{"id":129402,"date":"2018-09-18T09:29:19","date_gmt":"2018-09-18T13:29:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=129402"},"modified":"2018-09-20T13:48:45","modified_gmt":"2018-09-20T17:48:45","slug":"hey-necromancer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/09\/18\/hey-necromancer\/","title":{"rendered":"Hey, Necromancer!"},"content":{"rendered":"

On finding Leonora Carrington in her home in Mexico City and asking her to be a death guide.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Leonora Carrington at her home in Mexico City in 2008. Photo: Susana Gonzalez for the Los Angeles Times<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

What did we have on that day? We must have looked like maniacs. Striped long skirts and bracelets made from silver duct tape, dragging a leather suitcase that looked like the underbelly of a snake. We stood in front of a thick wooden door in the leafy Mexico City neighborhood of Roma, across from an enormous earthquake-collapsed building, overrun with cats and scorpions. I had come with two friends full of purpose\u2014to make art, to find a death guide\u2014and in the almost hallucinatory Mexican sun, we knocked on the door. After a good amount of time, the door swung open, and a moonfaced housekeeper named Yolanda told us in Spanish to come back in two days. Leonora, last of the living surrealists, wasn\u2019t well.<\/p>\n

Four years earlier and six weeks too soon, I\u2019d given birth to a baby. You might say my death drive, as Freud calls it, had made itself known. The baby\u2019s lungs weren\u2019t working properly, so he was hooked up to an incubator, and I was told to go home without him. It was a full moon. There were no beds, they said. I remember lying in our bedroom with my husband, a basket beside us but no baby in it. We would take a taxi to the hospital so that I could breastfeed, only to find that they\u2019d just fed the baby through a tube in his nose. Because they kept bank hours, my husband and I were stuck waiting it out\u00a0near the hospital between feedings. I remember sitting in a generic jazz bar thinking, My baby is in a plastic box in neonatal intensive care, and I am listening to a woman in a pantsuit belting out \u201cMy Way.\u201d I\u2019d kept it in, the whole shock of the rapid premature birth, the worry for the baby, the separation, but this was the final blow. Everything was wrong. Tears streamed down. I couldn\u2019t stop crying.<\/p>\n

And then, a week later, miraculously, he was in the basket. This simple arithmetic lodged in my brain. The cosmic joke: in birth, we appear; in death, we disappear. I became fixated on this, struck in particular by the metaphysical absurdity of death.\u00a0<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\u201cHe still has angels around him,\u201d a woman on a park bench told me, referring to the new baby. I wondered if I was hallucinating. She was wearing a belted wool coat, though we were in a heat wave. Mavis Gallant had wrecked angels for me when she said, \u201cAll angels are stupid,\u201d but I understood what the woman meant. He still had something of nowhere, of elsewhere, about him.<\/p>\n

I began writing what Margaret Laurence called an \u201cold lady\u201d novel. I say \u201cwriting,\u201d but because of the intensity of early motherhood, it was more like a weird, hyperactive enterprise performed in stolen moments. That winter, I trudged through snow to the library, baby strapped to me, and ended up leaving with a slender purple novel by Leonora Carrington called\u00a0The Hearing Trumpet<\/em>. Darkly comic and apocalyptic, it has what we would now call an ecofeminist heroine who refuses to consider death. The book was written in the fifties and, among other things, tackles gender identity, terrestrial reorder, and psychic freedom. Oddly, like Carrington\u2019s novel, my draft had a ninety-two-year-old at its center too. When I looked up Carrington and saw that she was then ninety-two, it seemed too strange a coincidence to ignore.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to write off surrealism, with its puns, pipes, and bowler hats, but its strange, uncanny nature was born of deep traumatic shock post\u2013World War I. After the violence of birth, I felt joltingly alive, the distressing kind of alive that has a bit of death in it. I was in the unsettling place between human and nonhuman, being and nonbeing\u2014that dark, debilitating nothingness that causes our last and final disappearance. This is the place from which I came to Leonora, who referred to herself as a \u201cfemale human animal,\u201d who made paintings that look like medieval pageant plays from another planet and gave them titles like\u00a0Aardvark Groomed by Widows<\/em>\u00a0and Who Art Thou, White Face?<\/em> I thought, through her deep-diving journeys inward, she might help lead me out. Her mind-blowing space-alien mix of the occult with old-world European esoterica and Mayan, Celtic, and Buddhist myth formed her own sharply focused vision. She had called forth the underworld, and I wanted, like Baudelaire, to call to her, Yo, necromancer.<\/p>\n

