Mosaic pilgrim: Maya Deren’s The witch’s cradle as filmic poem, dissociative medium, and fragmented channel facilitating a pilgrimage towards ecstatic awareness through art; and, Mosaic pilgrim: poems

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Content Mosaic Pilgrim: Maya Deren’s The Witch’s Cradle as Filmic Poem,
Dissociative Medium, and Fragmented Channel Facilitating a
Pilgrimage Towards Ecstatic Awareness Through Art
and
Mosaic Pilgrim: Poems
by Fox Frazier-Foley
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL,
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(LITERATURE & CREATIVE WRITING)
August, 2016.
Degree Conferral Date: 12/14/2016
Mosaic Pilgrim
Contents
Chapter 1: CPR for the Human & Magical
(Introduction) 1
Chapter 2: A Sure Poet 29
Chapter 3: A Poetics of Incantation 69
Chapter 4: Turning in the Widening Gyre
(Conclusion) 100
Appendix A 107
Appendix B 114
Appendix C 119
Appendix D 121
Appendix E 123
Bibliography 128
Mosaic Pilgrim: Poems 135
Mosaic Pilgrim
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Fox Frazier-Foley 1
Chapter 1: CPR for the Human & Magical
I. A SYSTEMATIC DERANGEMENT OF THE SENSES
OF POETS AND SEERS
In 1871, sixteen year-old Arthur Rimbaud wrote letters to two of his friends,
detailing part of his creative process: a “systematic derangement” of all his senses. In
contemporary parlance, Rimbaud was describing a temporary, controlled obliteration
of the ego that allows other forms of knowledge—usually those experiences described
as ecstatic—to filter into the human consciousness. As Rimbaud himself presented the
idea:
“I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The
poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and
systematic derangement of all the senses. Every form of love,
of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes
all the poisons in him, and keeps only their essences. This
is an unspeakable torture during which he needs all his faith
and superhuman strength, and during which he becomes
the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed—
and the great learned one!—among men. For he arrives at
the unknown! . . . He reaches the unknown; and even if,
crazed, he ends up by losing the understanding of his visions,
at least he has seen them! Let him die charging through
those unutterable, unnamable things: other horrible workers
will come; they will begin from the horizons where he has
succumbed!”
1

That same year, in his poem “Drunken Boat,” Rimbaud again expressed, and
investigated by enacting, the inextricable relationship between poeïsis and ecstatic
vision: his poem’s unmoored vessel (the drunken boat: a vessel that contains and/or is
the poet-seer) traverses uncharted territory, kept in flux by the currents of “the poem
of the sea,” navigating experiences both luminous (“l’éveil jaune et bleu des phosphores
chanteurs”) and hellish (“nasses / Où pourrit dans les joncs tout un Léviathan”).
Rimbaud’s project of investigating these overlaps between ecstatic vision and the poetic
impulse is very similar to the project I have undertaken in pursuing the central
inquiries of this dissertation. His justification for such a project of “derangement”—the
1
Kwasny, Melissa (2004), Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry, Middletown,
Conn: Wesleyan University Press. This letter of Rimbaud’s is sometimes referred to as “Letter of
the Seer.”
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2
temporary obliteration of one’s own ego and the particular narratives said ego has
invested itself in believing—is also, in many ways, shared by both the subjects of my
dissertation and myself. A certain brand of artist actively seeks encounter with what
Rimbaud called “the unknown,” and to allow ourselves to be illuminated by new
knowledge, markedly apart from the socially imposed narratives we have been
conditioned to understand and accept (or, as some might say, to place our faith in).
Of course, Rimbaud is far from alone in his embrace of such principles.
Mystically inclined individuals have employed a number of different means (including
but not limited to: prayer, meditation, automatic writing, religious ritual,
hallucinogenic drugs, and ceremonial dance) in order to facilitate mystical experiences
in which the ego is displaced.
2
This surprisingly large swath of self-fashioned “adepts”
includes poets such as William Blake
3
and Allen Ginsberg,
4
religious practitioners of
various denominations or paths
5
(including religions such as Spiritualism and—as my
argument will particularly detail—Vodou), scholars such as William James,
6
and entire
artistic movements such as Dadaism and Surrealism, whose participants sought to
unlock “the unknown” from man’s own subconscious.
7
This fascination with the
mystical, the occult, and the general unknown was a continued focus in the Modernist
literary tradition, from Plath’s use of the Ouija board to Yeats’ involvement with the
2
National Public Radio correspondent Barbara Bradley Hagerty provides a decade’s worth of
meticulous research and interviews that detail these various methods of disrupting ‘normal’
consciousness in order to reach an encounter with the Numinous, in her book Fingerprints of
God (Riverhead Books, 2010).
3
“The paths of excess lead to the palace of wisdom,” Blake wrote, and although there remains
some uncertainty as to how the visions described in his poetry were achieved (through drug
use, meditation, or hallucination born of mental illness, to name a few enduring hypotheses),
few seem to doubt that Blake experienced some sort of ecstatic vision that other poets and artists
wished to emulate. See Harvard M.D. Lester Grinspoon’s Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered:
“Blake, above all other poets in English, seems to have been able to enter voluntarily into states
of consciousness that others reach only by means of psychedelic drugs, and the shock of
recognition has caused many drug users from Huxley on to borrow his words to describe their
experience.”
4
“I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations,” Ginsberg tells readers in “Howl,” and then, in
the same chapbook, writes a poem about seeing Walt Whitman in the supermarket after
dropping acid. See Howl and Other Poems, City Lights: 1956.
5
Including but not limited to: the Catholic St. Theresa, ecstatic practitioners of Sufi mysticism,
contemporary Buddhists and Spiritualists, and faithful practitioners of both the Quaker and
Vodou/Voodoo/Vodun/Vudu traditions, both of which are predicated on direct personal
contact with the Numinous, frequently referred to as “Spirit.”
6
See William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience.
7
See Leon Surette’s The Birth of Modernism and Andre Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto.
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3
Golden Dawn to H.D.’s mediumship and séances.
8
Artists who created groundbreaking
works in the mid-1900s and thereafter, embracing a postmodern reality, continued to
plumb the depths of such mysteries—even those who identified as skeptical and
secular, such as Gertrude Stein.
9

10
This thread can be seen in later, millennial works of
American and American-ish
11
artists, as well—the incantatory, Buddhist-inspired non-
attachment of work by poet and performance artist Bhanu Kapil,
12
the mystical,
American Islam-influenced orality of Sonia Sanchez’s poetry, and the trance films of
poet and auteur Maya Deren.
13

However, where Rimbaud and many others have approached their encounters
with the unknown by repudiating (however temporarily) their capacities, respectively,
for conscious, critical engagement (and, presumably, other sensibilities that might be
utilized in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of empirical data), my goal has
8
For a thorough historical discussion of these, see Helen Sword’s Ghostwriting Modernism.
9
An evident example of this would be Stein’s automatic writing experiments when she studied
under William James at Johns Hopkins University. Stein later disavowed the experiments,
saying she did not believe anything “unknown” had been revealed from her subconscious, and
that she was in control the entire time. However, automatic writing has been at least partially
validated in a more secular sense; the exercise of automatic writing is employed or advised by
some psychotherapists, because, setting aside questions of the paranormal, it is seen as possibly
revealing subconscious ideas—i.e., thought processes in which the writer is not in conscious
control. This is attributed to the ideomotor reflex, which is significant to practices of
hypnotherapy and other aspects of psychological research. For more on the subject, see Ray
Hyman’s article, “The Mischief-Making of Ideomotor Action,” published in 1999 in The
Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine (Fall-Winter). For more on the ideomotor
phenomenon, see D.B. Cheek’s “Some Applications of Hypnosis and Ideomotor Questioning
Methods for Analysis and Therapy in Medicine”, in the American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis,
Vol.5, No.2, (October 1962), pp. 92–104, and J.W. Anderson’s “Defensive Maneuvers In Two
Incidents Involving The Chevreul Pendulum: A Clinical Note,” in the International Journal of
Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, Vol.XXV, No.1, (1977), pp. 4–6.
10
The effects of these early forays into automatic writing also appear to be palpable in Stein’s
later aesthetic inclinations, which utilize the sort of word repetition so common to automatic
writing exercises—only in a more calculated way, and to an arguably more deliberate effect, in
her crafted work, such as Tender Buttons, which relies in part upon the phenomenon of
semantic satiation (also called semantic saturation) for the efficacy of its aesthetic results.
Semantic satiation describes the phenomenon in which, due to repetition, one’s synapses tire
out temporarily, and the repeated language effectively loses its meaning for a temporary period
of time. Particularly, this later work of Stein’s utilizes the semantic satiation that results from
automatic-writing-like repetition in order to deliberately deprive words of their familiar
meanings in the readers’ minds, allowing them to garner new meanings and associations, and
thus for small, unknown truths hidden in our language to prevail. For more on the
psychological phenomenon of semantic satiation, see Leon Jakobovits James (April 1962):
"Effects of Repeated Stimulation on Cognitive Aspects of Behavior: Some Experiments on the
Phenomenon of Semantic Satiation."
11
I am not sure that Maya Deren or Bhanu Kapil would necessarily self-identify as American,
and intend no presumption in listing them thusly. Both of them are/were, at least, longtime
residents of the United States, though Deren was Ukranian by birth and Jewish by heritage, and
Bhanu Kapil is a British woman of Indian ethnicity.
12
Subject of a later chapter in this book.
13
Including Meshes of Afternoon and At Land, and her later film, the documentary Divine
Horsemen, which attempted to document experiences of religious trance.
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been to harness my abilities in these areas, and to apply them to my focus on works of
art created by visionary authors and auteurs—and I use the plural here because my
initial vision was for a larger critical project that focused on more than one artist.
During my early research, I became very interested in crafting a scholarly analysis of
aesthetic approaches that enact a systematic derangement of the senses: this dissertation
is an attempt to construct a more supple critical mode of academic interaction with
ecstatic art and literature. I am attempting, in this way, to contribute to extant critical
discourse about art that allows its audience of readers and/or viewers to participate in
achieving their own respective experiences of that Rimbaud-esque form of
enlightenment.
During my course of doctoral study at USC, I found myself interested in poetic
work that incorporates and interrogates lived experience of trauma. How does an artist
mine an experience of destabilizing the ego—without stopped at mere reportage or
reenactment? How can we trace the aesthetic choices employed by an artist such as
Maya Deren, who uses her art to not only describe, but enact a feeling of ego
destabilization? I would like to investigate and evaluate what experience this type of
work deliberately crafts for its audience: what new types of knowledge, what small
mosaic pieces of “the unknown” might filter through into the consciousness(es),
respectively and collectively, that they stimulate and expose.
My initial conception of a larger critical project, from which this dissertation is
drawn, was predicated on mapping common aesthetic—poetic—ground among several
works by authors writing the ecstatic from marginalized perspectives. These included
H.D.’s Sword Went Out to Sea, a volume that looks like prose but that borrows much of
its aesthetic structure from her earlier, book-length prose poem, The Gift; Maya Deren’s
early film, created in collaboration with Marcel Duchamp, The Witch’s Cradle, which
her mentor and other scholars agree marked her difficult transition between writing in
the medium of poetry and writing for film, with a great deal of aesthetic overlap; Bhanu
Kapil’s prose-poetry-as-performance art in Ban en Banlieue; Sonia Sanchez’s American
Islam-influenced poetry that honors an oral tradition of American literacy and liturgy,
Blues Book for Blue Black Magical Women; and Gertrude Stein’s avant-garde play Four
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Saints in Three Acts. The nature of my doctoral research has never been predicated on a
simple, linear tracing of aesthetic or creative influence from a given point in the past,
culminating in expression at some later date. Rather, my project has been to identify,
explore, and develop an understanding around some of the ongoing dialogues between
visionary works from various disparate time periods, conjured into being by creative
minds whose physical and psychic identities, and the life circumstances that shaped
them, were markedly different in many obvious ways. I became interested in these
works because, while all of the aforementioned authors are well-established poets, the
work of each that I came to focus on reads initially as genre-defiant. I am interested in
the ways that such ecstatic works trouble simplistic definitions and expectations of
poetry, calling to their audiences from the uneasy, less-defined spaces among
established genre conventions. Despite these ostensible differences in identity, in genre,
and in lived experience among the authors mentioned above, it remains an undeniable
fact that these creative souls were all touched by the traumas of war, sexual assault, and
other forms of violent aggression that are committed against marginalized bodies—and
that they have employed the aesthetics of altered states to investigate those experiences
on a grander scale. I am interested in what these women and/or non-binary artists, and
their non-linear, not-rational, ecstatic art can do for how we define and talk about
poetry and the poetic impulse. Due to the exigencies of time, however, I will focus in
this dissertation on the piece of the project that has emerged most powerfully for me:
the causes and effects of Maya Deren’s aesthetic in her development of the filmic poem
The Witch’s Cradle.
OF GENRE AND THE BODY
I will examine Maya Deren’s early, unfinished film, The Witch’s Cradle, as a
visual/filmic poem. I will first map the marked aesthetic overlap that occurred between
Witch’s Cradle and Maya Deren’s poetry (which she had, up until this point in time,
focused on accomplishing regularly and seriously) as she made the major career
transition between literary writing and writing for film. I will argue that the aesthetics
revealed in Deren’s poetry—intuitive rhythms, non-linear temporality, distorted or
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disrupted use of space, and an immersion in striking imagery that includes the
sustained implementation of symbol—are the core components of this film. I will
complement this analysis by drawing from recent decades of literary aesthetic theory
that began expansion towards recognition of video elements in work defined as poetry,
drawing my own parallels between Deren’s work and the work of contemporary poets
such as Billy Collins, in his Action Poetry
14
, to further evolve these extant definitions.
Part of this argument will include parsing more fully the difference between poetry
videos and filmic poems. For example, most current definitions used to evaluate art that
relies on interplay between language and film functions in the way that writers such as
William Wees have suggested:
…a number of avant-garde film and video makers have
created a synthesis of poetry and film that generates
associations, connotations and metaphors neither the verbal
nor the visual text would produce on its own.
15

