God in My Sleeping/ God in My Waking/ God in My Watching
BY MAKAYLA GAY
I have been moved by plenty of buildings. Most of which, as a consequence of what I was first exposed to as a child, are church-related.
I used to be engaged to an architect who opened my eyes to loving structures and the curves of concrete and glass. That happens a lot, doesn’t it? To find someone and then start falling in love with everything they are interested in. Come to think of it, he never quite “got the hang of poetry.” The Architect wondered many times why I couldn’t be a novelist instead. For many years I thought he was right. I thought I didn’t love poetry enough for it to be contagious.
I want to minimize my intense aesthetic reactions. I find it overwhelming and difficult to always be moved by things. Nothing fills me with more dread than those benches placed in front of particular pieces in art museums. It’s like someone is leading you by the hand to say, look, notice, be enveloped and if you don’t sit here for 25 minutes with your head cocked a bit and a single tear rolling down the gutter between cheek and nose then you are a stupid-idiot-dummy who has no taste in anything probably. I hold my breath around those sleek low benches and become a grateful Christian again when I see the seats completely occupied by a row of art students, copying some great emotional problem into their notebooks to solve later.
After breaking off the engagement with the Architect in Seattle, I moved to New York where I donate my eggs so I can pay for my MFA in Poetry. During the initial screening application, I was given a psych evaluation. I was asked all sorts of questions to determine if I have the sort of temperament that one would want to give to their children. Before the eggs are extracted from my body, they must be sure that there’s a demand for my kind of eggs. I am asked on a scale of 1-4 how often I have emotional experience with art (sometimes?). I am also asked how easily I share with others (often.) The test doesn’t show that this is my biggest fault.
I think that’s why I’m perfectly set up to be moved by buildings—They’re always on a street or someone’s private property so you don’t feel pressured to “take it in.” I can walk by some structures and feel hugely moved, mostly because I myself am moving.
The first time I visited Seattle I went to the Chapel of St. Ignatius at the University of Seattle. The chapel was smooth and dark and I felt like I was inside a diorama of a whale’s heart. Or perhaps in a really big bird’s nest. I loved it. There’s a Celtic prayer scrawled on the plaster walls. Oftentimes I frantically google “st ignatius seattle celtic prayer on walls god watching god sleeping” because the melody of the prayer bumps around my head.
I know next to nothing about the saints or catholicism. In fact, I’ve always felt jealous of the whole club because it seemed like Christianity’s prettier older sister. With the kind of protestant I was raised as, we had all the same bad stuff as Catholics (damnation, guilt, etc.) but none of the fun parts like picking saints and pretty churches. I was raised in a church with the ugliest taupe carpet and the kind of fake stained glass mirrors that looked like props from a haunted house.
The Architect and I moved to Seattle in January of 2020. Immediately, everything shut down. The downtown chamber commissioned him to paint a mural on a boarded-up storefront along Pioneer Square in May. Weeks earlier, he was riding a bike to pick up a cake to surprise me for my birthday and got struck by a street tram (grazed). He broke his collarbone and dominant elbow. I had to do all the painting for the mural. He would point to the blank spaces and tell me the shapes I was to put there. While we painted, we smoked cigarettes with our neighbors who hung out along the avenue all day because the shelters had been all closed down for social distancing. People from Renton and Issaquah came up in droves to walk along the avenue of murals while drinking canned wine. They took pictures of the art that was happening and the artists that were causing it. We worked slowly, conscious of being watched like we were performing something spectacular. In the evenings we’d pass out bandanas, Gatorade, and cheeseburgers to the protestors that were marching by towards the city’s center. A woman with her own public access show conducted interviews with her Samsung Galaxy. She was investigating art. Our mural kept getting tagged overnight, we did not paint over it. The lady with the TV show wanted to know why we let things look so scary, the world is scary enough.
