A Ghost of Myself

After voting yesterday my son and I paid a visit to the Detroit Science Center to see the “Accidental Mummies of Guanajuato” exhibition. Detroit is the first of seven cities on the tour of the mummies. Because of certain soils and certain dry conditions, mummies occurred naturally in Guanajuato and have been a tourist attraction for years. They are on view in this exhibit.

It was a very gentle show of very quiet, long-dead people. The overriding impression was of a dull brown, the color of a worn-out paper lunch bag. Everything had become a shade of that color, from the parchment-like skin stretched over fragile bones to the ribbons and bows and buckles and stockings left clinging to the remarkably tiny, mostly very Indian bodies.

Years ago one of my professors brought to class the mummified body of a cat that had squeezed under the crawl space of his house and died. It was beautiful in death in a pose of agony that was nothing more tragic than the slackening of muscles and jaw. It had taken on the exact same brown color as the human bodies in the exhibit. It was almost weightless and there was no odor at all, except the soft odor of dust and earth. We spent hours drawing the twisted form, understanding the form and the process.

At the exhibit I came face to face with the figure of a woman who had been very old when she died. She was fully dressed in a formerly colorful skirt and shawl, with a full head of white hair and, as tiny as she was, gave the impression of a woman who was secure in a certain level of power and intelligence. I knew at once she had been a witch before even reading the copy. And that she had been loved.

She greeted me with her hollowed-out eyes as if she knew me, and seemed to invite me to come over to the other side for a visit. So I painted this portrait of myself as a ghost, faded and brown and haunting empty rooms with chains rattling and my jaw hanging loose, too. The map in the painting tells us where we have been and where we might be going.

Acrylic on paper and silk with feather border. 32 x 40 cm.