By Alexa Winik
“We went down into the silent garden. Dawn is the time when nothing breathes, the hour of silence. Everything is transfixed, only the light moves.”
In the months following my dad’s death in late 2020, I grew very attached to a suite of paintings by the Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington. Inspired by Carrington’s study of the Tarot, the 22-part work, created around 1955, reimagines characters of the Major Arcana, weaving together Carrington’s deeply personal cosmology with traditional imagery drawn from the Marseille deck and the Rider-Waite artwork of Pamela Colman Smith. The paintings were lost for decades until seven years after Carrington’s death when curator Tere Arcq happened to stumble across them while conducting research for something else.
Without knowing what was waiting at the end of that December, my partner J bought a newly published book of the paintings for me as a gift for the solstice. Now, of course, I can’t separate their images from those early days of grief in its most acute, immediate form, when one of Carrington’s paintings in particular began to feel nearly talismanic.
That is, in the middle of a second Covid lockdown in Edinburgh, while freshly fatherless, having had the last images of my dad, my last words to him, shunted through the light of a laptop screen, in a time when such virtually distanced dying was happening en masse, as I filmed a eulogy for the online funeral, separated by an ocean’s length from my mom and sisters, and unwrapped wax paper parcels of fresh bread sent from our friends Moss & Rosa who couldn’t come sit inside with us, it wasn’t The Tower (Upheaval) or The Hermit (Isolation) or even The Star (Healing) whose page I kept open on my desk. It was the one canvas Carrington covered totally in golden foil, ‘Number XIX: The Sun’ (Joy).
THE SUN (UPRIGHT)
In its most simplistic, traditional interpretations, The Sun card signifies the joy and life-giving vitality of its namesake, as well as the symbolic connection between wisdom and light. In divinatory readings, it is almost always considered an auspicious sign for the querant’s current path, a promise of joys to come and a child-like receptivity to the world. Even someone unfamiliar with the Tarot could easily intuit these meanings from Colman Smith’s well-known imagery. A technicolor fever dream (red banner flying! sunflowers!), the card shows a naked child smiling, arms outstretched from the back of a white horse as the countenance of a giant, all-knowing sun watches from above.
While Carrington retains some of this imagery, I prefer her Sun for its differences: the ghostly (possibly feminine?) silhouette instead of a child; the ominous hollow-eyed horse; the faceless sun formed of flower petals (gentler, kinder). More elemental, subdued, her palette moves between metallic gold, white, and vermillion, which she shadows with an abundance of cross-hatching.
It is not so easy to divine joy in this painting. No easy slippage here into the happiness-obsessed language of capital; no universe rewarding the power of positivity and a can-do attitude. Rather, Carrington’s Sun painting has always seemed to me like a useful space in which to consider the revolutionary, relational qualities of joy, particularly as it communicates, rather than competes, with grief.
This is joy as the weird edges of an empty eye socket. Joy as the wind that makes the hair stand on end. Joy as a feral, uncontrollable groundswell out of the depths, rhizomatic and teeming in its relations. Perhaps even wonderfully corrupting in the way it refuses to repress.
Horse
The eye of Carrington’s horse is itself a portal into the void of what has been repressed, its golden, pupil-less orb indistinguishable in color from the golden field behind it. It inspires me to question the instability between negative and positive space, emptiness and fullness. Does the eye glow with the light of the sun? Or has it been hollowed out? Can joy be apophatic? The answer must, I think, be yes.
For Carrington, the white horse is not merely a borrowing from Pamela Colman Smith, but a deeply personal symbol throughout her body of work that signifies expressive freedom.
Fullness of feeling is central to Carrington’s artistic subjectivity, particularly as a woman in the mid-twentieth century whose work was often treated as marginal (and in the case of her Tarot, even disappeared). Indeed, part of her story involves terrible suffering under archaic forms of treatment in a mental institution during a period of psychological breakdown.[1]
Enter, the wild white horse. So central is the horse to Carrington that it even appears in her 1937 self-portrait as a distant figure in a window, running towards, we might imagine, the field of sunflowers in ‘NUMBER XIX: The Sun.’