We took walks to the neighborhood where Seattle University was. The nearby police precinct was hollowed out and an autonomous zone was set up. There were communal BBQs and theory reading. My father used to call me each night. He was scared we lived too close to the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ). I remember thinking, everyone is angry. Everyone. Everyone.
We walked by the chapel and of course, it was locked up. There was a board covering one of the red glass windows. The Architect shook his head and said it was all such a shame. That phrase can imply a lot without meaning a thing in particular.
I was so sick of only being able to see the outside of things. I began to sour on the chapel.
Who cared about the broken window? It was a window. It didn’t matter that the glass had to be sourced from some particular Italian island. When we were walking away from the chapel we passed men from the eastern part of the state holding very big guns on a strap across their bodies. The Architect didn’t see. I pulled on his neoprene sleeve. He was looking at a mushroom patch someone was trying to grow on the soccer pitch. He had laughed at the mushrooms and never noticed the guns.
That night, I wished for all the windows in the chapel to be broken. The thought echoed in my brain so loud I could hear it being played back to me. And why would you wish for such a thing? Because I am angry. So is everyone else. Everyone. Everyone.
*
I had to leave Seattle for a while that summer. The studio that we had loved in the brick-lined roads of Pioneer Square suddenly felt too tight. Him, too big. Me, too personal. Inside the apartment, we had this big oak box built into the wall right by the front door in the kitchen. It had ridged scotting and a latticed door. It looked like a confessional. We’d joke that our jackets needed absolution. Aside from the bathroom, which was too obvious, this was the only other door in the apartment to go behind and cry. I would put the cuffs of coats in my mouth and cry and cry and cry. When I’d come out, my dog would be wagging his tail, looking up like he does anytime I open a door.
After that summer, I started at the same wedding dress company that I now work at in New York. I thought I was never going to return to it but that is something I think often of things and am usually proven wrong.
*
With wedding veils, there are names for each of the lengths: birdcage for around the head, blusher for just under the chin, fingertip for just to the tips of the fingers, chapel which goes to the hem of a gown, and cathedral-length length which extends past the train. I have brides who ask about that. What’s the difference?
Chapels are little churches, cathedrals are bigger. I explain, pointing to the difference in veil length to the brides. Everyone gets what I mean.
*
My favorite parts of my religion were the little stories and the bits we’d do with each other. Like shaking hands before each service, smiling, and looking into each other’s eyes to say “No, bless you.”
There is this Bible story about Jacob who is supposed to be wise and loved by god. He meets a woman named Rachel. They fall in love. The talk of falling in love is rare in the Bible and rarer still in some translations. Most of the all-consuming love that is called by name is about god. Rachel’s father doesn’t like Jacob because he is loved by god. Rachel’s father wraps up Rachel’s much less desirable sister in a veil and sends her out to be wed. Jacob marries this changeling, not the love of his life, (how heavy the veil). The next morning, possibly hungover, Jacob realizes he has married the wrong sister.
That’s where the whole lifting of the veil after the father passes off his daughter came from. The idea is to check so you’re not getting scammed. And that other daughter? What’s so awful about her? Perhaps I’m sensitive on behalf of all the other “other” sisters out there.
I am also concealing something someone else wants. I have eggs that some people find valuable, tucked away in my ovaries. There’s a fat little binder in someone’s office with my name on it, well not my name but a series of random numbers that become my name for anonymity’s sake. In it, is the interpretation of my psych eval and full donor profile that reads like I’m trying to get a date. I had to write little essays about how I like to go on long walks on the beach and that I look for the good in other people. There are also a series of full-body shots. Someone saw all this and decided mine are the eggs they desired.
I imagined that layers of mucus, membrane, and muscle would be peeled back to pluck them out. Like when I was growing up, we found a black snake on our farm, and my brothers and I hoed it open and all these tiny baby snakes came wriggling out past all the onion layers of their mother. Except I will be given $10,000 and a bit of anesthesia for my trouble.