While this is clearly true, such definitions are incomplete because they reduce
all language to “the verbal.” My argument will argue for expansion of such definitions,
based upon semiotic theory, which demonstrates that any system of signifiers might be
considered a type of language, and in particular I will focus upon nonverbal language
that is expressed by the body in poetry videos created by ASL poets and performers—
most of these include the verbal, written text of the poem at either the beginning or
end, and ASL poets refer to them as “English translations” of the pieces they use their
bodies to communicate in each video. Arguing that symbol and the body bring
language of their own, in a non-verbal way, to Deren’s short, unfinished film, I will
illustrate the ways in which The Witch’s Cradle is not a poetry video by contemporary
standards
16
, but is in fact a visual or filmic poem.
17
I will then examine the role of the
14
http://www.bcactionpoet.org
15
Wees, William “The Poetry Film,” from Words and Moving Images (Wees, William, and
Dorland: Eds.). Mediatexte Publications,1984: pp. 109.
16
As I will discuss in later chapters, most poetry videos exist as book trailers, made to
promote the books of poets upon publication. They function essentially as music videos
frequently do for popular songs: one poem from the new book or one song from the
new album is set to a few minutes’ worth of video image, usually narrative in nature,
and contingent in all its functions upon the parameters laid out by the extant verbal
poem or song. In filmic poetry, the two elements are inextricable, and one type of
media or communication—verbal vs. visual—is not privileged over the other, but
rather work in symbiosis to create a unified experience for the viewer.
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body inside the universe of this video poem, and will also analyze the ways in which the
body of the viewer is involved, both voluntarily and involuntarily, in the experience of
the unnamed female protagonist around which the film centers.
After delineating the ways in which the viewer’s body and consciousness are
compelled to identify with the bodied experience of the film’s protagonist, I will
establish the ways in which she is a stylized version of the author’s identity during a
time when trauma effectively obliterated her ego. I will discuss the ways in which the
poetics of The Witch’s Cradle combine with Deren’s fascination regarding the occult
and trance states, creating a deliberate attempt to parlay sexual and psychological
trauma—both consensual (occult experiments) and non-consensual (a harrowing
experience of sexual assault from which she had to escape)—into an encounter with
larger, metaphysical questions. As the young woman in the film is held against her will
by artifacts and objects of ritual magic, Witch’s Cradle interrogates the relationship
between things-perceived-as-objects and their potential for subjectivity—and the way a
human being, once objectified, might be able to access the arcane, occult knowledge of
a possession state—trying to answer the question of how one might begin to create a
new kind of subjectivity where agency has been denied.
I will explore the system of spatial distortion and temporal disjunction Deren
employs in this (and later) work that interrogate and mimic states of possession and
trance, allowing (or perhaps inviting, or seducing, or forcing) the reader/viewer to
experience such states firsthand, while still trying to see past the moments of ecstatic
state and offer some sort of rumination regarding what type of transformative
knowledge might be imparted, to both the protagonist and the audience, as well as to
what end. My inquiries regarding The Witch’s Cradle will also include a discussion of
how Deren’s physical identity, which caused her to feel some measure of social
marginalization, may have contributed to the respective ways in which she processed
and experienced her lived trauma—as well as the respective ways in which she chose
17
The phrases “visual poem” and “filmic poem” will be used interchangeably from this
point on. “Poetry videos” is a phrase that will be used to denote the type of film
experience described in footnote 19.
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to mine, interrogate, stylize, and re-shape her trauma through her art
18
—towards a
greater metaphysical end. War, sexual assault, and the marginalization of important
artistic work by women and other minorities continue to be shockingly ubiquitous;
violence, aggression, and the competition for resources that results in brutality and
subjugation are a part of the human experience that has arguably been coded into our
DNA by evolution.
19
So, today it is as relevant and important as ever to question how
we might develop, from trauma that destabilizes the ego, both artistic and spiritual
apparatus that enable us to learn more about ourselves and our shared human
condition—and perhaps even begin to improve said condition through that psychic
understanding facilitated by art.
And The Witch’s Cradle does grasp, flail, and grope towards greater—
metaphysical—truths, drawing influence from an incantatory poetic tradition that
dates back thousands of years, across cultures, back to the earliest days of the Bible and
beyond: circling endlessly around the transformative connections humans might find or
formulate among the Numinous, an altered consciousness, and the incantatory power
of language, image, and rhythm. In such ways, this poetic work develops and maintains
an incantatory aesthetic that seeks to suspend the consciousness of the ego and draw
18
And, as trauma theorist Judith Herman notes, “The fundamental stages of recovery [from
traumatic experience] are establishing safety, reconstructing the trauma story, and
restoring the connection between survivors and their community.” Herman, Judith. Trauma
and Recovery. New York: Basic Books, 1997, p. 3. Emphasis mine.
19
In addition to the human competition across the planet for resources, which might be seen as
an empirically animal behavior and arguably related to the evolutionary tendencies of animals
(including humans), there have also been recent studies that have suggested that memories and
learned behaviors are passed down from generation to generation in our DNA. A team of
researchers at the Emory University School of Medicine participated in a study in which
laboratory mice were trained through punishments and minute violence to feel fear whenever
they smelled cherry blossom. The fear, aversion, and other adverse emotional reactions the mice
were trained to experience reflexively were passed on to their “grandchildren,” by means of
alterations in parts of the DNA in the mices’ reproductive fluids that were specifically
responsible for sensitivity to the cherry blossom scent. Changes in brain structure were found
in the mice and in at least the next two generations of their progeny, as were the changes in
DNA. Although the mices’ children and grandchildren were never exposed to the cherry
blossom scent, they avoided it immediately upon first exposure and exhibited signs of fear,
aversion, and negative emotion. The scientists’ report concluded that, “The experiences of a
parent, before even conceiving, markedly influence both structure and function in the nervous
system of subsequent generations.” This has raised the possibility that we inherit at least some
of our knowledge and memories from the experiences of our ancestors; once this becomes
plausible, it is not a far reach to suppose that some of the genetic memories possessed by the
human race involve subjugation and brutality over competition for resources. For more on the
study, see Brian G. Dias and Kerry J. Ressler’s “Parental Olfactory Experience Influences
Behavior and Neural Structure in Subsequent Generations,” in Nature Neuroscience 17, 89–96
(2014).
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forth some measure of that “unknown” with which Rimbaud so desperately sought
encounter.
Immersing myself in Deren’s work—as a scholar, an artist, an initiate of an
ecstatic religion predicated on direct encounters with the Numinous, and a woman who
has been subject to violence due to aspects of her own identity—I was inevitably drawn
to the way Maya Deren attempts to embrace experiences of cruelty and trauma, and to
dwell in the spaces of psychic and cognitive dissonance that such experiences create.
From Deren’s meticulously researched biographical record, provided in beautiful detail
by the scholars of The Legend of Maya Deren Project (Catrina Neiman, Millicent
Hodgson, and the late VéVé Clark, respectively), it is clear that the raw material for The
Witch’s Cradle was in large part drawn from traumatic lived experience(s). The
Witch’s Cradle both seek to utilize said trauma, however, as a transformative
experience: as the ego is displaced, false and familiar narratives (including the very
identities that have been prescribed for us by society
20
) are stripped away; other ideas,
narratives, and forms of knowledge are allowed to gather more prominence and
momentum.
21

Of course, the struggle to create philosophical or metaphysically-inclined
literature/art out of trauma, degradation, and suffering is far from new. The poetry of
Georg Trakl or Wilfred Owen, the prose of Victor Frankl or Tim O’Brien, all the way
back to the Biblical Book of Job, and beyond—the Western literary canon is rife with
such examples. And yet frequently, the voices of women, ethnic minorities, and sexual
20
David Foster Wallace explores this notion as a very difficult gendered concept in Brief
Interviews with Hideous Men, in a monologue that struggles to articulate how a victim of
violent trauma must work to regain the identity that has been obliterated: “. . . when everything
that has any connection to the you you think you are gets ripped away and now all that’s left is
only: what, what’s left, is there anything left? You’re still alive, so what’s left is you? What’s
that? What does you mean now? See now it’s showtime, now’s when you find out what you
even are to yourself. Which most people with dignity and humanity and rights and all that
don’t ever get to know.” See pp. 121-122.
21
Interestingly, this clearing of the mind and temporary obliteration of the ego is a tenet of
many religious practices, including Spiritualism, Vodou, and some Buddhist paths, as well as
some of the more ecstatic brands of Christianity. This dissertation will focus on the ways in
Spiritualism and Vodou incorporate these ideas, as those paths were of particular import to
H.D. and Maya Deren, respectively; but for more on the ways in which some practitioners of
Buddhism embrace this ideal and integrate it into their practice, see Dr. William D. Lax’s
“Narrative, Social Constructionism, and Buddhism,” in Constructing Realities: Meaning-
Making Perspectives for Psychotherapists. H. Rosen & K. Kuehlwein, eds. New York: Jossey-Bass,
1996.
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minorities have been ignored when attempting to interpret large-scale traumas or
events (such as the epidemic of sexual assault in America, such as experiences of war)
in this way. In particular, there is a long history in the Western canon of women’s
narratives being relegated to the domestic sphere. Even as recently as 2010, it was
deemed noteworthy—a milestone of sorts—that Katherine Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, a
film about both the lethal danger and the addictive nature of serving in war, could have
been directed by a woman and could have won high accolades and recognition within
the entertainment industry. And so, in considering what voices and perspectives might
have been (or still remain) marginalized, and whose work might still have much to
offer that is yet unmined, I found myself interested in the aforementioned works, and
Deren’s in particular, partly because they were created, respectively, by women who
have undergone trauma largely based upon various aspects of their physical
identities—and, particularly in Deren’s case, the traumas of an ethnically Jewish
woman whose family fled the Ukraine to escape vicious anti-Semitic pogroms, between
the desperate poverty of World War I and the anti-Semitic genocide of World War II,
who would live in America as an immigrant, as the child of immigrants, and who
would also become a divorcée when the social stigma surrounding that status remained
very strong in the USA.
However, I am also interested in Deren’s work for the genuine attempt at
redemption it seeks to deliver both its creator and its audience. Its unabashedly spiritual
orientation is, I think, sometimes considered incompatible with the rigorous skepticism
deemed vital for respectable academic inquiry—a contradiction that interests me. It is a
contradiction that I want to help unravel—as, in the intellectual lineage of William
James, interdisciplinary scholars such as Ann Taves and public intellectuals such as NPR
correspondent Barbara Bradford Hagerty, among others, have already begun to do.
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OF THE BODY AS A LIMINAL TEXT
Of course, it is not merely the influence of residual social stigmas or prejudices
that have relegated work this exciting to literary purgatory. While the groundbreaking
psychological work of Sigmund Freud and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s brand of
phenomenology will both inform my methodology as I analyze the ways in which the
construction, execution, and overall efficacy of Deren’s work has been predicated on
the body and bodied identity, these aspects of my methodology remain unable, by
themselves, to capture a complete picture of the way her work, and the work of many
other marginalized artists, exist in the world. As philosophers and scholars such as Luce
Irigaray,
22
Iris Marion Young
23
, Judith Butler
24
, and, later, Elizabeth Grosz have
pointed out, the works of both Freud and Merleau-Ponty uncritically posit an educated,
bourgeois, heterosexual, able-bodied, white, cisgendered male perspective as the
universal standard.
25
This, of course, becomes problematic when discussing the
identities, lived experiences, sociological viewpoints, and even sensory perceptions of
artists who embody virtually none of these traits fully.
26

22
In finding flaw with Merleau-Ponty’s “apparent generalizations regarding subjectivity which
in fact tend to take men’s experiences for [all] human ones,” (Grosz, p. 105) Irigaray uses
Merleau-Ponty’s own metaphor of one hand touching the other (one as subject, one as object,
though the roles are in theory reversible) and subverts it in An Ethics of Sexual Difference. On
pp. 134-135, Irigaray writes of these symbolic hands touching one another in a way that
refuses any sense of hierarchy or domination: “With no object or subject. With no passive or
active, or even middle-passive. A sort of fourth mode? . . . The hands joined, palms together,
fingers outstretched, constitute a very particular touching. . . . A touching more intimate than
that of one hand taking hold of the other. A phenomenology of the passage between the interior
and the exterior.” This subversion of Merleau-Ponty’s metaphor has often been cited as an
entry point of feminist phenomenology. Irigaray does not argue against or seek to invalidate the
philosophical work of the hands, but rather seeks to inject a multiplicity of viewpoints into
discourse on the subjects of consciousness and lived experience—here, an arguably feminine
(and arguably feminist) one.
23
See Iris Marion Young’s essay, “Throwing like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body
Comportment Motility and Spatiality.” Human Studies, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Apr., 1980), pp. 137-156,
in which Young navigates, in considerable detail, the differences between body as subject and
body as object, and presents very persuasively, with a great deal of evidence and articulation,
the idea that female embodiment and feminine lived experience differ from male bodied-ness
and masculine lived experience, in ways that Merleau-Ponty does not seem to recognize.
24
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York:
Routledge. 1990.
25
Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism, Indiana University Press,
1994. Page 19: “There are always only specific types of body, concrete in their determinations,
with a particular sex, race, and physiognomy . . . one body (in the West, the white, youthful,
able, [cis] male body) takes on the function of model or ideal.”
26
Grosz, page 19: “Where one body . . . [is treated as the] ideal . . . its domination may be
undermined through a defiant affirmation of a multiplicity, a field of differences, of other kinds
of bodies and subjectivities. Indeed, there is no body as such: there are only bodies—male or
female, black, brown, white, large or small—and the gradations in between. Bodies can be
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However, the groundwork has been laid by scholars such as Nietzsche
27
,
Foucault
28
, and Grosz, for my interpretation of Deren’s work—and The Witch’s Cradle
in particular—respectively, as both bodies and as texts
29
; they have all been inscribed
with values and identities that set them apart from the aforementioned standard, and as
such they may not have yet received the attention—quantitatively or qualitatively—that
they deserve. As philosophers and theorists such as Martin Heidegger
30
to Michel
Foucault
31
and Judith Butler
32
have already discussed at length, our culture has
developed a binary approach in assigning value to things—true or false, right or
wrong, valid or invalid, white or black, male or female, straight or gay, etc.—that has
not been fully challenged. Those who exist in less easily categorized bodies, and
therefore whose experiences are lived (and expressed) from less easily categorized
perspectives, are treated, consciously and subconsciously, as a deviation from the
standard—and perhaps thus as less important.
This attitude seems to me to be projected, at times unconsciously, in literary
conversations: when, for example, Victor Frankl writes Man’s Search for Meaning, our
society discusses his book as having something important to say regarding the human
spirit and the human condition.
33
However, even scholars who admire and respect
H.D.’s work, for example, refer to her as “one of many women writing about war in
innovative ways,” and discuss her work particularly in terms of what it says about
represented or understood not as entities in themselves or simply on a linear continuum with its
polar extremes occupied by male and female bodies with the various gradations of intersexed
individuals in between, but as a field, a two-dimensional continuum in which race and possibly
even class, caste, or religion form body specifications.”
27
Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Geneaology of Morals/Ecce Homo. Trans. Walter Kaufmann.
28
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish.
29
Grosz, 130-134.
30
Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit.
31
Although this is a theme that permeates much of Foucault’s later work, it is perhaps
particularly prominent in Discipline and Punish during his explanation of Panopticism,
wherein he breaks down the binary identities of prisoner and guard, or transgressor and
punisher: the system has been created so that every potential transgressor monitors, regulates,
and punishes himself.
32
Discussed at length and notably in Gender Trouble, among her other works.
33
Although this reception of the book is deserved, and is also so unanimous in Western culture
so as not to really need a supporting reference, the language in this review, published in a
popular American newspaper, provides merely one apt example of that greater-scale reception:
“Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, a powerful psychological
memoir and meditation on the author’s experience at Auschwitz, argues that meaning, not
success or happiness, is the driving pursuit of human life.” (Emphasis mine.)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/04/this-book-youve-probably-_n_4705123.html
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being female during World Wars I and II.
34
Surely such classifications are intended to
present a viewpoint other than the “standard” as being equally worthy of inquiry and
discussion—an obviously valid premise. And, in earlier decades, it was likely useful; it
is well-documented, for example, that Maya Deren was publicly disrespected by her
male literary colleagues in ways that would be considered intolerable today.
35
However,
I would like to suggest that this particular tactic may have outlived its well-intentioned
use when we examine such work in this historical moment.
At this point, a contemporary feminist scholar (and artist) finds herself
navigating difficult, nebulous territory: how to talk about women who create art based
upon lived, traumatic experiences—without allowing this to function as the sole or
reductive lens through which we explore or understand their work. Interpretation
based solely upon biography and bodied identity seems to have become part of a larger,
now-reflexive social apparatus that guides us to emphasize biography when analyzing
art or literature created by a woman based upon an experience of trauma—to the point
that we sometimes treat such work as mere reportage, reducing complex works to some
sort of essential truth about the particularly female experience, rather than interpreting
it as saying something more grandiose about the human experience.
3637

