Ode to the Anonymous Inventor

notes on surrender, artistic freedom, chronic illness, and re-finding my creative compass

Hello Friends— I am currently managing some health issues, which means you may see less newsletters over the next month or so. I am grateful for everyone who stays here, for all my paying subscribers, and for everyone here in this community. The thing about being a writer with a paid newsletter and also having an autoimmune disorder is that we are not machines. I am not a production line. I can’t promise you a newsletter every single week, but I can promise that I will continue doing monthly Spacious Centering sessions, and I will do my very best to show up for you in this space. That is all I can promise right now. I can also promise to send you two essays a month, from my heart. I consider it to be an absolute privilege that you read my work, whether you are paying or not. Thank you for being here.

In her essay “Welcoming Ghosts,” Edwidge Danticat writes about Hector Hyppolite, a Haitian artist discovered by the painter Dewitt Peters, while he was on a visit to Haiti.

Hyppolite, Danticant writes, was told by a night-visiting spirit that he’d one day be a famous artist.

When he was a teenager, Jean-Michel Basquiat announced to his father that he would be “very, very famous one day.” Basquiat’s father was from Haiti, but Jean-Michel was raised in New York City and had never been to the island.

Danticat threads these two artists together, illuminating their cultural and possibly spiritual connections. Basquiat had never been to Haiti, but the island influenced his art and its iconography and historical figures appeared in his paintings. Danticat writes:

“Basquiat did not belong to any fixed collective. He freely borrowed from and floated among many cultural and geographic traditions…He was symbiotic and syncretic in the same way that Hector Hyppolite’s Voudou paintings were, mixing European Catholicism and African religious rites and adapting them to a world made new by an artist’s vision or, in both Hyppolite’s and Basquiat’s case, visions.”

Maitress Erzulie // Hector Hyppolite (Wikimedia Commons)

Untitled (detail; 1982) Jean-Michel Basquiat. Collection Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Photo: Studio Tromp; © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, licensed by Artesar, New York

Hyppolite “saw his art as a gift from the lwas [spirits] and carefully tried to balance its demands and rewards. The canvas, for Hyppolite, was just one more space in which to serve the lwas, and when he served them properly he rewarded them with ideas for paintings.”¹

When I am in my most centered and quiet spaces, which often occurs when my body is failing and I must remember my values in order to move towards what feeds me as an artist, I rest in the understanding that art is sacred and collective. What creates original art exists outside of capitalism, but also, there is nothing truly original. We are all connected, and our origins are mysterious. No one truly knows where inspiration comes from.

In the same essay, Danticat recalls filmmaker Maya Deren’s concept of “an anonymous inventor, a member of the collective run by the gods.”

Since reading this essay a few weeks ago, the phrase anonymous inventor has surfaced and resurfaced in my consciousness. It’s become an obsession, creating a new compass inside me, or rewiring a compass that had, over time, lost its magnetic north.

I have long admired Maya Deren, a Ukrainian experimental filmmaker whose short films have had a profound and lasting impact. One could say that many modern filmmakers would not exist as they do without Deren’s influence. Her short film Meshes of the Afternoon has enthralled me for over a decade. Yet Deren died without having been widely recognized for her genius. She’s remembered as an experimental filmmaker, but her books are theoretically unique and inventive— she studied voudou and wrote a book called Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (and made a film of the same name).

These four artists, including Danticat, worked with one another, though they’ve never met. This is the magic of art. We exist alongside them, and as long as we don’t forget that we are artists, we are never alone. We work in seen and invisible realms. Our art is, I believe, most potent when we allow ourselves to wander the liminal, the borderlands between conscious and unconscious, alive and dead, and known and unknown.

Maya Deren in her short film Meshes of the Afternoon. 1943

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For over two weeks my body has been covered in hives.

I have some sort of infections and I’m on my second round of steroids— a medical effort to calm my immune system.

The hives tingle, itch, and burn.

My skin is the softest it’s ever been; the result of slathering myself in lotion several times a day, hoping for relief. I bathe in oatmeal, turning the water teeth-chatteringly cold. At 2am the itching wakes me, and I dip my fingers into the tub of numbing cream, take two Benadryl and practice the meditation techniques I learned at the Vipassana center. Scanning my body, I immerse myself in sensations. There is no escape, so why not dive in? Itching turns to buzzing turns to throbbing turns to warmth. I encourage myself to remain neutral. What is pain if not sensation?

