by Marin Sardy
There is always something that comes before words, before I find the words, and it is in that place that my stones and trinkets and broken pieces have meant everything. I’ve had them when words failed me, escaped me, betrayed me, misconstrued me, or erased me. I created my own language from these objects, each one a slippery signifier with meanings and resonances that only I knew. And when I made an altar I could build a web of meanings around things too inchoate or painful or frightening to speak. This was the edge of language, and I used it when I found myself at the edge of my world, carried there by schizophrenia. These objects anchored me to my life when I forgot again that I was real, that anything was real. When the scaffold of the world collapsed, leaving only madness and more madness. These were the fragments I shored against my ruin.
CONTENTS OF VINTAGE ALASKA: THE LAST FRONTIER PORCELAIN TRAY
Chunk of myrrh
Pendant, resin, Tlingit wolf design
Chambered nautilus fossil
Necklace of small turquoise beads
Flat gray pebble
Figurine, ceramic, very old: cat playing with yarn
* * *
—
If altar building was an act that occurred before language, spell casting happened at the point where language began. It was through language that I, as both a witch and a writer, would reclaim some control over the shadowy monsters in my mind—those unconscious memories, those black fears. Spells, many say, will not work unless the spell caster focuses her intent into words, preferably rhymes. These must be either stated aloud or written down. (Rhyme, according to the Wiccan Rede, binds the spell, so I indulged in writing whole verses of bad poetry—all of it so wretched that I’m too embarrassed to repeat any here.) The use of words in spells is a common requirement that to me feels fundamental to witchcraft. It seems, too, somehow fundamental to humanity. “In the beginning,” reads the Gospel of John, “was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
A spell, in the simplest sense, is a ritual in which a person expresses her intention while symbolically enacting the desired result. For me, spell casting was about focusing my mind and staying present with what I wanted. For a Letting Go spell, for instance, I might toss something into a fire and save the ashes. The spell would then be contained in the ashes, which I would keep close by. I read that the best time for spell casting is during an esbat—a full moon—or at any moon phase that seemed appropriate to my goal. So I’d cast Getting Over a Broken Heart on a waning moon; Finding My Way on a new moon. I would eventually see that I needed witchcraft because it suggested some way to project myself into the future. Because I had never understood how to have a relationship to things that didn’t yet exist. But the most important spell I ever encountered was not my own.
This was how witchcraft became an obsession during the months preceding my move to New York. My involvement with Will had begun the previous summer with highest hopes but fell to earth six months in. He had at first seemed an antidote to my past troubles, and at times he was the most soothing presence in my life. But that was a lot to ask of one person, especially given that he had a drinking problem and a divorce so fresh that it wasn’t finalized until after we started dating. He wanted to be with me, then he wasn’t sure, then he wanted to be with me as long as that didn’t involve too much being with me. We settled into a cycle of coming together and slipping apart, which triggered my old fears and sent me often to the Bad Place. By February I was sure we were hopeless, but I was cripplingly in love. I cast spell after spell, taking advantage of any opportunity to conjure some Personal Power, Guidance, or Letting Go. By summer, after trying and failing to dump him twice, I couldn’t wait to get farther away. There was no question that he wouldn’t come to New York with me. He had a job and two kids.
Around that time, someone told me about the Ditch Witch store. Erika Wanenmacher had opened a shop. I knew from her artist statement for her previous year’s show that every day she walked her dog on a path that followed the Acequia Madre—the Mother Ditch, Santa Fe’s centuries-old irrigation canal that runs through the oldest part of town. On her walks, she found all kinds of items on the ground—lighters, bent spoons, bits of porcelain, rusty tools, weatherworn liquor bottles. She collected the ones that appealed to her and took them back to her studio, where she used them to make her own style of spell. She would select a few objects, rim them in silver so they suggested stained glass, solder small hoops to them, and then tie them together on strands of black twine so they hung as long clusters on the wall. Her spells were sculptures.
A dozen or so of these were hanging on the wall when I stopped by the shop. It was just a corner space she rented within a larger store that sold art glass, and it was lined with shelves loaded with candles, incense, and items pulled from the ditch. Erika was out, but the glass store owner explained the spells, saying, “She does custom spells too. You can ask her to make you one if none of these are what you need.”
Time folded in on itself that summer. I was freelancing as an art critic, and when Erika had a gallery show I reviewed it in my column. At her opening I saw her but was too shy to walk up and say hello. Meanwhile, though I wanted things to work out with Will, I was giving up on him, preparing to leave, getting things done by just forcing myself to not stop moving. Fill these boxes. Buy this packing tape. Visit this art show. Will said he didn’t know if he was in love with me. I told him he was a fool. I was living on hubris and a determination to not let my friends see what sorry shape I was in. I started selling off my stuff, winnowing my possessions down to necessities and what fit in my little boxes. In a weird twist, the guy who showed up to buy my bike was Will’s ex-wife’s new boyfriend. He wanted to give it to her as a gift. Stunned, I told him that was fine with me. Gone. Done.
