Mina steps with the quietude of Paris 1931 before dawn to walk ten minutes home down rue du Cherche-Midi from Constantin Brâncuși’s Impasse Ronsin atelier. Commanding the self to unruffle the mind and listen to the sparrows. To what day says prior to delivery trucks and cafés setting out tables. Constantin just now in Mina’s absence scooping tea leaves from his kettle, polish of metal, jagged rough marble. “Constantin,” Mina said upon leaving, “we must never forget your name means ‘steadfast’ and was shared with eleven Roman and Byzantine emperors, several Bulgarian emperors, and two Greek kings.” Constantin who smells of stone, horse, rotted plum.

They talked all night. How to keep the body loose within tightening economy? Architecture within architecture within architecture.

Brâncuși since 1910 has created new works not as individual pieces but as components of mobile groups clustered throughout his studio. He often explains this, as if forgetting that for nearly a decade Mina has regularly frequented his atelier, has many times sat, just so, on a chair between a marble block and the stove. Has turned her face to the heat. Oval, sphere, angle, cube. Form’s completion disrupted by notch, furrow, cleft.

A layer of space. A circumference that properly belongs to the body though invisible to the eye. How else drive a car, ride a horse? A leaf placed on a piece of film set on an electromagnetic plate reveals that the plant’s aura spikes electric violet. Extension, network, constellation, fourth dimension. If the event is Mina, then surrounding the event is the invisible fact that “Mina” means “with gilded helmet.” White silk dress. Perfume of roses. Means also “of the sea.” Also: “will,” “desire,” “protection.” And, in Persian: “azure,” “blue glass gem,” “enamel.” In Coptic Egyptian, like Constantine: “steadfast.”

Also around each body, entity, name—a circumference of time. Brâncuși’s L’orgueil, head of a girl cast in bronze, shared the 1906 Salon d’Automne with Loy’s L’amour dorloté par les belles dames. Five water-colored women in pastel flounces and shawls pose surrounding a fainting nude figure with delicate wings. It’s easy to miss Eros’s genitalia, so finely drawn, but once noticed the expressions on the women’s faces shift from sisterly interest to irreverence and delight. Except for the woman in pink, who sits facing the viewer, her back to the scene. She’s slightly bored as she leans on an enormous blue medallion intaglioed with peacocks and vines.



The closeness of roses. Mina breathes them in as she makes her way down the boulevard in her rose mask.






To hold in the mouth the halo of space surrounding each syllable for the body and the life, the life and the body are part of the gall gates of the house. The roof beams, the walking sticks, the distaffs, the spoons. Breathing in on the contraction to a count of four. Exhaling for a count of six on the release. Repeat. Even while walking across the café, across the square, across the stage in the dark. Repeat this moving through water. These gestures confect a process that speeds up until they go unnoticed. But slow them down, film on a reel, they become offerings. The horse in mid-gallop floats all his legs in the air.







In 1931 drought overtakes the midwestern plains of the United States, and dust from overworked land billows into storms. Scientists at Columbia University demonstrate the existence of heavy water, an essential step in transforming common uranium into the plutonium that will fuel nuclear bombs. In 1931 László Bíró first exhibits his ballpoint pen in Budapest. Nylon is invented. The Empire State Building is completed and opens as the tallest building in the world. Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights premieres. Dracula starring Bela Lugosi premieres. Frankenstein starring Boris Karloff premieres. In 1931 Boris Yeltsin, James Dean, Rupert Murdoch, and Desmond Tutu are born. US unemployment reaches eight million. In 1931, the Black American teenagers Willie Roberson, Olen Montgomery, Ozie Powell, Eugene Williams, Roy Wright, Clarence Norris, Andy Wright, Charlie Weems, and Haywood Patterson are wrongly accused of raping two white women aboard a Southern Railroad freight train in northern Alabama. All but the thirteen-year-old Roy Wright, a minor, are sentenced to death. Virginia Woolf’s The Waves,Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth, and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath are published. Bunker’s woodrat goes extinct. In 1931 seven to nine million people visit the Colonial Exposition in Paris. The first Surrealist exhibition in the US opens at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, before moving on to Julien Levy’s gallery in New York City. Salvador Dalí paints The Persistence of Memory. Frida Kahlo paints Frida and Diego Rivera. Georgia O’Keeffe paints Cow’s Skull: Red, White, and Blue. The George Washington Bridge opens, and the Whitney Museum of Art is founded. The electric razor and the aerosol can are invented. In 1931 Greta Garbo stars in MGM’s Mata Hari. Gowns by Adrian include a fifty-pound gold mesh beaded dress with dolman sleeves inspired by Léon Bakst’s costumes for the Ballets Russes. In 1931 fashionable accessories are suede gloves with matching bag and shoes, a red or gray fox fur flung over one shoulder, batik scarves, large rings, and watches set with gems. In 1931 an average of 133 businesses collapse each day. Premier banks in Austria and Germany become insolvent, and the US suffers a second round of bank failures. In 1931 Thomas Edison, Anna Pavlova, and Khalil Gibran die. On May 4, speaking in private to Nazi party members, Hitler says, “We can achieve something only by fanaticism.” “The Star-Spangled Banner” becomes the US national anthem. In 1931 Al Capone is indicted for tax evasion, a British committee awards sole ownership of the Wailing Wall to Muslims, and Amelia Earhart crashes in Abilene, Kansas, exiting the fiery remains of the plane unscathed.  






