Like the popular depiction of a ghost — a floating spirit made visible only by dressing in a sheet — it strikes me as profound, chilling, and silly all at the same time [10]. I appreciate this mixture of responses because it stems from the splintering effect cloaking can elicit: it can conceal to reveal, but also transfigure, mock; it can also amplify by muting. To cloak brings forth a marketplace for various transactions, like the transaction the late author Joan Didion [11] refers to in her preface for Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968) when she says, “My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests.” They “forget” her, but she does not resist. Instead, Didion leverages not being “seen” as a chance to observe how the subject of interest consumes the space left by her absence. Author Rachel Cusk uses this same device but differently in her “Outline” series, three novels (2015-2018) in which readers comes to know the main character Faye purely by learning about the characters she encounters and the stories they tell her, not her own. Like Didion, Faye is a conduit, a relief imprint of her surroundings, a foreground defined by her background.

When reading the “Outline” books, this literary maneuver struck me as the most cunning method for capturing a female reality I had yet come across in a novel. And I suppose I owe much to Cusk for what happened months later when I found myself on set directing three women-identifying friends, naked yet shrouded in white satin, rendered anonymous — the outputs of which became my woman is a word series [12]. Not only were these feminine forms cloaked but onto them I also projected footage of mountains that I had manipulated into a psychedelic pattern. I wanted to see how these layers might compete to recede and advance back and forth, obscuring definitions of subject and context. Colorful, slightly pulsating shapes roved over the blank forms of these cloaked bodies, which subtly pulsed with the tapping of hands, nodding of heads, and yawns occurring intermittently under the fabric. These elusive movements representing the tracking of human time, performed alongside the presence of geologic time, or what author John McPhee coined “deep time,”[iv] [13] symbolized by the mountain ranges that wash over the blank figures in vivid waves.

Close your eyes and you might imagine Didion under that satin, or Cusk, or even me, a woman approaching forty and wading through physical and psychological trials of preparing for motherhood. Some of this was disorientating, painful, some rewarding. All of it sharpened that original, intimidating question of whether to create something out of the “fabric” that I’ve collected over the years. Must doing so entail procreating in its literal sense or can it mean something else? Can the absence of one thing define what remains to the point of fulfillment? Is what’s missing significant? Does one’s desire for a child mean that their selfhood has already been consumed by the background, the context that surrounds them? How might motherhood reverse the composition, resigning one to the background in service to the foreground? Will this perceived disempowerment engender other methods of empowerment, as it did for Didion and Cusk’s craft?

Here, again, my mind conjures the conventional ghost, that floating sheet symbolizing the intersection where depth, fear, and frivolity meet. Thanks to the Anthropocene in which we live, child rearing feels even more fraught, requiring great intention and resilience if we are each to do our part in restoring what ecological balance we can as a matter of our species’ survival. It can also seem trifling, and for the same reasons it’s gravely serious: in the end, our efforts may just be a laughing joke to the fate that awaits us. And while the times we exist in heighten this perception, this has always been the case. The cosmic backdrop will replace us on centerstage at some point.

There’s value in confronting this reality, in embracing the idea that “investing in dreams has always courted their ruin,” as Maggie Nelson puts it in her essay “Riding the Blinds,” in which she explores the complexities of raising a child in the shadow of grim facts. Embracing this tension is to grasp that every creation bares some level of destruction, every success some element of failure. To acknowledge that every subject is vulnerable to its context, that the stillness and serenity of the setting is in fact an illusion. To embrace this is to “cloak,” if only temporarily, so that one may observe all that surrounds something, and how the shiny fabric covering it deflects from whatever junk may lay underneath. The “cloak” mindset is to in effect uncloak, make naked, whole. It is to strip words like “woman,” “mother,” and “artist” of their veneer, recognizing them as mere precarious symbols, puppets of their context, which dictate how much power, weakness, or absurdity courses below the surface. As an “artist,” “woman,” and now expectant “mother,” this is the work.

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