*
One of my favorite hymns about the birth and death of Jesus Christ has this line that goes “The veil was torn.” Something about the space between heaven and earth and god and that phrase felt huge. It refers to this large veil, that separated the holiest of men from everyone else in the temple, falling at the moment of Christ’s crucifixion. But even when I was younger I couldn’t hear this phrase or that bit about the veil and not think of the vagina and tearing and how scared and excited I was to have sex.
Weddings are brimming with innuendo. I blush each time a mother or a best friend comments on the bride in the appointments like your ass looks GREAT! and Brad would love you in anything you walked down the aisle in, but he’d probably prefer you NAKED. “Haha,” I’d say and even though I was standing next to a woman in a white gown with a huge satin skirt I’d feel like the biggest virgin in the room.
A veil is a giant hymen you wear on your head. A veil can also be a hymen that’s just fingertip length. So many of us have to sit through whole weddings and dare not think of sex once. But it’s impossible. The garters, the veils, the white–
It must be so embarrassing to stand up in front of most people you know, like your parents and a few cousins, wearing a dress with the expectation that the whole affair doesn’t matter unless you consummately fuck that night. I have never been to a wedding. That is best for everyone involved.
*
The Architect and I nearly got married on a dock at a lake in a national park. I even had my dress. It was something from the shop I worked at and hardly anyone chose to try it on because it was homely in a way that I liked. Those who would try it on would hmm & haw a bit before saying, yes, it is quite architectural, isn’t it?
Dresses are just like buildings because sex can happen inside either.
At the shop, I learned a new way of speaking. I am not supposed to call anything cute, nice, or hot and I should never refer to them as dresses but gowns. Gowns are about gravitas. Specialness. We must be so specific about the way we describe the thing. Everything must have a category. Ball Gowns. Mermaids. Trumpets. Columns. Slips. Are all very different and are all types of gowns. Gowns that you pair with veils that are the length of houses of worship.
*
The Architect did have some nice advice for thinking of the world in the language of buildings.
One of his graduate professors told him that a house should be focused on the view, not a part of it. And those who chose to raze a mountain top to put up their big white barn house to say, look at me! My important big white barn house is on a mountain. As soon as you try to be a little like god you’ve just embarrassed yourself. Not like in a god-fearing idolatry way, but embarrassing like when someone doesn’t realize they are speaking over everyone else in a conversation.
The professor said another thing about trees. The Architect doesn’t remember what he said exactly, just the approximation. Something about how the barrenness of winter shows the true architecture of trees.
The “architecture of trees” is an image that looks heavy in my mind, but I am not thinking about bare branches and sticks. I am thinking of how something that is intended to have important meaning, falls short of sense. Oftentimes when I think about the Architect (especially in winter) I think about him struggling to remember a point. For many reasons, I’m glad we did not get married.
*
Veils were said to be used to cover the faces of brides as to not entice evil spirits who get geeked up on a pretty woman’s visage. We cover a lot to avoid someone else looking at it.
Sandwiches in common fridges, ATM pin pads, Christmas presents–
I’m afraid to let a lot out into the world to splay open because I think the wrong eyes will look at it. Yes, I suppose I could be thinking about THE MALE GAZE, but what I’m always concerned about are the eyes of god. Painting the mural while those people with canned wine took photos was the first time I was ever looked at while making something. It felt like going into those public toilets where the glass is supposed to fog over once you lock it but you’re never quite sure because everyone outside looks so clear.
The first few times I had the Bible read to me the bent-back economy of its poetics was undersold. At the start of the story, Jacob kisses Rachel and then “weeps aloud.” That moment though, hollows me out and makes a small case for me going back to read the Bible again. Reading the Bible again is like going to sleep after checking out the dark
closet at the foot of the bed. It’s easier once you are certain there’s nothing in there that can hurt you this time.
In grad school, we’re asked a lot about our “poetic lineage”. It’s very easy for me to talk about the parts in the Bible I loved most. The hymns, Psalms. Everything has always been about praise for me. But the real reason I like poetry– too private for even me to know.