38
While it is
34
The Sword Went Out to Sea. Foreword.
35
Twitter would have had a field day with the ways in which Arthur Miller and Dylan Thomas
spoke to her at events where she was invited to present alongside them as a panelist, an expert
in their shared fields. Chapter Two of this dissertation (and the writings of film scholar P. Sitney
Adams) provide a closer look and greater detail.
36
Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath were, and continue to be, perhaps the two best-known and
most-accessible victims of this treatment. Even grade-school Language Arts and English classes
today often instruct students to understand their work as mere reportage, with a slapdash
explanation that the label “confessional” signifies unstylized précis of life experience.
37
See, for example, the poet and editor Lynn Melnick’s essay, “I’m Fine, Thanks,” in Among
Margins: Critical and Lyrical Writing on Aesthetics. Eds. Fox Frazier-Foley and Diana Arterian.
Ricochet Editions (Los Angeles): 2016. Melnick describes various professional settings in which
her work, which deals with concepts of trauma, is repeatedly—almost insistently—greeted with
too-personal “concern” at readings, and treated as “confessional,” despite the fact that it clearly
does not fit any standard conventions of the confessional aesthetic. She notes that when this
happens, her male counterparts who write about traumatic or violent experience are usually
addressed with questions about their aesthetic decisions regarding how they decide to render
said experiences in their creative work—rather than with questions about whether their subject
matter is reportage or based in biography.
38
This sort of reductive treatment can be seen, too, in application to writing and art that
encompass race as well as gender. See Lisa Lee’s recent essay, “Report from the Field: Racial
Invisibility and Erasure in the Writing Workshop.” VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. January
2016. http://www.vidaweb.org/report-from-the-field-racial-invisibility-and-erasure-in-the-
writing-workshop/ Lee describes, among other things, a male colleague interpreting her
fiction as non-fiction because it described a female character dealing with racial prejudice. He
suggested that she attempt to write from a white, male point of view in order to prevent such
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true that Maya Deren is fairly well known for the aesthetic innovation of her first
complete film, Meshes of Afternoon, to reduce her influence and pioneering brand of
creativity to the work of a single trance film is to diminish the overall relevancy of her
work from what it ought to be, relegating her artistic identity to a spooky-kooky lady
who liked making short movies with her husband’s help and whose weird art was once
considered avant-garde. This sort of branding lessens what might otherwise be a
broader audience or readership.
Of course, the need to incorporate many viewpoints into our greater definition
of the human condition isn’t only about readership or exposure; it’s about being aware
enough to identify what, specifically, these works of art offer us, not only in terms of
illuminating marginalized perspectives, but how those perspectives and experiences
illuminate greater metaphysical truths about our shared human condition. The truth
will set us free—but whose truth, and how interpreted?
II. OR EQUALLY AGAIN WE SHOULD NOT BE SEARCHING
OF THE FLESH AND FLESHING OUT
Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s brand of phenomenology is committed to the primacy
of lived experience; he views experience as existing at the confluence between the
knowledges, respectively, of the human mind and body. When external stimuli happen
in the chaos of the external world, and we are present to observe them, we apprehend
said stimuli via the sensory perceptions that our bodies permit. Those bodied sensory
perceptions are then interpreted by our minds; this is how we develop a narrative (or
many narratives) of lived experience. For Merleau-Ponty, experience is crucial (though
not exclusively singular) to the development of knowledge. From thinking about our
experiences, we develop greater trains of conceptual thought. But all of this, no matter
inaccurate characterizations of her work in the future. This reference is included because it
suggests the ubiquity of this idea, and that we all may at times approach creative work with
these subconscious standards in mind—as we have been trained by the culture of the literary
industry and academic to do.
Fox Frazier-Foley
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how cerebral, is rooted in the body and the sensory perceptions that permit our initial,
baseline understanding of events and stimuli. For Merleau-Ponty, a simple example of
bodied knowledge—knowledge in whose formation the body and sensory perceptions
are integral, indispensible—is the act of touch-typing:
To know how to touch type is not, then, to know the place
of each letter among the keys, nor even to have acquired a
conditioned reflex for each one, which is set in motion by
the letter as it comes before our eye. If habit is neither a form
of knowledge nor an involuntary action, what then is it? It
is knowledge in the hands, which is forthcoming only when
bodily effort is made, and cannot be formulated in detachment
from that effort.
39

The experience of an accomplished/trained typist at a keyboard (writing a
dissertation, for example) is one in which any conscious thought that occurs is
regarding the content being produced upon the page; she does not need to pay attention
to the way her hands will fall onto the keys in order to correctly produce the specific,
linguistic signifiers that will convey her complex thoughts. Her hands know where they
ought to go, in greater service to her work, without her conscious mind directing them.
This type of experience occurs because, during her training, the typist is able to
apprehend and comprehend the location of each key through the sensory perceptions
her eyes and fingers (and, to some extent, her ears) allow/create for her. Her mind
gives her the capability to memorize the location of each key, as well as particular
idiosyncracies of that typing experience (e.g., perhaps one letter-key sticks a bit, or is
comparatively slow to rise after being struck, or needs to be struck harder than the
others, etc.). Her lived experience of typing her dissertation—the one in which her
conscious and subconscious mind become free to formulate different nuances of idea,
so that she may edit her thoughts as she types them—exists because of her bodied
knowledge of the keyboard. That is, at the confluence of her sensory perceptions (here
are the keys) and her cerebral analysis of them (here’s how I will remember where
each key is, and how to strike it), she forms a greater concept of experience, something
that makes an ordered narrative out of external stimuli: I sat down and crafted fifteen
pages of my dissertation today, and edited my thoughts as I typed them out onto the
page.
39
Merleau-Ponty, M. Phenomenology of Perception, Routledge: 1962. p.144
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Although Merleau-Ponty did the work of articulating and refining this concept
of lived experience and its relationship to the mind and the body, other important
schiolars have expressed ideas that might be seen as precursors, and perhaps helped
foster some of Merleau-Ponty’s insights. Sigmund Freud, for example, delineated the
formation of the ego in terms of corporeal projection.
40
As the ego is the part of the
human psyche that maintains a sense of order over the chaos of the external world, it
stands to reason that Freud was acting as an early prophet for the philosophy of
phenomenology that Merleau-Ponty would later construct in meticulous detail—and,
after him, Luce Irigaray, whose critique of Merleau-Ponty will become influential later
in this argument. Returning our attention to Freud’s description of ego formation,
however:
“The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego: it is not
merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a sur-
face. If we wish to find an anatomical analogy for it we can
best identify it with the ‘cortical homunculus’ of the anato-
mists, which stands on its head in the cortex, sticks up its
heels, faces backwards and as we know, has its speech-area
on the left hand side. . . . The ego is ultimately derived from
bodily sensations, chiefly from those springing from the
surface of the body. It may thus be regarded as mental pro-
jection of the surface of the body, besides, as we have seen
above, representing the superficies of the mental apparatus.”
41

In addition to recognizing the role of our physical sensory apparatus in the
formation of the ego, Freud also describes, more specifically, the way in which the ego’s
development is influenced by an interaction between cerebral, conceptual thought and
the body’s sensory input. As Grosz contends, Freud’s “notion of the body as a whole is
dependent on the recognition of the totality and autonomy of the body of the other. The
ego is thus both a map of the body’s surface and a reflection of the image of the other’s
body. The other’s body provides the frame for the representation of one’s own.”
42
Freud
illustrates this by the example of an infant learning to identify and understand its body
40
See Elizabeth Grosz’s compelling close reading of Freud’s description of ego formation in his
The Ego and the Id. She contends that, in Freud’s estimation, ‘The subject only gradually
acquires a sense of unity and cohesion over and above the disparate heterogeneous sensations
that comprise its existence. . . . For Freud, the ego is what brings unity to the vast and
overwhelming diversity of perceptions which, to begin with, overwhelm the child.” By invoking
Lacan’s “mirror stage” as an analogous interpretation for human development, Grosz
convincingly argues that, “Freud claims that the genesis of the ego is dependent on the
construction of a psychical map of the body’s libidinal intensities.” Volatile Bodies, pp. 31-34.
41
Freud, The Ego and the Id, 1923. p. 26
42
Grosz, pp. 37-38.
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through comparing itself to its parents, particularly the mother figure—we each build
our own self-image as we begin to understand the ways in which our bodies are similar
to the familiar bodies around us. We come to understand these familiar bodies and how
they function as we watch them navigate the world. Modeling our own behaviors after
them, we on some level model our understanding of our physical selves after them, too.
Thus is the ego very firmly rooted in the body, and, as Freud says, is a “psychical
callous”
43
that is, as Grosz phrases it, “formed through the use of the body . . . as a
screen or sieve for selecting and sorting the sensory information provided by
perception.”
44

OF VISION AND THE VISIONARY
If, as Merleau-Ponty contends, knowledge is produced by sensory perceptions
interacting with our consciousness and with the external stimuli of the world around
us—then to disrupt the senses is to disrupt the formation of knowledge. To put it in
Freudian terms, one might say that to disrupt the body’s ability to make sense of the
world via sensory perception and psychical integration obfuscates the mind’s ability to
craft a narrative of order from the chaos of experience. That is, to disrupt sensory
experience is to disrupt the production of knowledge, which is to disrupt the function
(perhaps, depending on intensity and duration, even the existence) of the ego. This
definition of ego obliteration or ego obfuscation is indispensible to a well-developed
discussion of the works of Maya Deren (and the other poets whose work my greater
project addresses), because she (and each of them) exerts an aesthetic approach that
locates itself at a confluence of the physical and the psychical—and then deliberately
disrupts both.
Witch’s Cradle does not take the aesthetic approach of simply narrating a story
that deals in experiences of trance and/or possession; rather, this poetic work embodies
the experience by enacting it—that is, the film distorts the sensory perceptions that a
reader/viewer expects and is used to encountering; in doing so, the film gives its reader
43
Freud, p. 26.
44
Grosz, p. 37.
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the same experience of disconcert and ego obliteration that a person going into a trance
or possession experience feels. Rather than expressing a linear narrative that describes
the details of what if feels like to go into a trance, The Witch’s Cradle enacts for the
reader a more direct experience in which we (readers) see, hear, and feel the world
distorted as if we ourselves are in trance, or being possessed as a medium.
Merleau-Ponty viewed his brand of phenomenological thought as answering a
dual set of limitations imposed by other major schools of thought: “Empiricism cannot
see that we need to know what we are looking for, otherwise we would not be looking
for it,” he famously wrote, “and intellectualism fails to see that we need to be ignorant
of what we are looking for, or equally again we should not be searching.”
45
Although
he was speaking ontologically, this liminal state that Merleau-Ponty describes between
knowing and not-knowing what one is looking for is also a psychic state that many
artists understand as well: in the act of creating art or literature, we know what we
want to say or create—and yet, we don’t fully know what we want to create until we
have finished the process of creating it. We frequently learn more about ourselves and
our awareness—the messages embedded in our art—as we enact the creation itself.
Frequently, the end product of a creative work differs in some measure from whatever
the artist or author had originally envisioned. This is because, although an artist begins
a piece with an initial core concept, during the controlled frenzy of the creative
process, new insights, both aesthetic and metaphysical, frequently come to light. This is
perhaps evidenced in no better way than simply observing that the act of revision
remains integral to the creative process.
This understanding of the creative process and the ontological process might,
too, be extended to a description of the mystical “process”—that is, the way in which
we seek that Rimbaud-esque encounter with “the unknown.” By definition, “the
unknown” is that which we don’t understand and cannot fathom—and yet we come up
with names for it, and concepts around it—ecstasy, vision, the Numinous, God, the
Almighty, Allah, Bondye, etc. To name something is to proclaim knowledge of it; to
claim knowledge of something is to define it as knowable, as quantifiable. Something
45
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception.
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that is quantifiable, of course, is not infinite in nature. This is one of the reasons that
some religious traditions maintain a taboo around speaking or writing the name of the
deities they worship—to defy or deny the infinite nature of the Almighty is
blasphemous.
However, this tendency that many have—to name that which is unnamable—
suggests a subconscious awareness that the apprehension and comprehension of truth
is—as Merleau-Ponty suggests—not an either/or dilemma. We don’t know God, but
when we talk about God, we yet have some idea of what we are talking about.
Similarly, when the protagonist of The Witch’s Cradle enters her trance-like state—for
that matter, when Maya Deren herself entered her own trance states, or when Arthur
Rimbaud attempted to drive himself temporarily insane order to reach “the
unknown”—there is a tacit recognition that the seeker possesses already an imperfect,
very limited knowledge of what “unknown” is being pursued.
OF IDENTIFICATION
As discussed earlier in this chapter, in The Ego and the Id, Freud writes that the
ego is formed, in part, by a child mapping himself and his reactions to stimuli via the
blueprint example set by another person’s body (usually, at first, the mother’s). A young
child is still pre-ego; due to the fact that every individual spends a certain amount of
early life without a fully formed ego in place, it stands to reason that, when the ego is
obfuscated, even temporarily, many will have a tendency or instinct to revert,
unconsciously, to a somewhat child-like state—as this was the last experience most
adults had of navigating the world without an ego to make sense of it. So, in this sense,
if we immerse ourselves in a work of art that employs aesthetic devices to create an
ego-obfuscating experience, it seems plausible that many readers will, in a state of
mildly helpless confusion, have a child-like, pre-ego reaction evoked.
This is significant because one of the defining traits of the child, in Freud’s
description, is the tendency to attempt to synthesize an ego for himself, by identifying
himself with an authority figure, and modeling his responses to stimuli after said
authority figure’s. So, when a work like The Witch’s Cradle deliberately hinders the
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function of a healthy ego, perplexing and in some ways paralyzing the viewer with
discomfort, disorientation, and confusion—then our natural inclination will be to look
for a figure imbued with some sort of authority, identify ourselves with her, and
attempt to model our response after her observable response. Since the protagonist of a
narrative is, by definition, imbued with authority within the world of that text (even
those narrators deemed “unreliable” still demand, and receive, a certain amount of our
trust a priori), a reader’s natural instinct when consuming this work will be to observe
the way the protagonist engages with the confusing, unsettling stimuli at hand, and
then begin an attempt to process said stimuli in a similar fashion. In art that embraces
the obfuscation or displacement of the ego, this creates a self-reinforcing cycle: the
more the aesthetic achieves a systematic “derangement” of our senses, the more
disrupted the function of our ego becomes; as this happens, we then in turn become
more dependent upon the model of the protagonist to suggest how we might map out
our own understanding and responses to these stimuli; in doing so with The Witch’s
Cradle, we acquiesce to a deeper “trance,” to a deeper state of our psychic possession by
the artwork itself. And, of course, as we are increasingly possessed by the experience
the aesthetic creates, the more vulnerable our senses become to the particular
disruptions they offer; so we may look again to the protagonist as a guide . . . and so on.
Our realities are altered by poesie. And this, too, is a Freudian concept of learning to
understand one’s own identity, and of gaining the knowledge from which to base one’s
own narrative of the self and the surfaces that surround the self:
“Pain, too, seems to play a part in the process, and the way
which we gain new knowledge of our organs during pain-
ful illnesses is perhaps a model of the way in which in
general we arrive at the idea of our body.”
46

These pieces of art are constructed so that in undergoing sensory and psychic
trauma, we—the viewer who identifies with the protagonist—are also able to overcome
it. Perhaps neither able to heal nor forget—neither work seems geared towards any
sense of closure—but we are able to come to a point where we can see it from above,
able to raise ourselves and our consciousness over the experience that has overwhelmed
46
Freud, The Ego and the Id. 1923: pp. 25-26
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us, and see beyond it—perhaps to some further illumination, something more
important, something that will help us move forward as who we are now, on the other
side of this trauma.
III. THE TRUTH WILL SET YOU FREE. BUT NOT UNTIL IT IS FINISHED WITH
YOU.
OF PAIN’S CURRENCY
Freud’s concept of pain as learning tool appears to have been influenced by the
writings of Nietzsche
47
, revealing this concept as significant in a greater tradition of
Western philosophical and metaphysical thought. In examining Nietzsche’s concept of
pain—particularly, his contentions regarding its currency as a facilitator of knowledge
production—and the place of such ideas the Western canon of thought, we may be able
to gain further insights into the aesthetic function of The Witch’s Cradle, including
further understanding of why and how the aesthetic innovations employed in this work
are particularly effective in (re)creating direct experiences of “the unknown” for their
respective audiences.
In 1882, in The Gay Science, Nietzsche wrote: “Only great pain, the long, slow pain
that takes its time . . . compels us to descend to our ultimate depths. I doubt that such
pain makes us ‘better’; but I know it makes us more profound.”
48
And how does it make
us more profound? (What, exactly, does “more profound” mean, anyway?) Four years
later, Nietzsche revisited this notion, expanding upon it thusly:
The discipline of suffering . . . is [the] only discipline that has pro-
duced all the elevations of humanity thus far[.] The tension of a
soul in misfortune . . . its energy, its shuddering in view of rack and
ruin, its inventiveness and bravery in undergoing, enduring,
interpreting [. . . W]hatever depth, mystery, . . . or greatness has
been bestowed upon the soul has . . . been bestowed through
47
Chapman, AH and Chapman, Santana M. “The Influence of Nietzsche on Freud’s Ideas,”
British Journal of Psychiatry, February 1995. 166 (2): 251-253. Although Freud claimed more
than once never to have read Nietzsche, there remains striking evidence to the contrary,
including his references to Nietzsche in some of his own writing and reported conversations.
Some of Freud’s basic terms (used in his professional writing) are identical to those used by
Nietzsche in his philosophical work; their descriptions of pain as an integral factor in learning
to understand and react to the world around us are indeed very similar as well.
48
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs.
Translated by Walter Kaufmann. Vintage Books, 1974.
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suffering.
49

