Sensuality of the Freeze
by Marina Gross-Hoy
Marina Gross-Hoy, View from the Garden chair, digital photograph, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
Sensuality of the Freeze
MARINA GROSS-HOY |NOV 2024 | ISSUE 39
What does a flower feel when it blossoms? Soft? Beautiful?
After being a seed, then a sprout, how does it feel to unfurl?
Nothing like the process that it took to get there.
— Your mother, on the phone last week
Crunch, the old man standing next to you bites into a tartine slathered in gobs of butter. Yellow flakes of crust snow down onto his neatly knotted wool scarf. Without looking down, he brushes them off with a practiced hand.
You are still waiting for your turn to order a coffee from the barman, who is laughing with two men in neon work jackets on the other end of the shiny zinc countertop. You make no effort to catch his eye. The longer this waiting stretches out, the farther away the moment when you will be forced to cross the river and sit at your desk, plotting like Perseus with his mirror-shield to avoid looking directly at your dissertation and being turned to stone.
The old man is now swirling the end of the tartine in his coffee cup. The skin of his hand is dotted with brown spots you once heard a French friend call ‘fleurs de cimetière’, cemetery flowers. As he raises the soaked bread to his mouth, you realize that his cup is full of hot chocolate. He is trying to taste his childhood. You get a flash of his boyself gobbling up this same meal at his grandmother’s table on another chilly morning, maybe even in an apartment near this café.
You’re just a visitor here, but you try to imagine how deep his gnarly roots must run in this place.
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Scratch, you drag the heavy green chair across dirt and pebbles to the gnarly roots of the plane tree, positioning it so your seat isn’t tippy. Then you commandeer two more, for your feet in front and your book bag beside. After so many mornings in this Garden, you have a system.
You lean back in the cold metal chair and watch three ducks glide around the dark waters of the fountain. The tight pink buds of your magnolia tree are hidden behind thick shrubs on the other side. You’ll go there after. You reach out your hand to touch the bark of the plane tree nestled behind you. Its truck is glacial, but you linger in this skin-to-skin communion. A warm presence, something living, slowly begins to reveal itself across the palm of your hand.
It’s time to get started. You riffle through the chaos stuffed in your bag — a journal, a research notebook, Inventer des musées pour demain, a bag of pens, The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control, a Duplo cat — and pull out two black cases.
You slide on your sunglasses, even though the depressed light of winter has all but given up on itself. You switch on the noise-canceling mode of your bulky silver headphones.
A cocoon of silence weaves itself around your body,
lifting you gently out of this time and place.
You are about to slip away, you tuck the handles of your bag into your arms, you take a deep breath. The audio track starts to play.
You close your eyes.
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“Shhhhh, open your eyes wide,” the woman in the chartreuse sweater whispers, holding up her hands like binoculars. “What’s in the Lady’s box?”
The children seated criss-cross applesauce stop wiggling and whip up their own finger-goggles, pointing them all in the same direction. Perched nearby on a gallery bench, you look over, too, but only with your boring non-imaginary glasses.
Rising up the wall is an enormous medieval tapestry showing a garden stuffed with trees and flowers and animals and a blue tent inscribed with the words MON SEUL DÉSIR, my only desire. At the center, between a lion and a unicorn, a very fancy Lady is reaching towards a chest filled with…
“I see jewels,” offers a quiet voice.
“TREASURE!” shrieks another.
“Yes! Do you remember how we learned that each of the other five tapestries in this room show a different sense? Let’s imagine that the Lady is filling up her treasure chest with each of those delights. The box shows us a sixth sense, a special container that holds all of the other senses so we can choose when to enjoy them.”
The kids let out an Ooooo, but you deflate at this interpretation. This room is wild: everything is in darkness except six fantastical tapestries celebrating sensory bodies. You spin your head around to follow the full narrative cycle on the walls around you — touch, taste, smell, hearing, sight, desire — you are getting dizzy. No, no, no. You can’t swallow it. You don’t want to enter into extravagant image after extravagant image only to climax with moderation.
