feel alone in our grief, walking the path out of Hades, alone with only our tireless heartbeat as our companion, the quiet Eurydice trailing behind us deftly, without breath. We think of her, we miss her, we would do anything to get her back and understand. In this moment, it showed that everyone understands this turmoil; everyone grieves; a quiet rotted shame we all hide.
Agnes hated Will for not being there for the death of their son; she hated that he was gone doing his work, thinking he couldn’t possibly understand the gravity of the situation. She spent her time looking back at Eurydice, and he spent his time looking forward out of Hades, or so she thought. (per my interpretation.)
I spent most of the movie marveling over how much I thought Agnes resembled my friend Sarah. They shared dark hair and dark eyes, as well as a vast wealth of knowledge and wisdom.
Several months ago, I was at a beer garden. The sky wept, drizzling mist on us in spurts, yet the drink was flowing, and the mood was merry. I stood halfway crammed under an awning as Sarah was telling me about Shakespeare– she told me that he had two great loves. One was dark-haired and older than him–she contained mysteries and darkness and depth and knowledge… She plunged him into the depth of his mind; she was a quiet, contained woman who did not strive for the stage or attention. He had another love, a blonde, young man of daylight and merriment.
Sarah detailed the ways both lovers were muses for Shakespeare- how both loves fueled him, yet we were interrupted by friends. The subject was changed, and we never found our way back to this topic– I always meant to ask her about it again, but I kept forgetting.
Sarah is a quiet friend who I have never seen cry, although I have cried many times around her. She would sit, imperturbable, and speak to me as if rivulets of hot tears weren’t streaking down my cheeks, as if my voice was not shrill–as if my chin was not crinkled. When I need to cry, she lets me cry and speaks to me with humor, present and solid.
For some reason, whatever she has to say to me about art is always exactly what I need to hear. In a poem she wrote, she describes love; how some love is visible and detectable, and some love is understated and unverbose, often underappreciated and seen as an afterthought. Sarah’s poem is called Marginalia, which is a word for notes and drawings in the margins of a book– annotations, doodles, fleeting thoughts of the reader. Sarah told me that historians study marginalia in old texts. In doing so, it has led to insights into how people felt while living in their time, and has occasionally been the key to deciphering old languages.
This made me think of when I visited Pompeii and saw graffiti, tender touches of ancient humanity… something produced by a person who would have never believed that their existence could impact humans hundreds of years in the future. I stood before political graffiti in my polyester shirt, bleached hair, dusty Chaco shoes rubbing blisters into my feet, covered in dust, blinded by the sun, smoldering in the heat. The person who wrote those words on the wall would have never guessed that hundreds of years later people would travel from all across the globe to marvel at the ruins of the city they lived in, and gawk at the words they scrawled on the walls. I teared up while looking at the plaster cast of a person crouched down, guarding their face from the debris.
When archeologists uncovered Pompeii, there would be pockets of space where organic matter decayed inside the compacted ash. The archeologists would fill those pockets with plaster before delicately chipping away at the dirt, and that is how they uncovered the organic life that lived within the unbreathing stone of Pompeii. With this method, they discovered that people would use a sort of wooden door that functioned similarly to window blinds to open and close their food stalls, as spaces containing the final positions and resting places of those who lived in Pompeii, the space they once contained still cradling the memory of their last moments alive.
One mold was of a dog, writhing in agony and fear. Historians theorized that the dog was tethered when the volcano erupted and was unable to run away, so it died while frantically trying to escape, yet was bound by its restraints. The dog was abandoned, a casualty among the many others.
I overslept the day we went to Pompeii. I was ridden by mosquito bites, my skin raw and riddled with pimples; the exhaustion from travel and the changes of water and climate aggravating my already angry teenage skin. I woke from my uncle banging on my door telling me that the bus was here. I was so tired and considered for a moment that I would stay at the hotel. I was so tired and felt so ugly, but instead I dressed in a rush and almost missed this experience due to my over-sleeping and desire to not be seen while feeling so ugly. I wonder who I would be today if I didn’t go.
There is no doing life alone; every name immortalized by history had hundreds who supported them in the margins… Thankless and unknown, and uncared for by history– yet their impact is essential, their legacy living on, their lives and perspectives breathing life into complete works of art through their tiny snippets. Nothing makes me cry faster when I buy a book second hand and see a note written in the front, usually curly cursive writing of a friend gifting a book to another.
This is a microscopic gesture compared to the moment where the audience reaches for Hamlet; we all understand, we feel the love in things even when it has nothing to do with us because in reality it has everything to do with us, even when our love is ephemeral or undetectable, even when we scrawl our name in graffiti on a wall, the only sign of our life years later, we matter. We matter so much. To be or not to be… to love or to be loved… that is the question.
My coworker glanced at my painting and didn’t want to say anything about it.
I started this painting months ago because my friend Bailey took this fantastic picture of our other friend Brady strolling through a graveyard. It instantly resonated with me even though I could not say why. I needed to explore it and was excited to see where it took me.
It took me here, I guess.
I’ve talked about this with Brady and Bailey many times– they went on a walk impulsively and took this picture without thinking, just having fun and being creative. They took that trek through the graveyard the same way that a person in Pompeii scrawled their graffiti on the wall; both could never guess that this decision would carry an impact the way it did.