It might be said, then, that Deren’s work, and in particular The Witch’s Cradle,
embodies and reflects the Nietzschean values of discipline, energy, and bravery
resulting from trauma—for surely her protagonist reveals that shuddering energy
before spectacles of “rack and ruin,” within the universe of the film. Further, The
Witch’s Cradle arguably expresses bravery simply in telling its story—the story of a
victimized young woman—and even goes so far as to demand a certain amount of
“braveness” from its viewers, in the same way that watching a horror movie might,
because it is so physically and psychologically unsettling.
As for the “inventiveness” of the film, its aesthetics stand out, as in Deren’s other
work, for their innovation and singularity of vision; one might say that these aesthetics,
in delivering a simple plot into a more metaphysical level of storytelling and
philosophy, lend themselves to expression of the bravery it requires for her to
reconstruct traumatic experience in a creative, stylized, deeply focused way. And,
speaking of this focus, the Nietzschean tenet of discipline seems to be revealed in The
Witch’s Cradle as soon as we acknowledge the discipline, both personal and artistic,
that Deren must have summoned in order to immerse herself in the traumatic
memories from which the film is drawn, for the length of time needed to write and
revise a shooting script, film the piece, and edit it. This sense of discipline is what
allowed Deren to craft the raw materials of thought and lived experience into
pioneering, innovative aesthetic expression.
Undergoing feels like a key word here: in order to overcome a trauma, one must
first undergo it—must submerge one’s consciousness in a traumatic experience that
contorts and displaces the ego. The Witch’s Cradle manages to communicate this via
the sensory distortions described earlier in this chapter; inasmuch as the expression of
trauma is important to Deren’s work in terms of its content, it also remains critical to
the successful execution of the experimental aesthetic techniques they employ. Just as
pain, for Nietzsche, is a mnemonic device, so trauma facilitates the production of
49
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Translated
by Walter Kaufmann. Vintage Books, 1989.
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knowledge when a reader experiences a work such as The Witch’s Cradle: first, as an
integral factor in the unsettling and unseating of the ego, and then in terms of
developing a lasting memory surrounding the experience the work has provided us as
audience.
It was not until 1887 (a year after extolling the virtues of the discipline of suffering
and painful critical engagement with the world that surrounds us, the better to learn
from it) that Nietzsche penned On the Genealogy of Morals, in which he specifically
described the role of pain as a mnemonic device—one that facilitates long-term
learning and the production of knowledge:
How do you give a memory to the animal, man? How do you
impress something upon this partly dull, partly idiotic, inatten-
tive mind, this personification of forgetfulness, so that it will
stick? . . . This age-old question was not resolved with gentle
solutions and methods . . . perhaps there is nothing more
terrible and strange in man’s prehistory than his technique of
mnemonics. A thing must be burnt in so that it stays in the
memory: only something that continues to hurt stays in the
memory.
50

I would like to argue that Nietzsche’s thought on pain are significant to The Witch’s
Cradle and Deren’s overall body of work because part of what makes it effective is how
deeply unsettling it is. The research of trauma theorist, clinician, and lab researcher
Richard McNally, though his position is a controversial one, also supports Nietzsche’s
characterization of how trauma and pain affect memory; McNally, and those who take
similar approaches to trauma theory, have rendered compelling arguments that
memories of traumatic experience remain present in a subject’s mind for the rest of
their lives, and that the more violent the experience and the more traumatized the
individual who experienced it, the more likely it becomes that the subject will
remember it always. Arguing against possibilities of repression and the willful
dissociation from traumatic experience that many subject claims, McNally contends
that those who are subject to traumatic experience can never forget the details of those
experiences, even if they want to.
51
This bears significance to The Witch’s Cradle
50
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Genealogy of Morals, Edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson, translated by
Carol Diethe. Cambridge University Press: UK, 2007. p. 38
51
For a detailed discussion that synthesizes clinical research and response to the literature of
trauma theory, see: McNally, Richard. Remembering Trauma. Harvard University: Belknap
Press, 2005.
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because the film suggests not only a need to re-construct the trauma narrative, as Judith
Herman posits as a symptom of trauma and a milestone of trauma recovery, but it also
satisfies McNally’s contention that, regardless of a traumatized subject’s desire to forget,
s/he will find themselves actively engaged with the memories of trauma. As the
biographical details that inspired The Witch’s Cradle are parsed in greater detail in the
chapter to come, it will become increasingly evident that Nietzsche’s ideas of both
courage and pain as mnemonic device have been brought to bear in this film through
Deren’s psyche.
I believe that audiences who consume the work of Maya Deren find her work in
relationship to these themes particularly enduring, perpetually of interest and open to
dissection, in part due to the lack of comfort her work provides. As audiences of The
Witch’s Cradle engage in experience of direct (as well as vicarious) discomfort, the
work will make more of an impression upon them, leading them (us) to internalize and
develop their (our) own insights. Of course, this is something that happens with many
pieces of art; I am merely arguing that the unsettling, disruptive aesthetics that Maya
Deren employs are, in the terms Nietzsche has set out regarding pain as a facilitator of
knowledge production, particularly successful—and thus situating her work in
conversation with an important piece of Western canonical thought, which, as
Nietzsche expressed it, “has its origin in that particular instinct which discovered that
pain was the most powerful aid to mnemonics.”
52

Our cerebral understanding of the protagonist’s and the author/auteur’s trauma is
in part brought about by our own experiences of discomfort while reading and
watching—first, by the violence being endured by the protagonist, then by the author’s
own violence towards us as the audience, as they utilize technique and device to
destabilize us. When we come out of the experience and our normal “psychical
callous” is restored to us, there is now something “unknown,” and, in the moment,
unarticulated, that has been able to get in under the skin, so to speak; with this new
52
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Genealogy of Morals, Edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson, translated by
Carol Diethe. Cambridge University Press: UK, 2007. p. 38
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ingredient like a splinter beneath the ego, it is as though we are newly seeing the
world—our perspective altered a bit. Or, as Nietzsche describes it:
[I]deas have to be made ineradicable, ubiquitous, unforget-
table . . . in order to hypnotize the whole nervous and in-
tellectual system . . . a method of freeing those ideas from
competition with all other ideas, of making them unforget-
table.
53
The pain of ego displacement/suspension is the mnemonic device that allows us to
internalize the insights that have been ushered into us as readers by both the immediate
and vicarious discomforts of the experience the work has delivered.
OF LITERARY EXPERIENCES RECOGNIZED AS MYSTICAL
Just as my chosen subject (and, often, the woman who created it) resists easy or
simplistic classification, so perhaps in some ways my own scholarly inquiry and the
identity from which it stems manifest a similar type of resistance. Perhaps as a scholar
and artist whose identity is largely gleaned from the margins, and from the apertures in
expectation of those around me—perhaps this dissertation seeks to articulate, by
emulation, the value in such an approach. In writing about work that is not easily
classifiable but which is undeniably poetic in nature, I am trying to shake up the
prescribed “genres” or methodology distinctions—the established, expected modes of
scholastic/academic inquiry. In taking a more interdisciplinary approach to my
research, I am attempting to establish one example of the value that might be found in
taking work that is familiar but not (yet) fully explored and providing new and
valuable context with which to not simply understand it, but to use it—as art is meant
to be used: to illuminate ourselves, to tell us something about how to survive in this
world—to internalize the ephemeral and difficult lessons these pieces of work provide
us—to be inspired by the vision that they offers. Or, as Horace put it: to delight and
instruct.
In taking this approach, I hope I can create research that will reinforce the
53
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Genealogy of Morals, Edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson, translated by
Carol Diethe. Cambridge University Press: UK, 2007. p. 38
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value of interdisciplinary academic inquiry. The University of Southern California has
already recognized the value of interdisciplinary scholarly work that melds the critical
and the artistic (the rational and the ecstatic, some might say), by establishing a
doctoral program that fosters hybrid study in creative writing and literature. I find it
telling that other prestigious academic institutions across the country have begun to
follow USC’s example; to me, this suggests a burgeoning recognition in artists and
scholars alike that we have, thus far, not yet maximized our ability to be illuminated by
important works of art and literature. That we might yet engage more parts of our
consciousness at once, when experiencing art, than we have quite yet begun to do
regularly. Perhaps as this impulse becomes more widespread, creative work will be
rightfully treated with greater relevance in academia, and scholarly study in the
humanities will garner wider respect and acknowledgment—not just in academia, but
in the public intellectual life of American culture.
OF MAGICAL THINKING, REDEFINED
If we choose to bracket the religious aspects of any concept of God or the
Numinous, and view it momentarily through a secular lens, it amounts to a startlingly
familiar engagement—infatuation with and anxiety regarding the idea that what Plato
referred to as absolute truth and Immanuel Kant referred to as noumenal truth—
“Truth, with a capital T,” as I sometimes call it—is not fully knowable to us. It is not
entirely dissimilar from Rimbaud’s conception of the unknown, in that it describes an
existence that we cannot fathom or apprehend using our human sensory apparatus. For
some thinkers and scholars, this type of truth is part of an abstract facet of the natural
and known universe; for others, it is something that surpasses that. These distinctions of
knowledge we’ve come to consider default and immutable—biology, chemistry,
psychology, literature, religious studies—may not be as axiomatic as we’ve made them,
however.
54

54
As Ann Taves writes: “For reasons of temperament and training, I find it natural and exciting
to make forays across what many scholars see as an unbridgeable divide between the
humanities and the natural sciences. I must admit to a certain impatience with those of my
fellow humanists who police these boundaries . . . In my view, it is better to construct rough
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Even if truth as Ding-an-sich is not something we can grasp, we might at least
continue gathering and sharing little pieces of truth, from our research and our lived
experience, amassing them into a kind of mosaic. As our mosaic picture built with
many smaller truths continues to grow, we may come to understand more and more of
Truth. This, of course, is the nature of scholarship, and not a radical suggestion in terms
of study within the humanities (or even mathematics or the sciences, which are
frequently preoccupied with questions of infinity). As Ann Taves, among other scholars,
has suggested, it is unfortunate that we begin to limit ourselves from gathering and
sharing knowledge regarding spiritual experience, due to a reflexive embrace of tired
narratives that bracket off certain topics as “unknowable.”
55
It is vital for us to continue
examining marginalized experiences of all kinds—those bodied and those spiritual—in
order for us to gather new pieces of experience and new ideas, new pieces of truth. This
is true whether said experiences have been marginalized by scholars because their
study proves difficult, given their ethereal/ephemeral nature; or whether said
experiences have been marginalized simply because they belong to those who, due to
their bodies, have been prescribed the identity of the Other, and dismissed as irrelevant.
Only by becoming ever more inclusive can we truly learn more about what it means to
be human. “Being human” may seem like a sentimental or simplistic theme for a
doctoral dissertation, and yet cultural critics and public intellectuals have repeatedly
insisted that what keeps art important is that it helps us understand (and retain, and
dwell in) our own humanity.
56
And this is why it seems especially relevant to an
introduction of my chosen subject: The Witch’s Cradle, and the inventive aesthetic
approaches it employs, enact what David Foster Wallace once wisely identified as the
defining quality of great art:
and ready bridges than to wait for the construction of a perfect bridge that will stand for all
time.” Religious Experience Reconsidered: Princeton University Press, 2009. xiii.
55
Religious Experience Reconsidered: Princeton University Press, 2009.
56
See, for example, Edward Lucie-Smith’s well-known art history text, Art and Civilization.
Prentice Hall: 1992. See also: Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. Vintage
Books: 2008. See also: the work of USC’s own Antonio Damasio, M.D., who has written
extensively on the ways in which art is crucial to the understanding of the human mind—and
the human brain. He recently expounded upon these writings, and his work through the
University of Southern California’s Brain and Creativity Institute, in a 2014 interview:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/22/art-human-mind_n_5569280.html
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28
Look man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are
dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that
does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything
is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to
be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of
what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite
the times’ darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark
a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict
this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive
and human in it.
57

It seems to me that the primary goal of such work is to channel the lived
experience of encounters with what Wallace terms “darkness” and “stupidity” into not
only work that identifies and lifts up what is magical, but that, in doing so, attempts to
give its audience an experience that will both tell the truth
58
and also suggest
something about how to survive in a world as dark, violent, and traumatizing as this
one that we share.
57
Interview with Larry McCaffery, 1991.
58
And, as David Foster Wallace once said, “The truth will set you free. But not until it is
finished with you.”
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Chapter 2: A Sure Poet
I am content if, on those rare occasions whose truth can be
stated only by poetry, you will perhaps recall an image—
even only the aura—of my films.
–Maya Deren
1
EARLY LIVED EXPERIENCES OF TRAUMA AND EARLY-LIFE KNOWLEDGES OF TRAUMA
When Maya Deren was five-year-old
2
Eleanora Derenkowsky, her Ukranian
Jewish family emigrated to the United States, via Poland and then France. Even at this
young age, Eleanora
3
had already observed and endured several types of hardship and
violence, including severe poverty
4
, the social and politically institutionalized
ostracization of those who shared her ethnicity in her homeland
5

6
, and the
1
In the Mirror of Maya Deren. Directed by Martina Kudlácek. 2002. Maya Deren speaks in a
recorded interview, Title I, Chapter 3.
2
According to Richard McNally’s aforementioned argument in Footnote 54 of Chapter 1, even
severe traumas that are experienced in childhood are nearly always remembered, as long as the
traumatic incident in question took place when the subject was at least two years old (he allows
that most people do not consciously remember anything, traumatic or otherwise, that happened
to them or in their presence before the age of two).
3
In 1928, upon becoming naturalized American citizens, Marie and Solomon Derenkowsky
legally changed their family name to Deren. Eleanora, who also went by the diminutive Elinka,
would be given the nickname “Maya” by her second husband, Alexander Hammid (and she, in
return, gave him the nickname “Sasha”). She actively accepted Maya Deren as her name, and
used for the rest of her life, both personally and professionally; and so, despite our introductory
reference to her as Eleanora Derenkowsky, she will henceforth in this chapter be referred to by
her chosen name, Maya Deren.
4
Although the Derens had, by Marie Deren’s account, lived comfortably in Russia, the political
instabilities of Kiev often forced inhabitants to live in conditions that were not only generally
symptomatic of poverty, but also frequently induced further poverty: currency was essentially
worthless and they had only a limited amount of goods with which they could barter for food
or other essentials. “The Bolsheviks would come, and then somebody else . . . [t]hen they came
back, and so on. And it was very, very tough. Because every government brought their own
money. They coined money, and they printed money, and they circulated it. And the result was
that the peasant doesn’t want to sell anything. They brought [goods] to the market, but when
you showed them money, they wouldn’t give [anything] to you. Instead, they gave in exchange.
You would come to the market with your arm outstretched, and here [on your arm] would be
hanging towels, and sheets—and this. And you came up to a peasant, and you showed her. She
fingered it, then gave you a pound of potatoes, or something. So that was that.” The Legend of
Maya Deren, Volume I, Part I. Anthology Film Archives: New York, 1984. p. 30.
5
As Mimi Ashram attests from her own eyewitness accounts of conditions for ethnic Jews in
Russia (and what is now the Ukraine), it was incredibly difficult in for Jewish people to break
out of the ghettos; social mobility was essentially denied to them, with a few exceptions of those
who were able to obtain enough education that they would have some sort of highly specialized
skill set that the government could make use of (as in the case of Deren’s father, who studied
medicine). This, of course, is a recognizable form of socioeconomic oppression that frequently
happens in many societies to racial or ethnic minorities who are persecuted or systemically
oppressed: “The majority of Jews couldn’t have a profession; you couldn’t have property; you
couldn’t have any kind of non-ghetto identity. It just was not possible.” The Legend of Maya
Deren, Part I, Volume I, p. 157.
6
Such oppression is also a matter of the historical record, apart from subjective accounts of
witness: “The laws of 1795 and 1835 had confined the Jews, formerly living in what is now
Poland, Lithuania, and the Ukraine, into the Pale Settlement. To further restrict their activities,
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increasingly violent anti-Semitic pogroms
7
that finally pressured her family into
relocating to another continent—as well as the trauma of their secret escape from their
homeland over the Polish border, which her mother, Marie Derenkowsky (née Fielder),
would later, in interviews, describe in horrifyingly fraught terms. One particularly
harrowing example from their experience of emigration occurred when Marie lost her
daughter, Maya, in the middle of a dark field on the night that they were smuggled into
Poland.
8
Even this, however, was far less frightening than the anti-Semitic pogroms and
violence that ethnically Jewish Ukranians suffered; rather, such moments of terror and
trauma were comparatively enough to seem like worthwhile risks the Deren family was
willing to take in order to escape the pogroms. As Deren’s paternal uncle Pincus
recalled it:
While we were living in the Ukraine, the Petlura, Machno,
and other Ukranian bands (white army and remnants of
the red army) not only looted, but also killed women and
children. They burned down synagogues. [. . .] This was a
period when the ruling powers believed that the end just-
ified the means.
9

