Tara Anne Dalbow explores artist-poet Mina Loy’s thrilling embrace of contradiction. (LARB)
In her unfinished epic “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose” (1923–25), Loy describes two occasions that alleviated the painful drudgery of her life. The first was a visit from her Hungarian grandmother, dressed in fine silk and lace, who lavished praise and affection upon her. Loy likens their embrace to a “spiritual orgasm, the mystic’s admittance to cosmic radiance.” The second memory recalls an escape from her parent’s rage into their garden, where she encountered the wonders of her consciousness as it appeared intimately interconnected with the surrounding world. Beneath the “high-skies,” she saw how the “steadfast light” shone not upon her but from within her—a moment of “indissoluble bliss” that “illuminated” her connection to all things and the generative possibilities of creative invention.
Taken together, these two experiences composed her initiation into the spiritual realm “beyond the synopsis of vision,” where she bore witness to the divine force beneath the material surface: the continual metamorphosis that sustains the world. Loy had discovered her salvation and her sui generis talent: distilling the transformative energies of the invisible—sensual, spiritual, mystical—into poems, paintings, and objets d’art. Yes, the invisible could be contained—invisibly—in the visible. From then on, artistic expression became primarily an alchemical act: like gold from lead, she would wrest beauty, love, and light from the wretchedness of life. At first, from nothing but the turning of her mind, young Loy imagined stories and poetry; later, scraps of paper became tessellated bouquets (her Jaded Blossoms series) and cellophane and salvaged glass turned into calla lilies suspended miraculously in a lucent globe at the base of a lamp.
[…]Loy adopted complexity as a liberatory practice, refusing to conform to social expectations or strip down her expansive notion of the self. She fought against what she perceived as a compulsive tendency to “re-simplify” in an attempt to “forget what a complicated affair life has been mistaken for.” Perhaps there is value in following her lead and making a more concerted effort to resist the reduction of our lives to easy categorization and quick consumption. Could insisting on a little more complexity restore some degree of agency or integrity? As Loy suggests in her 1917 poem “Human Cylinders,” a solution can “Destroy the Universe,” especially if that solution is homogeneity.
Loy’s understanding of paradox and her tolerance for uncertainty were qualities she brought to bear in every aspect of her life. Rather than upholding or evading binaries, Loy nullified them, ratifying the validity of both sides. And yet, she took stands, asserted her beliefs, refused the paralysis of inaction. She often went too far. She often went so far that no one else could see what she saw. Always alert to nuance and multiplicity, she reached a point where complementarity existed beyond duality, establishing a continuum of ideals, identities, affiliations, and faiths. She lived on a spectrum, ever moving toward what André Gide described as the “limitless possibilities of acceptance.”
Tara Anne Dalbow
“In a 1924 tribute, she calls Gertrude Stein the ??“Curie / of the laboratory / of vocabulary” who can “extract / a radium of the word.””
