Circle Game

Issue 50 • Fall 2024 • Nonfiction

2024: I was a botanist once. Hollyhocks are a misleading species; many confuse this biennial for a perennial. The hollyhock leads quite the double life, with people assuming it’s one thing when it fully intends to be something else.

2021: The used postcards were wedged between a display case of Hot Wheels of various vintages and life-size mannequins, unclothed. The cashier looked down at the postcard I’d brought to the register. “Nice, the vagina lady!” he said, holding it. On the postcard is the painting Black Hollyhock, Blue Larkspur (1929) by artist Georgia O’Keeffe.

I buy random items from thrift stores with irresponsible frequency, and this postcard was part of this trip’s haul. Secondhand postcards confound me; something about acquiring abandoned communication, words meant for another.

Much detail of Black Hollyhock, Blue Larkspur is lost in the just three-and-one-half by five inches, but “It is idle to fault a net for having holes.”[1] Postcards are informal. They’re for messages not worthy of concealment. Messages meant to juxtapose famous artwork like Black Hollyhock, Blue Larkspur.

Deep black and blue like a day-old bruise is Black Hollyhock, Blue Larkspur. The celestial black silken petals paired with “faded, tepid,”[2] Turbulent Indigo,[3] and a five-pointed star, are consuming. Hollyhock petals fill the frame, competing for space with the larkspurs. Grotesquely large, perhaps due to heavy watering, it vies for attention. The engorged hollyhock beckons; it has its fair share of the frame but wants more. In a moment of weakness, the upper left corner wanes showing a noncommittal smear. In this nebula, the edge of the petal fades into the gray nondescript background. I read it as a moment of vulnerability. O’Keeffe paints a small green leaf in the longitudinal center of the painting—a sign of life. A vital counter to the metastasized fecundity of the hollyhock.

1997: I am five and surrounded by trees. I did not grow up in a household of gardeners. The earth grew tall around the house and held us, and we didn’t grow a thing. The garden: False pine, hemlocks, Maple and Cedar,[4] sword fern. We thrashed feral through the underbrush with the genderless spirit of youth. The adults thrashed too, driving cars, grocery shopping, getting drinks after work. The underbrush left light reminders on our ankles, abrasions to encourage us to travel with care. Adults were afflicted by greater contusions. I use the mirror to decide what category of adult I will be. I stand on the edge of the bathtub, growing an artificial foot taller to meet my eyes in the mirror, to see myself in my nude glory. I pinch my waist. A magazine brunette, I decide. Magazine brunettes are well-liked. They are thin. I project that I will become blonde eventually instead, like Topanga or Sabrina or Cher Horowitz once I hit middle school, because I aim to be a success.

2007: Ten years later, I find myself in between these thrashings, playing in the trees and partaking in drinks after work. Joni Mitchell is on speed dial in my discman. I am a magazine brunette with sticks in her hair from the canopies I can now reach, and therefore, tangle in. Evidence of a youth no longer unisex, and I now aware that blonde hair doesn’t grow due to ambition.

2009: I am a rod, a cane. I demand respect as I approach the void between woman and man. Breastless. Back to the land. I’ve sacrificed. I’ve earned it.

2010: Play is how we get the sweet bruises. They bloom with the same touch as the branding iron.

Play is how the serious stuff begins.

Many of O’Keeffe’s early fans and critics accused her flower paintings of being an expression of female sexuality, thanks to the marketing of her husband-to-be and famous photographer Alfred Stieglitz. O’Keeffe expressly denied this, and the pigeonhole her flower paintings were crammed into (it’s a tight space) never did loosen its grip despite many years and many reproductions of her work in different mediums. Still today, the relationship between intimate closeness with a flower reads as explicitly “vaginal,” as if many are invited to view something so personal so often, and so closely.

I can understand the impulse to reduce O’Keeffe’s early work to pistil. Black Hollyhock, Blue Larkspur is, after all, distinctly anus-like. Like female expression in society—tense, sacred, banned from opulence—the ass is typically off limits. The ludicrous, simplistic comparison of a non-sentient yet reproducing object with the body part of a conscious, percipient individual is, unfortunately, not new.