Jewish customs were actively observed in the Deren household.
10
This
background, as well as her father’s standing in Russia before their emigration, gave her
a familiarity with and affinity for Trotskyism, as well. That Deren felt most comfortable,
as a young woman, within her cohort of NYC Trotskyites, may have had something to
do with their Russian cultural influences; it may also have had to do with the notion
that political progressiveness offered potential promise of greater gender equality than
other pockets of American culture at the time.
Despite the relatively egalitarian gender roles in her chosen, politically and
socially progressive settings as a young woman, however, it was still 1922 in the USA
when Deren’s family arrived and she began attending elementary school in Columbus,
many Jewish families like Solomon [Deren]’s were forced in 1882 out of the rural areas into the
towns. During the period of 1835-1917 [the year of Maya Deren’s birth], Jewish people needed
a special pass to enter certain areas. Kiev city was one of those places.” The Legend of Maya
Deren, Part I, Volume I, p. 161.
7
Under the pressure of pogroms against Jewish people residing in the Ukraine, the
Derenkowskys leave Kiev for New York via Poland and France. They disembark from the S. S.
Acvitania at Ellis Island on September 18, 1922. There they join other Deren family members
living in Adams, New York. The Legend of Maya Deren, Volume I, Part I: xxi.
8
The Legend of Maya Deren, Volume I, Part I, pages 32-34.
9
The Legend of Maya Deren, Volume I, Part I, p. 165.
10
TLMD, PI, VI, p. 161.
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OH. To put it into perspective: women had only been allowed to vote in the United
States for two years by the time that the Deren family arrived.
11
In addition to culturally
ingrained sexism and casual misogyny—which would later manifest itself in the rude
and dismissive way Deren was treated by her male colleagues, even at public events in
which she had been invited to participate as an expert speaker
12
, as well as the
treatment Deren’s work endured for decades, with repeated questions being broached
as to whether the films she made while married to Alexander Hammid were really
“more his” or entirely her own
13
—given the timeline, Deren would also likely have
encountered at least mild anti-Semitism in the USA at one point or another, simply
because it was a rather prevalent prejudice during the time period. Later, during the
1930s and 1940s, she would have been aware of Hitler’s genocide against the Jews in
Europe (and her own family’s temporally narrow margin of escape from similar fate)
and American refusal to get involved in the war against Hitler until Pearl Harbor was
bombed by the Japanese. It must have seemed to Deren as though even the safe-haven
of America contained cultural aspects that were sometimes hostile towards both women
and Jews.
Friends and colleagues have attested that Deren often denied and/or tried to
otherwise hide her Jewishness, to the point of other Jews outright accusing her of anti-
Semitism.
14
We know, too, that Deren was socially ostracized at Smith
15
—considering
the culture of that time and location, her “outsider” status may perhaps have been
11
The Nineteenth Amendment, which legally enfranchised women of all races in the United
States with voting rights, was ratified on August 18, 1920.
12
Jackson, Renata. “The Modernist Poetics of Maya Deren,” from Maya Deren and the
American Avant-Garde, Ed. Bill Nichols, University of California Press (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: 2001), p. 66: “Although Deren’s ideas . . . were not well received by some . . . Dylan
Thomas and Arthur Miller were particularly condescending, rude, and dismissive.”
13
We know that she had to fight fiercely to be considered independent from her husband as an
artist, and that even when he and their co-workers insist that “x film was always Maya’s,”
people ask whether she was really the sole auteur. This is even evident in interviews in TLMD,
when—ostensibly trying to put such questions to rest once and for all—the scholars interview
Hella Hammid and ask repeatedly whether At Land was truly Deren’s own film or more of a
collaboration—or whether it was really partly Hella and/or Alexander Hammid’s own work.
14
Miriam “Mimi” Arsham, who was a neighbor and close friend of Maya Deren’s, and whose
family were Russian Jewish émigrés, recalls in an interview, “She was very very very
embarrassed about being Jewish It was anti-semitic, let’s just say it straight out.” The Legend of
Maya Deren, Volume I, Part I, p. 156.
15
TLMD, Vol 1, Part 1, pp 295-298.
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sustained partly bc of her Jewishness.
16
It seems fair to suggest that because Deren
understood that her Jewishness was sometimes used to set her apart in a negative way
from those she desired as peers and colleagues
17
, she chose to try to hide it. This
behavior is suggestive of the desire to avoid unpleasantness—to avoid judgment,
perhaps—perhaps to avoid certain types of psychological trauma, such as
ostracization—or even outright violence, such as pogroms. Deren knew from
experience, after all, that both of those things were possible if one’s Jewishness was
disclosed.
Experiences of trauma can lead survivors to sometimes develop a fascination
with violence that manifests in many ways, including in to immerse oneself in
potentially traumatic situations in which one has a feeling of agency or control. It
would make sense, then, that later in life, Maya Deren may have elected to investigate
concepts that were initially to suggested to her by formative traumas. This is, perhaps,
one of the reasons that, as an auteur with a camera in her hand, she began to
investigate violences and traumas, against onscreen protagonists (possible stand-ins for
earlier version of herself) and, arguably, against the viewer at her own hands.
INTEREST IN ALTERED PSYCHIC STATES
Solomon David Derenkowsky, Maya Deren’s father, was a doctor who earned
multiple medical degrees.
18
Dr. Deren’s background was in psychiatry.
Deren was both self-described, and described by those who knew her, as being
especially close with her father (particularly as compared to her relationship with her
mother; the alienation Deren appears to have felt from her mother may have reinforced
an emotional dependency on greater intimacy with her father). Their close relationship
suggests he would have been a primary influence on Deren during the years when she
16
“Unique among many of the graduate women she encounters in the Masters program [at
Smith College], [Deren was not] a product of the surrounding New England social caste.”
TLMD, Vol 1, Part 1, pp. 296-297. We know, too, that when (at Smith) Deren wore the
clothing she had designed and made herself, she was “made to feel that she was inappropriately
attired” TLMD, Vol 1, Part 1, pp. 295-297.
17
Deren’s own mention of Easter eggs and Christmas trees as social currency whose absence
kept her on the outside, TLMD Vol 1 Part 1, p. 296-298
18
First in Russia and then in the USA. TLMD, Vol 1, Part 1.
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was forming her own identity and interests—including the interest in altered psychic
states that would later affect her art. Deren publicly attributed a great deal of influence
on her creative expression to her father
19
; beyond his immediate influence as described
by Deren, it is also reasonable to assume that her early exposure to her father’s work,
and her personal regard for him, combined to form a general interest in the study of
psychology that prompted her to take a course with Kurt Koffka on Gestalt psychology,
for which she registered at Smith in autumn of 1938.
Gestalt psychology and many of its premises would be sources of conscious
inspiration for Deren as she constructed her poetics; this is evident in her idea of a
piece of art that, as a whole, functions in a way that is greater than its mere sum of
parts, which she both articulates and enacts
20
through her writing in Anagram of Ideas
on Art, Form, and Film (wherein she specifically mentions Gestalt psychology as an
influence from which she “borrows”
21
), but also in the greater influence that the study
of human psychology exerted over Deren’s body of work—perhaps notably Deren’s
own informal, experimental “studies” in the modes of human consciousness. As
scholars have noted,
Deren’s understanding of psychology was not limited to her
exposure to academic theory, nor to her father’s teachings,
although these were certainly important guides. Many of the
seemingly disparate routes she took in life point ultimately
to her commitment to the experimental “study” of conscious-
ness. Her work as a research assistant for William Seabrook’s
book on witchcraft, her interest in ritual as involving the
depersonalization of identity, the state of “auto-intoxication”
she could induce while dancing, even the friends’ dreams
she interpreted—these were not just pastimes or adventurous
episodes for Deren. She was profoundly interested in the
human mind. It was this fascination, combined with her in-
19
From TLMD: Vol 1, Part 2: “Those who knew Deren’s father had been a psychiatrist were
often the most adamant about the Freudian source of her imagery. It is true that her father was
one of her most important influences, as she often acknowledged, even in her publicity on the
films. Writing of herself in a flyer in 1953, she noted: ‘. . . And if her films have the disturbing
“below-the-belt” impact of an obsessive dream, it may be partially because, as the daughter of a
psychiatrist, she has always respected the imaginative and emotional world of all human beings
as being important and real, as the material world.’ . . . [Deren’s father] taught Deren a great
deal about psychopathological phenomena, as is evidenced in her later writings, where she
often mentioned aberrations of consciousness such as fugue states, shell shock and amnesia, on
the one hand, and culturally “disciplined” states of dissociation such as possession, trance, and
hypnosis, on the other.”
20
The Anagram is written to be read in several different orders, with different meanings
gleaned every time—more than a mere collection of parts, it enacts a dynamic and varied
interplay between these parts.
21
See section 24 of Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form, and Film.
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stincts for poetry and dance, that largely shaped the kind of
films she made.
22

DEREN’S CREATIVE DRIVE: THE POETIC IMPULSE
Deren began writing poems at the age of 9 or 10; the academic year of 1926-
1927 marked the first of Deren’s attendance at Delaware Elementary School in
Syracuse, NY, and it was at this point that she began writing not only letters but also
poems to her parents when separated from them.
23
Even Deren’s juvenilia was focused
heavily on use of imagery; in autumn of 1929, at age 12, she wrote “A Wish,”
24
which
reads essentially as an ode to the season of autumn; the moments of euphoric praise
that the speaker in Deren’s poem offers up are all expressed in terms of sense imagery:
falling chestnuts and flying leaves in the wind, fast-moving clouds in the sky, a
“panorama” of color punctuating “vast” pieces of scenery; the body, too, plays an
important role in this lived experience of autumn: Deren’s speaker wants to let the rain
“lash” her hair and drench her face, “to let the ruddy sunset blind my eyes/to let the
starry heavens guard my sleep.” The bodied nature of experience is evidence in Deren’s
early poems, as is an exploration of the desire for a physical and psychical
overwhelming of the senses—concerns and foci that would last into her later literary
writing, as well as the films that she wrote and produced.
Nearly a decade later, in 1937, while living in New York City at the age of 20,
Deren wrote a poem entitled “Cinema,”
25
an early moment in which her poetic
inclinations and her engagement with the aesthetic and psychological possibilities of
film are conflated to productive end. The timing of this poem marks some significant
personal shifts for Deren that may have pushed her to focus on these areas of interest:
this was the year that she divorced her first husband, and one of the years that she took
literature classes at The New School. Deren had met her first husband at an organized
protest against racial discrimination in 1935, at the age of 18; they had quickly
married, and moved to New York City where Deren was not immediately part of any
22
From TLMD: Part I, Vol II.
23
TLMD, Part I, Vol. I
24
See Appendix A.
25
See Appendix A.
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literary or creative scene (though this would come later, when she returned to New
York City post-Smith), but was rather extremely active and engaged in political groups
through her husband, particularly the Young People’s Socialist League.
26
During this
year of divorce and literary study, “Cinema” marks not only a more mature piece of
writing for Deren, but also the beginning of a strong return to some of her own core
creative interests, undiluted by the influence or distractions of a domestic partnership.
27

This more mature poem again focuses on sensory perception and bodied
experience in a very concentrated, overt way: the pieces of experience that Deren and
her speaker wish to reflect upon, and entreat readers to reflect upon, do not simply
present bare sense images for reader consumption, but rather focus on the moments of
lived experience that render their presentation, first to Deren herself and then to her
speaker and finally, ultimately, to her readers: “Mine eyes have seen,” the poem opens,
and, two stanzas later, “And I have heard the amplified, inflected word.” Many poems
use sense imagery (though not all rely on it heavily), but out of those that do, not many
emphasize the sensations of experience as much as the stimuli. Many poems that deal
with a bird, for example, might simply describe the appearance of the bird, its song, or
the textures of its feathers—rather than reminding the reader that the speaker sees,
hears, or touches the bird. Sight and sound, and the influence they exert regarding this
speaker’s apprehension of reality, are plainly alluded to. So is bodily movement: the
second stanza opens with Deren’s speaker describing her “apologetic move to the far
rear” of the theater. The poem also slyly mocks the limitations and predictability of
Hollywood cinema, as Deren’s speaker at once employs more sense imagery, as well as
metaphor and humor, to decry “the usual rosary:/ reduce the triangle to two;/ end
with the fitting of the brittle shoe.” The physical fitting of the glass slipper, of course,
here becomes not only a conduit for an expression of an entire chapter of happily-ever-
after mythos in American culture, but Deren’s means of ridiculing it. The power and
26
TLMD, Part I, Vol. I
27
Although domestic parternships frequently impose distractions for artists of all kinds, it
seems readily apparent that, especially for American culture in the 1930s, there were
expectations placed upon a married woman that would necessarily have detracted from the
energy she could expend, independently, on her own interests and creative ventures, as caring
for one’s home, and by extension for one’s husband, via domestic chores and martial duties was
simply an expectation of the time.
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influence of film on the human psyche, however, are also reflected here: this stifling,
sexist “happily ever after” ending, so trite and commonplace to the ending of
Hollywood films, is described as a “rosary”—an apparatus by which those in need pray
for what they really want. It is the expression of a void and also an expression of the
desperate desire to fill it.
The poem ends by reflecting upon the power of film to affect both thought and
behavior of the viewer—the ways in which they see themselves and apprehend the
reality around them outside of their cinematic experience, after it has ended but the
values which it has suggested to them live on in their minds. And, again, the notions of
a void and a zealous desire to fill it appear—the reality of the film reel (note the pun of
“real wheel”) is reflected not only onscreen, but in the “pews” of “evacuated minds”:
Circumlocution on the too real wheel
Finds twice reflection:
Once upon the screen
And once upon the transient, evacuated minds possessing pews.
In 1940, Deren wrote “The Vampire Mirror, ” for a romantic partner named
Paul. She relates, in the first stanza, the well-known Eastern European mythos of the
vampire whose countenance may be observed in all its mortal resemblance by other
human beings, but cannot find reflection in a mirror. The second stanza plays off this
cultural myth in a way that foreshadows Meshes of Afternoon, the film Deren would
make three years later: the troubled distinction between the viewer who, as subject,
asserts the agency to observe and interpret the significance of an object—to define it—
and the person or thing that is viewed, that is relegated to object status by the gaze of
another, whose definition is created by its passive status as that which is viewed. In
Meshes, we see a faceless woman gaze at both protagonist and viewer with a mirror
where her face should be. We are not observed—our identities and existence(s) are not
reinforced by her gaze—but rather our gaze as viewers is turned back upon ourselves
in a moment of unsettling uncanniness. Deren describes just such a sequence of events
in the second stanza of this poem, using it as a metaphor for her fear that her romantic
relationship may not be built to last:
“If it would one day come to pass that this, between us,
lifts once too often the gilt mirror from the shelf
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so that there is a schism,
and we who too eagerly together have been looking, looking, looking,
will become nothing at all but the image of the mirror
which, losing its source, would eventually be dead, quite,
and there be no image before or in the mirror . . . ”
28