Is this a choice you are allowed to make? You don’t know if you can be trusted with the too-muchness that lurks in the other direction.
Marina Gross-Hoy, Lux 21 février, digital photograph, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
The barman finally turns in your direction, gliding along the shiny countertop. He twists his head up to gaze into the reflective metal above the bar, and you take your cue,
« Un café … allongé, s’il vous plaît. »
Barely a nod as he retreats to the espresso machine.
Your hand covers your mouth as if you had just belched. How did that allongé slip out? You only meant to ask for un café, an espresso, not a drink that dilutes the taste with too much water, like some vulgar North American.
Your thirst is showing.
The barman lays out the elements of your faux pas with elegant precision. A white cup with a thin red stripe along the rim, a splash of espresso at the bottom. A white saucer, a silver spoon, a sugarcube wrapped in orange paper. Lastly, he gently sets down a tiny pitcher in the same pattern as the cup, twirling away from you as quickly as he came.
You use your forefinger and thumb to handle the dainty pitcher of hot water, as if hosting a tea party for dolls. You pour and pour, filling your cup all the way up to the brim.
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The Lady holds the golden base of a jeweled hand mirror on one side of her lap, while a unicorn rests his front hooves on the other. She looks down at him tenderly, placing her arm around his white furry neck. He is gazing at his own reflection in the oval mirror.
That medieval unicorn likes what he sees.
You cannot look away from his big goofy grin. You are planted in front of the Sight tapestry, the last sense in the cycle before the mysterious treasure chest. But here is the real mystery: learning how to look lovingly at yourself through a mirror held in a warm lap.
Desire aches across your clavicles, threatening to twist the bones out of your body like featherless wings. Tides of visitors rise and recede around you in the dark of the room. You cross your arms across your chest, tucking your hands into the warmth of your armpits.
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You cross your arms across your chest, tapping one hand against a shoulder and then the other, tap tap tap, synched with the binaural beats playing in your silver headphones. In this cold garden chair, you will coax out the part of you that is broken and heal her into compliance.
You visualize yourself sitting at your desk surrounded by mountains of reference texts and your unfinished dissertation, letting the panic pool in your body. Your hands keep tapping. Buzzing is spreading across your chest and calves and hands and…
And you are sitting at your desk, surrounded by mountains of middle school textbooks and a mile-long list of late homework assignments sketched out in purple gel pen ink. Please don’t make me do this, you whimper to the empty room, but that is not a choice you are allowed to make. You will never be found if you don’t become worth being seen.
How did you let yourself get so dangerously behind? You hurry to glance down at the list and pick something small to start, but — oh no! — you have looked straight into the Gorgon’s bloodshot eyes. Her jeering face is a mirror reflecting back your own repulsiveness.
Stay very still, she hisses. Make any movement and they’ll be able to see how stupid you are. But how can they reject what is hidden? Freeze. Choke. Buy yourself time to transform into a person they might be willing to love.
You can’t breathe, you can’t think, your body is clenching down like the watertight doors on the Titanic. Move! You can’t move. Your potential is turning into stone. Paralyzed at the desk, the only sign of life is the gel pen in your fingers doodling blossom after blossom on a flowering branch that snakes around the margins of the untouchable list.
An ocean of archived sorrow swells out from your ribs, filling your body up to the brim. Nothing will ever change. Ancient salt water spills down your grown-up cheeks.
Your hands stop tapping.
Dazed, you open your eyes and register the sun’s passage into its late morning position. But this day will have to wait. You have seen your girlself petrified at the desk and you won’t leave her alone. You plant your cold chair next to hers, reaching down to grab a spiky seed pod from below its mother plane tree to fiddle with your fingers.
Marina Gross-Hoy, Lux 8 mars, digital photograph, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
Your fingers twirl the splash of wine around the wineglass. The waitress is hovering impatiently, staring out at the thick lines of rain flowing down the glass of the windows, the same downpour that interrupted your walk from the Garden to the dissertation desk. You hurry to take a quick sip and release her from this formality.
The wine is not bad, but you do not want to drink it.
