Birds and Birthdays

by Christopher Barzak

  “What do you think?” asked Ophelia.

  I said nothing, went straight to the bathroom, found my hairpins, and left her standing there beside the canvas.

  I wasn’t sure where to go this time, my building being occupied with so many of those I’d left behind. And I couldn’t afford to force more to go. I wandered through the five floors, very quiet, very calm, looking at each door as if what lay beyond might be salvation, but I hadn’t the strength left to fit myself into someone else’s life. I collapsed by a door I’d thought was a broom closet, but as I fell against it, it clicked open, and inside I found an unfurnished room, the hardwood floors unfinished. I started to think, Mine, but I soon discovered the room was already occupied.

  Sitting in the far corner of the room was a small winged creature with shiny black fur, its round golden eyes set like jewels in its face. I thought of the winged monkeys in The Wizard of Oz, but those had frightened me to tears as a child, and this creature looked sweet more than anything. It mewed like a kitten, folded its white-tipped wings, gave a loud yawn, and settled down to sleep.

  “That’s a good idea,” I said, and crawled on my hands and knees into the room, shutting the door behind me. I stretched out on that cold floor and waited for sleep.

  In the morning, the winged creature was still with me. Bleached light came in through a small frosted window high up toward the ceiling. I said, “What’s your name?” but the creature didn’t respond. It only sat in its corner and peeled an orange very delicately, one long ribbon, spiraling. It offered me a wedge and I sucked the juice out like a starved woman.

  I thought about leaving but I wasn’t sure what to do after that. So I decided to explore some of the doors in the room instead. One opened into a bathroom. Another into a kitchen. And the last opened onto a long hall of doors that opened and closed, opened and closed of their own volition. I closed that door quickly. I wondered if Rufus had done that restructuring I’d asked of him but hadn’t told me. I hadn’t asked him to put in an entire floor, but there it was.

  “I have everything I need,” I told the winged creature and it nodded, biting into an apple.

  I didn’t order furniture. I didn’t order clothes. I didn’t do my hair in any particular fashion or wonder what color to paint my nails. I didn’t have any mirrors. I didn’t have a phone. What I had was a series of rooms, a bathroom, and a kitchen filled with food. And the winged creature, of course, but I didn’t really have it. We only lived together in the same rooms.

  I thought about naming the winged creature “Papoon,” although I’m not sure if that word has any meaning. I liked the way it sounded, how the syllables fell over the creature’s wings and fur like a coat of dust or pollen. But the winged creature didn’t respond, and after a while, I realized naming it was stupid. It wasn’t mine to name.

  I did not know, nor do I now know, whether the winged creature was male or female. It sometimes seemed male, skittering about the room, climbing walls like a monkey, scratching its chest ponderously. But it also seemed female sometimes, curling up beside me like a cat, tucking its head beneath the fold of one of its feathery wings. After some time, I decided not to worry about whether it was male or female, and a while after that, I realized it didn’t matter at all. Only that we trusted one another completely, respected each other’s wishes, loved unconditionally. And we did come to love each other in our own ways. I would fix oatmeal for the creature, which it loved more than oranges and apples. It would scratch my back when I itched and give me an affectionate peck on the cheek before I went to sleep. Its lips felt soft and silky, warm. It smelled like bread baking.

  The winged creature and I shared a bond but never once exchanged words in each other’s language. I sometimes wondered if it even had a language. But then I thought language is nothing special. I shared one with my husband and lovers and never once felt understood or understanding. A word is a word is a word, but sometimes a word isn’t anything.

  That creature and I shared a secret. The secret went like this: I had no idea what it was and it had no idea what I was, and neither of us knew what the other wanted, so we had to just be. Somehow we took pleasure in each other’s company.

  A few weeks passed, then a few more, and I started to feel a little dizzy. I needed to do something other than cook, eat, and pass the time with the winged creature, which was wonderful really, but I realized I was waiting for it to do something incredible and that was a fantasy I had to leave behind.

