Missing Witches - MW+： Leonora Carrington - I Warn You, I Refuse To Be An Object

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00:00:44.040 And one last thing before we start. The stories we tell require a general content warning.

00:00:49.640 It's just a fact of this terrain, of interrogating what is missing.

00:00:54.700 We promise to hold those moments with care. 1.00

00:00:58.640 You aren't being a proper woman, therefore you must be a witch. 1.00

00:01:01.780 Be a witch! Be a witch! Be a witch! Be a witch! You must be a witch. 1.00

00:01:09.640 Leonora Carrington discovered the power of going all the way through.

00:01:14.300 She climbed into the cauldron of her darkest experiences by writing, painting, making dolls and puppets, and imagery for her own tarot deck.

00:01:23.480 She had to rediscover this woman that had been silenced, and she was always looking for what is this woman like?

00:01:36.920 And she would search this woman through her painting, through her novels, through her interest in witches, through her interest in mythology.

00:01:51.620 She met herself in that work and took herself and anyone ready to witness on the journey of all the way through.

00:01:58.760 the journey in the mind, in the perception of reality, the ride of kaleidoscopic changes in

00:02:04.920 the self and the self's perception of the mysteries constantly around us.

00:02:11.080 That's what I feel from Leonora Carrington's art, that she takes me to the cavern, to the cauldron,

00:02:16.600 to the kitchen table. I feel like gravity suspends and time bends and parts of herself and myself,

00:02:23.820 Bee goddesses and priestesses and laughing hyenas smile in the flickering light.

00:02:30.880 In her novel, The Hearing Trumpet, written when Leonora was almost 60, she tells this story.

00:02:37.720 Beside the flames sat a woman stirring a great iron cauldron.

00:02:43.320 She seemed familiar to me, although I could not see her face.

00:02:47.500 As I drew near the fire, the woman stopped stirring the pot and rose to greet me.

00:02:53.000 When we faced each other, I felt my heart give a convulsive leap and stop.

00:02:59.700 The woman who stood before me was myself.

00:03:04.140 True, she was less bent than I, and so her form seemed somewhat taller.

00:03:10.500 She may have been a hundred years older or younger. She had no age.

00:03:15.880 You took a long time to get here. I was afraid you might never come, she said.

00:03:21.440 I could only mumble and nod, feeling my age upon me like a load of stones.

00:03:28.280 What is this place? I finally asked.

00:03:31.540 This is hell, she said with a smile.

00:03:34.060 But hell is merely a form of terminology.

00:03:37.440 Really, this is the womb of the world whence all things come.

00:03:42.060 She stopped and looked at me and said finally, as if to herself,

00:03:46.220 old as Moses ugly as Seth tough as a boot no more sense than a skittle however meat is scarce so

00:03:56.540 jump in she jumps into the hot cauldron and when our narrator comes out the other side

00:04:04.340 she feels refreshed after the hot broth and somehow deeply relieved

00:04:08.900 leonora invites us down to the womb of the world through death to the relief of our real selves 0.85

00:04:18.440 her art was a practice of getting into the cauldron of her experiences

00:04:24.140 living fully in the strange palpitating world of visions that was the truth for her and is the

00:04:30.080 truth for all of us she said i always had access to other worlds like we all do we all sleep we

00:04:38.020 all dream that kind of feeling that you had in childhood that things are very mysterious

00:04:43.860 do you think anybody escapes their childhood i don't in leonora's art practice she endlessly

00:04:50.740 meets what is possible beyond conformity she bends linear time to see vast cosmologies she wrote the

00:05:00.340 duty of the right eye is to plunge into the telescope whereas the left eye interrogates

00:05:06.100 the microscope. In the preface to the Invisible Painting, Gabrielle Weiss's memoir about his

00:05:11.780 mother Leonora, Jonathan P. Ebern writes, Carrington's art encourages us to live

00:05:17.660 simultaneously in two dimensions. To live not just our ordinary existence, but also in a visual

00:05:24.520 marsh that pulls us in as we engage in creative imaging. This marsh, like all marshes, is a place

00:05:31.240 of decomposition and new life, a liminal site between worlds. At once estuary and breeding

00:05:37.700 ground, it marks the meeting point of land and sea, of death, rot, fecundity, and rebirth.

00:05:45.600 Let us not forget that Mexico City is built on the ancient Lake Texcoco, a fundamentally

00:05:50.680 unstable ground. Trembling with earthquakes, it is bound up in historical as well as geological

00:05:56.820 cycles of death and new life. This is the terrain of Leonora Carrington's imagination.

00:06:05.280 In our full interview with Leonora's son and grandson, Gabriel Weiss Carrington and Daniel

00:06:11.100 Weiss Argomedo, which we'll share on Thursday, we'll get their personal perspective on this

00:06:16.540 person they loved so much and are trying with all their might to both share and to protect.

00:06:23.100 First of all, she was not a witch. Now, this is something that a lot of people want to create, and it was part of what Daniel was saying, a kind of glorifying an image.

00:06:36.500 She was interested in witchcraft. She was interested in witches. But because of this interest, something opens in one, of course. Now, this opening is very mysterious.

00:06:55.160 It has to do with understanding the kind of dark side of the psyche, if you want, but only as Sixou would have spoken about it.

00:07:08.340 Hélène Sixoux was a very interesting feminist writer, no? And she did speak about the witch,

00:07:16.860 but it's a very particular witch. It's a witch that is there to be found, and that discovers

00:07:26.860 something within one. And that is the kind of witchcraft my mother was doing continuously. 0.71

00:07:36.300 Leonora Carrington painted a magical surrealism.

00:07:42.860 She drew in mythic image languages from Celtic traditions, Buddhism, the Kabbalah, Mexican Mayan and indigenous lore, European goddess cultures, esoterica, and more.

00:07:56.220 She paints and writes and sculpts with a complex reference and a sense of humor and a feminist disruptiveness.

00:08:02.640 but the resulting stories and images project a galaxy of her own visionary selfhood.

00:08:09.660 I warn you, I refuse to be an object, she wrote. And also this. Most of us, I hope,

00:08:19.480 are now aware that a woman should not have to demand rights. The rights were there from the 0.92

00:08:24.840 beginning. They must be taken back again, including the mysteries which were ours and

00:08:30.400 which were violated, stolen, or destroyed, leaving us with the thankless hope of pleasing 0.91

00:08:36.100 a male animal, probably of one's own species.

00:08:42.820 Leonora's life story has to do with taking back mysteries, from industrial patriarchs,

00:08:48.780 from the misogyny of the art world, from torture and assault during mental illness,

00:08:54.160 from the terror and fascism of war.

00:08:57.080 and i'll tell you some of that here but pouring over her writing and art and biographies about

00:09:03.260 her and even during my conversation with her son and grandson it's like the iron in my blood gets

00:09:10.000 pulled toward a different focus not to all the times she had to come crawling out but to a time

00:09:17.500 of friendship and creative life shared between powerful women loving partners children and

00:09:24.500 animals treated with loving respect like the friends and wise allies they are this is the solace

00:09:32.340 venus shining above the trees a community making together leonora carrington remedios varro and

00:09:41.060 their photographer friend caddy horna were very close in the 1950s their children grew up together

00:09:48.500 carrington worked she has said with a baby in one hand and a paintbrush in the other

00:09:52.660 In a hidden corner of Mexico City, Leonora, Remedios, and Cati took Surrealism to a new place, a place where it was woman-centered and instinctive.