Armed only with a telephone number copied down from the p\u00e1ginas blancas<\/em>,\u00a0I had flown to Mexico with two friends to hunt her down. We called and called, and eventually, someone answered. It was a hair salon. With only a few more days left to make contact, we started to accept that we might never find her. Drinking tequila on the rooftop, we admitted to the French filmmaker we were staying with that we had no formal interview set up, no address. He seemed a bit horrified. But then, the next morning, he called us. \u201cYou\u2019re not going to believe this,\u201d he said, \u201cbut my ex-girlfriend lives on her street.\u201d So like a kind of lucid dream, in a city of twenty million people, we found her address.<\/p>\n

Two days after Yolanda turned us away, Leonora herself answered the door. She stood ramrod straight, piled with sweaters, her blazing black eyes full of electricity. She was wraith thin and chain-smoking, and she carried a kind of unplaceable old-world aristocratic bearing, hair swept up, dressed for English weather. She let us into her house, where a tree grew through the center, in an inner garden. First we sat in her dark, chilly kitchen. She smoked Marlboros continuously, so we did too. It felt a bit like purgatory. \u201cWhat do you want?\u201d she kept asking, without ironic undertow, refusing to playact any artificiality. I wanted to know about death but thought better of beginning there, so I told her I was writing a novel about a ninety-two-year-old. She laughed, blowing out a stream of smoke. \u201cIt took me twenty years to find a publisher willing to touch a book about an elderly woman being shipped off to a home for senile females.\u201d I pointed out that her book was now a Penguin Classic, to which she countered: \u201cOne that has been out of print since the 1970s.\u201d<\/p>\n

Death guides aren\u2019t born; they make themselves. Leonora Carrington was born into extreme wealth in England in 1917. She was expected to marry into the aristocracy, though it was clear, even from a young age, that she would outwit her destiny. She was deeply miserable at convent school, where she drew incessantly and smuggled in cigarettes, and she was kicked out for things such as writing backward and trying to levitate. She endured her own coming-out ball and then wrote about it. Where someone else might have simply satirized the experience, she shot it out of a cannon. Her short story \u201cThe Debutante\u201d\u00a0tells of a hyena she dresses up and sends in her place wearing the \u201cvery neatly nibbled all around\u201d face of her recently murdered maid as a mask. At the end of the story, the hyena removes the human face and, to the horror of the dinner guests, eats it.<\/p>\n

We are living in monstrous times. Leonora and the women of surrealism\u2014such as Meret Oppenheim, Dora Maar, Toyen, and Maruja Mallo\u2014had to outsmart male authority by engaging on different terms, creating their own female archetypes and their own freedoms. Now we have finally begun to see them as the contemporary feminist heroes they were. With her distinctly female vision of dark futures and wildly feminist weirdness, Carrington couldn\u2019t be more uncomfortably relevant. While we\u2019ve just begun to talk about gender fluidity, she was already onto species fluidity. She advocated and rendered for us an androgynous, radical inclusivity that strikes the distinct tone of now. She saw us all on the same plane\u2014humans, plants, animals, minerals. \u201cDespise nothing, ignore nothing,\u201d she instructed, instructs us still.<\/p>\n

On our second afternoon in her house, we walked up the stairs, past the tree, and into another dimension. Her sunny living room was filled with tapestries, sculptures, photographs by her friend Lee Miller, and drawings by Max Ernst, whom she\u2019d met at a dinner party in London when she was barely twenty. He was forty-six and married to his second wife at the time, but the meeting struck them both with such force that she left everything she knew and ran away with him to Paris, where surrealism was in full cry. \u201cYou became a surrealist,\u201d I ventured. \u201cI was<\/em> a surrealist,\u201d Leonora corrected, saying it was the first time she ever felt, in her entire life, that she belonged.<\/p>\n