The reduction makes a mockery of not only O’Keeffe’s life-like floral magnifications, but also of the vagina itself. It is a toy to be gazed upon; a discrete object distinct from the person attached to it. It is easy to poke, and poke fun at, because it’s puzzling (where’s the clit?) To this, O’Keeffe said the following:

I’ll tell you how I happened to make the blown-up flowers. In the twenties, huge buildings sometimes seemed to be going up overnight in New York. At that time I saw a painting by Fantin-Latour, a still-life with flowers I found very beautiful, but I realized that were I to paint the same flowers so small, no one would look at them because I was unknown. So I thought I’ll make them big like the huge buildings going up. People will be startled. They’ll have to look at them—and they did. [5]

The comparison of flower to vagina in O’Keeffe’s work in the ‘20s served her bank account well. In reality, these flowers were not just flowers. They were a public representation of flowers advertised as a taboo concept: the body for sale. Large, floral crevasses, anal and vaginal to the primarily male bourgeois, could be had, mounted; they were simply for purchase. And boy, did they sell. Black Hollyhock, Blue Larkspur was bought by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1934 as Black Flower and Blue Iris. Her flowers sold, so she kept painting them. O’Keeffe became the most expensive female artist when her painting Jimson Weed (1932) was sold by Sotheby’s in 2014 for a record sum of over forty-four million dollars.[6] It is a record because she has a vagina. She is revered for this fact and for the reach of her work. Her work is so ubiquitous that the postcard I purchased depreciated to the cost of only ninety-eight cents.

We learn O’Keeffe resented the idea that she was a great woman artist. She rejected the idea that she painted girlish, womanly, female content.

When a woman singer sings, they do not expect that she sing exactly like a man. But if a woman painter paints differently than a man, they say, “Oh, that is woman. That has nothing to do with painting.”[7]

O’Keeffe was right. Magnified flowers also look like the fold of a velvet curtain on stage, or the inside of a victrola horn. “‘The critics [who write about sexual symbolism in my work] are just talking about themselves, not what I am thinking.’” [8] Could we have come to know O’Keeffe’s work without all these critics talking about themselves? Perception was the inevitable windpipe O’Keeffe instrumentalized to sell her body of work.

2015: I used my body in this way. My body is a tool I’ve allowed people to rent because of their ideas of it. My body is also like art. It’s subject to gaze and commentary. My (skin deep) beauty, like my worth, is in the eye of the (powerful) beholder. This objectification causes me pain, but it does not stop me from capitalizing on moments of grandeur as a magazine brunette. This manifests in more than the following ways: free drinks, free money, free entry, most anything but free time. I play to the hand of the normativity police, sending energy into my external facing carcass, building viscosity disguised as substance into a glutinous wall.

2016: I ride the bus to work and devour The Argonauts with a fever so hot every brain cell died and was reborn queer.

2017: I shave my legs to compete with the masses. (A regression.)

2018: I am in a dark dive bar on my computer. A man sits down across from me. Balding, tattooed all over. He asks me if I have a boyfriend. I ignore him. He tells me he owns a martial arts studio. He offers to buy me a drink. I decline. He offers to guess my ethnicity. I decline. He tries to guess anyway. I put a price on my attention. “I bet I can drink you under the table,” I say, “and I bet you $100 you can’t guess my ethnicity.” He orders us a round. Jameson. He orders another. He orders another. This goes on. He never guesses correctly, nor can he sit up straight in his chair any longer. He can, however, hold a bill between his index and middle. I snatch the Benjamin from his filthy paws, and as I leave the table, I’m careful not to step in the pool of liquor to the right of my chair for fear of leaving tracks.

***

“Though no junkie, Joni Mitchell…bears the ‘ravaged’ epithet,” [9] Maggie Nelson notes. She then quotes a review [10] from 2002:

“If the health warning isn’t enough to put you off cigarettes, the nicotine-ravaged vocals of the once angelic, now gasping, Joni Mitchell should. . . [Her] voice is a husky shadow of its former feather-light glory, mirroring how her joyful, playful attitude has dwindled to bitter dissatisfaction.” [11]

2004: I first listened to Joni Mitchell on a discman player my dad would take to the gym. The album I listened to was Court and Spark,[12] which I would be told later by a young colleague “was really not her most profound work” and that I should “give Blue a chance.” I would put the sweaty foam over-ear headphones on and lay in bed, eyes closed, her lilting soprano floating across my mind in a night sky abyss. “Help Me” grasped me first, of course, but I quickly branched out to an obsession with “People’s Parties” and, eventually, came to write poems in the fourth grade that quoted “Free Man in Paris.” My teacher, in his late thirties, didn’t catch the reference. He read the poems anonymously aloud. Another student, a boy whose mother was a teacher at the school, said the poem “sounded depressing,” and that he thought “the person who wrote it is very sad.” My middle school wasn’t known for its outstanding literacy rates, so his lack of verbal comprehension did not surprise me. The lyrics ask, Will you take me as I am? [13] The answer was, and is, no.

I do not like Maggie Nelson’s use of the epigraph, though I don’t think she’s wrong. Mitchell, like Nelson and like myself, is complicated. Nelson tells the reader one reason why she feels this way about Mitchell: The song “River” came on the radio and was praised for its original content by the disc jockey.

