FEMININE NIHILISTIC GOSPEL SONG
Imaged generated using AI.
For the first six months of the pandemic, I embraced a monastic lifestyle. I walked daily through a five-acre nature preserve a few blocks from my house in Spokane, Washington and watched the scenery change. Ice turned to massive puddles, massive puddles to dry earth; different flowers bloomed and disappeared; grass shifted from brown to green to brown. On a lucky day, I’d come across a family of deer, a snake, maybe a rabbit. I’d listen to music as I wandered through the wilderness. I kept adding songs to a playlist I named XO—my soundtrack for lockdown was love.
The Visitors by Ragnar Kjartansson is a beautiful piece of performance art where Icelandic musicians in different rooms of an old mansion in upstate New York play a haunting song, together, but separate. I watched the 64-minute performance projected on nine screens in a dark room at The Broad in Los Angeles in 2017, and I couldn’t tear myself away. Kjartansson played an electric guitar in an old bathtub; a barefoot woman in a white dress played an accordion; a man in a plaid shirt played a grand piano. In lone rooms surrounded by old furniture, floral wallpaper, and peeling paint, the performers made a chorus of enchanting sounds. The song was repetitive and slow, sweet yet sad. Kjartansson refers to marathon performances as “divine boredom,” so it’s unsurprising that this piece became emblematic during the pandemic. “My works are all kind of anti-storytelling,” he has said. “They’re always about a feeling, but there’s no story.”
The initial meditative pause of 2020 turned into prolonged purgatory and then into gnawing urgency. In different circumstances, I might have maintained an admirable patience, but I was falling in love with a man 7,000 miles away whom I could not visit. In the absence of story—our physical narrative—I lived solely in imagination and sensation. Alone in bed, I cried as I orgasmed, unruly tears running into my ears and onto my pillow. It was the first time I was overcome, and coming. It did nothing to subdue this bone-deep want that was closest to satisfied during video calls. For a few hours, I’d be satiated and weightless—relieved from the heaviness of yearning, the gravity of human need.
In The Visitors, they repeat the line, “Once again, I fall into my feminine ways / There are stars exploding around you / And there’s nothing, nothing you can do.” Kjartansson calls it a “feminine nihilistic gospel song.” It is nothingness and praise; it is dirge and lullaby. Recently, I learned that the lyrics are from a poem by his ex-wife, Ásdís Sif Gunnarsdóttir. He had been getting divorced and falling in love at the time of making this piece in 2012, perhaps channeling the complicated and potent combination of grief and passion.
Falling into feminine ways wasn’t a feeling I resonated with. However, with this man, I was free falling into a soft surrender that felt more like trust and safety than self-abandonment. For most of my life I’d agreed with writer Jeanette Winterson’s line that marriage was “a plate glass window just begging for a brick.” Weddings seemed like overpriced spectacles for squabbling relatives, and marriage—at its worst—a delusion that devolves into a sticky legal nightmare. But, in the absence of story, marriage became a solid and meaningful foundation on which to build a future, and an anchor I clung to in a sea of uncertainty.
Kjartansson has noted that The Visitors felt like the end of a musical era, a hopeful time in America, a celebration of art and the tail end of youth, and that things got much darker in the world afterwards. I have wondered how this performance would have resonated if I watched it in 2021.
I continued walking as the seasons changed at their own steady speed, wanting to be elsewhere but trying to find some peace where I was. I’d sit on a rock by a marshy pond, watch birds circle the sky, listen to my growing playlist, and daydream the future. Eventually the pandemic would ease, and I would marry the man I’d grown to love from afar.
At the end of The Visitors, the musicians put down their instruments, wander into other rooms, until they all, now without headphones, gather around the grand piano. One man lights a cigar, and another pops a bottle of champagne. Then, still singing and finally together, the musicians leave the decrepit mansion and walk across a vast grass lawn and into whatever came next.
Kimberly Sheridan’s work appears in The Big Smoke, Entropy, The Midst, Monologging, and University of Hell’s essay collection, 2020* The Year of the Asterisk. She wrote a column Tattoo Ink for The Big Smoke USA. Kimberly holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from Eastern Washington University and served as the managing editor of Willow Springs. After many years in New York City, Los Angeles, and Spokane, she’s recently relocated to Wellington, New Zealand. Find her at kimberlysheridanwrites.com.