  One day I remembered how I once painted and how I missed it, so I returned with my hairpins to Ophelia’s apartment, picked my way in and took her easel, paints, brushes, and the faceless portrait of me on the window bench. I rummaged through closets, picked out a few items, and took the full-length mirror off the back of the bedroom door. I returned to the rooms where the winged creature spent its days drifting in and out of sleep, pacing the perimeter, and the first thing I did was wipe down Ophelia’s portrait of me with linseed oil. The colors bled into one another and soon her vision of me was gone.

  I set the mirror up against a wall, set the easel up across the room from it. I put on an old costume blouse with puffy sleeves like a Renaissance bodice, and left the front open, my breasts bare. I wrapped my legs up with a dark blue sheet, and draped myself with vines. My feet were bare. Behind me was the door that opened onto the secret hallway with all those doors opening and closing. The doors were completely still sometimes, but mostly they flapped uncontrollably. I started to paint. I started to paint my portrait on the canvas Ophelia had used. The winged creature crouched beside me, watching.

  I’m not sure how long it took. Days, weeks, perhaps two months. But I finally finished the self-portrait, which included the winged creature as well, and what I did next was look at myself in this painting and wonder, What was she? What could she possibly mean? It was only after long staring that I realized she didn’t have to mean anything at all.

  I didn’t stop there, though. There was another thing I’d been avoiding. Quickly I gathered stationery from Joe’s apartment while he was out and sat down to address invitations at my old desk, which was scattered with his bills. I was going to have a party. I was going to have a birthday party. I hadn’t had one since my parents’ passing, and now I found myself somewhere between my early late twenties and late early thirties. I had lost count over the years, but an approximation would do.

  When the date arrived, I waited until people from the building had gathered in my parents’ old apartment, which I had left and not leased out again when I married Joe. To tell the truth, I didn’t expect everyone to show. I knew Joe would come; he was ever faithful, and Jenna was by his side. But everyone else had come as well: August and Artemis, Rufus, Ophelia. Even the model! And all of the old renters I had turned away from years ago. I’d hung my self-portrait on the wall, and they were gathered around it, chatting. Someone said, “What the hell is that thing sitting beside her?”

  Someone else said, “I think it’s a lemur, but I’m not sure about those wings.”

  Someone commented on my breasts and the strange garb. “Why is she wearing vines?” Joe wanted to know.

  I cleared my throat and everyone turned to find me in the doorway. Jenna pointed and said, “Mother,” and though I had a pang of fear, I stayed.

  I wasn’t sure whether I needed to apologize or explain myself, or do both of these things, and if so, which first? Before I could say anything, though, Joe said, “You look wonderful, Emma,” and I blushed like a schoolgirl and thanked him.

  After that, things seemed to lighten, and the party, like all good parties, took on a life of its own. People mingled in the same ways they did when I was a child, making small talk, complimenting one another, commenting on the weather and the state of political affairs. I gave Jenna a set of paints as a gift, and she said, “I thought you were supposed to give gifts to the person whose birthday it is, not get them.”

  “That’s usually how it’s done,” I said, “but I have a lot of
birthdays to make up for.” When she beamed a smile like Joe’s, I nearly broke.

  You are probably thinking I’m a crazy woman. There may be some truth to that, I’m not sure. Someone once said art is the mirror of life, but I have discovered that this isn’t always so. For in this case it is within you, Dear Reader, that my reflection appears. It is within you that I see the contours of my life. In your tears, my tragedy. In your laughter, the folly of my absurd enterprises. Is that serious look you sometimes acquire — the furrowed brows, the pinched lips — a reaction to my character? Whatever you think, you are probably right.

  A thin veil separates us, but the more you read, the closer we come to passing through it, the more of me you’re able to see. At any moment now these words will fade and my eyes will appear, searching your face for the tiniest sign of a verdict. Am I moral enough? Forgivable? Able to be redeemed? At any moment now I will come to where you are, through the crowded rooms and halls of your life, through your doorway, my blouse unbuttoned, my life laid bare for all to see, and then what will you do, Dear Reader, to greet me?