00:10:03.660 instinctive. Caddy Horna was an anarchist photographer who revolutionized war photography

00:10:12.760 in her early 20s by photographing women, children, and the elderly alongside and within the surrealist 0.68

00:10:19.620 detritus of modern life. Puppets and dolls especially. Haunted broken toys that war and

00:10:26.780 the exhausting hamster wheel of capital make of us all. Remedios Varo studied art in a

00:10:33.580 prestigious school in Madrid as a teen and got married and painted, and then left her whole life

00:10:39.140 to join the Spanish Revolution. She was imprisoned during the onset of World War and escaped to

00:10:44.700 Mexico, traumatized but alive. She lived in poverty in Mexico for many years, but made art that is

00:10:51.800 luminous and utterly magical. She dug into Carl Jung, Blavatsky, Gurdjieff, Eckhart, the Sufis.

00:11:00.640 She was passionate about the legend of the Holy Grail,

00:11:03.260 sacred geometry, witchcraft, alchemy, and I Ching.

00:11:07.720 Varro described her beliefs about her own powers of witchcraft 0.90

00:11:10.600 in a letter to the Wiccan conjurer, Gerald Gardner.

00:11:16.060 She wrote,

00:11:16.520 Personally, I don't believe I'm endowed with any special powers,

00:11:20.280 but instead with an ability to see relationships of cause and effect quickly,

00:11:24.740 and this beyond the ordinary limits of common logic.

00:11:30.000 Add this to the cauldron of the word witch, as we like to play with it, an ability to see cause and effect quickly and beyond the ordinary limits of common logic.

00:11:42.360 A doorway that opens something within us.

00:11:48.640 Remedios deserves an entire episode, so I won't tell you everything I feel about her paintings here, because they give me huge feelings.

00:11:55.400 these sympathetic glowing women looking deep into the souls of cats

00:12:00.060 reading out time from the tops of towers that bend the dimensions of the world 0.99

00:12:04.520 painted with such mastery they appear lit from within

00:12:08.120 these paintings are in conversation with the dimensions inherent in leonora's paintings

00:12:15.920 and they're related in the way i picture these women in conversation exploring laughing and

00:12:23.700 then finding their own ways to look up close and far away, to look past common logic, to take back

00:12:30.880 their own mysteries. I want to just imagine these women together, in Leonora's kitchen in Mexico

00:12:41.300 City, the things they talked about, the ways they laughed and played. Janet Kaplan wrote,

00:12:47.840 Using cooking as a metaphor for hermetic pursuits, they established an association between women's traditional roles and magical acts of transformation.

00:12:59.080 Leonora made a home for herself and painted hundreds of images that flicker with a magical life and laughter and acts of transformation.

00:13:09.540 Susan Aberth writes about visiting Leonora in Mexico City, and she describes some of her most straight-up mystical paintings.

00:13:15.800 In the house opposite, a hybrid animal-human-female figure sits alone, at an altar, table, set in the central stage-like space.

00:13:27.040 With the calm of a priestess, she ingests a ritual meal, an act that provokes transformations in the surrounding pictorial spaces.

00:13:36.900 We are now in the domain of the feminine sacred, where food production and consumption is a magical act.

00:13:43.720 Sidhi, the white people of the Tuatha de Danann of 1954, portrays the spectral sorceresses

00:13:51.160 of the ancient Irish fairy race gathered about a table in a communal meal. The chair, Dagda

00:13:58.460 Tuatha de Danann, and Ab Eo Quad have as their focus a table upon which a large white egg

00:14:04.900 and a rose commingle in an alchemical exchange of milky fluids. In all of these paintings,

00:14:12.340 the table acts as a doorway between the terrestrial and spiritual worlds,

00:14:17.060 and the kitchen is now both the artist's studio and the alchemist's lab.

00:14:22.980 The full implication of what it means for domestic feminine space to become

00:14:27.780 occult space imbues these works with a radical gravitas.

00:14:35.540 What does it mean for domestic space to become occult space?

00:14:39.940 What does it mean to see domestic unpaid labor as radical, world-changing labor?

00:14:45.860 What does it mean to see the places where we actually live our lives as touching the universe?

00:14:51.780 The present moment as a cauldron we can crawl inside of to let our old world,

00:14:56.340 old selves die and syncretize them into the future.

00:15:01.540 Susan continues,

00:15:03.380 Carrington was influenced by Mexico's particular brand of Catholicism

00:15:07.700 where the surviving folk beliefs of the indigenous population merged seamlessly with the canonical

00:15:13.380 Catholicism of the Spanish conquerors. This combination of paganism and Christianity

00:15:19.300 appealed to her, as her own Celtic-Irish ancestors employed much the same strategy

00:15:25.140 during their forced conversion to Catholicism. It is in this subtler way that Mexico influenced

00:15:31.620 her vision, as she always eschewed more overt borrowings that smacked of exoticism and appropriation.

00:15:39.540 The daintily draped table typical of bourgeois households has been slyly re-envisioned

00:15:45.620 as a non-hierarchical meeting ground between women, their animal familiars, and the celestial realms.

00:15:54.020 The paintings feel to me like meeting grounds for different kinds of being

00:15:58.260 across time and space and other dimensions some look like deities some like microbes

00:16:05.220 blink from the left eye to the right and you can travel out along the multiverse

00:16:11.060 i was deeply delighted and somehow gratified to learn from leonore's grandson

00:16:15.620 that she had been swimming in string theory before she died like us she loved the science

00:16:21.380 and magic of the greatest questions in the universe she liked witchcraft for what it opened up

00:16:28.260 She was drawn to the witch, as in Alain Sixou, who writes, 0.51

00:16:32.320 Now women return from afar, from always, from without,

00:16:36.940 from the heath where witches are kept alive, 0.92

00:16:40.140 from below, from beyond culture,

00:16:43.180 from their childhood which men have been trying desperately to make them forget,

00:16:47.040 condemning it to eternal rest.

00:16:49.260 The little girls and their ill-mannered bodies,

00:16:51.740 immured, well-preserved, intact unto themselves in the mirror,

00:16:55.520 frigidified but are they ever seething underneath what an effort it takes there's no end to it for

00:17:03.000 the sex cops to bar their threatening return such a display of forces on both sides that

00:17:08.940 the struggle has for centuries been immobilized in the trembling equilibrium of a deadlock

00:17:13.840 here they are returning arriving over and again because the unconscious is impregnable

00:17:22.860 here we are returning over and again seething underneath returning from the places where

00:17:31.280 witches are kept alive carrington's novel the hearing trumpet in particular sings of the kind

00:17:39.240 of laughing witchcraft i recognize as kin with its old lady the bearded and dapper narrator marion

00:17:46.300 arriving to her wild childhood self freed through the cauldron finding coven community with

00:17:52.620 elder women who together survive cruel children and pompous new age men and murderous women too 1.00

00:17:58.540 who want to protect the narrow dominance they've eked out by sustaining the status quo.

