Alida Walsh and Generative Grieving - By Daviel Shy

Alida Walsh and Generative Grieving

My partner lost her mother in August. Perennial public learner that she is, she has turned her pain, anger and “dark night of the soul” into an intensive studying and teaching of grief and its oft forgotten but deeply essential ties to the creative process.

And so my lens, by proximity and circumstance, in engaging with Alida Walsh’s legacy, is steeped in the tea of grief and healing, and of what grief has to teach and to offer us as artists, viewers, healers and children.

I asked my mother, a Rabbi, why it is customary to cover mirrors during times of grieving. She responded that it is not a time to focus on superficial things. My own research found that there is also the superstition that a departing ghost might become trapped in the mirror on their way to salvation. Perhaps the putting away of these tools of self knowledge is a custom more reflective of a culture which encourages looking away from death and death’s effect on the living than a prescription rooted in making space for grief, solace, and healing in the mourner?

Walsh’s films request the viewer to instead perform a long steady look in the mirror; at the undersides of society, identity, and life. They are unapologetic for the death necessary and inherent to any rebirth. In Happy Birthday I’m Forty, aging is seen as an occasion for devouring the confines of one’s birth or circumstance. In the film, the artist bursts forth naked, fully grown, free and self-named out of the ashes of a postwar militaristic identity both conjured and shed in the same breath. Sped-up home movie footage creates a vocabulary of movement that naked grown Alida replicates and destroys. Her starched upbringing, represented by a white-tiered birthday cake between her legs, is sumptuously and grotesquely smashed between her fingers, rubbed over her painted body and eaten. Here the confectionary carcass of childhood may be reconstituted inside of the shaman-goddess, so that the “wild and wonderful,” “squirmy” bits can be reabsorbed, while the conditioning and rigidity, excreted.

In I Want to Go Home, the cyclical deterioration of her mother’s memory is recorded, gently but diligently over the course of eight years. Alida builds this work through radical patience and the wisdom to show up for death’s gradual arrival. She makes a film of, for, and about the decay of her mothers’ memory- her painful return to a primordial daughter seeking home, seeking “mama” womb, seeing birth, beginning. Committing not merely to the idea of cyclical natural time, but the messy realities of it.

In Lady of the Lake, a woman polishes a mirror while her reflected self polishes the world beyond her: barren, mesmerizing, teetering between form and void, kaleidoscopic, breathing. She holds the other her’s hand as together they stir a pot of music; a chaotic, drumming, popping, mechanized yet primal funeral dirge, and she is multiplied. Her skin’s surface, blue and shiny, another lake in itself. In the sustained repetitive action, (ritual) the woman dissolves the surface, her own reflection, and time and space as the “lake” of the mirror gives way to cataclysmic cosmos. Her tactic is to stay with the metaphor long enough to earn its breakdown, both testing and rewarding the patient viewer. To be superficial would be to look upon a mirror and see the glass. Instead, Alida’s Lady of the Lake rubs the mirror into a portal.

Throughout these films Walsh maintains a commitment to what Malkia Devich-Cyril calls, “metabolizing grief.” There is a difference, Alida shows us, between reflective and reflexive. Like many in the Women’s Movement, Alida is an escapee of the society that bore her. But Alida Walsh clings to the complexity of her context and her escape. Rather than a condemnation or a complete breach, she demands a holding between a term and itself- between the seed and the plant, the mother soup of circumstance and the universe we create by surviving our parents.

Alida the priestess, Alida the healer, chain-breaker, myth-maker: Making us ask, is that a sunrise, or an explosion? Juxtaposed with a sea turtle. A creature, they say, that carries a calendar on her back, thirteen months on the outer ring and each day of the year inside. This primordial connection is to a kind of time tied by tides and bodies that move together. As mammals we were all carried in that sea, the connection of child to mother, the relation of coming from her body.

Alida the devotional daughter, who does not fear ghosts or monsters, but stays with the circumstances of her birth, and the repetitive presence of memory keeping, inviting her mother’s demons, even as the leak in her mother’s cohesive narrative becomes a flood.

Alida the filmmaker, composer, musician, the editor. See her diligently sewing the painful moans of her biological origin into the song of loss that is our universal beginning/ destination.

-Daviel Shy