Halloween this year found me wandering the rooms of the Museum of Surgical Science dressed like a dark and winged thing. The museum is always delightfully creepy in the daytime but was made even more so by candlelight and spooky costumed wanderers at a Haunted Soiree event. There was a mystery we could solve that involved a giant Ouija board and a seance, but we wound up tipsy from the complimentary cocktails and way too warm, so decided to bow out early to try to catch Halloween at the Logan (unfortunately it was sold out.) Still, I appreciated the storytelling and world-building, which seemed like a smaller-scale Theatre Bizarre but a little more Victorian in aesthetic and inspired by Francisco Goya's work. The seance was brief but involved calling out the ghost of a dead little girl named Little Magpie, watching her toys play and move on their own, and then a giant bird creature erupting from the table itself. It made me think of its kinship with my own work, AUTOMAGIC in particular, with all its seances and spiritualists and spooky birds.
It also struck me how much seances are like writing. Like listening very closely for some open door or rattling chain, some voice coming down and into you. How it can be gone as quickly as it appeared. I have not been devoting daily practice, only occasionally bleed something out onto the keyboard, but am kind of in a holding pattern since summer. I feel like the poems are maybe still in there rattling around like ghosts, but no one, not even me,is making a space for them to come out.
Still, Halloween was snowy and tempestuous and very un-fall like. It felt very late--not just in the night, but also in the year. This weekend is daylight savings, and it will seem even more disorienting come Sunday when dark lands squarely before 5pm. So I've been fending off the darker spirits that like to roost in my head with movie nights (last night, a screening of The Thing, tonight Priscilla.) With crock pot creations and chocolate and scones for breakfast. Today we lingered in bed late watching Haunting of Hill House, which J has never seen and I realized it's probably something way too sad to be watching in early November when the road already feels way to slippery. But I am enduiring.