When I say fullness of feeling, I am thinking of how the poet Ariana Reines – who once channelled a poem spoken to her directly from the sun – describes the transformational process of grief as a possibility for “a royal experience” – a golden experience – of being “brought into the full depths of your heart.”[2] To do so, according to Reines, is a revolutionary, counter-cultural act in a society that values power and “winning” at all costs, even at the cost of human life and the life of the planet itself.
I love Carrington’s Sun for its capacity to exude this fullness, in which grief and joy not only co-exist but co-constitute each other – a mysterious intimacy. The eye of the horse asks us: what new space might be created when we allow grief’s sun to flood our inner world? What happens when we permit the work of grief to be abject and uncertain and peculiar?
What can happen, I think, is a renewal of the imagination. If grief desiccates the imagination – an endless leakage of love-without-object – then joy restores it. In other words, we might encounter a heightened clarity of what joy even is: “You’re not chasing someone else’s fantasy of what goodness is … You’re rooted in your own joy,” Reines says. “And that capacity comes, I think, through this school of grief.”
Rider
Grief, like joy, both is and isn’t all that we say it is. Over a year and a half since my dad died, I still can’t always distinguish what it is exactly that I’m grieving: if it’s the way he died, the years of illness, his utter absence, the disagreements we left unreconciled, or something else I don’t have words for yet.
At the same time, I’ve felt myself becoming more sensitized to the quotidian as a kind of pharmakon for this confusion: how the objects and movements of everydayness can both wound me and ground me, how they can be at once a source of painstaking tedium and boundless joy. Or as the poet Bernadette Mayer once wrote, “Nothing outside can cure you / but everything’s outside.”
These lines come from Mayer’s poem ‘The Way to Keep Going in Antarctica’, one of my favorite poems for the simultaneity of complex grief and complex joy it considers.
The poem opens with a lone traveler, much like Carrington’s single rider beneath the sun, and the immediacy of a self-address: “Be strong Bernadette / No one will ever know / I came here for a reason.” From here, the poem unfolds a series of potentialities, loosening in increasingly slippery syntax, of how the traveler might stay alive in territories of loss and suffering – that metaphorical tundra of the soul, where she wonders impossibly: “perhaps there is a life here.”
At first glance, it’s possible to read the poem as a bit of a downer – a spiral from the height of its self-address into the seemingly cynical shrug of the last line: “If I suffered what else could I do.” I think it all hinges, however, on how one hears the self-address, whether one hears it as a false sense of bravado or as a genuine, if fragile, mustering of courage.
I have always heard the latter. The rest of the poem, then, can read like a spell cracking open the ice sheet of grief’s everydayness – its banalities and confusion – into a full spectrum of feeling. As Mayer writes:
Perhaps there is a life here
Of not being afraid of your own heart beating
Do not be afraid of your own heart beating
Look at very small things with your eyes
& stay warm
Though the word ‘joy’ is never used in this poem, the traveler describes the possibility of reaching a state in which “there is no more panic at the knowledge of your own real existence,” which sounds as much like joy to me as anything.
And this is also what I see when I look at Carrington’s riding figure.
Perhaps reminiscent of Mayer’s traveler on her southern journey, oscillating between polar solstices of total sun and total absence of sun, Carrington’s rider exudes an ecstatic knowledge at her own existence: exposed to the elements as she is, hair flying, holding nothing but a red flag to announce herself. I came here for a reason.
I think of her as someone who knows, crucially, that if she is solitary she is not alone, connected to even the smallest of things in a world worth grieving over. She is also, we might say, someone who has seen some shit. Or someone who will tell you that the way to keep going is, simply, to stay warm, as she rides her horse into the heart of the sun.
It’s also true that a painting, or a poem, is a very small thing.