This idea of the body as both subject and object—the seer and the seen, the
beholder and that which is viewed or beheld—or held—would continue to be a central
theme in much of Deren’s later work, both poetry and film (and the moment of most
overt overlap between her poetry and film that is The Witch’s Cradle). While in Los
Angeles during the year 1941, Deren wrote “To Those With the Stain of the Dark Star
on Their Faces,”
29
dedicated to the Biblical figure Lilith (Adam’s first wife, who would
not submit to him, cast aside for Eve and sometimes in mythology represented as a
succubus, which has led to her being considered to be the first vampire), as well as to
several of her own friends, and “unnamed others, wherever they are.” This poem, too,
deals with the role of the body in forming lived experience—although, as the
dedication suggests, on a much more personal level: Deren and her artist/outsider
friends, marked by a “dark star” on their faces, recognizable in this way to one another
as kindred spirits, might best be understood through Grosz’s reading of Foucault and
Freud regarding the body as a text that is inscribed by the self and society to create the
narrative(s) of experience.
30
Deren writes: “Look how hungry we are for the people./
Look how we reach for them in the street,/ how we weep for a multitude of alien
faces,/ knowing them alien.” It is by the visual language of signifying marks that are,
and are not, written upon the body, that the speaker recognizes those who are
metaphysically (and physically) like or unlike her, respectively. Deren’s speaker
continues:
Look at how we strain towards each other
Seeing the dark-star-stain, suddenly, on a face.
“Here I am; we are the same.
Break through your blackness. Come to me,
Rip a wide hole in mine. Let the light in!”
Look how we strain towards each other
Spilling cut blood words, blood silences
In thick black pools upon the tables and the floors.
28
See Appendix A. (Ellipses in the ultimate line of the second stanza are Deren’s own, and part
of the poem.)
29
See Appendix A.
30
Grosz, Elizabeth.Volatile Bodies. pp. 145-150.
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Look how we strain towards each other
Beating our bodies together
Breaking the flesh
Bursting out of ourselves
Over and over like a ripe fruit bursting,
“Receive me! O receive me!”
Exploding out of ourselves, pouring ourselves out,
Annihilating ourselves perpetually.
“Receive me! O receive me!”
When will we learn we are already possessed,
Chained to the cruel jet star?
In October of 1941, Deren wrote the poem “Genesis,”
31
which is focused
entirely on a desired occurrence of magic—of transformation for the speaker, arguably.
It reads like an incantation:
Let us reserve this hour for magic.
Beginning with nothing, let it be swiftly perfect with impossibility.
Let there be singing of unutterable words
and wearing smiles intolerably bright
let us fill a quite incredibly white night
with unimaginable movement.
Let the impossible be real.
Let the incredible be true.
Let us accomplish now this cosmos
now, swiftly, now
before the world shall come to pass.
Notably, even the metaphysical aspirations of the speaker in this poem—to bring
about the impossible and incredible into actuality, into reality—is rendered in physical,
bodied terms, rather than more esoteric or spiritually-oriented language:
“unimaginable movement,” “singing” (by definition a bodied act), “wearing smiles.”
From this small selection of Deren’s literary work, we can see that her aesthetic
trajectory as a poet was, at this point, concerned with the body as both subject and
object. During 1941, Deren was travelling the United States with Katherine Dunham’s
dance troupe as they performed Cabin of the Sky in different cities. This job would take
Deren from New York to Los Angeles (another moment that would shape Deren’s
aesthetic and overall body of work, as Los Angeles is where she met and married her
second husband, the exiled Czech avant-garde filmmaker Alexander “Sasha” Hammid,
with whom she would collaborate extensively on her first film, Meshes of Afternoon),
and as Katherine Dunham has attested, Deren was an avid dancer in unofficial capacity
31
See Appendix A.
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during the group’s rehearsals.
32
This experience seems to have honed Deren’s
awareness of her body, and found its expression in the aesthetic that her poetry, during
this time period, reflects.
Deren’s use of sense imagery in the above poem appeals to the reader’s own
bodied experience of her texts, of the experience which, through her writing, she
wishes to immerse them in. Her description of physical, bodied reality guides the reader
through definitions of the self, and the surfaces that surround the self: the viewer of the
film is influenced by the sights and sound with which she is bombarded, and moves to
the back of the theater; the social outsider/bohemian artist recognizes those of like
mind and spirit based upon signifiers inscribed upon the body; a pair of lovers realizes
that they may one day no longer be in love—and, should they see evidence of it, it will
have the external result of the separation of their bodies; the dissolution of their
metaphysical relationship will, when realized, dissolve their physical definition as a
couple.
Deren’s literary work up until this point was also notably concerned with
possession—lovers who possess one another, artists who want to be possessed by one
another in order to escape their own intensities and limitations, a child who wishes to
be immersed in the sensory stimuli of autumn to the point where they might arguably
possess her consciousness. This aesthetic trajectory foreshadows Deren’s later
preoccupations and concerns in her art: it is highly sensitive to the role of the body in
both interpreting and in creating lived experience; it is also subsumed in its own
questions about the mystical, and encounters with the unknown—as evidenced through
the depictions of Nature as an intoxicating force, through established and familiar
vampiric mythos being subverted into a metaphor of the understanding of the self and
of the fragile ecstasy of romantic and/or sexual love, through the body being treated as
a necessary vehicle for encountering the unknown. The senses may need to be
“deranged” in order to reach it (as in, singing unutterable words)—but they are still, in
fact, needed.
32
See Dunham’s interview in In the Mirror of Maya Deren. Directed by Martina Kudlácek.
2002.
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In these early works, too, one can also sense Deren’s near-frustration with the
limitations of the page: the images seem to wish for immediacy in a way that Deren’s
language does not quite deliver—a fact that was not lost on Deren, who described
herself thusly:
I was a poet before I was a filmmaker, and I was a very poor
poet, because I thought in terms of images. What existed as
essentially a visual experience in my mind—poetry was an
effort to put it into verbal terms. When I got a camera in my
hand, it was like coming home. It was like doing what I always
wanted to do, without the need to translate it into a verbal
form.
33

It is perhaps the nature of her written work, in these ways—the bodied-ness of
it, the reliance on sense imagery to communicate intense emotional experience—that
makes it unsurprising that Deren’s later work, while it remained within the vein of
poetry and the poetic, would begin to seek out other media to further its expression.
And, as “Cinema” especially expresses, the power of film to help shape reality was
especially suggestive and attractive.
In terms of her involvement with literature, Deren did not limit herself to
writing poetry; she also made a successful academic study of it at the Masters level, at
Smith College, where she began studying English literature in autumn of 1938,
receiving her Masters degree in June of 1939. It was during this time that Deren
immersed herself in a period of reflective fascination with the works of H.D.,
particularly her poetry
34
, which Deren described as setting off a “poetic renaissance”
during H.D.’s own time
35
, as well as a marked interest in the works of T.S. Eliot. Deren’s
Masters thesis framed an argument regarding the French symbolist influence on
modernist English and American poetry. During this time, and after (as the above
examples illustrate), Deren continued to write poetry even as she honed her ability to
write critically about poetry. And writing about poetry in an academic style was as
exasperating for Deren as it was enlightening: she confided to Eda Lou Walton that she
struggled, frustrated, with the seemingly irreconcilable tasks of satisfying her
33
In the Mirror of Maya Deren. Directed by Martina Kudlácek. 2002.
34
TLMD, Part I, Vol I, p. 298
35
TLMD, Part I, Vol I, p. 191
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committee’s requirements while maintaining what she viewed as the unique
character—the vision, some might say—of her intended argument, which was that:
. . . the Symbolist school, with its emphasis upon the inner
realities, led, in turn, to a new sort of idealism (different
from that of the Romanticist movement) because the essence
of inner man, or the subconscious mind, is unknown and
by its very nature, unknowable. Furthermore, that this re-
action away from outer reality to the inner reality was an
inevitable consequence of the growing complexity and the
seeming irrationality of the sociological environment of
the artist.
36

Ultimately, vestiges of this argument remain evident in Deren’s introduction and
footnotes to the thesis.
37
And, although made to feel like an outsider at Smith, Deren
was academically successful; her peers and professors alike recognized her talent as a
scholar and a poet. Deren’s background was in expository writing in the discipline of
literature, as well as creative writing—it is clear from her remaining body of work that
Deren was an adept literary writer; from her ability to sell her stories, it is equally clear
that Deren was a talented professional creative writer. Those youthful peers who had
hailed her as “a sure poet” were accurate in their collective assessment.
CONFLUENCE OF INFLUENCE
During autumn of 1938, Deren elected to take a class with Kurt Koffka in
Gestalt psychology, which, as mentioned earlier, would prove influential to Deren’s
creative trajectory and the way she viewed the creative process: as a whole that was
greater than the sum of its parts, and, as such, was “unpredictable” and able to jar the
viewer/reader. Deren saw a piece of art (particularly one created by her) as an
‘emergent whole’ (I borrow the term from Gestalt psychology)
in which the parts are so dynamically related as to produce
something new which is unpredictable from a knowledge of
the parts. It is this process which makes possible the idea of
economy in art, for the whole which here emerges transcends,
in meaning, the sum total of the parts. The effort of the artist
is towards the creation of a logic in which two and two may
make five, or preferably, fifteen: when this is achieved, two
can no longer be understood as simply two.
38

36
TLMD, Part I, Vol. I, pp. 302-303.
37
TLMD, Part I, Vol. I, pp. 302-306.
38
Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form, and Film. Section 24.
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During this time period, and immediately after, Deren supported herself by
freelancing as a secretary and editorial assistant for several well-known American
writers, including Eda Lou Walton, Max Eastman, and—perhaps most significantly—
William Seabrook. She was, in her spare time, consumed with literary pursuits of her
own, including a translation of Ville Conquise by Belgian socialist author Victor Serge.
39

There exist a few variations of the narrative surrounding Deren’s employment
by William Seabrook—all of them imparted, with some amount of privacy or secrecy,
by Deren herself to close friends. The details are somewhat difficult to parse, because it
appears that Deren, on multiple occasions, began to tell the story by sharing a few grim
or upsetting details, and would then say something to the effect of, “I’ll tell you the
whole story sometime,” and never mention it again.
40
The notable discrepancies among
these different versions of the narrative will be revisited and critically examined later in
this chapter; however, all of the different versions of the story of Deren’s interactions
with Seabrook do include the following elements:
Her freelance work for him began in autumn of 1939.
41
Seabrook was a self-
styled “adventurer” and a successful author. He had lived in Africa and in Haiti, and
was now settled on a rural estate in upstate New York, with his second wife. He was
rumored (a rumor that Seabrook himself actively cultivated) to “dabble in the
occult”
42
—at any rate, he certainly collected souvenirs from his travels that might have
seemed exotic to the average, working- or middle-class American of European ethnic
heritage (which describes most of Rhinebeck’s inhabitants, and upstate New York in
general, during that time period), during the 1930s. Deren was aware that Seabrook
harbored interests in the supernatural and/or occult; she worked as an editorial and
research assistant for him while he was writing Witchcraft: Its Power in the World
Today.
For months after Deren’s initial employment, Seabrook attempted to procure
Deren for participation in ‘experiments’ that were, in unspecified capacity, related to
39
The Legend of Maya Deren, Volume I, Part I. xxii
40
TLMD, Part I, Vol. I, p. 405. Herb Passin, in an interview, describes this tendency.
41
TLMD, Part I, Vol. I, p. 409.
42
TLMD, Part I, Vol. I, pp. 406-409; also described in Seabrook’s autobiography, No Hiding
Place.
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the acquisition of occult knowledge and the testing, or cultivation, of extrasensory
perception abilities. Deren politely refused his invitation several times, but at some
point during the winter of 1939-1940, with her financial situation becoming
increasingly unstable, Deren made arrangements to travel to Seabrook’s rural estate
home on the outskirts of the small town of Rhinebeck, in upstate NY.
43
Deren authored
a written account of the ordeal that suggests that it occurred over a period of a day or
two in early February of 1940; however, those who have researched her life for The
Legend of Maya Deren Project have, through an arduous amount of painstaking,
meticulously detailed work, placed the event in winter of 1939 (the same season, but a
few months earlier). Based upon the variation of different accounts Deren offered to
her confidants at different points in her life—and the accounts offered by Seabrook
himself and the townspeople of Rhinebeck—it seems as though the episode may have
been more extenuated than Deren’s letter to Herb Passin intimates. What we know for
certain is that the timing of Deren’s letter places the end of the event in early February
of 1940, while research conducted by Clark, Neiman, and Hodgson puts its inception at
some point during the winter of 1939.
44

Upon her arrival, Seabrook showed Deren many of his ‘exotic’ artifacts and
souvenirs, among them an object he called a witch’s cradle. In his autobiography, No
Hiding Place, Seabrook admits (or, perhaps, boasts) that some of these “artifacts” were
in fact commissioned for creation at his own request:
I now bought such paraphernalia as was purchasable . . .
had in[to the house] bewildered local carpenters and a
blacksmith to help build what I couldn’t buy. We made a
cage similar to the one the Manchu princess who turned
Taoist saint had been imprisoned in for twenty years. We
even built a witch’s cradle. And never, when things
got going, was there any dearth of young apprentice
witches. I called them “research workers” . . . since they all
reappeared sooner or later alive, the State Police never came
to dig up the sub-cellar or garden.
45

And what, exactly, is or was the witch’s cradle? Many sources agree that the
witch’s cradle was a medieval torture device used by the Catholic Church during the
European witch-hunts—an ugly and grotesquely misogynistic chapter of Western
43
TLMD, Part I, Vol. I, pp. 411.
44
TLMD, Part I, Vol. I, p. 304.
45
Seabrook, William. No Hiding Place. Pp. 372. Emphasis mine.
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history that had already become recreationally sensationalized for entertainment value,
as well as eroticized, in mainstream American culture, by the time Maya Deren was
standing in William Seabrook’s barn. This sensationalism and eroticization may be why
Seabrook’s apparatus appears to have been different from what most historical sources
define or describe as a “witch’s cradle.” During the witch hunt(s) associated with the
Spanish Inquisition, a “witch’s cradle” described a large sack, made out of opaque
cloth. An accused woman would be placed inside the bag, and it would then be hung
from a tree using a rope and swung, spun, and otherwise violently struck and/or
moved about at the will of her accusers and torturers. The sensory deprivation often led
to hallucinations. This form of torture was frequently enough to elicit a confession of
witchcraft.
Seabrook’s device, on the other hand, appears from all descriptions to have been
a variation of what is commonly described as a Judas Cradle—an entirely different
medieval torture device. A Judas Cradle consists of a “seat” shaped like a pyramid, over
which a prisoner is harnessed and then lowered. The further the victim is lowered and
the more pressure is applied, the more damage the pyramid causes to the genital
organs, and the more pain it inflicts. Seabrook told Deren that this object, which he had
paid carpenters and a blacksmith to construct for him, was a medieval device that
apprentice witches were expected to straddle for hours so that they could better learn to
straddle a broomstick, on which they would presumably fly, and must be able to control
in order to properly navigate. This claim is obvious nonsense; yet it remains difficult to
discern whether Seabrook was consciously attempting to deceive Deren (and his other
“apprentice witches”) with this description, or whether he was gullible enough to
believe the misinformation he propagated.
46
Specifically, one of the arrangements that
Seabrook entreated Deren to agree to—with the understanding that she could not
retract her agreement, once given—was as follows:
Remaining in the witch’s cradle for six hours. (The witch’s
cradle is a medieval narrow sort of seat which apprentice
46
It does appear, at times, that Seabrook may have been—perhaps willfully—credulous enough
to believe some of the ludicrous pieces of misinformation that he casually dispersed to those
around him. For example: his belief that acts such as “stewing babies” were tenets of African
religious practice.
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witches were supposed to straddle for hours to eventually
be able to ride a broomstick.)
47

There were, too, very specific and stringent “rules” that would govern this
“procedure,” should Deren agree to it. They were, Seabrook told her, as follows:
1. the condition of nudity; 2. the condition of punishment
if the [participant, in this case Deren] somehow violated
the agreement, and the punishment was whipping . . .
3. the [participant] was not to be allowed to say an intelli-
gible word, but was only to make animal sounds to express
itself. Infraction of this condition punishable by whipping
also.
48
Perhaps most troubling about the situation is Seabrooks’ lack of understanding
regarding consent.
The statement at the top of the page, being the condition
for all . . . was that once a procedure had been agreed up-
on, it would have to be adhered to for the duration of the
time agreed upon. If agreement was upon a procedure last-
ing 6 hours, even if one shouted bloody murder at the end
of two hours, she would not be permitted to cease.
49