00:18:04.240 Marion's put away in a surreal landscape that mostly seems surreal in the way that real life is 1.00

00:18:09.720 with stupid concrete buildings done up like a birthday cake a lighthouse like mushrooms for 0.99

00:18:15.280 adult women to live in their paint crumbling into weird colors and she goes through the cauldron 1.00

00:18:21.660 and finds herself as the world ends,

00:18:24.580 as the very poles shift and winter comes to Spain.

00:18:29.900 And the bee goddess is returned her holy chalice

00:18:33.040 by seven old ladies and a wolf-headed woman and a poet.

00:18:37.220 And things begin anew with a gentleness to animals,

00:18:42.140 new kinds of hearing, and a fire that never goes out.

00:18:48.720 The hearing trumpet does not embed itself

00:18:50.960 and being anti-what-came-before or anti-anything.

00:18:54.620 Marion's narrative progresses by being joyfully generative,

00:18:58.660 by asking if the stories one had been fed

00:19:01.160 might need to be bent into a shape that's not yet been imagined.

00:19:08.360 Leonora is neither interested in being anti-anything nor in fitting in.

00:19:12.600 She is creative, generative, always meeting herself in illusions,

00:19:17.600 in dark corners, in stories, in friendship.

00:19:20.960 in the lands beyond, where the witch lives.

00:19:24.580 In the Invisible Painting, Gabrielle, her son, writes,

00:19:27.680 I recall that Leonora had two visions of herself.

00:19:31.140 The first as a bag lady, laden with large packages and random objects,

00:19:36.360 keeping up a nonsensical monologue as she walked the streets of New York. 1.00

00:19:40.700 The second as part of a gypsy caravan, 0.97

00:19:43.300 on a beautifully decorated wagon, drawn by four strong horses.

00:19:47.220 Leonora saw every journey as a way of seeking out that caravan.

00:19:53.220 She'd imagine the scene aloud, dreamily voicing the subtle chiming of the bells on the horses,

00:19:59.140 moving along a dusty road. Blink and you miss it, our shift between these two visions of ourselves,

00:20:08.180 bag lady and glorious caravan.

00:20:11.860 when leonora first encountered max ernst art it struck her heart and decades later she would

00:20:19.680 remember how it felt like a burning inside she wrote you know how when something really touches

00:20:24.700 you it feels like burning that burning was a flicker of her future life of the surrealist

00:20:30.220 art making and storytelling that lay ahead for leonora and i think following that feeling helped

00:20:35.920 her survive great loss and great darkness. I think for all of us, finding art that makes us burn can

00:20:42.780 fuel our resistance, our resilience, and our delight. Leonora was aware of Ernst through his collage

00:20:51.580 Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale. Leonora would say, ah, I thought this is familiar.

00:20:58.160 I know what this is about, a kind of world which would move between worlds. The world of our

00:21:04.020 dreaming and imagination. Leonore refused to talk much about her relationship with Max Ernst,

00:21:10.040 but she was 19 and he was 46 and already married when they met and moved in together.

00:21:15.660 And although they lived a kind of paradise for a while, making art and jokes together,

00:21:21.920 he and André Breton and other patriarchs of European surrealism conceived of young girls

00:21:26.660 as these marvelously magnetic conductors. Belief in the penetrating faculty of youth

00:21:33.260 in the young woman-child's closeness to mystery and sexuality

00:21:36.740 formed the crux of the surrealist doctrine.

00:21:40.620 And when Leonora wasn't writing stories and making art,

00:21:43.900 it seemed she was expected to make house

00:21:45.820 with a steady stream of guests who came to visit her and Ernst.

00:21:49.620 And I want to join with others who have questioned

00:21:51.860 this imbalance of power between them,

00:21:54.160 but I also know Leonora wasn't interested in being a victim

00:21:57.360 or a subject at all.

00:21:59.060 She was from the earliest of days a creator,

00:22:01.740 a maker of her world.

00:22:03.260 A full participant, awake, powerful, alive, making her own choice to leave the new money

00:22:10.040 Victorian hustle of her father's dreams behind. Making art everywhere that sang of life and its

00:22:16.380 unbridled mystery. Even in the utter trauma of fascist, genocidal war, she vibrated with the

00:22:24.300 urgency of life and her own perceiving. And I know, she said, Max was the great love of her life

00:22:30.380 and that she was destroyed when he was taken by the Gestapo.

00:22:35.780 And when he was gone with the disease of cruelty

00:22:38.580 mounting all around her in the small town she found herself alone in

00:22:42.440 at the edge of the war, she got sick.

00:22:46.700 And at her father's direction, she was imprisoned in a mental institution

00:22:50.940 where she was assaulted and tortured with medications

00:22:54.480 that induced violent mind-and-body-destroying seizures.

00:22:57.840 Leonora published her memoir of her psychotic break and of her doctor's sadism down under in

00:23:05.780 1944. It was André Breton who urged her to tell those stories, to get them out, and she told them

00:23:14.280 as a kind of self-guided therapy to work her way through what had violated her and what she wanted

00:23:19.040 to keep of her descent off the edge. Later she would dance with that edge for her own alchemy

00:23:25.360 and art. She describes learning a shifting angle of view and doubled vision, and a felt sympathy

00:23:32.580 with all matter, without hierarchy. And she kept those visionary abilities, making pictures that

00:23:39.740 communicated what she saw in ways that exceed the written word.

00:23:55.360 she had to endure no other people calling her mad and and she had to suffer you know

00:24:08.680 she was inflicted upon they they gave her a drug called cardiazol that was extremely dangerous and

00:24:18.600 electroshocks and so on and so forth so no it's not amusing no it was not the kind of strange

00:24:28.760 magical moment that Breton speaking about in Nadia no art was much more than quote-unquote

00:24:38.160 a creative activity no it was a restorative activity and a renewal so she she also felt that

00:24:51.520 when she was painting no and there's also a historical component behind this word madness

00:24:59.900 Right. And even how it sort of was used to criminalize those that lived differently than us, those that had different sexual orientations.

00:25:10.900 I mean, this was weaponized and to a certain degree still is, unfortunately, in many places.

00:25:17.900 Right. So I think one also needs to understand the structures of power behind these categorizations.