With war at their heels, they fled south, and when Ernst was taken to an internment camp, she stopped eating, started drinking, and began to hallucinate. She felt like an animal; she felt like the universe (a combination that both describes her descent into madness and sounds an awful lot like childbirth). On the way to the coast, she ended up in an asylum in Spain. Newly released, Ernst arrived on their doorstep only to find she had vanished. He gathered up their paintings and fled to Lisbon, where by chance they found each other. She had escaped from the asylum and, in order to travel to America, married a Mexican poet friend of Picasso\u2019s. Ernst had become engaged to Peggy Guggenheim. In New York, Ernst\u2014who, according to Guggenheim, was \u201cstill obsessed with the beautiful painter\u201d\u2014tried to win her back. But by this point, Carrington had transformed herself into something else. She had worked out an important truth about being a female artist: to be with a more famous man meant she would never get to be herself. They exchanged portraits of each other and never saw each other again. Decades later, she looks straight into a camera in Pamela Robertson-Pearce\u2019s documentary Gifted Beauty<\/em>\u00a0and says: \u201cThe soul is very important. You have to own your soul, as far as it\u2019s possible to own your soul\u2014or for it to own you. But to give it over to some half-assed male? I wouldn\u2019t recommend it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her small white dog, Yeti, sat by her chair while she smoked the Marlboros we\u2019d brought for her. She told us about the alchemical experiments she\u2019d learned from female healers in the market and concocted in her kitchen with her close friend, the painter Remedios Varo. She\u2019d lived in this house fifty years, with her two sons and second husband, a Hungarian photojournalist\u2014whose ghost she said she occasionally saw smoking at the end of their table. In the top-floor studio, she had painted for almost seventy years, including posters in the seventies for Mexican women\u2019s liberation, pairing the saints and their miraculous actions with a feminist consciousness.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe know nothing about death,\u201d she\u2019d once said. \u201cWe\u2019ve been brainwashed into the idea of death as horrible, disgusting, and shameful\u2014and also the end. But the end of what? What is it the end of?\u201d<\/p>\n

When I finally told her I\u2019d been thinking a lot about death, she cut me off in her droll upper-crust English, saying, \u201cAll the thinking you do, I doubt you\u2019ll figure out much.\u201d<\/p>\n

She spoke of a lot of things\u2014including her friend the surrealist Leonor Fini, who in Paris used to arrive at parties at midnight, cross-dressed or wearing nothing but white boots and a feather cape\u2014but not death. Perhaps at ninety-two, she was too close to it now to philosophize. Or ever the rebel, she rejected the wise mentor role I wanted her to take.<\/p>\n

Leonora refused the reality she was given and dream-lived her own, arrowing into hallucinations, darkness, and death. I was a new mother and a fledgling writer, between states, and something pulled me toward her frequency. But it was like looking for a guide on a trip where you\u2019re not allowed to take anything with you. In her presence, I saw that understanding death is like understanding life\u2014a process that cannot be summed up. Its very definition is the disintegration of meaning.<\/p>\n

I went home and immediately tore up my draft. <\/em>I hadn\u2019t just met the last surrealist or someone of interest to me and my book. It felt more like discovering a lost planet, a once-in-a-millennium heavy hitter of rare, wild talent (even Picasso, after all, was a failed poet, whereas Carrington wrote and painted, literally, with both hands).<\/p>\n

And now, a decade and a novel later, I see what a ridiculous question I had posed. Who can possibly tell you about death? She had no need to talk of it, especially when her painting and writing dragged it squarely into life. By refusing to answer me, she made me more present to myself. The revelation is within, to what you, as female human animal, are capable of. In the end, the book I wrote, The Dictionary of Animal Languages<\/em>,\u00a0is about an old woman. There is a lost child, a lost painting, a troubled affair, but at the heart of it, it is none of those things. It is a book about a woman working. Leonora took everything she knew and everything she couldn\u2019t and shaped it\u2014into layers of egg tempera and hand-ground pigments, words, and political posters\u2014and it became something else, something truthful and unsettlingly alive. Something immortal. She showed us what making art can do. It is the work itself that beats death, nothing else.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00a0Heidi Sopinka is the author of <\/em>The Dictionary of Animal Languages<\/a>, out this week from Scribe.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On finding Leonora Carrington in her home in Mexico City and asking her to be a death guide.     What did we have on that day? We must have looked like maniacs. Striped long skirts and bracelets made from silver duct tape, dragging a leather suitcase that looked like the underbelly of a snake. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1597,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[35,19976,2186,31519,37520,37522,11140,35006,11612,37525,37528,11613,37527,3286,2229,19992,19614,27382,7318,27279,37523,37521,37526,37524],"class_list":["post-129402","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-art","tag-childbirth","tag-death","tag-dora-maar","tag-french-surrealist","tag-heidi-sopinka","tag-lee-miller","tag-leonor-fini","tag-leonora-carrington","tag-lisbon","tag-maruja-mallo","tag-max-ernst","tag-meret-oppenheim","tag-mexico","tag-mexico-city","tag-old-women","tag-peggy-guggenheim","tag-remedios-varo","tag-surrealism","tag-surrealist","tag-the-dictionary-of-animal-languages","tag-the-hearing-trumpet","tag-toyen","tag-visual-art"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nHey, Necromancer!<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"On finding Leonora Carrington in her home in Mexico City and asking her to be a death guide.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/09\/18\/hey-necromancer\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Hey, Necromancer! by Heidi Sopinka\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"September 18, 2018 \u2013 On finding Leonora Carrington in her home in Mexico City and asking her to be a death guide.     What did we have on that day? 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