Its greatness lies in the fact that no woman had ever said it so clearly and unapologetically before: I’m so hard to handle, I’m selfish and I’m sad. Progress! I thought. Then came the song’s next line: Now I’ve gone and lost the best baby that I ever had. [14]

Nelson is unimpressed with Joni for caving like that, and handing away her agency, but Joni doesn’t give a shit. There is strength in acknowledging a good ol’ fashioned loss. She wrote about lovers for years until ‘75 (enter Hissing of Summer Lawns), and heteronormativity and love are bland and mainstream, sure, but who can deny the catharsis of record sales?

Many people would consider Mitchell’s work feminist, but Mitchell disagrees. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Mitchell unpacks where she situates herself amidst fellow artists:

For a while it was assumed that I was writing women’s songs. Then men began to notice that they saw themselves in the songs, too. A good piece of art should be androgynous. I’m not a feminist. That’s too divisional for me. I’ll tell you one thing that’s pretty arrogant. This guy came up to me at some public event once, and he said to me, “Joni, you’re the best woman songwriter in the world.” And I went, “Ha,” and kind of snickered. And he insisted, “No, you are the greatest female singer-songwriter ever.” And I walked off. And he thought it was because I was being modest [laughs]. But this whole female singer-songwriter tag is strange. [15]

Mitchell’s shortcoming in these interviews is the re-elevation of men’s artistic success in relation to her own: “So over the years I think I’ve gotten more androgynous — and maybe become an honorary male, according to Bobby [Dylan].” [16] My take? If you pretend to be a beholder of the male gaze, you best see yourself that way too. Her reclamation of androgyny is a glass house and she a rolling stone.

Androgyny is “the state of being neither specifically masculine or feminine. A combination of feminine and masculine characteristics.” [17] It’s a noun, not a verb. She’s pretty, blonde, and thin; an “ideal” beauty. Joni Mitchell doesn’t read as masculine, much less queer; she’s no Brandi Carlile. The sole alignment with androgyny she claims is her success that outshines her male peers. Her historical disownment of feminist rhetoric kills me for this reason (though I am only dead on the inside). It’s something that conflicts me in my adoration of her music.

2010: I am five-feet-eight-inches and weigh one-hundred-and-seven pounds. I live with him, but we just broke up. I am grateful that I’m no longer bound by an agreement, like a target down range. “I do not love you anymore,” he says, “But I am still attracted to you.” I have eaten only air for days; I want my clothes to drop off in droves. Sexless. Androgynous. We lie on our backs; I am light as a feather and he is stiff as a board.

Mitchell argues, blindly and incidentally, in favor of her distinction from her gender in a Rolling Stone interview and others. She does, however, also recognize the music industry as a capitalist game: “Making music is great. The exploitation of it is horrible.” [18] It may be because of interviews like these that people used to tell Joni Mitchell she reminded them of a young Georgia O’Keeffe. [19] Mitchell’s creative outlet? Painting.

O’Keeffe’s personal style was described as masculine for her time, perhaps because it was the only role a woman could assume at the time that envisioned a future untethered by expectation. One day, O’Keeffe announced to her peers, “I am going to live a different life from the rest of you girls. I am going to give up everything for my art.” [20] Neither O’Keeffe nor Mitchell hesitated to market their talent or bodies as adjacent to men’s work, all while capitalizing on their productions as women’s work. There is no solution to this restless conundrum. It walks the bounds of artistic choice and survival.

2010: I’m surrounded by friends, and one has a machete. “Cut it off,” I say to them, though no one is sure I mean my hair. I want it gone. I want to reveal my neck. I want to eliminate the burden of femininity from behind. I want to keep them guessing. I want my backside to read: blank.

Journalist and cultural critic Rubén Martínez points out in his work Desert America that Joni Mitchell was one of many famous stars looking to purchase real estate in the rapidly developing Joshua Tree area, a place originally occupied by the Serrano, Cahuilla, Mojave, and Chemehuevi peoples. [21] She had sold her body of work for thirty years, and was, in 2004, looking to own a stake in land that was once someone else’s home. “Rumors circulate that Joni Mitchell, Lucinda Williams and Bob Dylan are house hunting.” [22] The ravaged ravage. She contributed to the face of a movement aiming to “spread out,” moving from Laurel Canyon to the desert.

2020: Ten years later, I have my own Heijra. [23] I secured a job on a basil farm in the Utah desert. The lodging was a wheel-less school bus with an electric hotplate and a foot-pump sink. The bed was dingy from excessive use, and the swamp cooler broke in the July heat. My “nowhere”—Moab, Utah—had already been turned upside down by tourism, specifically by the ATV community and National Parks fiends. My body went to work. I was displacing locals even as a contributor to the local economy.

Much to the chagrin of the hollyhock in Black Hollyhock, Blue Larkspur, the hollyhock and larkspurs must be considered in conversation with one another. And if they could speak, what would they say? The hollyhock might continue to show itself in oppressive size silently, while the larkspurs rustle for a moment in the picture, striving in the ultimately unsuccessful fight for interest, for visibility. Larkspurs are truly no match for the tenacious hollyhock. Hollyhocks are able to survive “come drought or bad soil,” [24] and are doted as one of New Mexico’s favorite flowers.