00:25:29.900 um hello my name is molly mcgregor and i am the art coordinator for mad pride in toronto

00:25:46.620 ontario so i am a mad person i am bipolar i was diagnosed in 2015 when i was a student

00:25:56.060 living in Montreal. And part of being mad in 2015 is a huge amount of shame for being

00:26:08.780 neurodivergent, having difference of reality. I started a social work degree to work with people

00:26:16.560 of neurodiversity and tell my story of recovery. When I went sick, I had a spiritual awakening

00:26:24.500 and I met God for the first time right in a very what felt like a very real way and I learned that

00:26:31.240 part of living with psychotic deletions and part of living with neuro changes is absolute magic

00:26:39.420 and then coming out of living in KMH I was there for three months against my will then not against

00:26:45.400 my will I ended up taking a course at X University where I was studying social work in mad studies

00:26:51.380 I started under the professor Gemma Reed who was an amazing activist in the mad community in Toronto

00:26:57.240 and here I met other mad people and we began to kind of synthesize the experience and began to

00:27:03.900 have real conversations about it and I got like a very academic understanding of how madness is

00:27:10.620 not something to be ashamed of a madness something to be understood and celebrated and critiqued and

00:27:16.660 talked about and found in community in combination with this work I began to practice magic I met

00:27:27.080 people coming out of psychiatric institutions from across Toronto and we ended up forming a

00:27:32.940 group where we openly talked about our delusions and began to slowly piece them together and make

00:27:38.400 sense of them in terms of poetry because for me the best way to talk about a psychotic delusion

00:27:43.540 is to compare it to art and creativity last year i met some really cool activists across the world

00:27:50.780 and found out the mad community is global and there's a resurgence and i don't know low-key

00:27:57.020 rebellion against the neurotypical all over the place and i fell in love with this work

00:28:02.320 and then in april i got a little message from the one named natalie forcep who is this

00:28:09.480 a 19 year old

00:28:11.440 from Centennial

00:28:12.500 addiction and mental health studies

00:28:15.540 and she was like

00:28:17.240 hey, our team is posting on these forums

00:28:19.240 do you want to start Mad Pride

00:28:21.560 with me? Mad Pride hadn't

00:28:23.560 been initiated in Toronto

00:28:25.360 since 2017

00:28:26.260 and so Natalie pulled together me

00:28:29.300 this guy you and this guy Miles

00:28:31.200 we all have neurodiversity changes, addiction issues

00:28:33.780 we're all

00:28:34.320 positive people

00:28:36.320 and we

00:28:38.060 we dove into organizing full time we found ourselves sitting in front of cam h and just

00:28:45.160 sitting and just breathing and watching and imagining how this space could be transformed

00:28:50.340 art made by mad people because i think i think that art made by mad people is like

00:28:57.340 like the most beautiful like it's like really pure and focused and emotional magical creations

00:29:05.940 mad pride and the kind of art making that molly believes in makes it into the story

00:29:22.840 because madness was in leonora's life and in her storytelling and in her art 0.75

00:29:28.580 it wasn't romantic or fucking fun but she kept what she wanted of the magic of her other vision

00:29:37.820 and she refused to let it be destroyed mad pride claims a place in the global work of liberation 0.81

00:29:44.820 for those who have experienced mental illness those who have experienced psychiatric incarceration

00:29:52.080 those who have survived incarceration in spaces that remain largely unseen in all our cities

00:30:00.120 mad pride says you are not broken your visions have a place you are allowed to be sick

00:30:07.440 you deserve community on your way through the cauldron we're all so tired now these plague 0.96

00:30:16.860 years lunatics with their itchy fingers on the nuclear buttons women tortured for showing their

00:30:22.820 hair the cost of food doubling and we watch people lining up for hours to kiss a dead queen and the 0.72

00:30:29.120 world is madness and we're sick of keeping a straight face about it all we are very tired

00:30:35.520 and very angry and very sad

00:30:38.700 i think that we're a place where we cannot imagine a society where someone living with

00:30:49.360 glycotic delusion could just be allowed to live with glycotic delusions and that we would have

00:30:55.520 a society where we would allow people to just be sick and we would have the capacity as a community 0.58

00:31:03.500 to let them get their sickness out of them because usually people just have to you know

00:31:08.020 get their get the delusion of their system and be crazy and do their thing before they can come to

00:31:13.160 understanding on their own that they need help or they're in a position where like they've they've

00:31:18.940 harmed themselves and their friends and family lovingly take them to the hospital or the community

00:31:23.980 lovingly takes them there and they're and they're there because they want to be well not because

00:31:29.640 they are forced to take medication and i feel like in time we're going to get to a place where

00:31:36.440 these systems of health care are actually run by psychiatric survivors the best work in psychiatric

00:31:43.780 care right now i've seen is done by peer support because so much of it is getting through stigma

00:31:48.960 and finding empowerment to make choices that are healthy for yourself because you get into

00:31:53.600 rut three and just like you're you're not home you're medicated you're sleeping 18 hours a day

00:31:57.460 and you forget that you can go outside you forget that you're beautiful you forget how to cook you

00:32:03.060 forget how to take care of yourself and you just need someone who's on your side who's been through

00:32:07.320 before who's just holding your back and saying you can do it you can take care of yourself

00:32:11.240 you can push through this you've got this you've got this you've got this

00:32:14.680 you've got this you've got this you've got this you've got this

00:32:23.720 molly and mad pride make it into the story about leonora

00:32:29.340 because these pieces somehow hovered together for me,

00:32:35.020 even though they're not people who ever would have interacted in any way.

00:32:39.380 It was Molly alone and so vulnerable that I saw in my mind's eye

00:32:43.380 when I read Leonora's description of her experiences in the asylum in Down Under.

00:32:49.940 And I hear Molly's voice, the people who supported her,

00:32:54.000 and all the people she supports now in her community social work.

00:32:57.360 I hear them around the edges of some of Leonora's paintings

00:33:01.420 and in the stories of Leonora and her surrealist friends.

00:33:05.920 There is a mad, magic, post-war kinship here

00:33:09.360 between these Toronto teens

00:33:12.200 and the cackling, traumatized artists in Mexico City.

00:33:17.580 Molly makes these massive puppets these days

00:33:19.900 that in their uncanniness and careful craft

00:33:22.560 learned at summers at Bread and Puppet

00:33:25.040 Remind me of Leonora's puppets and Caddy's photographs.

00:33:29.180 Molly brings her giant puppets to climate protests and they loom like spirits above the crowd, whispering,

00:33:35.700 You are beautiful. You can do this.

00:33:39.900 Art like madness can wash through us.

00:33:43.340 Walk through our cells. Spill past defensives.

00:33:46.940 how art and madness act on us and change what we understand as possible exceeds what historians

00:33:55.500 can archive what politicians can legislate and that is a clue to their time-traveling power

00:34:02.260 both art and sometimes madness can open doors to possible futures can when held in interstitial

00:34:11.760 communities of care, re-route around the domineering real world to conjure resistance

00:34:18.540 and re-enchantment. Leonora found her way out, out of Europe, out of incarceration,

00:34:25.780 out of the total grip of sorrow and illness, toward a life that, at least within the cauldron

00:34:31.120 of family and friends, cherished her, her vision and craft and selfhood for who she was.

00:34:38.400 Leonora landed in the community of artists who soaked themselves in the light, stories, and other medicines of Mexico City, 0.98

00:34:45.300 slowly sweating through the poisons of their war traumas to invent a totally new feminist refugee surrealism.

00:34:55.640 I see my own grandmother sometimes in Leonora's story, the way her trauma experience of war blasted her off her feet and fractured her perception. 0.85

00:35:03.800 I feel all our ancestors gather close as we gently unravel the threads of what madness is.

00:35:11.280 How we can be sick in community with art making as a shared language and lifeline as we manifest liberation.

00:35:21.080 I really feel, in this work, I feel so connected to ancestors.

00:35:26.340 My ancestors are from Salapara, and they were activists during the apartheid.

00:35:32.620 my aunt nancy woke at the black sash collective which is a collective that nelson mandela was

00:35:38.780 involved with and i really feel them in this word i feel them i felt them throughout my whole degree

00:35:43.260 like i'd be writing about anti-abression and like crying on my computer at like 8 p.m on a friday

00:35:48.500 night trying to crank out essays and i feel them behind me i'm like can you join the word

00:35:53.600 continue the word keep me the word i feel like very supported in a strange way by 0.83

00:35:59.620 these women who are seeking liberation.

