Calenduulah

Thirsted and blacked, starved to a distant dragged step, Ж welcomed Calenduulah into being as a teenager. 

Borned in one of Ж's childhood homes, brush struck with visceral, abstract ideas in mind, describing Calenduulah in several words is "a task I am still understanding how to conquer," they say.

The figure in the center, decoratively inspired by older Russian royal garmentry, represents a sort of being who, though very human, exists in a state of inexplicable how and has one foot in all pricks of time itself.

On the left side of her face are thin tears. On the right is a bare cheek. This is not because the figure has cried and tears only claimed one side of her face, but that she exists in multiple different states of time and moments of emotion. One hour in which she is straight faced and rush full of fire and another hour in which there are wells of salt water being emptied from her eyes  in emotion.

Ж's younger years were claimed by a severe eating disorder and ambient depression, it was during this time Calenduulah was born. Crafted during hours of deprivation, bodily deterioration, and mental torture, Ж would nightly lay in their bed, their body rested back flat and find themself turning their eyes to Calenduulah as she hung on the wall without noise.

Ж would watch her, examine her and always find their body rising to paint her. "I will just fix the arm," Ж would say only to sit down and become lost in Calenduulah, hours sculpting her as if she wanted to be known or become seeing herself more badly than anything. 

The figure n the center came of her own being but ultimately exists in a state of control. She can and will anything or everything. She is all emotion, all touch, all art, luck and time. She is stellar fire and glass lake water together.

She is red burning gold with greenly striped black braids, and the beings to her side watch not her but us. They are the same as her, not lower or higher, as if limbs or lungs to her body.

Crafted using a collection of jewelry, glass beads, pearls, wax, ribbons, lace, acrylic paint, oil paint and olive oil. 

October 5th, 2024

I woke from a dream. The twilight was setting in upon the sky. My apartment was still, quiet, darkening. Everything just as I had left it. Those are the strangest wakings for me, the ones in the evening. I’m always a little surprised to still be in this reality. 

I had dreamt of a woman with antlers and white eyes, who gave me a bead from her wrist each time I killed a man. Blue glass beads that looked like little tears. 

We’d meet on a street in the Admiralteysky District of St. Petersburg, Russia. If you’ve never been, the city blocks are composed of straight corridors of petrine baroque facades. We’d meet in the empty street and she’d give me a bead. Each bead gave me a power: the power to deflect bullets, the power to fly. And then she’d send me off on another mission.

At first I didn’t understand why she wanted them dead. Then after so many kills, I began to realize there were trees growing right in the middle of the street where I’d meet her. And the corridors didn’t feel so empty and alone anymore. And then I knew: each soul of man was one of the trees. 

Back on my twilight apartment couch in Oakland, CA, the first thing I saw in the darkening blue light, through the window, were the branches of a pine that stands in the courtyard in the back of our building. I felt there was a man reaching for me, pleading for me to help him, trapped in the branch of that pine. I got up groggy and decided to walk it off. 

I went out in the early evening, down the fancy old stone apartment blocks off Lake Merritt. The street lamps were coming on. I noticed with a vivid awareness all the trees I walked under, sort of for the first time. They were alive to me like they hadn’t been before. It was eerie. Were there souls trapped in them? And why had I needed to kill men to create trees? To reduce human population? Or was it more metaphorical, like to kill the destructive spirit of man and replace it with something more benign? From these ponderings emerged the face of that woman in the dream. I hadn’t thought of her as Mother Earth. She did, after all, live in a luxury condo over an opulent street in St Petersburg, Russia. But perhaps she had been an agent of Mother Earth. An exterminating angel, as it were. 

As I thought of her more, more of her textures returned to my memory. She wore flowing black robes. Beads hung like strings of rain drops from her antlers. She wore necklaces upon necklaces that flashed in and out of existence like lighting at her chest. Thinking of these, all the string lights that danced from light pole to light pole along the shore of the lake suddenly called my attention and reminded me of her strings of beaded necklaces. I felt her in the air. Her form was everywhere. Again, I had a spooky feeling, as if I was being watched or stalked. 

I turned down Grand Ave, and had a choice to make. To the right is a park and grove, which at this point of the evening looked dark and foreboding. I was frankly worried that if I went that way, I would find the woman, in the woods, or her breath or voice would speak to me, and I had an ominous feeling I would see her in the waking world. This thought scared me into cowering away from there because of the violence she’d commissioned of me in the dream. 

So I went to the left, following the avenue and the lights into the district of restaurants and store fronts, and human traffic. The human world was a cozy company to me in this moment. Safety from my own thoughts. A few blocks into this course, I came upon a crowd spilled into the street. Through the large windows of a gallery I could see some kind of exhibition going on. I was about to pass it by when from the crowd I ran into my friend Xxhe. Blue hair, blue robe, blue lightning marks across their face. They asked what I was doing and I said I was shaking off a nap I’d had. I asked them what they were doing and they said they had a painting in the show. They asked if I wanted to see it. “Of course.” We wove our way through the milling crowd, deeper into the space. I was relieved. More than random human company, I now had a friend to alleviate my feeling of being pursued. My heart was lightening up rapidly. I’d almost forgotten my dream when we arrived at a back brick wall and there in the track lighting was this painting, “Calenduulah”. 

I shit you not, the resemblance was uncanny. It was too close to be comfortable. My surprise was like a stupor, a disbelief. Like a swarm of bats the fear fluttered up all over me again. I’ve experienced small synchronicities, but this made me feel something else: that there was a will at play, that perhaps she - the white-eyed woman with the beaded antlers - was real, and looking at me. 

Xxhe must have seen the drop in my face, because they asked me why I looked like I was looking at a ghost. I told them the story of my dream, and the walk to the gallery, and asked where this painting came from. They told me it was created back in 2017. They told me they followed a gut feeling and sort of uncovered the image, not knowing who she would be until she herself had emerged. They had intended to make an abstract rendition of a multiplicity of emotions, and this woman became the face of it. 

2017! I couldn’t believe it. To me it was like this woman, Calenduulah, had revealed herself to Xxhe back then as a message to me today - somehow operating outside of time - so that I would know she was really here, really speaking to me, and that I dare not dismiss her as a dream. 

Then the fear in me took on a whole new pallor, because in her dream I had been a killer, and I dared not think what she might have me do if I put my faith in her. 

I told Xxhe I had to keep walking. I avoided dark places and stayed in the street lights, near the warmth of voices and crowds. I found a bar and had a couple glasses of scotch, because alcohol always dampens the celestial antenna for me, and I had to mute this voice. It was becoming too real. I was able to walk home, my mind sort of swimming in a tank of alcohol, and the sharpness of these insinuations about Calnduulah muted.

I think - I hope - Calenduulah heard my heart and decided I wasn’t her man, because after that night, I’ve never heard from her since. 

But I’m still haunted when I think of this “occurrence”. Like perhaps she didn’t leave me be, but is merely waiting for me to mature into a certain disposition. It makes me afraid when I take psychedelics sometimes. I think “what if this is the time?” 

But so far I’m relieved to say I haven’t heard from her again. 

I don’t think Xxhe knew this when they asked me to write a little piece about this painting. Honestly, this is the first time I’m looking at the painting since the night in the gallery. Thankfully now as I look at it, it looks more like a painting. But it does have the lingering aura of a spirit that makes my belly tingle when I think about how close I came to being commanded by its power.