Foreword: A Wind That Somehow Included Me

Kushner, Rachel

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Foreword: A Wind That Somehow Included Me

Rachel Kushner

Yield: The Journal of an Artist

Foreword

Author

Rachel Kushner

PublisherYale University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-23158

Foreword: A Wind That Somehow Included Me

Rachel Kushner

“We are and we are not,” Anne Truitt wrote in her journal on December 10, 2001. She was quoting Heraclitus on presence and vanishing, the constant flow of change. Anne Truitt was, and is no longer. I am and will no longer be. Everything will depart and the world will remain, and we are of the world, and so something of us remains, too. I don’t mean in the form of sculptures and journals and books, but something intangible, like the end of the rainbow that Truitt recalls seeing as a young girl, see-through colors cast upon the ground.

Still. With these journals, we continue to have the daily observations of an artist at the end of a long and productive and steadfast life, even as her vigor, as she says, no longer underwrites her will. I have read Yield both out of curiosity about Truitt and her life, and for more selfish reasons: I wanted to know, at my age—right now, fifty-two—how to live, by drawing from the wisdom and determinations of a woman at age eighty. I was looking for hygiene, perhaps, of a particular kind: in thought and habits, in temperament and mood. I wanted instructions, silly as that might sound, for parsing the world with care, and honoring my own life.

“Every day a page is turned,” Truitt says of the Gutenberg Bible in a library vitrine. A daily journal is only for the diligent. A strange document. It records what you later won’t remember of the details of the day. So much passes through the sieve of consciousness and into oblivion, and yet it is what we are: a succession of days. What we do remember naturally, without writing it down, is shaped into a category Proust calls “voluntary”—memories we mull and rework, sometimes into myth. A diary, instead, can be a sort of camera, snapping pictures of things you would otherwise not be able to later see.

To read Truitt’s diary shows me what she thinks about without a mannered or false layer of retrospective presentation. How she orders work and friends and ethics and stillness. The ways in which she values her own life. I think of my mother saying to me just the other day, with humor but also gravity, “Too bad we don’t get to do this twice.” It goes fast. I want to cherish it. So did Anne Truitt. That doesn’t mean she was perfect, even as she seems to have been motivated by great purpose, and by restraint and routine. There are accounts of sadness and regret, a dream about a lonely child; a phone call where she senses she is being a bully. Darker thoughts— for instance, a murdered friend. The violence of the real (“Actuality mocks art,” she says of 9/11, a horror followed by the horror of nationalism and war). There are thoughts on Yeats, Sun Tzu, her own sculptures. And fun cameos, remembered or recorded: vodka martinis with Clement Greenberg. Thrifting with Jem Cohen. A conversation with Duchamp at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Washington, DC. And meanwhile, insights both minor and grand. So few artists, she says, have the strength to afford tenderness. And images, such as her description of the scene from Bergman’s Wild Strawberries in which the protagonist’s long-dead parents wave from across a river inlet: the permanence of a memory, a moment in which an old man is a boy, love is eternal, and, as Truitt says elsewhere, “the past folds into the present.”

“Our deepest intimacy is that which trues us on a spiritual plumb line,” she writes. And elsewhere: “I looked ‘out’ and saw something that matched what I already knew to be true.” On a farm in Virginia, her aunt taught her to take pleasure in the daily. This seems to have gone a very long way. Of her turn to art: it one day occurred to her “that if I made a sculpture it would just stand there and time would roll over its head and the light would come and the light would go and it would be continuously revealed.” Near the end, both of these journals and of Truitt’s life, she writes of the “feeling of prairie grasses rising and falling, sweeping and twisting, in a wind that somehow included me.”

The wind included her. And she, it.

To parse the external world with care, and to honor your own interior life: perhaps these finally merge in some union where they are, or always were, the same thing.

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