June 20, 2023
Philothea tells me that I am a Gate
A black-clad nun wearing a tight scarf over a conical hat tells me her name is Philothea and she’d like to show me the cathedral’s basement. It’s carpeted. She asks repeatedly if I’m Ukrainian or if I can, at least, speak Ukrainian. Before each gothic painting of Jesus she repeats the five languages of spreading christ’s love. I’m not really listening, I’m fixated on her eyes, which I think are one of the divine languages: to make all people feel love through smiling eyes. We stop in front of a sallow virgin with gray skin and dark concavities. She’s holding a despondent jesus. His eyes are rolling and he’s got puckered up lips. In the other hand, she holds a daisy. A daisy, Philothea says, in all her languages.
We turn to the daisy. Theadora, the nun says, your name means that you are a gate. You’ve been given the name of a gate and to be a gate you must open. With grace your body is a gateway to God. Consider the daisy. We can, she says, caress a daisy to our cheek.
It’s suggested the daisy might send me into a state of ecstasy. She claims she’s seen it before with other women who have also been gates. Now her eyes are at some primal crux. I am a gate. It’s working, I’m converting. The daisy, she says—yes, I’m listening!—opens in the morning and closes at night. It is like life. We too are always following the day. She’s starting to glow. “Jesus Christ” she bellows, arms lifting up, getting bigger, ascending.
Then she suggests I, as a gate, write a book about the daisy. The book:
offers relief, in need stop, whimpering
home’s not bad, over here, full of mice,
“intimacy” and “collage”
this is about “person” and the possibility
of kindred mouse living inside
a thumb and a strong palm dig into my back
that side, this side, that side
again, this side, it seems fine and then it falls apart.
Theadora Walsh is a writer based in Oakland, California. Her work has been shown at The Glucksman, the Granoff Center, The Shed, and Pratt University. Most recently, invited by the artist Chip Lord, she contributed work to The Exquisite Moving Corpse, a video project that has shown internationally. Her essays and art criticism can be found in Art in America, Artforum, Variable West, Hyperallergic, Art Papers, BOMB Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, Gulf Coast Magazine, and elsewhere. Currently, in collaboration with Gabriel Garza, she runs a curatorial project called In Concert.