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| The exquisite moving book |
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| Katherine Vaz |
You've never experienced a book like this. I promise you. The Heart Is A Drowning Object, from Artist's Proof Editions, is a
collaboration in poems and paintings by the novelist Katherine Vaz and
the artist Isabel Pavão.And it is astounding. Vaz's poems center on the sudden affliction of her beloved husband and the way she tends him.
Pavão’s vibrant pictures share and explore grief and age and, of course, love.
Together, both show how late love, girded by the fear of possible loss, create a world that is even deeper in joy than ever imagined.
Please pre-order as soon as you can, so you can be as changed by this work of art as I was, and we can talk about it incessantly.
And thank you Katherine and Isabel for agreeing to do this interview!
About the Artist:
Isabel Pavão earned the degree of Doctor of Arts at NYU in 1994. A native of
Portugal, she has lived and worked in New York since 1990. She exhibits her
work in New York City, and in many museums and galleries all over the world. Among them are the Chiado Museum, Natural
History Museum and National Museum of Ancient Art in Lisbon, Gulbenkian
Foundation in Paris, National Museum of Rio De Janeiro, Museum of Modern Art in
New Delhi, Orient Foundation in Macau, Poets House in New York. She also
participates often as an invited artist as well as a guest professor in
Universities, Art Schools, and Museums.
About the Writer
Katherine Vaz, a former Fellow in
Fiction at Harvard University and a Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for
Advanced Study, is the author of two novels, SAUDADE and MARIANA, the latter in
six languages and selected by the Library of Congress as one of the Top Thirty
International Books of 1998. Her collections FADO & OTHER STORIES won the
Drue Heinz Literature Prize, and OUR LADY OF THE ARTICHOKES & OTHER PORTUGUESE-AMERICAN
STORIES won the Prairie Schooner Book Award. She has done many cultural
exchange projects between Portugal and the U.S. and is the first Luso-American
to have her work recorded for the archives of the Library of Congress, Hispanic
Division. She lives in New York City with Christopher Cerf, a Sesame Street
composer, TV producer, writer, and editor.
I’ve always believed
that art can change us, emotionally, and maybe even on a DNA level. But it can
do this only when it’s really close to the bone, risk-taking, and it hits all
the sense. These two broadsides that I saw did that. I kept becoming immersed in
the photos and artwork, the whole feel of them, and it felt like the poems were
an integral part of that.
KV: I’m so glad you felt like that! Immersion—the idea of
drowning—is about the enveloping that occurs when all senses are firing. And we
very much want the viewer and reader to add to what we’re offering—so that all
of us are speaking together. What’s close to the bone is of course close to the
heart. The poems begin with an actual damaged heart in a love story—a husband
with a sudden affliction, and a wife tending to him but also to the biggest
truth we all carry, that one day an end will come, for those we love and for
ourselves. How do we carry this so profoundly that we can find joy anyway? And
even more: How can we find joy in the process itself of endings?
IP: Because we’re not just drowning...when we discuss the
idea of dropping, going down, maybe into water, into something, we transcend
ourselves. It’s no longer about you or me, it’s a sense of communal
experience—or feeling. Something that no longer belongs to us—it is a Thing out
there. If we go into it, we join everyone else. We touch a feeling that is no
longer ours, but one that belongs to humanity. That’s also what a collaboration
is about!
I always want to know
what haunted you into writing this book, and how did it take shape? How do you
both know each other, and how did you know you could work well together? I love
the whole idea that it is about older women/older woman, and facing the illness
of a husband. These are things that have not always been talked about,
especially the differences between a long-time love when you are older and one
that sparks and fireworks when you are old. I love that. Was that part of your intention? The images I
saw are perfect for the prose and I was wondering how both of you worked to
make this happen? What was the planning
like?
KV: I’ve written novels and short stories, five books now,
with a lot of themes about the Portuguese community in America, especially
California, where I grew up, and I’m fascinated by art books, by combinations
of painting and words. I do box-art pieces. I’ve done lots of cultural things
for the Luso community (“Lusitania” being the old Roman word for Portugal)…and
I’ve long been acquainted with Isabel’s gorgeous, deeply felt art. She’s
exhibited all over the map, a native of Portugal but longtime New Yorker. Both
of us are transplants who adore where we now live. It was Ana Miranda Ventura,
who runs Arte Institute in New York City—an organization dedicated to promoting
the cultural and art of Portugal in liaison with North American artists,
writers, filmmakers, musicians of Luso descent—who introduced us. I can still
see us sitting in the library in my home, the three of us talking away. Isabel
and I knew we wanted to do something together.
IP: Yes, but at first we didn’t know what. We deliberately
did not want to plan. First we recognized that we had a lot of links concerning
color in our work—vividness in your stories, a fascination with people who
think in color—
KV: And your work has that too, of course.