*
We make time and space pure so something grand can dwell within us. God, children. To not have children is to keep god from loving something. Which is not something he is so happy to do. So many churches built nowadays look like airplane hangers with the awful adornments of the little white ‘t’s in the yard. When we drove by the Catholic church in town I had asked my mother about this and she told me what they stood for. I was educated early on metaphor. I asked if God loved babies so much wouldn’t he be happy to have them up there?
Catholics think that aborted babies go to Hell with their mothers.
She had almost married a Catholic. “And what do we think?”
That just the mothers go.
In the 7th grade, the first atheist I had ever met said that Easter eggs were traditionally dyed from the blood of slain babies the priests had with prostitutes. Blood is god’s only Tide Pen.
*
Growing up my greatest hardship was never having the shiny plastic eggs to hide and hunt for the bits of candy hidden inside. My granny would stand over the stove, gently lowering and lifting eggs with a little speculum made from undone paperclip into small bowls of vinegar. I wanted my eggs to sit in the pool of pink for as long as possible. Each year was a new quest to see the possibilities of the pinkest pink on an egg. We’d hide the boiled eggs around the yard. Then, after me and my cousins had our fun, we’d bring the eggs back to Granny in her kitchen. She’d shell them and we’d have faded blue and green deviled eggs and pink egg salad to eat on for the week. I have never gotten food poisoning in my life.
On the eve of the first big extraction I had in life, to remove that petrified ball of hair that I secretly ingested when I was four, I sat in the pews of our church to sit and pray in the dark. My family would come back for me once they had eaten lunch. This was a Laissez-faire exorcism of sorts. On the chance that I didn’t wake up from the operation, my four-year-old soul needed an extra turnaround in the wash. I watched the afternoon sun push through the colored film on the windows that gave everything a watery, stained look. I hadn’t seen the light come in through so low in the windows before. I had never been in church at 3pm. Something was supposed to come in to fill me. I thought about it like I was waiting to meet an uncle from my mother’s side of the family.
I collected little moments of light like this and referred to them as feelings. Each is something distinguishable and tradeable like Pokemon cards. Here was the morning I woke up to a thunderstorm in the summer and the air smelt like Florida. There is the light of the empty afternoon church. I decorated my interior with these moments.
If I have something, I must give it. Because nothing is mine to have. Just sometimes though, I would like to keep things for myself inside myself. This is what poetry was supposed to do for me. I was building a little reliquary inside myself and poetry was supposed to hide these little moments that I would be able to come back to later to understand the bigger importance of my life. Not to say my life has any more particular importance, I just mean to say there has to be some underlying connection through all of this.
The little interiors of my feelings I collected were the only thing my younger sister couldn’t put in her mouth and my older brothers couldn’t rub against the commode seat.
*
As a kid, I lied with the consistency of a speech impediment. Everything was tried to curb my habit but none of it worked. I tried to just stop talking for 3-4 days. That’s how I found out about lying by omission and I knew that there is no way to win with morality. To have a nice roomy uterus and not CREATE was the opposite of CREATING; which is DESTROYING.
I told my nearly catholic mother I never planned to have kids of my own. That’s like having a gallon of water and not giving a man dying of thirst a drop. She had six children.
*
I am disappointed by how frequently my life ends up serving god’s purpose.
*
I am afraid of what I have hidden in my own eggs. Once the eggs are found within all the shrubs and garden planters of my body by the doctors, my own flaws will be made apparent to other people in their children. I wish I could crack out a poem or a feeling to see it through, so I could hold it. To see if it’ll sizzle on a hot slate surface. Once you crack open an egg, the tiny half-melted tootsie roll is never as resplendent as when it was the slip of shadow in a pink plastic vessel that hinted at the idea of a tootsie roll. Things hold more value when they are hidden.
We can cover so many loved things by building something concrete and glass around it so others can mistake that for the thing to be treasured. For some loved things; tulle, satin. For other kinds, Sriracha.