Even the most intense BDSM practitioners use safe words: because consent is, by
its very nature, something that can be withdrawn at any moment of any experience or
interaction. That Seabrook deliberately discards this aspect of the situation in writing,
up front, is certainly indicative of darker things, and makes Deren’s variations in
narrative all the more troubling, because it suggests that perhaps they may be in some
measure accurate.
This particular definition of the witch’s cradle as constructed and proffered by
Seabrook implies a definition of possession that melds/equivocates the concept of
sexual possession (man takes charge of woman and ‘trains’ her in how to mold the
shape of her sexual organs) with supernatural ‘possession’ and witchcraft (the idea of a
witch being, as Anne Sexton wrote in the late 1950s, a woman “possessed,”
50
flying her
broom over houses in the dark of night).
This object obviously made an impression on Deren, perhaps as a physical
emblem of the entire ordeal—as did its specific use in the greater situation she was in.
This object, and all of what it signified to her—would be brought to bear on the
essential core of her first film, which she titled after this heinous artifact that came to
47
TLMD, Part I, Vol. I, pp. 412-413.
48
TLMD, Part I, Vol. I, pp. 412-413.
49
TLMD, Part I, Vol. I, pp. 412-413.
50
Sexton, Anne. “Her Kind.” To Bedlam and Part Way Back.
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emblematize her trauma. Anne Clark (aka Pajarito), a sculptor and Surrealist artist in
her own right, who starred in The Witch’s Cradle, “characterized it as a ‘metaphysical
film,’ an exploration of ‘Maya’s own ideas about magic.’”
After showing Deren his collection of relics, both authentic and invented,
Seabrook then entreated her once again to participate in what he referred to as his
extrasensory perception experiments. Upon receiving a graphic, pages-long written
description
51
of said experiments by Seabrook, Deren was put off by their sexualized
and ostensibly derogatory nature, and responded with an intense interrogation of the
value of the experiments as relating to extrasensory perception. After an extenuated
exchange during which his responses were mostly evasive, Seabrook ultimately
admitted the experiments for which he had procured Deren were erotic exercises in
bondage and domination/submission, with little to no intent of revealing anything
about extrasensory perception. Horrified, Deren refused to participate. At this point,
Seabrook appears to have expressed surprise that Deren would not allow herself to be
violated in the manner he had described. Rather than acquiesce to her decision not to
participate, Seabrook applied pressure in a different way—by suggesting that perhaps
Deren was not an intuitive enough person to be of value to experiments; that although
she didn’t look or appear very intelligent, she was behaving in too cerebral (and
therefore deficient) a way, in this moment, to perhaps even be allowed to participate in
the experiences for which he had spent months recruiting her:
He looked at me a long time, and then he said . . . “Well, I
was mistaken. When I saw you sitting on the floor at
Martha’s Vineyard, with the wide bracelet and your hair
down, you didn’t seem to me to be a girl whose primary
function was thinking. But your mind is too involved here.
It would be hard to break that down into a state of passivity
which extra-sensory perception requires.”
52

To shorten a long and ugly story, Seabrook finally accepted Deren’s refusals to
participate; he appears to have finally stopped arguing. In all of the varying narratives
surrounding the Rhinebeck episode, Deren had to spend at least one night at Seabrook’s
51
TLMD, Part I, Vol. I, p. 412.
52
TLMD, Vol. I, Part I, p. 414.
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estate against her will.
53
Although in the most benign form of the story, Deren was
simply detained due to practical measures regarding an “eastern blizzard,” she
nonetheless even in this version of the story described having feelings of “terror” at
being compelled to remain at Seabrook’s place,
54
as well as afterwards having a
“terrific nervous reaction, like after an emergency dealt with,”
55
which today would
likely be considered diagnosable.
5657

It appears that Deren expressed, over the years, a few different versions of this
narrative to her closer friends and confidants; these later variations of the story suggest
that she was shackled or physically restrained
58
at Seabrook’s estate for an
indeterminate period of time—that a blizzard was not the only thing that caused her to
remain there against her will. Other versions of the story (again, provided by Deren
herself at different times) suggest at least some participation in Seabrook’s experiments,
and include a narrative of “escape” that implies her release was not as consensual on
Seabrook’s part as her letter to Herb Passin describes. In light of contemporary experts’
recent writings on the ways in which victims of sexual violence often process trauma—
53
The reasons for her detention/delayed departure vary by account: in her letter to Herb Passin
describing the ordeal, she was detained overnight at the estate due to a blizzard; in other
versions, including one she shared with Passin, she was “shackled” and had to “escape”
(TLMD, Vol. I, Part I, p. 405)—she had willingly begun to participate in some of the goings-on
at the Seabrook estate, in those versions, but clearly some sort of transgression transpired: she
came to feel that the situation, and ostensibly the perpetrator, was “evil.”
54
TLMD, Vol. I, Part I, p. 414.
55
TLMD, Vol. I, Part I, p. 414.
56
As Susan Rubin Suleiman describes it, “A . . . neurologically based definition [of trauma
symptoms] would be that a traumatic event—or ‘traumatic stressor’—produces an excess of
external stimuli and a corresponding excess of excitation in the brain. When attacked in this
way, the brain is not able to fully assimilate or ‘process’ the event, and responds through
various mechanisms such as psychological numbing, or shutting down of normal emotional
responses,” only reacting later, when, as Judith Herman phrases it, safety has been established
(in Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books, 1997, p. 3). For Suleiman’s description of
trauma as described in the beginning of this footnote, see “Judith Herman and Contemporary
Trauma Theory,” Women’s Studies Quarterly, Vol. 36, Numbers 1 & 2, Spring/Summer 2008,
pp. 276-281.
57
See the ADAA’s criteria for diagnosing PTSD, which includes, “Exposure to actual or
threatened . . . sexual violation,” and “flashbacks or other dissociative reactions in which the
individual feels or acts as if the traumatic events are recurring,” both of which Deren describes
in detail as part of her extended reaction to the situation, once she had left Rhinebeck and was
back in New York. Someone today who revealed this narrative of experience and described
these (wholly understandable and appropriate) reactions would surely be referred to a mental
health professional whose focus was on treating trauma patients.
58
TLMD, Part I, Vol. I, p. 405: in an interview with TLMD Project, Herb Passin recalls: “. . . She
said it was evil, she started with great enthusiasm and willingness to accept a great deal but,
then she began to feel that it was evil. She felt trapped and she wanted to escape from there. In
fact . . . her getting away from there was a kind of escape. She was shackled or something and
had to get away from there—something like that. It sounded very dramatic. But I don’t
remember the details, because she said, ‘We’ll talk about it sometime,’ and she never did.”
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we now know that a symptom of PTSD is in fact experiencing gaps in memory
59

60
,
which often results in the presentation of different details at different times/different
incarnations of the same core narrative being offered at different times. This can
sometimes also present as the overwhelming desire to either suppress or make light of
the events, via dissociation, so that the victim retains a sense of control, facilitated by
denial (and the temporary, false “escape” it seems to offer) of the trauma s/he has
suffered
61

62
—it seems difficult to ascertain which version of Deren’s story (if any) is
the fully accurate one. This is perhaps particularly true due to Deren’s identity and
talent as a writer, as well as her creative process as an author: from her Haiti diaries,
we know that Deren’s writing process involved making a series of initial, hasty notes to
herself, written in emotionally-charged shorthand (i.e., a few words or an image that
would conjure up an entire memory or story for her, personally)
63
, and then, much
later, would delve into the narrative and the memories conjured up by her brief notes,
and ultimately deliver detailed written narratives of lived experience, rendered in
beautiful language and a compelling, poetic style.
64
Deren’s manner of revisiting stories
and memories to produce a beautifully detailed narrative from basic notes, coupled
with the relevant tenets of trauma theory outlined above, makes it seem very believable
that she may have elected to keep some of the more traumatic aspects of that story
private when crafting her brief, comparatively undetailed, written account to Herb
Passin. Further, as many have attested, Deren felt and often displayed a strong need to
both be in control of herself and her surroundings, as well as to project an image to
59
As Judith Herman writes in Trauma and Recovery, p. 157: “The patient may not have full
recall of the traumatic history and may initially deny such a history, even with careful, direct
questioning.”
60
Again, from the ADAA: “Inability to remember an important aspect of the traumatic events
(not due to head injury, alcohol, or drugs).”
61
“Some theorists also claim that in situations of extreme stress [in the context of trauma], a
dissociation takes place.” Suleiman, Susan Rubin. “Judith Herman and Contemporary Trauma
Theory,” Women’s Studies Quarterly, Vol. 36, Numbers 1 & 2, Spring/Summer 2008, p. 278.
62
A powerful, contemporary example that enacts this idea can be found in the first-person
essay that combined the aesthetic of a graphic novel with lyrical non-fiction, which recently
brought this issue into the center of public dialogue in American culture (titled, “Trigger
Warning: Breakfast”) when it appeared at Medium: https://thenib.com/trigger-warning-
breakfast-c6cdeec070e6#.ktnrw0mc7
63
The Legend of Maya Deren: Volume II, Part I: Bossale. Unpublished. Forthcoming (tbd) from
McPherson Publishing Company, UK.
64
The Legend of Maya Deren: Volume II, Part I: Bossale. Unpublished. Forthcoming (date tbd)
from McPherson Publishing Company, UK.
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others of such control.
65
Particularly, one with this personality type or tendency might
not want to admit in writing the humiliation of having been “shackled,” detained
against her will (or otherwise abused) as she claimed she was: one of the most
traumatizing things that victims describe about such abuses is the humiliation of being
deprived of their agency over themselves, their bodies, and their situations. Many
survivors of assault or abuse are reluctant to admit this, and Deren may well have been
among that demographic.
All known narratives of the Rhinebeck episode share the thread of trauma
resulting from both unwanted sexual advances and a sense of captivity; likewise, all
versions of the narrative include Deren’s increased awareness and interest regarding
the use of objects as signifiers that could create atmosphere, communicate power (and
other things, and serve as stimuli intended to elicit specific psychological and
behavioral (and perhaps spiritual or metaphysical) responses from those who viewed
them.
66
The fact that the Rhinebeck episode emphasized this interest for her is made
unequivocally clear by her letter to Herb Passin:
Stepping into [Seabrook’s] studio was like stepping into a
different world. It was a large beamed room filled with the
fantastic objects which you find in the African room of the
museum. There were wooden masks and strange grass
tapestries, bows and arrow, curious boxes and chairs, much
much [sic] primitive jewelry, strange leather things hanging
from the ceiling, many strange and curious—the trophies of
an adventurer who had seen Arabia and Timbucktoo. But it
was somehow different. In a museum these things are behind
glass; in the trophy room of an adventurer they decorate the
walls. In a museum our sense of history is distended, we are
reminded of how old the world is. In the trophy room of an
adventurer our sense of time is distended, we are reminded
of how large the world is that holds both ourselves and these
things But in Seabrook’s studio it was all somehow different.
I mean I sensed it then and name it now for the first time.
Here time, instead of being distended, was telescoped; and
geography became a provincial thing. I mean that one felt
that one was at home among these things, that as I flick my
ash into the familiar, dirty ash-tray beside this typewriter,
65
TLMD, Vol. I, Part I, interview with Alexander Hammid, in which he is pointedly asked
whether he or anyone close to them might remember any anecdote or point in time at which
Maya did not seem to be in control of herself and her surroundings; he sighs and answers
(elaborately) in the negative. pp. 405-406.
66
See Deren’s note to Herb Passin, in which she describes Seabrook’s “cunning” in using these
objects to set the viewer outside of “normal life” and “normal values,” a manipulation designed
to elicit an altered state of mind resulting in consent for activities he knew most young women
would never normally agree to.
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so I would move among these things.
After I had wandered among the objects for a while, Sea-
brook gave me the manuscript of three chapters of his
forthcoming book to read. “These,” he said, “will give you
an idea of the sort of experiments I’d like you to help me
with.” I read them quickly. They dealt with extra-sensory
perception. They proceeded upon the logic that when, for
example, someone is very very exhausted and thus physically
unable to exercise their regular senses normally, they get a
type of lucidity and hallucination which has a profound
subconscious basis etc. etc. . . . It was reasonable and
interesting. Working and living as hard as I do, I had often
reached the hallucinatory or imagistic stage of fatigue. I
had even experienced those strange moments of lucidity.
I thought I would be a good subject. I said so and we went
downstairs to lunch.
67

[ . . . ]
It was only the next day on the train, when we began to pull
into the Bronx, that the completely fantastic quality of the
thing came to me, and the extreme cunning of the man
became clear.
He created, in décor, a situation which immediately took you
out of the normal to the fantastic and removed you from the
presence of any normal values. He spoke to you about the
entire procedure in so casual and usual a tone that it seemed
normal. . . . I had a terrific nervous reaction, like after an
emergency dealt with. The images
68
kept coming to me and
all day long yesterday every muscle in my body would contract
in spasms of horror, and revulsion. Even today they float
about in the room. . . . Only this morning I remembered that
I had slept alone, in the midst of a howling blizzard,
surrounded by his instruments of pain and hideousness.
69

It is possible that this curiosity or interest or inclination of Deren’s had been
brewing quietly for a long time by the point of the Rhinebeck episode; the use of color,
shape, and symbol to elicit particular states of consciousness is also a tenet of Kabalah,
and we know that Deren had been exposed to Kabalistic writings, and found them to be
67
TLMD, Vol 1, Part 1, p. 412. Letter to Herb Passin regarding the Rhinebeck episode.
68
Given the larger context of her letter, Deren appears here to be referring to images that she
has described a few sentences earlier, which are graphic images of young women being
sexually abused by Seabrook. The detail Deren imparts, and the emotionally heightened tone
she uses—as well as the fact that these images “keep coming” to her as she pens the letter—
again raise questions as to how long Deren was actually at Seabrook’s estate, and whether these
images are imagined or real. I have omitted this portion of the letter for the purpose of keeping
the focus of my own argument on Deren’s interest in the ability of physical objects to influence
the human psyche and behaviors.
69
TLMD, Vol 1, Part 1, p. 414. Letter to Herb Passin regarding the Rhinebeck episode.
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of particular interest or inspiration towards the making of The Witch’s Cradle;
70
we also
know that this is an important aspect of Vodou, the religion Deren would eventually
convert to.
71
In between Kabalah and Vodou, though, this question is also something
which undeniably influenced her aesthetic as first a poet and then, perhaps more
predominantly, a filmmaker—as can be seen through her use of imagery, rather than
speech or a linear narrative plot, to create a visual system of signifiers—a sort of
language based upon body language, facial expression, and objects that are charged
with symbolic values—to guide audiences through an experience of a film, or to tell a
reader of her poems how to feel about the subject matter.
This question of the power of objects and artifacts, and the agency they may
exercise over humans—as symbols, or as objects of secular or religious ritual—is
perhaps the most obvious aesthetic foci of The Witch’s Cradle, which features
enchanted artifacts and art objects in a museum, and examines their ability to exert
psychological and behavioral reactions in the woman who observes them. The
questions Deren poses about this, through the film, troubles the fine line between
human subjectivity and objectivity.
INEVITABLE: THE WITCH’S CRADLE
Deren had been writing poetry for sixteen years, and seriously for
approximately a decade
72
when, in 1943, three years after the Rhinebeck episode, she
70
TLMD, Vol 1, Part 1, pp 158-159: “Attached to the shooting script for Witch’s Cradle were
several pages of drawings, [including] four rows of letters which Deren had copied from a text
on the Cabalah [sic], some of which appear full frame in the outtakes [. The letters ] are those of
a magical or ‘mystical alphabet’ known as ‘The Characters of Celestial Writing.’ In the Cabalah,
the magical alphabets are said to ‘preserve the secrets of spirits and their names from the use
and reading of profane men.’ . . . Deren’s drawings indicate that she had at least a passing
familiarity with the Cabalah, but there exists no other written documentation to substantiate
the sources or depth of her knowledge on the subject. Certain thematic elements in her other
films and scenarios do, however, suggest that she ma have made a fairly close study of texts on
the Cabalah [. . . ].”
71
One of the main tenets of Vodou is the use of this psychological truth that colors, shapes, and
other visual signifiers can be used to trigger and create specific states of mind; see Sallie Ann
Glassman’s book Vodou Visions for a discussion of this; she explains this first as a tenet of
Kabalah, and then describes traditional Vodun, Vodou, and Voodoo altars being constructed by
mostly illiterate peasants and slaves, and thusly written in a kind of visual language to express
biography, essential truths, and personal details about the likes and dislikes of each lwa.
72
“I am hailed by all the girls as a sure poet,” Deren wrote to her mother while a young
undergraduate.
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decided to make the film The Witch’s Cradle. It seems, in some ways, an inevitable
culmination of the combination of personal and aesthetic influences and inclinations
we have spent the earlier part of this document covering. The Witch’s Cradle reads as a
visual poem about the lived experience of trauma and violence, as much as about her
preoccupations with trance, altered psychic states, and the supernatural or occult.
We have seen from Deren’s earlier work that she was, as a writer, at once
intensely cerebral and able to identify and analyze aesthetic components of a work (e.g.,
those that might suggest influence from another school, as was the subject of her
Master’s thesis), as well as highly intuitive in both a spiritual and a biological, or
bodied, sense—“possessed,” as Katherine Dunham has said of her, “by rhythm,”
73
and
yet despite this bodied approach to her lived (and desired) experiences, Deren
remained fascinated by questions of the intangible as well—from her childhood hymn
to the sensory overload offered by autumn to her intensely emotive desire to recognize
emotional, psychological, and spiritual relationships with others through the work of
the body.
Given these qualities in Deren’s earlier work, The Witch’s Cradle feels like a
project that was bound to happen—perhaps needed to happen. No written poetry
specifically narrating the ordeal of the Rhinebeck episode, or her reactions to it, have
surfaced or made public at this point in time; perhaps she was waiting to explore the
visceral terror of the situation in the kind of poetry that she would not need to, as she
put it, “translate into a verbal form.” Her body was so emphasized by Seabrook’s
behaviors, and the adrenaline and other reactionary chemicals (cortisol, perhaps) that
Deren must have felt rushin through her veins must have added even further emphasis
to the fact that this was a bodied experience, in nearly every way possible. And, by
Deren’s own description of herself as both an artist and a human, the body was
incredibly important to her sense of the world:
If I did not live in a time when film was accessible to me as
a medium, I would have been a dancer, perhaps, or singer.
My reason for creating them is almost as if I would dance,
except this is a much more marvelous dance. It’s because in
73
In the Mirror of Maya Deren. Directed by Martina Kudlácek. 2002.
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film, I can make the world dance.
74