IP: Yes! And some time went by, but we finally made a lunch
date, first at the Harvard Club,
followed by another one at the Lotos Club in New York. We agreed not to
come in with a list of ideas, but to see what might evolve naturally. It was
funny how we surprised ourselves with what became the obvious parallel of
having older husbands who had undergone serious ailments and spent a long time
in the hospital, but it was important not to report on that alone as
photo-realism, but to go into the secrecy of that time, the feel of it. The
silence and the hunger. We could have called upon friends, but we both chose to
address these times of pain and uncertainty and fear with quietness. We wanted
to delve into how it felt to be an older woman dealing with a longtime love. We
don’t hear about that very much. It’s not hugely acknowledged—almost as if it’s
rare or insignificant or even embarrassing. We wanted to feel our way along
rather than outline too much or spell things out. So at our lunches, we made a
grid. That was our start! The stages of feeling and the colors that might relate
to what happened, or to the stages of going into and coming out of the
immersion of fear of loss. “Mottled” was the first category.
I went home and start making drafts of paintings. At first,
I held back, because I didn’t know what to do, and then it was an incredible
burst—a flooding! The pictures poured out of me.
KV: The best part was that it was exactly the same for me. I
haven’t written much poetry. We’d agreed that I’d look at your pictures and
make suggestions; we’d rearrange or omit or adjust, but I was astonished that I
loved them all and in fact suggested we leave the raw rough edges, as if that
captured even more the idea of creation in a burst. I think I suggested
changing the order of only two paintings?
IP: Two. Yes. That was it. I was astonished too, that it made sense for both of us to keep
to this idea of “Draft” as a form of its own. It felt truthful to our feelings and
artistic vocabulary.
KV: I held back from writing as well, when I had all your
paintings, and then it was a gusher. It felt exhilarating. I worked after you
did, and it seemed to happen very fast. We talked about doing one painting and
poem at a time, a pairing, but after everything poured out of you, I followed
the exact same curve of experience. That was part of the unity we made. Good
for a book about drowning that it all felt complete and fluid.
IP: In spite of the subject being a fear of the future, a
wariness about living without the person! Somehow also the idea arose that this
is a common issue for women our age, but it’s taboo.
KV: Why is it such a taboo, do you think, Isabel?
IP: We don’t want to face vulnerability. I don’t know. The
culture?
KV: Because we feel we have to be strong all the time, or is
it because we’re invisible?
IP: Invisibility. It’s more a case of invisibility for older
women. We created an artistic voice when we were young, and now we have to find
it again, or to make a new one.
KV: In spite of being artists our whole lives.
IP: This is a new situation, a new exposure of ourselves. We
have gone through a definite experience of actual life-and-death. We were
called upon to respond.
KV: An experience we didn’t choose, but one that everyone
faces.
IP: There’s no guide or manual on this, because the issues
older women face aren’t addressed! There are manuals on birth, how to teach
toddlers, etc. But no education on being closer to the biggest issues of life,
which are about handling loss or maybe changing what loss should mean. So we
chose color, the feel of the body, to talk about these things. An intensity of
sensation.
It’s part of our vocabulary as creators. Using colors.
Foods, colors, flowers—those are equivalent to feelings. That’s the common language
we both had, from the beginning.
KV: Then one night, I was giving a reading at KGB Bar in New
York, at the invitation of Elizabeth Hodges, the editor of the St. Petersburg Review because I had a
new story in her magazine, and Katherine McNamara, the publisher of Artist’s
Book Editions, one of Elizabeth’s friends, happened to be there, and we chatted,
and I mentioned the collaboration. And she said that was exactly the sort of
project she liked.
IP: And remember when you and I met at the Morgan Library,
after I’d come back from Portugal, and Katherine wrote to you maybe twenty
minutes before we met for coffee, saying she wanted to publish the book? And she
became a third collaborator. We spent a weekend in her home in Charlottesville,
and she brought exquisite talent to the project—her vision of how to present
images and words, how to create video poems, how to produce elegant prints. As
it happened, she had her own story of love and loss.
I’m astonished at the exquisite beauty of
the images and the prose, but the emotions that welled up as I read were almost
overwhelming. (By the way, these lines did me in: When I die, please let me be
the shade fuchsia in the 30-gigahertz band.
When my husband dies,
please let him be the sound there.)
KV: Isabel’s work evoked the radio spectrum color chart for
me, among other things. I like that sound and color have an official code. I’m
glad you liked those lines.
IP: The other thing to point out is that we did not want to
have writing that described the images, and we didn’t want the artwork to be
only illustrations accompanying words. We wanted some kind of elevation—we
wanted to create something else entirely, together. A collaboration. The images
and words becoming a new thing, a new dimension if we could.
KV: I wanted to be inspired by the colors and paintings and
to have them inform what I wrote, but we did a good job in avoiding the sense
of illustrations.