Is this a choice you are allowed to make? You apologize with the same remorse as if this woman had personally fermented the grapes. She does not look at you as she goes off to find another bottle.
People are rushing past the windows holding newspapers over their heads. Soon, you will have to go back out there — cross the bridge that leads to your desk and attempt to evade the Gorgon. You shiver at the memory of her humid breath on the back of your neck. You are running out of time. PhDs are like pregnancies, they don’t let you stay frozen forever. If you can’t find a way to induce your own labor, they’re going to cut you open and find your potential is not viable.
But now, here, the storm is offering sanctuary. You open yourself to receive it, washing in the sounds of rain drumming, people chatting, forks clinking. Your body unclenches in this warm bath of wasted time.
Another splash in your glass, the waitress awaits your verdict. This wine is the color of blackcurrants, your favorite shade of lipstick, that tight wool sweater that made you feel so pretty in college.
Swoosh, swoosh, you drag the glass back and forth across the grainy wood of the table.
You raise the wine to your lips
and taste.
The liquid covers your tongue gently at first. Then the flavor announces itself. All the wine tasting vocabulary you’ve ever learned evaporates in the sizzle of your body consuming something that is exactly right. The rightness blossoms. It floods past your tongue and down your throat, branching out to your fingers and across your legs. Your toes curl in your boots. Then, just as quickly, the sensation rushes back up the front of your body and out your empty lips,
« Oui. »
Marina Gross-Hoy, Lux 17 mars, digital photograph, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
A hand reaches for the empty plate you’ve pushed away to make room for your journal, startling you back into time and place. The other tables are empty now, a waiter is wiping their surfaces with a yellow dish towel.
« Vous êtes écrivaine ? »
A young man is standing over you, your lunch plate in his hand. Are you a writer?
You look down at the pen pinched between stiff fingers and the journal full of chicken scratch complaints and prayers and poems. You take in a sharp breath to quickly correct this misinterpretation. Writer is too beautiful a word. These scribbles are just the marginalia of an unfinished dissertation.
But the skin of your hand is still wet from rubbing against the puddles of black ink that have deflowered blank pages.
A smile blooms up from the lump in your throat.
You look up,
« Oui. »
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You look down to dig through your wallet for three coins. The barman has just discretely placed a small silver dish next to your almost empty cup of coffee, the short bill tucked underneath.
Your daily offering of exact change sings out against the metal of the dish, ratta-tat-tat.
The barman keeps his head down as he turns to take the dish and tuck it below his side of the counter. His body completes this arc of movement by twisting towards a cheerful regular.
One last sip, and you lug your book bag over your shoulder. It is time; first the Garden, then the Gorgon. As you pass the barman and his regular, you fling out your customary
« Merci beaucoup ! »
And today,
his voice
meets yours:
« À demain ? »
See you tomorrow?
Your body freezes.
He is holding out a gift, a jewel, an acknowledgment that you have been coming to this countertop for four weeks and ordering the same café allongé and dropping the same three coins onto the little metal dish ploink ploink ploink. He has seen you.
You are seen.
You are not from here. You don’t know this man’s name and he doesn’t know yours. But the regular presence of your body at this countertop has worn out a groove that welcomes your shape.
Your giddiness tickles your chest, waiting to explode all over your face outside on the sidewalk. You turn to look at this person who is planning on seeing you tomorrow, and take a leap,
« Oui. »
Marina Gross-Hoy, Lux 19 mars, digital photograph, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
Marina Gross-Hoy is a scholar, writer, and speaker who lives in the Eastern Townships of Québec. She is completing a Museum Studies PhD dissertation at the Université du Québec à Montréal on the development of digital interpretation projects for visitors. She holds degrees in History of Art from the University of Michigan and muséologie from the École du Louvre in Paris. Marina writes about playing with new ways of paying attention to embodied experience. By subverting the gaze honed through looking at art in museums and turning it onto the ordinary and natural world, her essays explore how engaging with life through this 'museum gaze' can open us up to wonder, compassion, and empowerment.