00:36:03.580 I think with racial work, this is another form of it, 0.99

00:36:06.660 this is another way of doing it.

00:36:08.300 I feel very connected to my ancestors.

00:36:18.920 Leonora's cousin went looking for her wayward kin in Mexico

00:36:22.100 and wrote about her life before she died.

00:36:25.800 Joanna Moorhead wrote,

00:36:26.720 Varro and Carrington in particular found they shared a deep intensity of imagination.

00:36:32.140 They encouraged each other in feats of daring.

00:36:34.960 Varro would write letters to strangers, their names picked at random from the phone book,

00:36:39.300 inviting them to attend dinner parties.

00:36:42.160 A character in The Hearing Trumpet I feel like is a loving take on Varro,

00:36:45.960 also writing letters to strangers,

00:36:47.520 and ends up being this brilliant investor and crime solver and day saver,

00:36:53.580 thanks to their uncommon logic.

00:36:56.380 Anyway, Joanna continues.

00:36:58.700 There were also endless experiments in cookery

00:37:01.220 with surreal recipes served up to unsuspecting friends.

00:37:05.080 But amid the fun, games, and tequila,

00:37:07.340 there was serious work being done. 1.00

00:37:09.640 All three women had to earn their own living. 1.00

00:37:12.200 Painting was done anywhere in the house where there was space. 1.00

00:37:16.520 Frequently with children and animals playing around on the floor.

00:37:20.440 Far from shackling them, domesticity seems to have been liberating.

00:37:25.080 Many of Carrington's and Varro's paintings are set in the interiors of houses,

00:37:29.580 which are transformed into places where extraordinary, inexplicable, exciting things take place.

00:37:36.660 In Carrington's The House Opposite, female figures move through floors,

00:37:41.060 change into trees, and mix a mysterious potion in a cauldron.

00:37:45.960 In Varro's The Creation of Birds, a female figure sits painting birds

00:37:50.180 that seem to come to life on the paper and fly out of the window.

00:37:54.220 Coven, listeners, I hope you carry this from Leonora and from her circle.

00:38:00.160 When you bring a few trusted ones together around a pot, a kitchen table,

00:38:05.300 and let the mask of conformity slip off your glowing, brilliant spirit faces

00:38:10.280 and shine with your weird truths, your quick visions,

00:38:14.860 together you are part of the great resistance that has always hummed down the wires and ley lines of this living world.

00:38:21.180 part of the birds that have always been lifting off the page

00:38:25.040 and singing out from our private, domestic, magic, craft places

00:38:29.520 you can give each other's strangeness a safe space

00:38:33.980 and help channel art that changes the world

00:38:37.660 you are, to paraphrase Donna Haraway

00:38:41.000 widening the spaces of refuge for each other

00:38:44.120 allow yourselves your madness

00:38:48.660 be loving to it

00:38:50.820 and also careful 0.92

00:38:51.920 maybe treat it like those witches

00:38:54.380 coming back from the wild places

00:38:56.320 because I think the places

00:38:58.660 where we bend

00:39:00.620 and what we see then

00:39:02.360 and how we hold each other together

00:39:04.600 have something to teach us

00:39:06.760 about this time

00:39:07.860 and about what comes after

00:39:10.220 we can make portals

00:39:12.580 to new worlds when we make art

00:39:14.380 and when we care for each other

00:39:16.460 in our magic and in our madness

00:39:18.620 everybody would always ask leo what is that she hated that right she would always throw it back

00:39:26.480 to you and ask you what you saw because you see it's much more important for her that you

00:39:31.860 become involved in the creative process yourself and understand the importance and value of that

00:39:38.820 creativity and continue to strengthen it because it's like a muscle right because that is truly

00:39:46.300 what can change things and I still truly believe that that is the most valuable thing we can

00:39:51.340 harness in ourselves is that creativity I love this new format for the podcast where I get to

00:40:08.840 ask you what you think about the person that I wrote about and we just get to talk about it I'm

00:40:14.300 So excited to hear what you think about Leonora Carrington and Molly and Renata and Canny Hornet, like this whole strange kinship community.

00:40:24.700 I'm really excited.

00:40:26.340 Yeah, I made some notes.

00:40:27.840 I have some of Leonora Carrington's paintings in front of me while we talk.

00:40:34.780 And I just kind of want to bathe in that like surrealist space.

00:40:41.000 I was pulling some out today too.

00:40:43.460 the it has different names depending on where you look at it but the priestess

00:40:48.720 the giantess with the white birds coming out of her coat is my favorite that's a good favorite

00:40:55.480 it's so funny to write it and be like i'm aware of the time about this like the the idea of like

00:41:00.520 she wasn't a witch but the idea of which opened doors for her you know that her son said i mean

00:41:07.600 that's the thing too like exactly like that's that we're not looking for what label can I take

00:41:14.180 on we're looking for like what doors can I open and like maybe investigating this word or this

00:41:20.740 play space is and and speaking of which like there there were this whole thrust in in your

00:41:28.840 telling of the story was like art and creativity as a place where we can meet ourselves I love this

00:41:37.220 idea and i think that it it ties into surrealism because it is like like you i think you said like

00:41:45.200 a a safe place for strangeness you know when we're in these creative spaces it's a safe place for

00:41:53.360 strangeness and i think that like that how we can meet ourselves in surrealism is just like an

00:42:00.480 interesting you know thought experiment to consider well and that's why I felt like it

00:42:07.900 had to be connected to Mad Pride even though those movements are so far apart Mad Pride starts you

00:42:15.520 know 1970s Parkdale Toronto all around the world kind of flickering in and out as different people

00:42:22.700 take up this cause but this idea and you know I call Molly to be like tell me about this I know

00:42:30.280 that you were a part of this this year i saw pictures of puppets like just tell me what this

00:42:34.260 is and she immediately starts telling me and listeners if you are members of the patreon

00:42:40.740 will have the whole audio of that interview with molly up um but she immediately starts telling me

00:42:46.640 about how madness and art by the mad is totally magical she had to she had to get sick twice to

00:42:54.580 fully understand what her bipolar was teaching her and that like sitting and being I call her

00:43:01.940 at one point in the interview a madness doula and she gets really emotional it feels like really

00:43:06.340 because she ends up she finishes her degree in social work and she ends up being that person

00:43:11.180 during COVID that people call to sit with their loved one who's breaking apart like flying into

00:43:18.860 pieces to help them get to a place where they choose and I just love her idea like

00:43:24.580 just like, it's okay to be sick. Like the society's fucking sick. Why do we, why do we lock 1.00

00:43:29.440 people away? It's okay to be sick. How can we make safe spaces to be sick and then make art

00:43:34.460 through that and see it as poetry and see it as prophecy? Like, how do we, how do we enshrine it

00:43:41.280 differently? Yeah. I, I, I was going to say frame, but enshrine is a much better, is a much better

00:43:48.160 term um we've talked about this a lot over the years like just trying to change the narrative

00:43:54.400 of how our brains work so that it's not like what's wrong with us but you know what what can

00:43:59.820 we do so many so many things come up in this space like this this is what art is right it's

00:44:09.320 like a different way of looking at things and this idea of a madness doula i think is perfect because

00:44:17.220 those of us who have had or are having experiences where they're struggling with

00:44:25.820 their mental health we often it happens in episodes you know going through the birth

00:44:31.880 canal or going through the death canal we're coming in and out of this space of you know

00:44:37.000 for lack of a better word madness and and having like a a guide a non-judgmental guide for that

00:44:45.380 who's not just pushing you to have a fast birth, but like a healthy one, you know?