For mid-mornings at Le Dôme, Mina selects a table by its relation to other tables. Her preferred place: outside, next to the potted majesty palm. She and the palm eavesdrop in English, French, German, and Italian; with her little gold pen she begins to write the next section of her Book. It is June 15, 1931, a Monday under the sign of Gemini’s incompleteness. Mina once had been a sphere, now is hewn in two. Why else pause over coffee, over a cradle, over a sewing machine, over a ledger, over a telegraph, over the writing of a book while caught in the sensation of loss? Lost in that primordial divorce, divide, disunion, uncoupling, unyoking. Oh, why do we ever part, cut, detach, break, burst, sever, and scatter?

At the next table a woman recently arrived from New York City spoons sugar into her tea as she tells her companion about the premiere of Martha Graham’s Lamentation, which she attended at Maxine Elliott’s Theater on Broadway.

As the four-minute dance begins, Graham sits spot-lit on a spare bench. Statuesque, wrapped head to toe in a tube-like costume of violet jersey, legs turned out, knees out in a wide second. A birthing position. The violet jersey is attic drapery, a shroud stitched from Chanel couture twisting as the dancer’s torso angles, pelvis rooted and torso reaching. The costume clings, stretches with the extension of arms, head, legs. The spiral begins from the inside of the body and works its way out. Wrapped in mood, light falls on Graham’s lifted face as she contracts and releases a form of grief that doesn’t drop like a flower or attitudinize like a frieze but spirals from the center through torso and arms. A star falls into itself then bursts out.

What had been I reveals I had been all along not only eternal light but sparrow, shoe, tooth, teacup, chewing gum, vowel.

The arm a wing. The wing an arm.

The brass sphere rocks back and forth. On vacation at the shore waking early and pulling on her lover’s nearly dress-length sweater and pinning it here and here and here before making her way to the water, Gabrielle Chanel discovers that the raw jersey fabric of men’s underwear and sailor sweaters neatly tailors to the female form.

“The scandal of it;” says the woman’s Parisian companion—la danse, while seated—“only an American could dream such a thing.” Sparrows skitter after crumbs of a baguette. The dance invites the dead to appear for a moment in the theater, a feather drifting down as the houselights are raised. A feather resting in the hand. A feather tucked into a pocketbook.

Lamentation.

—aeolian alien anima anneal annotate atilt atman atone elm elation eon entail entoil eolian inane inmate innate intent into iota intone lament lamina latent alone—

At my café table I am writing this down while saying “yes” to the waiter and his suggestion of another espresso, as if all I had on my mind was espresso. “Yes” to the square of lemon cake sent over with the compliments of the man at table five, as if all I had in mind was the man at table five. Meanwhile, I say to myself, for wine glass write “breakage.” For progression of society write “knot.” Between each phrase write the telegraphic “stop.”






A gramophone sings. An airplane roars. For the 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition, open since May, the French milliner Agnès has designed an Algerian hat with a fetching “native” side point. Woven of strips of brown wool to show hair at one side in the smart new manner, this hat is worn by none other than that icon of style, Baba. Since prior to the exhibit’s opening, Knox in New York has had this hat.

New York possesses the hat, sells the hat. Paris replicates the colonies: within fifteen minutes of the Palais Garnier visitors are transplanted to the Bois de Vincennes—exhibition grounds populated by the jungles of Africa, palaces of Angkor, entire villages of Congo huts, Chinese temples, and, as if in collusion with Knox in New York the buildings of Mount Vernon, manufactured by Sears, Roebuck and Company. The exhibition doesn’t include the property’s eight thousand acres divided into five farms, which had been worked by over five hundred enslaved people at any given time. The Guyanese exhibit also omits slaves and prison laborers. Offers instead butterflies of blue enamel. Fine hammocks.