  There is really only one proper answer for a woman who walks out of paintings and stories. But will you say it?

  Happy Birthday, are the words I want to hear so badly.

  Happy Birthday, Happy Birthday, Happy Birthday

  Re-Membering the Body:

  Reconstructing the Female in Surrealism

  1. The Canvas and the Corpse

  Was it the look? The gaze they’d been making for so long already? Pinning down the bodies of women to canvas with the stroke of a brush, like butterflies pinned under glass. The wings torn away, the body opened for viewing.

  As a movement, Surrealism had the intention of disrupting the systems of almost every tradition it encountered: political, scientific, artistic, literary, musical. It was meant to be a constant revolution, tearing down hierarchies and paradigms in the wake of its random (its purposefully random) attention. Despite the declaration of intent to free others from restrictive traditional customs and roles, though, Surrealism seems to have missed the mark in regard to the roles of women, both within the movement itself (where women certainly existed but were rarely acknowledged) as well as within the visual art initially produced, where the bodies of women were often depicted in various states of rupture, splayed open, or aggrandized to the point of making the female body into something mysterious and other.

  The distortions to the female body came in a various forms. In Rene Magritte’s famous painting, “Le Viol” (or “The Rape”), a woman’s facial features have been replaced with the midsection of a nude female body: her eyes, breasts; her mouth, a vagina. In Andre Masson’s lesser known but well respected “Gradiva” a woman’s stomach and pelvis are transformed into raw steak, her vagina depicted as a clam with fang-like protrusions. In the background of the painting, a volcano erupts, while a swarm of bees has been attracted to Gradiva’s rotting body. The German Surrealist sculptor, Hans Bellmer, constructed life-sized dolls of women out of various materials (generally plaster, metal, and wood) that twisted the female form into the most excruciating of positions, much in the manner of sex dolls. It could easily be said that these artists were commenting on the breakdown of classical art (Masson’s Gradiva is in reference to a classical Roman bas-relief of the same name; Bellmer’s life-sized dolls can be seen as a modern breakdown of classical sculpture). But the male form is mostly absent from these commentaries. In a period of such paradigmatic change, just after the opening of the twentieth century, in a movement that so loudly declared its intention to emancipate people from restrictive and traditional cultural or social roles, it is odd that women and the female form seem not to have been freed so much as ravaged in a manner of which the Marquis de Sade might have approved (and of course his shadow lingers as an influence over the men of the Surrealist movement).

  The female body became a primary image or metaphor for the Surrealist intent to destroy calcified categories, hierarchies, and traditions, but in the process, the female body was stretched and ripped and cast to the various corners of a wide, long, plastic earth, where elephants walk on stilts and people have no faces, or have many faces, or have the face of an animal, or (as already described) the face of a naked woman’s midsection. Andre Breton, one of the movement’s leaders (“leader” being a term that implies a hierarchy of its own), is known for describing the spirit of Surrealism with a quote from the Comte de Lautremont (pseudonym for the nineteenth century author, Isidore Ducasse) as, “the chance meeting of a radio with an umbrella on a dissecting table.” But in examining the wide record of Surrealist art, it might also be appropriately defined as, “the deliberate meeting of a woman’s body with a scalpel on a dissecting table.”

  In many ways, the Surrealists appear to have meant well, however much their intentions seem divorced from the representations of Woman they made. Many of the women artists attached to the Surrealist movement protected the men who led this particular revolution, protected their ideas, their intentions. The men claimed to adore women, though even that verb is suspect (to adore is not necessarily to respect or to see as equal), and much of their endeavor has been marred by their inability to see that they were taking apart the image of Woman but not that of Man, which might have been fairer, at least.