00:44:51.180 I was really astonished by so much of that, the insights from that conversation with Molly

00:44:57.320 and from, you know, watching these pieces, Leonora talking about her experience, her 0.98

00:45:03.120 incarceration, the violence of all of that, the total fucking madness of fascism, right? Like 0.97

00:45:09.640 My grandmother experienced it in her own ways. I know your father did. Our families, we are in this direct lineage. Even if we are settler colonizers sitting on stacks of privilege, we're in this direct lineage of global trauma. We're in this immediate direct lineage of global trauma right fucking now.

00:45:32.260 You know, like, of course, we're losing our minds. And what does that even mean? Like, we're not we're not able to just grin and bear it and work another nine to five. Like, what does it what does it truly mean? Like, you read Leonora's Down Under, where she goes back through the experience in her perception is so colorful and hilarious and surreal, truly surreal. 0.97

00:45:57.580 but it's like I don't know it kind of makes sense as a response to what she's living through

00:46:04.520 right I mean if you live in insane times like if you have been alive and the whole time you've

00:46:13.160 been alive you've been hearing I mean throughout history since the beginning of time we've been

00:46:17.880 obsessed with the end of the world let's be clear about that you know but the amount of

00:46:22.600 information that we're getting it's just a constant stream of this like a meme of like

00:46:27.700 they're saying the quiet parts out loud they don't even bother with the curtain anymore

00:46:31.720 and if you're having like a depressive episode because the world that you live in

00:46:37.700 it's like valid you know but it doesn't mean that you get to step out of the grind

00:46:43.500 yeah so what happens to you you get ground down and then we shatter or we we make these

00:46:50.640 communities of care you know we we have faith in these other kinds of communities of care where

00:46:56.700 you can have a safe space to make your art that imagines a different world and that reminds you

00:47:04.300 that you're beautiful and lets you feed yourself i i just love and i wish i could wish there was

00:47:11.400 video i wish i could be there and talking with her son and grandson was such a pleasure but it

00:47:16.680 didn't give me what I wanted because of course it couldn't because they're not in that gang of

00:47:21.720 women you know like I want to know what those women talked about when they were by themselves 1.00

00:47:25.560 these brilliant fucking incredible painters yeah photographers and artists like and you get a 0.79

00:47:34.920 little window of it in the hearing trumpet because two of the characters are very much 0.96

00:47:40.300 them and so you do kind of get like her her showing you their friendship but I just wish

00:47:48.180 I could like hang out in that kitchen I mean she tolerated no bullshit so I would have been

00:47:53.980 terrifying and scathing too but just to hang out but like what what did Leonora and Frida Kahlo 0.98

00:48:01.920 talk about like I would love to know that I don't think Frida Kahlo had any fucking time for them 1.00

00:48:08.560 she called them those european bitches leonora carrington went to her second wedding with 1.00

00:48:14.720 diego rivera and i don't think frida calo and it wasn't cool i still want to hear it yeah it wasn't 0.97

00:48:20.560 cool you know the framing of that that i've heard that kind of makes sense is like they

00:48:28.200 these like you know refugees european refugees end up in mexico city and they kind of live a

00:48:38.820 little bit outside the dynamics that still really existed between gender roles in mexico city

00:48:46.300 so the women these like white and a lot of times coming from privileged women were kind of 1.00

00:48:54.240 bitches like to these Mexican women who were like making art and very much involved in a struggle 1.00

00:49:02.480 for women's liberation and Leonore Carrington was in the women's liberation movement in Mexico 1.00

00:49:07.160 basically from the time she got there she had to leave because it became dangerous to her her 0.99

00:49:11.240 activities in the liberation movement she went back she continued to do it so she was not a bitch 0.99

00:49:15.700 she was a fucking badass but I also don't like don't harbor any bad bones at Frida Kahlo for 0.97

00:49:22.700 be like that's the european vengeance i don't know about this place yeah yeah it's very real 0.97

00:49:33.600 i don't even know if it's true it's just like that's like said that she said that you know

00:49:43.260 yeah yeah like we hear in this interview like a lot of what circulates leonora carrington is a 0.77

00:49:50.140 very beloved painter in Mexico but a lot of what circulates about her is bullshit like including 0.54

00:49:55.300 whole very impressive galleries full of sculptures that are fakes that are absolutely not hers 0.97

00:50:02.180 yeah but when her name got some cachet then there was money to be made and yeah so it goes

00:50:09.340 yeah so it goes so I want to ask you about this piece and this is like maybe a little bit of a

00:50:15.620 tie in to next week's episodes too we're going to talk about octavia butler um so i've been

00:50:22.120 listening to this podcast with toshi reagan and adrian marie brown called octavia's parables

00:50:28.120 where they basically in each episode tell you what happens in a chapter of one of octavia's books

00:50:36.620 which is octavia's books are i think really fun to read and you can go through them and deal with

00:50:43.140 the horrors that are within them because you are held lovingly by a wonderful narrator but there's

00:50:48.200 also some very dark shit so if you just want to hear two incredibly wise people just kind of chat

00:50:53.040 about it and tell you what happens that's a nice way through the book anyway she ends these episodes

00:50:57.700 with a question and i'm listening to this and thinking about mad pride and leonora and she

00:51:06.440 She asks, Adrian asks, I think I know people who have psychic abilities that the world is not ready for and that they don't necessarily know how to use their harness.

00:51:16.260 And I feel like I know some people who are learning to harness, figuring out how to work with powers that are beyond the norm.

00:51:22.800 And she asks listeners to scan your family and your family histories.

00:51:27.220 Do you have family that always seemed to know things or family members that got locked away or became secret or people called them crazy?

00:51:34.800 just think can you see those people through a different lens of possibility

00:51:39.180 so i wanted to pose that question to you in the context of leonora are there people in your own

00:51:48.220 family and i i can talk about people in mind too that we can look at differently now that you look

00:51:57.960 at differently now are there times that you can look at differently and think like maybe madness

00:52:02.160 is something akin to magic or like if they had an art practice magic could have been accessible

00:52:10.120 to them or something my uh my grandmother i mean it was never talked about she apparently

00:52:17.600 had some kind of psychic ability where she just knew things that she couldn't know like

00:52:22.620 one example is like and again you know this was a very long time ago so if you're thinking like

00:52:28.660 oh she got a text or saw it on social media or something like no that this was before all that

00:52:33.500 so my mother came home and she had bought a tea set and my grandmother was napping and apparently

00:52:39.160 if she was very sleepy that's when she would let it sort of slip you know and my mother said to her

00:52:44.740 uh you'll never guess what I bought and my grandmother sort of sleepily like didn't open

00:52:50.720 her eyes and said a tea set that kind of thing but also apparently and again I don't know much

00:52:57.980 about it because nobody ever talked about it and god do i wish that they had talked to me about it

00:53:03.240 she was also institutionalized that she had i don't know i know some things about her physical

00:53:12.240 like she had thyroid problems and i have thyroid problems so i can guess how she felt and also like 0.89

00:53:23.520 This is a long, long, long time feminist issue of women being institutionalized or incarcerated because of their mental health for various and sundry reasons that are mostly or often at least about how they performed their wifely duties and polite femininity in public. 0.96

00:53:50.460 and there are ghastly, ghastly punishments that women endured for not doing that

00:53:57.220 and still continue to to this day, right now, in this very moment that I'm talking.