I had thought my hives would be gone by now, or that I’d know their cause, but the Internet tells me that uticaria can happen out of nowhere and stay for years. So, I am making peace with this. If it subsides? Wonderful. If it doesn’t? I’m prepared for that. Immunosuppressants and steroids are familiar to me. Although I’ve never had hives like this before, it wasn’t surprising when they happened. I knew something was coming. My PhD program, my book revisions, and this newsletter have all worn me down to a shell of myself. I am rearranging my life like a pyramid. My health is at the bottom— the foundation. Then my book revisions. Then this newsletter, which provides much needed income. Then teaching. Then coursework. This is how it has to be. I think about my future, when this book will be published. Years and years of work, birthed into the world. I must be here for that; and as healthy as possible, so I can enjoy the results of my own work.

I had not realized that, over the past couple months, I have been having PTSD flashbacks. These were the hammer that did me in. The flashbacks are sneaky because when we think of flashbacks we imagine a past moment flashing before us, like a scene from a film. Recognizable.

But it’s not like that.

A neutral event in the present moment summons my child-self without my awareness.

I am thirteen. My mother and stepfather have locked me in my bedroom again after a screaming match. The next day at school I disobey a teacher, trying to assert the humanity I am not allowed at home, and it’s the last straw. I am expelled from school in the seventh grade. My thirteen year-old self, my twelve year-old self, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. I could write a list of the ways in which I was dehumanized— of the refusal of my parents, of men and boys, of educational institutions; their refusal of my very right to be my own person, have my own opinions, and assert my right to exist as an individual, and their deep misunderstanding of my past and current situations; but there is no need for a list.

I only need to remember that all of those denied selves live inside me. An event that appears neutral happens. They are summoned into the present moment. I become that thirteen year-old locked in their bedroom, pulling on the immobile doorknob. Banging on the door. Begging to be seen and heard.

I arrive to the present moment filled with rage. Breathless. I react in outsized ways, or I don’t react and am instead sitting there, filled with this rage and not knowing why. Shame arrives.

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Knowing that this has been happening is a gift. I understand myself better. I know that my rage and terror are valid. Not now, for whatever is happening in the present, but then, for what happened in the past.

In this way, everything is always happening again and again. PTSD and CPTSD dissolve the borders between past and present.

I remind myself that the present is a neutral space. If it does not feel neutral, the past is here distorting it, like a hallucination.

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I have slept more in the past two weeks than I have in the past two years, it feels like.

My body is remembering rest. I am remembering myself. I am remembering myself as an artist. I have stopped checking my subscriber count and unsubscribed from the grow your Substack newsletter. I remember: this is not what I am here for. I know who I am.

I slip into the liminal space. I handwrite the beginnings of chapters and tell my editor I need more time. I assert my right to be an artist and I remember the work I am here to do.

I listen to the spirits.

Last night I rewatched Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of a feminist film. Someone said Poor Things is not a feminist film, and that bothered me because what exactly does that mean?

In Fire Walk With Me David Lynch asks us: what is the subconscious and the conscious, and what happens when the psyche can no longer protect us from what is true? Bob is Laura’s father. Laura is an innocent whose father has stolen the most precious part of her away. She sees her innocence. She feels it near her and inside her and yet she knows it is gone. Her father has taken that from her. The conscious and the subconscious merge.

Laura and Donna: two teenagers.

Donna is who Laura would have been without her father’s betrayal. There are two Lauras. There are two of everyone. Two, or millions of fragmented pieces, depending.

the white horse represents…

I remember the anonymous inventor and I surrender to the process of finishing my book, of making it what it needs to be, of listening to the voices and the past and the future and knowing that I am not the only one finishing my book revisions or the only one who has written this book. I am guided. I trust. I allow inspiration to come. I know there are guides, and mysteries, and realms upon realms.

And I must rest when I need to rest.

Thank you so much for reading, and being here. You mean so much to me.

1. Danticat, Edwidge. Create Dangerously. First Vintage Books edition. New York : Vintage Books, 2011. p. 131