Year 5, Piece Forty-Two: 35. Blue Black White
GUEST PIECE by Kendrick Wanamaker
Every seventh piece for Rainbow Squared Year 5 is by a guest artist, and this sixth one is by Kendrick Wanamaker. This piece also happened to be the last collaborative color combination open for the year, sort of waiting for the right person. When that right person was Kendrick, it felt like a bell was ringing out: “Of cooooooourse!” I’ve always admired Kendrick’s artistic sensibilities, but we hadn’t quite had the opportunity to collaborate directly. Well, unless you count the time he and his partner built a remote-control rolling piece of astroturf so that my otherwise inanimate pet Rabbit could serve as a wedding ring-bearer. Just like mobilizing Rabbit, he has a knack for evoking the right thing at the right time, bringing a certain pragmatism to the whimsical that is the key to materializing it, materializing magic.
Kendrick is a queer and trans artist who lives in Seattle with his partner and dog. Originally from Texas, he studied poetry and screenwriting at North East School of the Arts, a magnet high school for social pariahs. His more recent work with Little Arcana includes large-scale interactive art, immersive theatre, and blinking lights. He is a voracious reader, a student of tarot, and a believer in big collaborative art.
35. Blue Black White
Blue black white.
From darkness to light through water.
Communication to reveal interconnection.
Bring the hidden into the light. Wash it clean.
I am standing on one side of a river. Wading through is the only way to the other side.
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Where I live, it’s the season of dying. Each day is a little shorter, night stretches out in all directions. Water from the sound comes inland in sheets of rain. It’s too much water for plants to drink, so they drown instead. You can smell the decaying leaves. Death has a sweetness to it. City streets look like little rivers, reflecting the moon and the street lights. Everything looks like everything else, wet and dark and shining. Blue and black and white.
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When I was 13, my mom got into bed and didn’t get out for 6 days. I remember not knowing what was wrong. I remember making dinner for my younger siblings, and finishing up a science project with what we had in the house. Her friends came over and hugged me extra tight but did not offer any explanation. What happened after is cloudy and muddled. I remember my mom losing a lot of weight. We called her lollipop head, because she was so thin she looked like her head was on a stick. She stopped going places. She lost her old friends and didn’t make new ones.
What I know now is that my mother was slipping quietly into the tides of addiction. At 13 I was old enough to know that something was wrong, but too young to understand what it was or where it came from. I only really knew that she had changed. She was underneath something, and the deeper she went the further she felt. The distance between us was jarring at first. She was not the same person who had raised me, walking me to the library, teaching me how to waterski, pinning art to the fridge. As I got a little older, I got used to the distance. Eventually I came to identify with it. My independence was how I defined myself, and it kept me safe. I was afraid of her darkness, and refused to let it spill over into my life.
As soon as I could leave, I left. I decamped first to college, then to California. My calls home were infrequent. My visits mostly revolved around trips to the hospital or rehab centers. I still loved her, but I did everything I could to put space between us, to keep the line between us rigid.
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I recently picked up Sabriel, a fantasy young adult novel by Garth Nix. Cliches aside, I was drawn in by the cover. A young woman with dark hair and sharp features stands in front of a white abyss. She wears a blue cloak embroidered with tiny keys. The hem of her cloak is a violent wave of water. Standing over her shoulder is a shadowy black monster with menacing eyes and sharp teeth. Blue cloak of water, black shadow, white abyss. Blue black white.
At its core, Sabriel is a story of magic, fate, and the inevitability of death. Sabriel is an Abhorsen, the last of an ancient lineage responsible for keeping the dead from returning to the world of the living. To maintain this border, she moves between Life and Death, slipping between worlds when there is work to be done. Light has a strange quality in Death—a heavy mist makes it hard to see further than a few feet. Death’s only real feature is a vast river, infinitely wide on either side. A cold current sweeps souls along, carrying them through nine portals. Past each portal, the river changes. Sometimes the river comes in waves, some portals bring deep sinkholes too dark to see. The final portal is the stars above the river of Death. There are so many stars they completely fill the sky, making one giant cloud, white and shining.