00:54:02.900 But yeah, my grandmother was psychic, apparently, and institutionalized, definitely.

00:54:09.080 And she was very silent.

00:54:11.600 I know that she had shock treatments, electroshock treatments,

00:54:14.460 which back then were not anything but terrifying to for me to think about but I mean in in answer

00:54:23.240 to the question of like do I see her differently yes because now I imagine when I'm in those

00:54:31.480 places of terrible terrible anxiety which is the place that I imagine she existed a lot

00:54:38.940 I can reach out to her. I never really got to know her because, you know, my grandfather died

00:54:45.920 when I was pretty young. And when he died, she died in all but body. You know, she just checked

00:54:51.240 out. And she lived for years, but completely checked out. Not a conversationalist before that 1.00

00:54:57.240 either. But I don't know if that's because, you know, they lobotomized her with electricity or

00:55:05.200 because she just knew better than to say what she was thinking I don't know and I'm never going to

00:55:11.700 know but I do feel you know I'm never gonna know but I I have felt that I can go to her when I'm

00:55:23.260 in these places and say like I know you felt this way I know you felt this way too and it's sort of

00:55:29.640 like almost like a forgiveness like when we when we're dealing with our differences of mental

00:55:37.140 health and I don't you know it's not a good thing to feel so anxious that you want to vomit and cry

00:55:43.400 and you can't you know go about the things that you need to do it's not a good thing so I'm not

00:55:48.680 trying to sit here and say like yeah we should all you know be seeking out um but it it's definitely

00:55:57.160 a different perspective it definitely has you know some secret pros among the many cons and

00:56:04.580 again just to go back to the question like yes i do see her differently

00:56:11.780 knowing that and sometimes i think that i'm just

00:56:15.720 living a life that she may have dreamt of and and that makes me feel good and that makes me feel

00:56:26.620 like she is the doula for me in those episodes that's such a powerful idea that we are living

00:56:38.740 oh these imperfect lives but they are absolutely lives that women in our families and men in our

00:56:47.900 families would have just dreamt of for us i mean just beyond even i think what they could imagine

00:56:53.540 And we're in these homes that are covered in art.

00:56:57.700 We have a room of our own.

00:57:00.520 You know, we write.

00:57:02.560 We're honest with the people around us about our sickness and also our magic to whatever degree we choose.

00:57:11.140 I mean, just that alone is beyond.

00:57:13.720 There's an ancestor wall behind me with candles lit for this conversation.

00:57:17.100 just beyond what those women really could have chosen to talk about but i i love i've been

00:57:25.380 thinking a lot about your chapter in our new moon book about the coming out next year

00:57:30.900 um just about the idea of the circle the circles everywhere you know that those women

00:57:37.900 you know we can use whatever language it does not bother me if you don't like the

00:57:43.320 word witch or coven like i don't care about that but they had circles you know they they played

00:57:53.240 card games they had knitting circles they cackled with their girlfriends you know they were in my

00:57:59.520 grandmother was in like a secretary's sorority where they swapped vintage teacups like you know

00:58:05.840 they they didn't talk about everything there but at least there was there was a place to let down

00:58:13.260 a little bit yeah a movie that i return to again and again um is called how to make an american 1.00

00:58:21.800 quilt yeah did you ever see that movie sort of thing it's like multiple generations of women

00:58:28.600 who get together to make quilts for special occasions and it's just wonderful i i love a

00:58:35.440 multi-generational coming of age story it's like winona rider too isn't it oh it's winona rider

00:58:41.660 oh it's Winona Ryder but I mean I don't want to get too far into Winona Ryder's movies because

00:58:46.520 you know we could we could do that because it is it is spooky month after all

00:58:52.060 but I do want to touch on one more thing which is you sort of I can't remember if you allude

00:59:01.800 or if you say this exactly but this this idea of of a life being a cauldron because you know

00:59:11.100 we're sort of fresh off the heels of of the autumn equinox and we were talking to kitchen witches

00:59:16.060 and then I started thinking about like if if a life is like a cauldron it's like a brew like

00:59:23.120 when we think of our our traumas or our joys or or these things that happen to us as these like

00:59:29.180 monoliths but if if I if we if you can think of them more as ingredients than in a cauldron then

00:59:39.440 we have more agency like if you put too much salt in something that you're making you can put in

00:59:46.520 some sugar and magically this like balances out the salt flavor somehow I still you know or put

00:59:54.020 in some potatoes and that's going to upset and you know your salt sugar and potatoes can be like

00:59:59.680 witchcraft and therapy as Jinx Monsoon always says witchcraft and therapy or you know these circles

01:00:05.700 or but I just love this idea of a life as a cauldron with like mixing ingredients and

01:00:11.040 and one of the biggest ingredients is our DNA it's like these soups in like you know

01:00:17.020 ancient Chinese cafes that have been like cooking in the same pot for a thousand years and they just

01:00:24.120 keep adding ingredients and ladling out soup and adding ingredients and ladling out soup

01:00:28.920 so i'm really stuck on that right now this like your life is a cauldron and

01:00:37.400 there's so much room for like absurdity and surrealism and like strangeness in there and

01:00:45.920 it's bubbling you know just the visual of it of pouring ingredients you know three cups of joy

01:00:53.880 you know my it's tasting a little salty i need some sugar today yeah i need a little lemon

01:01:03.420 exactly and we and we've all done that we've all tasted something that we were cooking and said

01:01:09.120 like this needs something and we don't really know what it is and so we kind of have to expect

01:01:14.360 does it need a little more garlic add a little garlic no that oh it's acid and finally you're

01:01:19.860 like oh that was it it needed a little acid and i'm just kind of obsessed with like thinking about

01:01:25.480 my life this way now yeah i love that i'm definitely that witch in our family mark is

01:01:31.620 the chef but i'm the one he comes to where he's like what is that what is missing

01:01:35.540 i'm good at it and not just that he does it to make me feel included

01:01:41.060 no but that's like an intuitive you know and sensual and sensual experience yeah there's

01:01:51.860 this chef i like natasha pikowitz and she was writing about um some people keep like a bread

01:01:58.560 mother or and uh you know a mother for scoby or whatever and she's like i always keep a soup

01:02:04.940 mother too do other people do this and so it's the same idea but you're saying that she keeps

01:02:09.680 every soup a little bit goes into the next soup yes there's this fermenting and changing and

01:02:18.680 lineage aspect of cooking love that um one more quote from leonora i refuse to be an object yeah

01:02:28.840 i think that that's like yeah i refuse to be an object like i feel like every