  Whatever we may say about them, the Surrealists were also men who had recognized something: a change of consciousness in the western world after World War I. Like many traditional social roles, women’s roles had changed over the course of the Great War, and the Surrealists had taken notice. If the methods they employed to explore their interest in Woman are flawed, it seems flawed because they failed to listen to women and were not prepared to stop talking, creating a male conversation on the subjects of Woman as Language / Woman as Time / Woman as Knowledge / Woman as Political System, ad infinitum. In doing so they perpetuated one of the layers in a hierarchy that they intended to tear down. Employing the image of Woman as a site for the emptying out of all old meanings and categories of meaning, using her to display the the chaos that emerges from such rupture in a culture, is not only unfair to the image in that it begins to feel a bit clichéd through overuse, but also because it forces the singular image of Woman to carry the burden of their message, while the men remain carefully obscured, safe, behind the images they created.

  It seems rather a disappointment, in retrospect especially, that they simply couldn’t stop talking to listen to — to look at — women’s self-representations. Inherent in this is a distrust of women’s ability to articulate their own meaning. As the keepers of a more public language, a benefit of patriarchal society, the Surrealists began to articulate for women, through the female body, on canvas. Because they could not understand Woman from the inside, though, they had to cut Her open. Surgical techniques were applied to the female body, a forced entry: the female body was broken open as they wished to break open all signifiers that bore the seeds of old ways and old meanings. I’m again reminded of Magritte’s painting, “Le Viol” (the woman’s face replaced with breasts and a vagina). It might be that, with a knowing title like “The Rape,” some male Surrealists knew that what they were doing was, in essence, a violation, that they hadn’t been given permission by women, but had gone inside Woman anyway.

  In Mirror Images, the critic Whitney Chadwick says that, “While male Surrealists rooted the disruptive and creative potential of erotic desire in the masculine libido and exalted woman as muse in fetishized images that celebrate her as Other, women artists turned to their own reality. They located the sources of Surrealism’s disruption of rational boundaries within their own subjectivity and gave it concrete form in works that explore the female body as a site of conflicting desires and femininity as a taut web of social expectations, historical assumptions, and ideological constructions” (viii-ix). The self-portrait, then, that age-old tradition, became a form through which female Surrealists reflected their own identities, and provided a counter-narrative to the representation
s men had made of them.

  It’s ironic that this conversation with an anti-tradition movement like Surrealism was only forged through the employment of a traditional form like self-portraiture. Within Surrealism, the self-portrait becomes subversive, particularly when women, whom male artists had traditionally used as subjects upon whom they could project their own narratives, used the self-portrait as a form to reclaim their bodies, their self-definitions, repairing their stories after the brush/scalpel had made deep cuts.

  What were the roles of women within the Surrealist movement? Most often they were the wives or girlfriends or lovers of Surrealist men. Many artists, writers, and poets signed the original Surrealist Manifesto, but none of the names inscribed upon that tract belong to a woman. The role available for women within Surrealism was the femme-enfant, the woman-child, which the critic Whitney Chadwick, in her Women and the Surrealist Movement, states is “…that enchanting creature who through her youth, naïveté, and purity possesses the more direct and pure connection with her own unconscious that allows her to serve as a guide for man” (33).

  In his essay, “Surrealism and Misogyny,” Rudolf E. Kuenzli furthers Chadwick’s description: “Women are to the male Surrealists, as in the longstanding traditions of patriarchy, servants, helpers in the forms of child muse, virgin, femme-enfant, angel, celestial creature who is their salvation, or erotic object, model, doll — or she may be threat of castration in the forms of the ubiquitous praying mantis and other devouring female animals” (19). In limiting the role of women within their own artistic and cultural sphere, then, the men perpetuated an aspect of the very culture they meant to reject. Women remained the handmaid, the “other half” who looked after the male artist as caretaker in the service of his art. Throughout the Surrealist historical record, it can be observed that nearly every female artist associated with this movement went on to make her own visions and mature work only after she walked away from the center of Surrealism as a social network with its own gendered stratification of available roles.