Earlier that summer, finches had flown into the storage room in the house I shared with my roommate and nested in the hanging plant beside my bathroom window. Every day I would sneak up and stand on the toilet to see the baby birds in their nest. After they fledged I stared at the empty nest for weeks, full of angst. Then one day I took it down and set it in a corner of my room, and as I sorted my stuff and prepared to move, whenever I came across some small scrap of paper or other piece of detritus, I tossed it in the nest. This would be my last Santa Fe spell—Taking Flight. On a night lit by a waxing moon in late July, in Adrienne’s yard, we set the nest inside a big fireproof bowl and lit it on fire, and then I jumped over it as it burned. Goodbye, Santa Fe. Goodbye, Will.
MOON ALTAR FOR TAKING FLIGHT SPELL
Sky-blue tissue paper
House finch nest
Found paper scraps
Three pillar candles
Four elements: pile of dirt (earth), feather (air), red candle (fire), cup of water
Moon disks: mirrored, mother-of-pearl, silver
Feathers
Necklace of turquoise beads
White handkerchief
* * *
—
I called Erika and said I wanted to buy a custom spell. We set up a time to meet at the Ditch Witch store. She was a rectangular woman in a tank top and worn jeans, with cropped hair, a thick nose, and tattoos of flowers and birds winding up her arms and shoulders. When I walked in she started talking and didn’t stop.
“The word witch comes from the Old English wych,” she said. “W-Y-C-H. It means ‘to bend.’ What I do is try to bend people’s perceptions, just a little bit.” She gestured as if bending the air in front of her, as if it gave resistance and she had to really tweak it. She didn’t make much eye contact with me, and her manner had the geekiness of a computer programmer. I suspected that, similarly, she was used to spending her time translating what appeared to be a near-constant stream of thoughts into code—some personal lexicon by which she sorted her universe and r
endered it as art.
“I’m moving to New York,” I said. “I need a spell for a soft landing.” I paused. It was time to put the rest into words. As I had done when I first began saying schizophrenia out loud, and then cried at random times for months while it sunk in that refusing to say it hadn’t made it disappear. Now would be the time to turn away from that chaos, that inaccessibility. “And—I want a partner,” I said, “someone who wants to build a life with me.”
She wrote my words down and looked at a cabinet behind her, which was full of old boxes and worn bottles and bowls full of amulets. “I think I know where I can start,” she said.
When I came back for the finished spell, she had it inside a refurbished wooden box onto which she had glued a red heart-shaped rock. She held up the glinting spell and explained each of the items, all of which came from the ditch. A red porcelain shard meant love. A large heart-shaped rock was me and a small one was the partner I would find. A pencil and slate she put there because, as a writer, I might want to write something of my own onto the spell. “Hang it up near you, someplace where you’ll see it a lot,” she said. “And read what it says on the flyer. Magic is the art of changing consciousness at will.”
CONTENTS OF ERIKA’S CUSTOM SPELL
Clear glass lid, no handle
Coat hook, bent, rusty
Copper disk with a pentagram painted on one side and LOVE, ERIKA 2010 on the other
Glass bottle with cork lid, filled with dirt, incense, and blue “magic sand”
Shard of blue-glazed stoneware
Shard of red-glazed porcelain
Shard of green-glazed stoneware
Shard of white porcelain with red deciduous-tree design
Large heart-shaped rock
Small heart-shaped rock
Short yellow pencil
Flat piece of slate
Thin copper tag hand-engraved with words articulating the spell:
Marin
Partner in All Aspects
Soft Landing
* * *
—
I have an idea that love is less a feeling than an action, or really a long series of actions that intertwine to form a kind of web, and the web is life. I perform acts of love for the people I love, and so create my world. In the same way, witchcraft isn’t a system of belief for me so much as it is a series of acts—of imagination and will. These are the acts by which I have built a life where madness does not reign.
When I took home Erika’s spell I didn’t mention it to Will. He knew I had ordered one, but I never told him what I asked for. He seemed in a state of suspension, behaving as if we would be together forever and yet as if we were not together at all. “Once I’m gone,” I told him, “it’s over, you know. For good. I can’t ever come back to this.”
“Yes,” he said gravely, “I know.” But something in his face made me suspect it wasn’t sinking in.
One week after I got to New York, I told him I needed to stop the phone calls for a while. Okay, he said. My landing, it turned out, was blissfully soft. In my new apartment I hung the spell on the wall above my bed. I took a look at online dating, and on Facebook I changed my relationship status to single.
