When I was in Athens in 2021, I had these profound feelings of both elation and sadness that I couldn’t place. I remember calling my sister on skype and trying to convey what I was feeling while sitting on this balcony https://www.instagram.com/p/DLFOSoounXD/ and staring at the most magnificent dusk light I’ve ever seen… it was all deep orange and golds emanating from behind black silhouettes of mountains. I told her it was as if the most important memories of my childhood had become so distant from me that they seemed to be slipping from my sense of self. But something about that was also beatific: it proved that those memories, those feelings were real.
I wrote a poem to try to explain it better. I revised the poem a couple of times over a couple of years, and each time, it felt to me as if that experience from 2021 had just happened. https://www.instagram.com/p/CtAZdkPt10k/
The poem still doesn’t quite express what I was feeling, to be honest. I have wondered many times where it came from. I thought about genocides of the past, age-old tragedies I might have been channelling while in Greece. I thought about Covid. I thought about the individual heartbreak of acquaintances. I asked friends of mine if they’d been depressed at that time, and they denied it.
Today I found out on the internet that my friend Kate Garrison passed away that year, in 2021. I wrote about her in my women geniuses blog. She was a truly wonderful person. We emailed very frequently while teaching together in my final year at the School of Visual Arts. She was funny, witty, and deeply humanitarian, as she would talk to me about her job training kids with learning disabilities to write essays. It always seemed fascinating and mystical to me.
Kate had gone to Amherst and UC Berkeley, two schools I always deeply admired, to study literature. She had a twin sister who had gone to Oxford and sometimes made appearances on the BBC, whom she mentioned from time to time. Kate was one of five people who gave me a recommendation for Columbia in 2017. I wish I had been able to say goodbye.
This was shocking news. More information at this link: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/19zdp7Xiuj
Kate, you belong in heaven, so I am sure you are at peace up there.
2:53am: As I found this tweet, I thought I heard Kate’s voice saying, “I love you.” https://x.com/battening/status/1351180837568581640