Tough is the image O’Keeffe leaves in her wake, too. After living 35 years outside of Taos, New Mexico, in Abiquiu on “Ghost Ranch,” she is, obviously, postcard-level famous. In Desert America, Martínez referentially posits that when people see or think of New Mexico, they simply think “O’Keeffe”:

…in O’Keeffe[’s work]…, we are directed how to view the land. The projection draws us to a “Land of Enchantment” (the official state nickname), a misty imaginary that erases my neighbors in Velarde and their story of dispossession and addiction. [25]

O’Keeffe, like many before her, claimed a stake in stolen land and our shared cultural psyche. The voiceless can be silencers, too.

There are many stories to tell here, but here are two: Story one is that a successful artist moved to a place where she could consider the desert, in solitude, and in all of its dangerous beauty: “The bones seem to cut sharply to the centre of something that is keenly alive on the desert even though it is vast and empty and untouchable – and knows no kindness with all its beauty.” [26] Story two is that a white artist of notoriety became so inseparable from the landscape of New Mexico, home to many groups of Indigenous Americans [27] previously colonized by the Spanish, that she is our easiest historical memory of the region. She enables praise for a woman artist, and the ignorance of our sins.

It was in O’Keeffe’s later years, in the ‘80s when she was very well-known and ninety, that she wrote to Joni Mitchell. [28] The two women artists who reclaimed androgyny because, to them, it symbolized male adjacence, developed a friendship through postcards.

2023: I learn from my garden that Hollyhocks reseed quickly. The first year they will seem unassuming and weed-like, only to announce themselves a year later with profound height and stunning floral blooms. You can cut them back and throw them away to prevent a tall army of gorgeous blossoms from hostile takeover. Mine are ambitious and obsessive. I prefer to let them reseed year after year.

2024: I write this essay three times about the parts of me I’ve chosen to abandon, those I’ve leveraged, and those I’ve decided to embrace.

1. Nelson, Maggie. The Argonauts. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 2015. p. 3.
2. Nelson, Maggie. Bluets. First edition. Seattle, Wave Books, 2009. p. 14.
3. Mitchell, Joni. Turbulent Indigo. Released 1994 by Warner Music.
4. O’Keeffe, Georgia. Maple and Cedar, Lake George. 1922.
5. O’Keeffe, Georgia via Barabara Lynne’s “A Problem of Position” referencing Katharine Kuh’s The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists. p. 190-191, via The Expanding Discourse, 1992. p. 445.
6. Crow, Kelly. “$44.4 Million ‘Flower’ Resets Auction Record for Female Artist” The Wall Street Journal, November 20, 2014.
7. O’Keeffe, Georgia via Kuh’s via The Expanding Discourse, 1992. p. 442.
8. Ibid,  446.
9. Nelson, Maggie. Bluets. p. 55-56.
10. Clarke, Betty. “Joni Mitchell: Travelogue” The Guardian. November 22nd, 2002.
11. Nelson, Maggie. Bluets. p. 55-56.
12. Joni Mitchell, Court and Spark, 1974.
13. Joni Mitchell, “California,” Blue, 1971.
14. Nelson, Maggie. Bluets. p. 16.
15. Wild, David. “Q&A: Joni Mitchell.” Rolling Stone. October 15th, 1992.
16. David. “Q&A: Joni Mitchell.” Rolling Stone. October 15, 1992.
17. Merriam-Webster. Androgyny.
18. David. “Q&A: Joni Mitchell.” Rolling Stone. October 15, 1992.
19. “Life Lessons from Joni Mitchell,” Interview Magazine. May 11, 2021.
20. Mlotek, Haley. “Georgia O’Keeffe’s Powerful Personal Style,” The New Yorker. April 6, 2017.
21. The Native Americans of Joshua Tree National Park: An Ethnographic Overview and Assessment Study. Cultural Systems Research, Inc. August 22, 2002.
22. Martínez, Rubén, Desert America: Boom and Bust in the New Old West, Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company, 2012, p. 100.
23. Mitchell, Joni. Heijra. 1976.
24. “Celebrating hollyhocks, the tough flower that survives,” Santa Fe New Mexican. July 6, 2020.
25. Martínez, Rubén, Desert America: Boom and Bust in the New Old West, Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company, 2012, p. 108.
26. O’Keeffe, Georgia. “The Natural World” exhibit. The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.
27. Abiquiu, NM, is home to the Genízaro peoples.
28. “Life Lessons from Joni Mitchell,” Interview Magazine. May 11, 2021.

Issue 49 • Spring 2024

Fiction

Poetry

Fiction

Poetry