Flowers – in fragments
i) A hairline gash through the center of the painting. Wall, horizon, or breaking point. Seven sunflowers float over its edge like the faces of medieval saints, a dark nimbus behind each circle of petals. We might imagine them as witnesses to the horse and the rider, joyful companions through the territories of shadow and light. We might imagine them, again, as evoking a certain mode of intimate attention, in the sense of to attend, to be in attendance, or to give care.
ii) Origins of Joy, or the Way to Keep Going in the Winter of Recurring Dreams in which the Daughter Must Be the One to Tell Her Father He is Dead:
pink mountain morning - awake to seagulls, snow - J reaching for me in his sleep - oranges we sliced into small suns for the tree - the absence of sunlight - a pair of thrifted golden candlesticks - the brightness of Pandoro cake + icing sugar - Moss & Rosa outside at sunset, holding bread, baked beans, red cabbage in tupperware - remembering to return Moss & Rosa’s tupperware - bad photos of the Full Moon in Leo (Snow Moon, Hunger Moon) - apparitions of snowdrops, crocuses - the all-knowing north sea - here comes Helena on Portobello Beach & Helena’s love for the starlings of Portobello Beach - mom on the phone - sisters on the phone - the aesthetics of the voice message - sun returning as forsythia, daffodils, smoke in the allotments - crow sunning itself in the alder tree - mushrooms - bluebells - Lily’s hot pink coat - bad photos of the Full Moon in Virgo - cemetery walk with Rosa (evening sun) - cemetery walk with Becky (afternoon sun) - wilt of basil plant (too much sun) – hand-knit mustard yellow hat from Ness - faces of friends in the trees, in the grass, in the Water of Leith - sun-glint - fast swan - wild garlic - spells for health for love for change for more time together - citrine - lapis - small fire half-way to the solstice - all that we wrote down spoke to each other then burned in the flame -
(iii) oh the “inconsolable outdoorness of the heart” (Claudia Rankine)[3]
THE SUN (REVERSED)
In divinatory readings, pulling The Sun in a reversed position does not necessarily dilute the positive aspects of the card. Rather, the querent is encouraged to consider how joy may visit in ways that are subtle or quiet, perhaps emanating from within one’s interior world.
I imagine Carrington in her library in Mexico City, years after her breakdown, having survived an accumulation of significant losses, including the end of a tumultuous love affair with the artist Max Ernst. Now a mother to grown children, she pulls a book from the shelf to show her son – Le tarot des imagiers du Moyen Age by Oswald Wirth – and tells him she wants to start a new project. I think of how she turns her attention from the large canvas to the small canvas and gathers her tools: thick paperboard, oils, silver and gold foil, an agate-tipped burnishing instrument called a wolf’s tooth. How the act of creation that brought ‘NUMBER XIX: The Sun’ into being – that brought it to me – is itself a hard-fought emanation of inner joy.
I think also of the words of the poet Linda Gregg: “Fragile, and momentary, we continue.”[4]
//
I am floating on my back in the lake near my dad’s hometown.
It is six months after his death and we have just buried his ashes under the blue pines where, as my mom keeps saying in a way I find both ominous and endearing, he’ll like that view of the water. It is the height of summer – heat, blue sky, black flies – and after the small ceremony, my sisters, my mom, and I decide to run into the lake because there is still, impossibly, this joy available to us.
We run from the beach, kick up water, let our hair fly until the water is over our heads. A composite of horse, rider, flowers; running, waving, shouting, turning towards each other.
I follow the light to the surface. Let myself float in the warm air looking up. I can see the blue pines swaying high above me, and the big sun hanging in there, just there, high above the blue pines. Perhaps there is a life here.
[1] Carrington writes about this period of her life in her memoir Down Below.
[2] These quotes are taken from an interview with Ariana Reines by Amanda Yates Garcia on the podcast Between the Worlds, Episode 7: 5 of Cups, Coping with Grief and Loss.
[3] From ‘Toward a Biography’ in Claudia Rankine’s The End of the Alphabet.
[4] From Linda Gregg’s poem ‘We Manage Most When We Manage Small’.
BIO: Alexa Winik is a poet and writer from southwestern Ontario and the author of the poetry chapbook Close River (Magma). In 2020, she was awarded the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers by the Writers' Trust of Canada. She lives and works as a bookseller in Portland, Oregon. Follow her on Twitter at @aj_winik.