It was winter when I finished my painting. Brady happened to come over a few nights after it was finished. We sat on my patio, shivering in the cold, drunk off wine, cigarettes smoldering in our fingers. Clumsily, I tried verbalizing what Eurydice meant to me and why I chose to name it that (originally I intended to call it “closure.”)
She listened to me while I stumbled over my words, barely able to express the depth of what I felt into words. I’ve been told in the past that I speak too much in metaphor, so I have been making an effort to communicate more directly.
I told her about the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, and she looked at me and said, “Oh Renee.. Have you ever seen Portrait of a Lady on Fire?”
I told her no, although she has recommended it to me before in the past. That night we sat on my couch and watched it together. It is magical when things click like this– my own path of inspiration interweaving with the muses feeding me and keeping me on track. (Another theme from Hamnet: Hawks are symbols that you are on the right track.)
This movie devastated me. The muse begs the artist to look back at her as she must complete her fate of marrying a man she does not love to fulfill her role as a woman at the time. Each shot of the film seemed to be framed through the painter’s gaze. As a painter in the throes of inspiration, you can’t help but see the beauty of the world around you; everything you see could be a painting… and that is clear in this movie. At the end, the painter enters her painting of Orpheus and Eurydice into an art show under her father’s name because she would not have been respected as a female artist without doing so. She looks back and sees a woman who resigned herself to her fate, ensnared by things out of her control. She poses for the painter even when she catches on fire, even then knowing she is fuel, understanding that she is the one to feed the artist; her love is the marginalia, she is the snippets of notes, puzzle pieces, and the painter puts all the pieces together.
Same with Shakespeare and Agnes. She resents him for her perceived lack of grief, love, and understanding towards the nightmare she has gone through, resenting him for not being there for the death of their son. Hamlet was his proof of understanding. He put all the pieces together and told his story the way he knew how.
In Hamlet, Shakespeare plays the ghost of the king; he was the one dead and his son alive. I interpreted it as him wishing he could have swapped places with him, which is fascinating because Hamnet willingly swapped places with his sister so the plague would not kill her; he said that if he lay with her, he could trick death into taking him instead. When Agnes gave birth to them, she didn’t know they would be twins nor knew their gender, and when her daughter, the second of the two, was born, she was dead. Agnes demanded to hold her, and in her arms the baby came to life. I was weeping throughout the entirety of this scene, and barely contained my weeping throughout the rest of the film. This film devastated me.
When I was preparing for my art show, I was snowed into my apartment. Before then, when I could still work, I was confined to my windowless attic office, and when I came home it was already dark. I felt like Orpheus trekking through Hades. I sat alone a lot, chain smoking my cigarettes quietly, feeling sick, terrible, tired, restless, and disparaged. I felt like spring would never come and that I would never achieve my goals, although I knew spring would, like it always does, and that I would be just fine, like I always am.
I stared off into the trees from my porch and saw barren branches twisted into a type of archway. My mind wandered into the darkness; I longed to be free from all my responsibility, from all the pain and discomfort I felt in my life. It was so hard to be at this time, in any capacity. I had so much to do and no energy to do it. I felt barren and dried out and asleep.
Gazing from my back porch to the trees across the street from me, I thought of the poem by Robert Frost, Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening.
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Thick icicles lacquered the branches, giving them the visage of iron bars; I let myself contemplate death.
It would be so easy to go peacefully into that dark night, yet I remember that final line: “but I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep”
It sunk in for me in that moment that when one decides to live, one begins to fear death.
But it also was the key to my perspective on the painting I was working on: The arches of the trees looked like the entrance to Hades; am I almost out of the woods? I hear it is always darkest before things get better.
I want to move on from my despair and trauma yet recognize that it will always be there; I must reflect upon it when the time is right–there is no moving on from something, just growing around it. I don’t think I will ever have it “figured out.”
At my art exhibit, a stranger came who saw my poster and decided to come. He is a film student and asked about Eurydice. I mentioned The Portrait of a Lady on Fire to him as it was the inspiration for the piece, and he brightened up at it. A few days ago, I ran into him while eating a pretzel dog with beer cheese while out at the local pub some Saturday night. We greeted each other, and he admitted that he did not remember my name, and I admitted that I did not remember his. I joked and said that we should each say what we thought each other’s name was on the count of 3. I don’t remember what I guessed his name to be, but he guessed my name to be Calliope.
I found it so funny and incredibly flattering.
Sarah and I often talk about the Greek muses; Calliope is quite a major one.
He and I laughed about it and tried to figure out why he guessed her name, and that is when I remembered that Calliope is said to be Orpheus’s mother; somehow things always find a way to connect.
I find it fascinating that the visuals and themes of the movie Hamnet tied in perfectly with what I have been artistically exploring recently, and I sat dumbfounded as the painted set at the end of the movie was identical to my vision I had for a companion piece to Eurydice, inspired by those beckoning trees I would watch from my porch.
I sit now on my couch with the windows open and the sun streaming in. It is a windy day, and I am wearing a new thermal sweatshirt that I have sweat completely through. I feel so empty after crying so much, wrung out this time, but in a good way. I don’t feel as tired; I feel much more capable. I feel encouraged.
I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, miles to go before I sleep.
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