Three Ghosts - By Kate Walsh

Silence is not absolute, because matter vibrates as a fact of its existence. Silence only names a quality of refused rationality, refused sociality, which is to say refused intimacy. So it’s not so much silence as it is the ghost, the ghosting, of severed connection, a renunciation of the possible in the service of coherence of normativity. Such ghosting is the presence of loss.

—Ashon Crawley

Alida Walsh (1933–2006)

Filmmaker, sculptor, multimedia artist, and my dad’s second cousin

Mary Walsh-Brand (b. 1945)

My dad’s second cousin and Alida’s sister

Susan (Susie) Walsh (1938–1966)

My dad’s sister

Katherine Susan Walsh (b. 1982)

Me

We didn’t know each other.

In early 2017, while researching my family for an entirely different project, I discovered a relative of mine whom I never knew about. Alida Walsh was a queer feminist experimental filmmaker and artist who was active in the late ’60s and ’70s in New York City. Discovering her existence led me on a research journey to her archives at Smith College, to Florida to meet her sister (another relative I had never met before), and to talk more deeply and intentionally with my dad about his family and memories. I quickly learned that Alida was a contemporary of my father. They grew up blocks from each other in South Shore in Chicago but never met.

Between my family’s silence about my aunt Susie—who died by suicide before I was born and who was also a lesbian—and this newly discovered relative, I found myself in a winding narrative of queerness and silence, ghosts and grief, memory and myth, and mysteries of severed ties.

I started this research on my own journey of healing and (re)discovering my queerness. Sitting alone in my room, recovering from a wrenching breakup, I discovered Alida’s name while looking at Ancestry.com and then googled it, pulling up a summary of her work, and was immediately obsessed. I dug in harder, searching and searching for any info or connections to her at all. She had been in one of the first women-only shows in New York. She protested against the Museum of Modern Art not including women artists. Who was this person? I secretly wished to myself that she had been gay. Or at least on her own. I found a picture of her at her wedding. My heart sank.

I kept googling. I found people who knew her, and I started calling them. One woman used to work with the National Organization for Women. She told me some slightly incoherent stories about celebrities, and she didn’t really know Alida. She said, “Get to interviewing all of us. We’re all dying.” I never followed up.

I called Inverna Lockpez, another person with whom Alida’s name was always connected. On the phone, she was abrasive and abrupt, asking, “What do you want, exactly?” I asked her, “What was your relationship with Alida?” “I was her lover,” she said matter-of-factly. I drew a sharp breath and awkwardly continued the conversation, but my heart swelled. (I soon discovered that Inverna was an amazing person in her own right: a participant in the Cuban Revolution, an artist, a thinker, and a writer worthy of her own project.)

I found Alida’s sister, Mary, also my dad’s second cousin. I emailed Mary about permission to look at Alida’s archive at Smith. We exchanged some calls and agreed that I would come to Florida to meet her. Mary picked me up in her car at the airport. I told her that she could recognize me because I’d be wearing all black. She said, “That makes sense. You lived in New York.” Mary was kind and open and a slightly terrifying driver. I got a UTI while I was there, and she took me to urgent care and waited with me as if it were nothing.

I recorded Mary and me talking for hours. We also talked to my dad together. He talked about his sister’s (Susie’s) funeral. Mary remembers being there, remembers hearing that Susie died from “overwork,” not from suicide. My dad didn’t seem to understand what I was doing or why. It was all hard. I didn’t ask all the questions I wanted to.

Right before I met Mary, I talked to my dad for a long time about Susie and his youth, while sitting in a park in San Francisco. We cried together. I learned more than I had known before. Susie was an incredible piano player. She drank a lot. She wrote letters home. She protected my dad. He didn’t remember a lot of things. They had a difficult childhood—a cold, harsh household, with alcohol, silences, and outbursts.

The only other time I had really heard about Aunt Susie was when my dad and I had gotten into a fight years before. We walked around the high school track in my hometown, and he told me about his sister, that she was gay, that she had come out to my dad, that she had taken sleeping pills and died on purpose, that my grandfather had gone to retrieve her body. After Susie’s funeral, the family never really spoke of her again. Likewise, Alida’s family (besides her sister Mary) never spoke of her work, her lesbianism, or her artistic legacy. At Alida’s funeral and memorial service, some family members asked for her work to be taken down and not shown at all.

There’s an old Irish tradition of keening (performative wailing and singing) at wakes and funerals. There were keeners at Susie’s funeral, but it’s no longer common in the United States. Part of the musical aspect of this project will be performing a sort of keening for these lost connections, for these ghosts of people I never knew but feel deeply connected to. This entire project feels deeply connected to Irishness. Perhaps part of this project is trying to heal my generational trauma, to allow the grief to run through me, and then get to a new place of belonging. To publicly acknowledge, assess, and perform grief and then to try to let it go.

Alida, Susie, and Mary all went to the same Catholic elementary school, within a couple years of one another. I just keep thinking, what if I could have known Alida and Susie? What if they had known each other? Could have had each other’s backs? Helped each other survive? And helped me find my way too?

In my more uncharitable moments, Susie represented what I was theoretically scared of becoming: withdrawn, sad, an alcoholic and workaholic, lonely, someone to feel bad for. She was the ghost that hung around our family. A fog, discreet looks in silence, confusion. Circling around subjects we couldn’t and wouldn’t talk about. A starkness, a coldness, a chilling draft. I wondered about her so much, and I would find myself squinting in just the right way to see myself in her. I would imagine us drinking beers on a Chicago three-flat back porch, laughing and joking, talking about books. In my journal from many years ago, before I started all this, I wrote about Susie: “I think a lot about how I got here. I’ve been thinking so teleologically. Like I’m an end to something. I guess that’s how I’m supposed to think. … I want an answer. I want a book. A whole book. That I can start and not ever finish.”

Alida is what I theoretically wanted to be and what I wished Susie could have had the chance to be: a force to be reckoned with, confident, making art because she couldn’t possibly do anything else, even if she never “made it.” Deeply personal and vulnerable in her work, literally naked, whereas I was ashamed, embarrassed, taken aback when I first watched her films. This was a way I could never be but sometimes wish I could. Was I looking to her for permission? Maybe her art is bad, I thought. I don’t really know. Do I even care? What do I want from her? What do we all want from our queer ancestors? Maybe it’s a projected fantasy that when I’m one hundred, some young relative I never knew will find my band’s music and decide it’s worth listening to. Maybe I needed this to feel OK about my own failures and indirection.

Alida, Mary and my dad made it out of their difficult situations, made lives for themselves. Susie didn’t get to do that. I didn’t have to make it out of anything, really. But the presence of loss remains. Like a cassette tape, copied over and over, the presence of loss and decay of sound—the hisses, the white noise, the blips, the warbles. They all make up this presence of loss, present through various generations, through whispers, through words unspoken. I hope that showing Alida’s work, that making music based off of my experiences here, will bring that presence of loss to the foreground, turned up in the mix.

Acknowledgements

The deepest thanks to my family, collaborators, readers, and editors.

Jack Walsh

Donna Besecker

Mary Walsh-Brand

Inverna Lockpez

Jose Luis Benevides

Daviel Shy

Billie Howard

Elanor Leskiw

Emily Marker

Semyon Khokhlov

Sarah Lazare

Abby Glogower

Joshua Boydstun

Claire Keating

Institutional Support

Smith College Special Collections

City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events

Elastic Arts Foundation