The pavilions have been created for Baba entering through the Port d’Honneur in a smart tweed suit. Baba in baby blue with navy bows at the neck, shoulders, hips, and wrists posing with an enormous plume of cotton candy before the oval lawn parterre. Baba languid in silver Vionnet bias-cut silk against the central obelisk. Baba slinking past twenty-two illuminated pyramids. Baba in black with a necklace featuring an enormous zircon cross pausing before the performance of cascades and jets colored by electric lights in the “Theater of Water.” In 1931 “supermarket,” “nuclear physics,” and “military-industrial complex” enter the lexicon.

L’intransigeant and Paris-soir report that in thrall to the Colonial exposition numerous designers and shop owners have replaced the traditional white wax mannequin with dark-gold abstracted figures by Siegel and Stockman, makers of tailors’ dummies, window bust forms, and mannequins since 1867. Their heads bear a striking resemblance to Brâncuși’s 1909 La muse endormie, just as their limbs resemble his 1923 Bird in Space. These golden goddesses pause languidly in the arched windows of the high, pink Madagascar Palace, crowned by four bull heads. They linger seductively in the French national pavilion wearing lingerie, or draped in Mme Pangon textiles—velvet, chiffon, and silk batik printed with soap bubbles, peacock feathers, seaweed, fruit.

Once an ancient forest home to boar, deer, ortolan. Bacchus, Diana, Silvanus. Then the hunting ground of royals. Then military training grounds. Then public park, then prison grounds housing Denis Diderot and the Marquis de Sade. Mata Hari during the First World War prior to her execution in the Bois de Vincennes blows a kiss to the firing squad.






On the opposite side of the exhibition’s “Theater of Water” stands Giles, back from the dead. Stolen from Florence when he was twelve by Haweis who, while Loy was in New York, had taken him to live in the Caribbean. Giles died unexpectedly two years later, in 1923. Yet here he is, grown into his safari jacket and pith helmet. By the time the waters stop, he’s vanished.

“If you see Mina,” Haweis had written, “tell that her that he lived finely and died bravely”—making much of the fact that Loy had left Giles’s letters unanswered. If her silence and not a rare cancer hadn’t killed him, it at least amplified, Haweis wrote, Giles’s suffering. Had Loy really left her son’s letters unanswered—had she, and why?

“At the Exposition,” a critic writes, “we reconstitute the marvelous stairway of Angkor and make the sacred dancers twirl, but in Indochina we shoot, we deport, we imprison.”

On the fringes of the Bois where itinerants pitch their tents, Mina joins a stranger at his campfire. Staring into flames she states Giles’s death was the most difficult thing. And then repeats “the most difficult thing” with gestures. She puts her hands in the fire, and I put my hands in the fire, fire travelling up my sleeves, down my dress. The stench of burnt cotton, burnt hair, burnt skin.

A radio broadcast cuts out after reporting that Britain has just released Mahatma Gandhi from prison, where he’d been held for walking twenty-four days to the Arabian Sea to lead an illegal harvest of salt from its waters in protest of the British salt tax. When the broadcast cuts back in a reporter announces that between March 2020 and November 2021 the collective wealth of the world’s richest increased by 1.3 billion dollars a day. Dresses made from the loveliest iridescent fabric lift, all at once, into flame.






I go to the library always alone. Alone with soft lights creating the halo of space in which I sit, documented by security cameras and therefore inhabiting the quintessential position of the twenty-first century. Always alone but never alone. Loy in an unadorned peasant dress, pearls, and chandelier earrings, hair parted in the middle and pulled softly back, sits in the center with Berenice Abbott—Brâncuși  and Tristan Tzara to their right, Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson to their left. Empty wine glasses in the foreground, the group casts shadows across the crumbling walls of Brâncuși’s atelier in this file folder’s copy of a 1923 photograph. An orb of light nestles in Loy’s lap just where his Sleeping Muse might have been.

The next folder’s manuscript, nearly one hundred years old, disintegrates along the edges. Where will Loy be found when she leaves her paper form? Typescripts, handwritten drafts, doodles, drawings, patent designs unfold across whatever is at hand: address books, cablegrams, tracing paper, notebooks, typewriter paper, invoice slips. Letterhead from the Paris lamp shop partially funded by Peggy Guggenheim, opened in 1926 and sold in 1930. The shop’s address is printed in peacock blue. The lamps had been a success but overwhelming, especially after Julien Levy came calling. Tobacco, vetiver, and something indistinguishable but quite sharp. Young Julien admiring Loy, flirting with Joella then marrying her six months later. They depart for New York in 1928. Nine-year-old Fabi tending her menagerie.



Who would answer if I dialed the shop’s number? Digitized, does Loy live in the space between paper and screen? She made her lampshades from fragile material—cellophane, paper, the new mailable plastics.

