by Jenny Apostol
I thought I was writing a piece about resistance. But I came to see the writing more genuinely concerned with negative space.
What holds the body together? I’ve been learning about the fascia, a three-dimensional web of fluid and fiber that encases every muscle, bone, vessel, and organ inside the body. A system of membranes embedded with nerve cells that signal to one another, connecting each separate part into a whole. Fascia are permeable and flexible so we can move, yet strong enough to keep all our pieces in place. If one were to extract all of this material—our organs, muscles, vessels, and cells—nothing would be left inside of us except the fascia’s whitish structure, which would resemble a complete body like an illustration or a hologram. Or as a body worker explained it, like a negative space of whatever is in your body.
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My mother was a potter who sometimes used a technique called wax resist to etch a design into her ceramics. Wherever wax adhered to the clay it repelled glaze; color could not saturate the entire exterior of the pot. By keeping part of the surface gravelly and raw, porous to air and light, my mother was making a statement about materials; that stoneware is as beautiful naked as when dressed by the strange alchemy of heat and silt, pigment and glass. She was exposing the contours of form within a form, training the eye on a two-dimensional outline of surprising clarity onto a three-dimensional shape. It was like drawing along the edges of a central figure, holding off an expectation that everything be filled. In this way, my mother accommodated the negative spaces, the parts you overlook. Did overlook. Where beauty hides, waiting to be sought. Not come upon randomly. Searched for. Found.
My mother was a seeker of beauty who remained resistant to control—by systems or people or religion. She abhorred allegiance to a spiritual group, found no communion with any circle of believers other than artists and visionaries bent on rebellion and a way out. To escape whatever held her. Where did faith come in? From an original way of being? Devoid of any desire to conform, she had no circle to complete, tail to head, her art could remain open-ended. In perpetuity.
All of my mother’s ceramic pieces were experiments. She kept notes, recorded what she mixed, all her trials made permanent by firing in the kiln. On Saturdays, I stood near her in the dank basement studio as she opened the oven’s brick-lined door. Felt excitement as she removed pieces, now cool to touch, each one a portrait of a recollection, a confirmation, or surprise. She found herself there, reflected in earthenware’s rounded shapes, in brush strokes that meandered from base to rim, allusive of substance.
I was an only child; a legacy of pearl slipped from her shell, my mother’s best artwork. She was good at making three-dimensional things that held other things, like food, or flowers, or other precious objects. Cast an airy scaffolding where I flourished unfettered, to grow into, or away from, my own light. As a teacher, she held spaces for other people’s creative expression. She used to comment that a few of her students looked held, by which she meant partially immobile, holding on or back some physicality of themselves, stiff and unfree, as if lacking sufficient fluid that glides us through youth.
Art was the only thing my mother believed in and she leaned upon its shifting contours. And then, suddenly vulnerable to life’s inevitable push-backs after all, she gave up resistance to her body’s systems. Felt the grief for what had slipped from her grasp, let go.
I had only one dream after her death where my mother came back to me clearly. I was running down a winding path inside a park, looking for a place for her to hide. I came upon a pine tree with a wide girdle draped to the ground. For a moment, I crouched underneath it, breathing the scent of damp, broken needles on pillows of moss. Sound stilled by branch cover and shade. I turned to fetch my mother from her apartment which was inside a stone building, very like the library in the neighborhood where I grew up. She was still in her bathrobe, not quite as old, standing in her galley kitchen near the front door, making coffee. “Come, come now,” I urged her; tugged at the soft of her arm. She laughed, one elbow raised to pour water into the machine, as if to say, relax, I’ve got time, coffee first. Or perhaps she felt resigned to being taken away. What happened next, men—officials like police—came and escorted her from the second story. Outside the window I could see the wide pine nestling the park path. Mother, exposed and raw, and now unprotected, had chosen not to resist. I couldn’t spare her. Shield her inside a space carved from nature, alongside the smooth, familiar surfaces of glazed windows, cream-colored stone, and hexagonal pieces of gravelly pavement. The fine, curved intricacy of the tree’s limbs in the park had reminded me of a book I’d loved, one found at the library when I was perhaps four years old; a Norwegian fable about a gnome who spoke to animals in a language only they could understand. The blue liquid shroud of his snowbound winter, the gleeful shelter of fir, the hush secret that allowed the gnome to keep his animals alive. We returned again and again, my mother and I, to renew the book so I could hear a story about being understood even when there were no words for what you could see. A private language not held by sound. What child wouldn’t grasp the beauty of that?
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Our bodies are adaptive. The same stimulus can produce different, even opposite effects. For example: exposure to cold. Fall through the ice on a pond, trapped in freezing water, your body will quickly die. But some people seek out immersion in cold water for its stimulating, rejuvenating effect. Instead of stiffening, the body perks up, releases tension and pain. Perhaps such exposure feels good because cold hijacks the mind into a state of delirium, or suspension of logic. We lose our resistance to it. Our breath shallows, from anxiety or from calm.
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There are two different kinds of resistance. One is to hold on for dear life, the prey animal threatened by predator, freezing or walling up. The other, like the wax resist of my mother’s glazing techniques, is a refusal to hold, more a yearning to reveal, to line, uncover. I felt the strain of my mother’s resistance my whole life. I preferred believing that what held me upright could not be seen or touched or filled up.
On certain days, I can still make out the leafy pattern of her dress, shapes like the shadows that dappled the sidewalk where I took my first steps. Just beyond us flowed the East River, its passage rippling fingers run over tiny stones. Water crested the lip of the pier. Wind blew so hard off the harbor, walking into it my small face could barely breathe. Until I let it blow through my body, weightless and cold.
What space does any child hold for a mother? How long does it take to claim our own? Such an almighty idea: self-possession. How we hold ourselves together in the world. Even a hollow object will displace water and air.
I thought I was writing a piece about resistance. But I came to see the writing more genuinely concerned with negative space. Not the same thing, though the two ideas still blend in my mind. How we feel we know things we cannot see or touch. What remains when parts are carved away or interrupted. The flow between solid and permeable. Something to do with not being held to the logical ways we define ourselves—these ideas were all calling me to imagine the inside of my body. The fine, white mesh that is both a container and an outline spoke to me. The scaffold of my mother’s legacy that was there, inside me, all along.
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Jenny Apostol’s essays and poetry have been published in Brevity, Creative Nonfiction: "Sunday Short Reads," River Teeth Journal: “Beautiful Things,” Haibun Today, Blood Tree Literature, and Flatbush Review. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the Rainier Writing Workshop, at Pacific Lutheran University. Previously, Jenny produced innovative, popular nonfiction television about the natural world for National Geographic Channels. She lives outside of Washington, D.C.