01:02:36.700 which every person that we have ever profiled or spoken to or been in circle with sort of has

01:02:47.380 this sentiment about them it's like an unfolding idea in my head too right like i refuse to be an

01:02:53.400 object to myself too like at times i want to like concretize how i see myself because i sometimes i

01:03:03.760 just feel like this mass of particles and ideas just like mooshing through time changing and

01:03:12.360 adapting doing my best to hold some kind of gravity and I'm just like pulling in ideas and

01:03:19.000 letting ideas go and it's all very wavy and like sometimes I need to look in a mirror and like I 0.91

01:03:24.840 said in the last one like say my fucking name say my ancestry like become concrete in the present 0.90

01:03:33.060 but also to not get too stuck i think i was stuck for a really long time in some ways like 0.96

01:03:42.040 i get too stuck in this one set of possibilities for myself like i had to do certain things i had

01:03:49.100 to make a living i had to be the provider i had to had to get myself out of debt i had to get

01:03:53.460 myself out of shit relationships i had to like do this one job or whatever like i had to be this one

01:03:58.220 thing and um learning how to not be that not just um object but product not be that that particular 0.91

01:04:11.700 tool like that's taken some undoing and as like some crises of faith that i could be something

01:04:19.820 else that are ongoing. Yeah. One of my friends always used the word calcified to describe how

01:04:28.300 she felt. And even when she changed her circumstance, like you say, like it took her a

01:04:32.860 while to become decalcified. It wasn't like she made the choice and then everything, I mean,

01:04:39.420 everything did change, but the process was slower. And again, I mean, this is something that we can

01:04:46.360 talk about with chronic illness physical mental slow is okay and we know that capitalism tells

01:04:54.700 you that it's not and we know that you're a product and that you are a brand and that you

01:05:00.200 have to monetize every fucking thing that you do to survive in the world but man like slow and surreal 0.97

01:05:10.960 is the tempo 0.99

01:05:13.900 and I still like I you know I have a very supportive spouse which is amazing and

01:05:24.140 and some days I just don't have it some days I just don't have it and I'm like well time to

01:05:31.000 freak out and beat myself up and you know my spouse is the one who will be like you know you 0.96

01:05:37.680 kicked ass four days in a row and you know you have a chronic illness and you have to 0.97

01:05:43.720 and I'm like like you just want to it's but it's like banging your head against the wall you know 0.99

01:05:52.380 so if we can be around people who you know like Risa and I we're we're not always on our a game

01:06:00.880 but we have each other to like fill in the gaps and that's why like we can have what is a business

01:06:07.660 essentially but like that feels way outside of capitalism because we are there for each other

01:06:16.800 and sympathetic not everybody works in those environments where you can be like listen I just

01:06:21.160 don't have it today and your boss is like I love you yeah that's funny I think we'll talk about

01:06:30.760 that more in this class we're doing for the bardo so we're writing this class on writing in community

01:06:37.180 writing in collaboration um because Kate Bellew asked us to and we were like oh yeah that's what

01:06:43.340 we do that's that's something we want to think more about because we do it and it is so deeply

01:06:50.580 satisfying and healing and successful and like flourishing and full of kindness and it's teaching

01:06:57.480 us different ways to be in community with all different kinds of people but a huge aspect of

01:07:03.560 it and this is something you're talking about with Molly too is like cherishing what you have

01:07:11.540 the capacity for and not resenting when that capacity isn't there like just we're not these

01:07:19.840 endless machines we we break apart we we fall into disrepair we need to be fallow fields we're

01:07:28.440 just tired it's the new moon let me know like whatever it is and working in true collaboration

01:07:35.880 and working with you has been such a lesson for me in this is like like when i collapse amy just

01:07:43.760 picks up whatever she can and when she collapses like just pick up whatever i can like there's no

01:07:50.500 that's just what it is cancel whatever we feel like we pick up whatever we can we just do what

01:07:56.680 we could do we love each other that's all I don't know and and and we also love you all our coven

01:08:05.020 mates and our listeners and we love you enough that we're not just gonna keep churning out

01:08:10.000 stuff until we hate it until we don't want to do it anymore and you're listening you're like

01:08:14.620 what happened it sounds like they hate this I mean I don't want to get to that point I don't

01:08:21.340 want to get to the point where it feels like oh you know I have to do another like it's still a

01:08:27.740 joy it's still a joy which is amazing to you and we're so grateful that someone is listening

01:08:33.620 in the cauldron of our lives like let us gather around you know let us gather around those

01:08:41.500 cauldrons of our lives like you know you don't have to be the only one putting in ingredients

01:08:46.080 Lord knows, like, we had to take enough ingredients in our lives before we were, you know, grown enough to make our own choices. 0.99

01:08:53.460 And even then, you know, shit happens.

01:08:56.780 But so, you know, this notion of being around a cauldron together where the contents of the cauldron is like our collective work, our collective joy, you know, our collective dissidents, our collective transgressions. 0.98

01:09:14.080 and that we're just trying to make

01:09:15.360 the best tasting soup that we can

01:09:17.280 because we're all going to share the soup. 1.00

01:09:20.340 And then Sisu, she calls on women, 0.98

01:09:25.220 just write, we need you, 1.00

01:09:27.500 write yourself in the story.

01:09:29.540 It's like Leonora crawling into the cauldron

01:09:33.080 to meet herself on the other side.

01:09:35.900 Whatever your art practice is,

01:09:38.900 I hope you find one, play with one. 0.99

01:09:41.980 And I hope that, like, whenever the racism, brutal fucking racism of this world and misogyny and, you know, this nightmare of seeing women burned and shot for showing their hair, that plays out in different versions over and over again all around the fucking world. 0.97

01:10:05.560 i hope that when you feel the object making force of that 0.98

01:10:13.320 that there is a place you know to wind in the spaces of refuge that there is a space

01:10:23.260 that you can make refuge for yourself to meet yourself and i i think that that's art i think

01:10:29.240 in poetry you can meet yourself in total abandon to a writing practice that has no sense or an art

01:10:37.060 practice or to like a kitchen dance like flail your decalcify your body if you can flail it or

01:10:44.260 whatever that practice is for you if it's ritualized or not if it's witchcraft or not

01:10:50.340 if it's ancestor conversation or not i hope that in those places you feel like you meet

01:10:57.300 meet some of us around the cauldron.

01:11:00.940 Meet yourself, at least, you know. 1.00

01:11:05.980 Bless the fucking bee, I guess. 1.00

01:11:09.500 Bless the fucking bee. 1.00

01:11:10.920 You must be a witch. 1.00

01:11:12.840 The Missing Witches podcast is created by Risa Dickens and Amy Turok

01:11:16.900 with insight and support from the coven at patreon.com slash missingwitches.

01:11:23.600 Amy and Risa are the co-authors of Missing Witches,

01:11:26.400 Reclaiming True Histories of Feminist Magic, which is available now wherever you get your

01:11:31.280 books or audiobooks, and of New Moon Magic, 13 Anti-Capitalist Tools for Resistance and

01:11:38.800 Re-enchantment, coming Fall 2023.

Missing Witches - October 02, 2022

MW+： Leonora Carrington - I Warn You, I Refuse To Be An Object

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