That did it. I marvel that what it took to convince a forty-four-year-old man that I was actually breaking up with him was a change in status on Facebook. But it hit him like a train. Three days later he wanted me back. No, I said. On one side of the slate I wrote, “Someone who wants to build a life with me.”
No, I said, and I kept saying it. He kept calling. He’d had an epiphany, he said. “It’s too late,” I said. He would repeat himself, and I would say I’d wait and see. I told him this would never work unless he took control of his life. Regularly I glanced at my spell, fiddled with its pieces, reminded myself that I believed in what it represented, that such a partner must exist and be capable of being found. Something about the spell’s own objecthood, its concreteness, made that imagined future seem more probable. Even likely. It could be touched. On the other side of the slate I wrote, “Someone who can lead. Someone who knows himself.” And at night I sighed in relief for the many miles that kept me from driving to his house and climbing into his bed.
We went on like this. As we talked I would lie on my bed and look up at my spell. One night as we Skyped I showed it to him, and read him its tag, and read what I had written on the slate. He looked as sad as I had ever seen him.
When he quit drinking, I was floored. Then he came up with a plan to leave his editing job and split his time between New York and the Southwest, working as a freelancer. He said he could make it work. It seemed that the determined, devoted man I had once seen in him had returned. And become more. “Who are you and what have you done with my boyfriend?” I said.
“This is me,” he replied. “This is me being me.” He told me he wanted to be the small rock in my spell. I said that if we were going to try again, we needed to work through all the things that had gone wrong that first year. He agreed.
That spring we hung the spell up in our new Manhattan apartment, inside an old gold-leaf frame my grandmother once gave me. And when we later moved to Tucson together, I gave it pride of place in our new house. It would be glib to say the spell worked. I worked. Will worked. The world remained as wild as ever, of course. But we found a new way to do things, the two of us, by way of that spell. So sometimes I still pause beside the wall where it now hangs, and I touch the red porcelain. Sometimes I take the slate in my fingers and turn it so the graphite catches light from the window, and I read again the magic words.
Vagabond
When you go hunting for advice about how to help a mentally ill loved one, much of what you find actually focuses on what you can do for yourself: Learn as much as you can about mental illness, find a supportive community, ask questions. We did this, all of us. We took the National Alliance on Mental Illness’s free classes. We read books like When Madness Comes Home and Surviving Schizophrenia. I talked to doctors and read articles and met with support groups. Dad consulted experts, conferred with lawyers, met with people with schizophrenia who had rebuilt their lives. He even gave presentations at the police department to help Crisis Intervention Team–trained officers better understand mental illness and its human costs. Much of this helped us enormously, and it certainly improved my relationship with my mother, but ultimately it did very little for Tom.
I had had it in my head that it would take maybe six months or a year on the street before Tom changed his mind about treatment. It was a number I pulled out of the air and soon enough it was proven wrong. I did continue to believe that eventually, with us or without us, Tom would choose to come inside again and begin the long, slow journey back to health. But I must have known the odds deep down, held them there, buried: the likelihood of things going another way. His thoughts were so convoluted, his grasp on reality so thin. What drove his decisions was at once more immediate and far more distant than such a choice required. He was aware of the basest necessities and most transcendent abstractions, and almost nothing in between. All the midlevel motivations—for applying for jobs and signing a lease and paying bills and buying towels and mopping the floor and changing the oil—all that had fallen away.
As I learned more about schizophrenia, I would call Dad and offer up suggestions, wondering could we try this, could we try that. But inevitably he had already considered and discarded the ideas. Could we get him an apartment? Pay the rent and utilities for him? He’d leave something on the stove and burn the place down. What about hiring a personal caregiver? They couldn’t be there twenty-four hours a day. That would take three full-time employees. What about API? API didn’t have enough beds to meet the demand, so it pushed people out as quickly as possible. What about a private psychiatric hospital, someplace he could stay
longer—like the place Mom was at for three months? Charter North was no longer a psych hospital but an addiction recovery center for teens. What about some other private psych hospital? There were no other psych hospitals in Alaska, private or otherwise. What about moving him to a hospital outside of Alaska? He’d walk away. We couldn’t force him to stay there, and once he was out he could go anywhere. We’d never see him again.
I thought of Tom out there in the enormity of America, unknown in the communities he passed through, uncared for, with no one around to look out for him, no one to tell us they had spotted him, no way for Dad to check on him. Places where the cops didn’t have CIT training, where police were more aggressive toward people with mental illness than they were in Anchorage. I had begun noticing news items about police killings of unarmed or lightly armed mentally ill men in situations that could have been de-escalated. It was common enough if you kept an eye out for it. And in my conversations with others who had mental illness in their families, I had heard about parents who avoided calling the cops when an ill son was unstable because they were afraid he’d be shot rather than helped. No. That didn’t seem like the best idea.