Brâncuși in contrast ensures the preservation not only of his works but also of the spatial configuration so essential to his practice by bequeathing his original studio to the French state upon his death in 1956. Workbench and tools exactly as he left them along with 137 sculptures, 87 bases, 41 drawings, 2 paintings, and over 1,600 glass photographic plates and original prints. The studio is dismantled and then reconstructed at the Centre Pompidou inside a building designed by Renzo Piano in 1977. 

Joella donated Loy’s papers to the Beinecke in 1974 and 1975. A collection of 4.25 linear feet housed in 8 boxes. Compare this with the H. D. Papers: 30.88 linear feet, 71 boxes. The Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers: 93 linear feet, 173 boxes, which is joined by the Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Collection: 24.41 linear feet, 45 boxes. The Ezra Pound Papers: 203.4 linear feet, 300 boxes. The Langston Hughes Papers: 305 linear feet, 673 boxes.

Loy’s most brittle pages are preserved by clear, polyester protective sleeves, a material perhaps not unlike Verrovoile, the delicate plastic—glass fabric—Loy invented for the detailed work of her sculptural floral lamps, their finely lined leaves. Arum lily. Trumpet lily. Lamp shop stationery torn at the corner, Loy worries her designs are being stolen, and I am so close to knowing the light or heavy fabric of her dress and Clarice Lispector–like in the living room balancing a typewriter on her knees. Fountain pen, ballpoint pen, biro, pencil, and red crayon. Incomplete.

The body is us, exceeds us.

Only Joella, Fabi, Julien, Djuna Barnes, and Natalie Clifford Barney knew of Loy’s novel, her prose, her Book. A curator suggested I read Loy’s letters and drafts housed in the papers of Carl Van Vechten—the writer and photographer who acted as informal literary agent for Hughes, Wallace Stevens, and Stein and promoted the Harlem Renaissance to white audiences. He and Loy became intimate friends after meeting at Moose’s Villa Curonia salon in 1913, and Van Vechten was essential in placing Loy’s early work. In a 1915 letter she describes a new project that must have been a novel, the book goes well —26 thousand words so far—I think it is new—I wonder if it will get published—of course it is entirely imaginary! In June she had written him with excitement about what seems to have been the same project: I am writing a book—the purest—most truthful—and personally imaginative book that could be written—She goes on to offer a bit of the book about the Colosseum at night, filling an entire stationery page with impressionistic prose describing a sensual encounter with stamens of flowers . . . the spring beating things into her arms which would not come.

Box 6 holds shorter works—stories, essays, plays, meditations and uncategorizable writings mostly unpublished until the scholar Sara Crangle transcribes and edits them for the 2011 Stories and Essays of Mina Loy. “Mi & Lo,” sixty pages of philosophical fragments on form, universal energy, and the body as a lightning rod, commands attention. Undated but thought to have been written in Paris in the early ’30s, the first page is just seven words scrawled in cursive, letters spaced equally, continuous but with more pressure on downward strokes and crossbars—

      Power                         

force animating                  

            Body-                     

   Electric Prayer

I rush across this page, hardly notice it in the reading room, but at the sublet I zoom in on the digitized version to study the word Power. Nearly crayon-like when compared with the smooth graphite of Loy’s other lettering. Perhaps written in a pastel pencil she had just been drawing with. This, and its cramped placement on the page, creates the impression she added it after the fact. Or perhaps it was written first and after meditating on Power Loy expanded into force animating. The solar plexus’s little sun. Paper and pencil reveal the hand, reveal the temporal nature of all the writer touches—paper aging into gold and two puncture wounds at the left margin as if Loy had entertained, and then abandoned, a crude binding. Electric Prayer for our shattered era, etc. Etc underlined emphatically twice. 

Power. Force animating. In this philosophical mode Loy contrasts conceptions of events with events per se, providing the example of a woman starving to death. She proposes that as we read about the woman her suffering holds our entire attention, leads us to contemplate the social injustice of such a tragedy. In contrast, in the event per se of starving to death there is no energy to comprehend anything beyond my shoulder blades are bobbing through my jersey dress and the awareness that it would be as impossible to extract a peso out of anybody as to travel to the moon. Starving to death, a person feels nothing but an awful fool—

Convention asks each of us to behave as if we have constant volume, but this is a misunderstanding of the movableness of the I, its lacy, fictive nature—

Against skylike washes of ethereal gray-blues float gray-blue beings. Incipient human forms emerging from snail shells. Disembodied cherub heads with wings. Hands juggling stars. For this series of paintings Loy completes in 1932 and shows at Levy’s gallery in 1933, she creates a new medium made of sand, plaster, gesso—a mixture of animal glue binder, usually rabbit skin—chalk, and white pigment.

A light leap over nothing, into nothing. The faces Loy paints in blue mirror the profiles she sketches in the margins of her manuscripts.