Katherine, you said
something to me, about this being “the color and feel of an older woman, in her
physical being.” Can you talk about this please? (Both of you, please.)
KV: There’s a movement in writing by women now to eschew
what can be seen as emotional or sensory, an insistence that this is an old
trap. The argument is more or less: “Women are not merely emotional creatures who
can only write about love rather than the intellect. Sensory views of the world
are therefore inadequate.” But I wanted to have both, because the physicality
of older women calls for that, as it does for anyone carrying the state of
grief—men or women, young or old. And in that, I hope, the intellect is also
awakened, but the brain doesn’t take the lead.
IP: Being intellectual at every moment can be a form of
self-protection! And as women, we are always being asked to rationalize, to
explain. But I think real exposure of the inner self goes a step further.
That’s what we chose to do. And it’s a risk for a writer, or artist, to tell a
story that way. We need bliss, joy of the body too.
KV: A friend just described my life, and hers—she’s older
too, with an ill husband—as being in the “sweet spot.” We’re lucky with having
great love in our lives, and it is still here. We’re all still here, and that’s
the joy.
IP: The experience gave me the power to produce this. I
couldn’t have done it five years ago. It’s a creation out of a certain timing
in life. Also, as we’ve said, as people get a little older, the
intellectualize, as a protection; they step away from vibrancy, and this is an
opposite response, to celebrate the spirit and life.
KV: Here’s a “physical being” response. I gave a reading at
Hunter College one night, a few hours after I was told that they didn’t know
why my husband wasn’t getting better. My eyes got physically so cloudy it was
hard to read. But as if through a scrim, I saw one friend, Dylan, who had tons
of things going on in her life, and yet she was there. And my friend Dustin
said he would walk me home afterward. He and his husband lived in the opposite
direction, but he insisted, and we walked the few blocks, and we talked about
general things and said good night—and I thought that was so remarkable, such a
lovely thing. A perfect comfort. All of us say, Tell me what I can do to help,
but the best moments are when life naturally flows in a companionable way.
IP: This collaboration is about celebrating love’s
fragility, and I want to say also that we’re talking about older women, but
really, fragility is present at any age. When we’re older, we’re more likely to
be asked to deal with it, to understand and feel it; when younger, we might postpone
it, dealing with the ending of life. But we all now it’s there.
We chose to go through the illnesses of our husbands pretty
much in silence. We could have called our friends, yes. But it was our choice
to go through it alone, to converse our energy.
KV: I’d pass a falafel place when I’d walk home from the
hospital. Now when I pass that place, I can smell the hospital too. You had
part of a large meat pie every night. Could we mention your meat pie?
IP: (Laughs). Every night, a small piece. A symbol of survival, keeping being alive…and
a glass of red wine…
What’s next up for both of you?
IP: Putting this creation out! Celebrating it. I have a show
coming up in Lisbon, a retrospective, thirty-five years of my career. Revisiting
my different stages!
KV: I’m finishing a new long novel. In contrast to the speed
of The Heart Is a Drowning Object,
this book has taken fifteen years.
What are you most hoping that people
will get from this gorgeous work of art?
KV: To feel in communion with the notions that have nothing
to do with age. I’d be happy if young men also had a strong reaction to our book.
It’s about love. We all know we can lose someone at any moment. This
collaboration is about changing the normal response of fear to an intensity that’s
in fact about finding pleasure.
IP: I totally agree. Plus the beauty of this has been in the
creating of it, and with Katherine McNamara’s help putting it out there. It
doesn’t belong to us any more! I want it to be gender-less; it belongs to
everyone who reads/sees/listen to
it. We put it out there for others to embrace it, or not!
What’s obsessing you
now and why?
KV: I have to fix my damn ceiling. All those aquatic images
you did, Isabel, were so sumptuous, but water is not so pretty when there’s a
downpour through the roof! Our ceiling collapsed in the last rainstorm.
IP: We have a parallel there too! My house got hit in the
storms and we’re leaking all over. You and I have this eerie connection. You
know what we haven’t mentioned? The process of working together was a real
delight. The easy flow of it all—that was a surprise! The ease of doing
something together, from all that we’d stored up. And out of it is our
friendship now. We knew of each other, but we hadn’t yet become friends, and
now with Katherine McNamara also there is a bond based on sharing and work, a
collaboration, a sisterhood. Taking the train together, speaking Portuguese on
the way to Charlottesville…we found out we had an obsession with packing our
lunches really precisely. We laughed the whole way.
And we visited the printing press with Katherine M., and
went to a garden party, and found each other, all three of us. And we laughed
on the train the whole way back. Suddenly Katherine and Isabel and Katherine,
the KIK Sisters. The work gave us each other.
Please check out these links:
https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-heart-is-a-drowning-object/id1482030857?ls=1 (the
book can be pre-ordered and will be available October 22nd, 2019)
A video poem
https://vimeo.com/361705094
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