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About a year ago, my mother’s addiction turned a new, black corner. I knew she was still drinking, but the lines I had drawn meant I didn’t really know. While I lived my life 2,000 miles away she developed Wernicke Korsakoff syndrome, a brain condition that occurs when the body adapts to getting all of its calories from alcohol. She was completely nutrient deficient. The lack of vitamins—mainly B-12—had caused what is essentially brain damage. It’s sometimes called wet brain. I only found out when my father, her faithful enabler, called me in a panic. My mother could barely talk. She didn’t know where she was, or what was going on around her. I struggled to wrap my head around what he was saying. My father was scared—this was deeper and darker than he had bargained for. He needed help and wanted me home. I did not want to go home. I was afraid of what I’d find. I was afraid to walk through the door, back into a life I had marked off from mine. I went home anyway. There was work to be done.
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“Does the Walker choose the Path, or the Path the Walker?”
Sabriel’s Almanac
Throughout the book, the character Sabriel resists coming to terms with her bloodline and identity. This is especially true as it relates to her father, the last Abhorsen, who is lost somewhere in Death’s great river. She does not want him to die, even though there is great evidence that he is dead already. She cannot reconcile that his mantle is her destiny. She only wants to save him, even though she knows he is already gone.
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When I arrived at my parents home my dad met me in the driveway, sobbing. In all my 33 years, I had never seen him this way. This was not how we communicated. I walked through the door to find someone who was decidedly not my mom. She was shuffling around, looking back and forth at nothing in particular. It was as if she couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of her. Her voice was gone; she had nothing to say and no one to say it to. There was no light in her eyes, only clouds and confusion. She was alive in the biological sense, but she was a shadow of a person. A shell.
The next several days were, without question, the worst of my life. I tried to hold myself steady as I called doctors, rehabilitation centers, and psychiatric hospitals. I helped her eat, changed her clothes, held her hand while she stared hard into nothingness. We exchanged almost no words. Anything I said drifted past her, and the few things she said made absolutely no sense. As I arranged for her care, first in a detox facility and then in a long-term psychiatric hospital, I was overwhelmed with the feeling that this could not possibly be recoverable. Brains are too delicate, and the body keeps the score. I was sad for her, sure. But if I’m being honest, I was so very sad for myself. The line I had drawn between us was now an unscalable wall. We would never have the chance to go back, to make sense of the past, to understand each other. My saddest, most persistent thought was that she and I had already had our last conversation.
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I wonder how much plants know. Trees can live so long, and do things that drip with intelligence. Smaller plants too have an embodied sense of reason, deciding where to reach, what to hold, when to shed a part for the sake of the whole. I wonder if they know that this season of death-by-water is not a real death, just a stage in their living. I wonder if they fear the flood, trying to hold the line, or do whatever the plant version of that is. The darkness will inevitably give way to lightness. The same water that turns the soil black and brings the leaves to rot will collide with sunshine to make energy. Do they know that the rest of their life, their blooming, is on the other side of this river?
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After 20 years of missing each other, my mom and I have finally started talking. She’s alive, sober, and coherent now, three things I had largely given up on. Through our newly established communication, I am turning to face our duality and our interconnectedness. I am not my mother, and she is not me, but we are a part of each other. Despite my best efforts, there is no line separating us. The more we talk the more I understand, the line becoming a wet blur. What happens, has happened to her, happens to me too. Things she said to me when I was little still spill through my brain. Our voices sound the same. Her story is my story. Even our differences are related. Many of my adult choices—seeking sobriety, waiting to have children, prioritizing health, building chosen family and community—are choices I made because of her. In spite of her, maybe. But because of her, nonetheless. The more we talk, the more I understand. We sit next to each other like black and white on the same card, always touching, defining each other.