Perhaps something about the wordlessness of Deren’s films made it an attractive
medium to try to distill the story of the Rhinebeck episode—not only in terms of
purgative value, but also to distill it to its most personally complex and interesting
possibilities for Deren—given her interests in possession and the occult. It is easy to see
how the ability proffered by the medium of film, to use visual signifiers to convey the
more metaphysical parts of the story that Deren herself may have had trouble
articulating at that point—may have been intensely appealing to Deren as a storyteller,
a poet, a woman purging a narrative of trauma, and a person who relied on the
language of the body and visual signifiers in order to make sense of her own lived
experiences. Deren’s own writing on the subject supports this contention of mine:
There are times when an artist who may ordinarily work by
different principles, will use some aspect of surrealism—like
the simultaneous presentation of exteriors and interiors—for
a specific problem. Look how, in this film by Maya Deren, the
portrait becomes an X ray also. And how else could one have
said, without speaking, that the string of the mesh in which
the girl holds the universe are no more and no less than the
projection of her blood—that there is danger in the traffic of
veins and arteries. And that in the moment when the heart
breaks, we learn for certain that it is with the heart that we
see the world, and through the blood that we know it.
75

Although critics have argued that Deren’s intentions, as they are expressed here,
are not fully executed in a way that makes them fully legible on film, I find it
particularly interesting that Deren mentions veins and arteries; not merely because it
further substantiates my contentions regarding the importance of the body and sensory
perception in Deren’s work, but more because of how string is used in The Witch’s
Cradle—both as conceptual metaphor and as visual metaphor. Conceptually, the string
exists first in the film as a means of playing a game that looks like Cat’s Cradle; Cat’s
Cradle, of course, is a game predicated entirely upon using one’s hands to manipulate
74
In the Mirror of Maya Deren. Directed by Martina Kudlácek. 2002. Maya Deren speaks in a
recorded interview: Title I, Chapter 2.
75
Undated note, in Deren’s handwriting, regarding The Witch’s Cradle. It is well-documented
that Deren wrote most of the flyers and program notes for her own work, and that our current
understanding and scholarship, and the way the general public has learned to discuss her
work, were heavily influenced by her own thoughts and intentions regarding how her work
should be read. It appears that her writing of program notes and such, for early screenings of
her work, were by invitation of those who held screenings, events, etc.—perhaps feeling less
than confident in their own abilities to accurately articulate her aesthetic goals, strategies, and
achievements for audiences seeking education.
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string in order to create illusions that result from reversible transformation(s). Notably,
too, one of the stages of Cat’s Cradle is a star, which, framed by the hands, looks exactly
like a pentagram.
76
Using the string and its game as concept, Deren has already infused
her filmic poem with atmospheric connotations of illusions and the supernatural.
As noted by many other scholars, string is used as a visual metaphor, too—in
multiple ways—in this video-poem; however, in certain particular shots, the animated
string, which seems to have developed volition of its own, moves darkly up a pale arm.
The thin line of the string and its fluid movement are indeed highly suggestive of a vein;
the visual resonance is such that the shot reads like some particular, dark artery being
revealed to the viewer. To hear Deren describe it as a bodied vein whose traffic contains
elements of danger is surely easily readable to many viewers of this film-poem.
The other functions of string in this film will be revisited, and examined in
greater detail, in Chapter 3—particularly, the ways in which it relates to Duchamp’s
“16 Miles of String” installation, and the connection it reveals between Surrealism and
Deren’s work.
77
However, it seems important to note at this point that the string that
reminds the viewer of veins is the same string that appears in two other important ways
in the film. The first appearance of this string occurs outside, in daylight, at an al fresco
café. A man and a woman sit, sharing an afternoon drink. The man idly plays a string
game, like Cat’s Cradle. The woman watches. Through her reverie, we are transported
to an interior landscape in which this inanimate object—the string—takes on first the
agency of a bodied artery, and then, later in the film, webs the room and becomes one
of the objects that helps hold her hostage.
Deren’s interest in the power of objects (versus the more universally recognized
notion of the power of the subject) may feed into bigger questions that were triggered
76
See Appendix D.
77
Duchamp’s “16 Miles of String” installation, also referred to sometimes as “his twine,” was a
major part of the First Papers of Surrealism exhibit organized by André Breton to benefit the
Coordinating Council of French Relief Societies, and which opened in New York City in 1942—
during the very same week as Peggy Guggenheim’s Surrealism exhibit. The First Papers of
Surrealism exhibit opened at the Whitelaw Reid mansion at Madison Avenue and 50
th
Street;
Peggy Guggeinheim’s Surrealism exhibit—the same exhibit whose art-objects are featured in
The Witch’s Cradle—opened in her gallery, This Century, on 57
th
Street. Both openings were
considered major cultural moments, and there is little to no doubt that Deren, as a Manhattan-
dwelling artist with at least a passing interest in Surrealism at that time, would have attended
both.
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by the Rhinebeck episode, as well—questions, for example, about female-bodied
autonomy and subject-versus-object power within that context. This film interrogates
the concept of objects with agency; we might ask whether there is an implication here
that, if these objects have subjectivity and agency, then perhaps even a woman who has
been reduced to an object, in a violent way, might then more easily be able to see
herself as possessing subjectivity and agency—in a similar way to these other objects
that wield power and influence? It seems important that the inanimate object that has
seized a great deal of agency by the end of the film—the string—is also identified with
an artery or vein, thus locating it inside of the objectified female body. If the string can
summon such power, perhaps so can the marginalized body that has been reduced to
the status of an object. As Merleau-Ponty writes in Phenomenology of Perception:
. . . insofar as I have a body, I may be reduced to the status
of an object beneath the gaze of another person, and no
longer count as a person for him, or else I may become his
master and, in my turn, look at him. But this mastery is self-
defeating, since, precisely when my value is recognized
through the other’s desire, he is no longer the person by
whom I wished to be recognized, but a being fascinated,
deprived of his freedom, and who therefore no longer counts
in my eyes. Saying that I have a body is thus a way of saying
that I can be seen as an object and that I try to be seen as a
subject, that another can be my master or my slave, so that
shame and shamelessness express the dialectic of the plurality
of consciousness, and have a metaphysical significance.
78

This idea of the body as both subject and object—the seer and the seen, the
beholder and that which is viewed or beheld—or held—would continue to be a central
theme in much of Deren’s later work, both poetry and film (and the moment of most
overt overlap between her poetry and film that is The Witch’s Cradle). We will examine
this more in-depth in the next chapter (and the ways in which feminist scholars such as
Iris Marion Young and Luce Irigaray have problematized Merleau-Ponty’s approach as
described above) once we have more firmly established the status of The Witch’s Cradle
as a visual poem, and are prepared to then authoritatively administer a literary close
reading of its presentation and underlying concepts.
78
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Routledge: 1962, pp. 166-167.
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THE WITCH’S CRADLE AS A VISUAL POEM
FROM LITERARY WRITING TO WRITING FOR FILM
The Witch’s Cradle marks a point of pivotal transition for Deren, both
personally and aesthetically; it marks a point at which she documents her lifelong
fascination with the occult, ritual, and psychology of mysticism; it allows her to both
purge and examine, through her art, a lived experience of trauma, and also to
document and establish a lifelong aesthetic trajectory that is preoccupied with
questions about violence; finally, it documents the transitional moment between the
period of her primary mode of creative expression being literary writing, and the rest of
her life, during which writing for film and shooting and editing and producing film
would be her primary mode of creative thought and expression. Its genesis also occurs
a short time after two influential Surrealist exhibits in Deren’s city, and clearly displays
the influence of Surrealist artists whose playful early film experiments are now credited
with leading to our contemporary incarnations of filmic poetry. All of these aspects of
Deren’s life and art reach a point of confluence in The Witch’s Cradle.
This moment of confluence finds Deren, then, trying to reconcile the
differences between the kind of writing with which she had become familiar, and had
been doing with some measures of respective success—literary writing such as
translation, poetry, and essays—and trying to do the kind of writing that she had begun
to want to do—screenwriting, writing for film—in order to take advantage of the
things that made this way of writing attractive to her.
Deren married Alexander “Sasha” Hammid in 1943, after a whirlwind romance
in Los Angeles. The Witch’s Cradle was made shortly thereafter, and Meshes of
Afternoon later that same year. Hammid, Deren’s second husband, had been a leader in
the avant-garde Czech film scene before coming to American to escape political unrest
and then Hitler’s genocide—he and his friends were arrested for surreptitiously filming
Nazi parades. He mentored Deren as she began to try out film as her own medium,
introducing her to European experimental film (including Surrealist short films) from
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recent decades. Hammid has observed that The Witch’s Cradle was neither complete
nor, by his own standards or Deren’s, ultimately a successful film:
Witch’s Cradle kind of fell apart. I wasn’t in on it much.
There we parted a bit. I would say, “We don’t you do this
and that?” But she had her own ideas . . . . It seemed to me
that she was thinking even more in a literal way, in a ver-
bal way, as to what to express. Then when it was put on
the screen, it just didn’t project what was in mind. It be-
came visually incoherent. It was coherent perhaps on
paper, in words. This is just my theory. It’s hard to say, be-
cause the film was never completed. After a point, where
everything that she wanted to shoot was shot, she left it in
the middle. She stopped shooting. . . . But it was edited
partly, and it didn’t seem to go anywhere.
79

Other scholars have corroborated Hammid’s evaluation of this early effort of
Deren’s as marking a moment of awkward transition between Deren’s literary writing
and writing for film:
Judging from the shooting script and the footage which
does exist for Witch’s Cradle, Hammid’s opinion that
Deren’s ideas were still too literal, or literary, at this stage
is well founded. “The strings of the mesh in which the girl
holds the universe” being “the projection of her blood,”
and seeing the world “through the heart’s eye” are concepts
transposed word for word into images. Such visual “meta-
phors,” like some of Deren’s poetry, remain completely
obscure without her explanatory notes, and these are sparse.
Thus Witch’s Cradle reveals her first awkward steps in
making the transition from a literary to a filmic language.
This difficulty is also evident in an early set of notes and
drawings, perhaps for film strips, which . . . date from
1943-1944 [as well as] two poems which are related
to them in theme, [written around the same time as]
Witch’s Cradle.
80

The general consensus about the failures of The Witch’s Cradle as a film centers
around the notion that while Deren—given her literary training and abilities—might
have used language via poetry or essay to more articulately render the concepts of The
Witch’s Cradle into intelligible experience for her audience, she could not, with her
skill set at that time, appropriately achieve this effect in this new (to her) arena of
writing for film. Such evaluations are bolstered by later confirmations of the fact that
Alexander Hammid had worked with her extensively in the creation of Meshes of
79
TLMD, Vol I, Part II, p. 157.
80
TLMD, Vol I, Part II, p. 162.
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Afternoon; while Meshes did in fact come first in Deren’s chronology of film projects,
its finished product reads like a second, more sophisticated filmic effort that—it is not
surprising many scholars initially, wrongly guess—must have come after The Witch’s
Cradle. Scholars attribute this to Hammid’s own statements that Deren rebuffed his
proffered help on the genesis and execution of The Witch’s Cradle; he had helped her a
great deal with Meshes, but she was now trying to spread her wings, so to speak, and
craft The Witch’s Cradle alone, working from a private personal experience (one about
which she, by Hammid’s account, never wanted to share many serious or graphic
details).
These evaluations regarding The Witch’s Cradle as a useful failure in Deren’s
career as a filmmaker are clearly well-founded; there are certainly aspects to what
Deren wanted to convey, as evidenced in her written notes on the film, that never made
it to the screen. For example: even I, who readily identified the vein-like qualities of the
string upon a first viewing of The Witch’s Cradle, could not necessarily have
authoritatively stated an opinion that this visual reference to a vein necessarily meant
that the later use of a “mesh” of strings, in which the female protagonist “holds the
world” necessarily has the same resonance that Deren describes—that we “know the
world” through our blood. Certainly, that reading might have presented itself, upon
multiple viewings, even without Deren’s note—and yet the film does not convey the
intended relationships between these images quite clearly enough for it to be a
definitive reading, without Deren’s own words to bolster said interpretation as the
appropriate one.
On the other hand, it seems wrong to say that the film entirely fails to
communicate these ideas. It is, for example, evident from viewing even this unfinished
cut of the film that the use of string in multiple modes or degrees of agency is deliberate
and is well executed. The string is first presented as an inocuous object that is used
towards an arbitrary means—playing a game of Cat’s Cradle, or similar. Shortly
thereafter, the string displays its own small amount of agency and direction—it begins
to interact with the human body in a less passive way, as it snakes along appendages,
gracefully crossing hands and arms like small dark veins (another reference to agency,
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as the blood flows of the body’s own accord). Finally, the string webs a room in such a
way as to determine the bodied fate of the protagonist. This escalation of object
immanence is undeniable, within the constructs and universe of the film. Its intended
communication can only be described as successful. Similarly, the interspersed close-up
shots of the protagonist’s face in a horrified, agonized expression, and close-up shots of
a human heart beating fast, then faster, then still—effectively communicate anxiety,
and the role of the body in experiencing, internalizing, sustaining, and ultimately
releasing that anxiety. This apprehension of the world through the body, made clear in
Deren’s own notes above, it also clearly intended. It would be difficult to dismiss the
film’s articulation of it as unsuccessful. And, the successful elements of the film (of
which I have only yet named two) do work together to create certain intended effects
for the viewer: the distortion of time and space, the sense of (visual) incantation
brought about by repeated images; and the interrogation of the trance or possession
experience, and the ambiguous role of subject-object that the body plays within the
context of such an experience. It seems that we necessarily enter a grey area in
attempting to adjudicate a project of this nature; it cannot be described as a successful
piece (especially since it remains unfinished), and yet it accomplishes several of the
tasks that it sets out to achieve. Certainly, we might argue that many works of art and
literature, including some of Deren’s own, are neither wholly successful nor wholly
unsuccessful. We merely find ways of delineating for ourselves—and usually not by
immutable, uncontestable conclusion—whether they are more successful than they are
unsuccessful. It may be useful, then, to attempt an interpretation of The Witch’s Cradle
in terms such as these. Especially as we know that it must remain unfinished in
perpetuity—given Deren’s death her lack of an intellectual heir—perhaps rather than
simply dismissing it as an early failure, we might more articulately and more
productively discuss the project of The Witch’s Cradle in terms of what it attempts to
do, and how, and where its particular successes and failures in its intended modes of
execution inform Deren’s later work (and, perhaps too, the later work of other artists).
It remains difficult to assess whether Maya Deren would ever have returned to
this film and completed it, had she not suffered the premature death that many sources
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suggest was precipitated by the frequent outbursts of rage she suffered as a side-effect
of the “vitamin shot” injections of B-12 and methamphetamine she had been
prescribed and was regularly taking.
81

82

83
As a known filmmaker who had received
many professional accolades later in life and who lived in New York City, she may well
have had access to Peggy Guggenheim’s space, or any number of others, had she
wanted to re-shoot or finish the film. Similarly, with age and experience, Deren had
developed not only her firsthand knowledge of altered states, but her awareness of how
ritual use of objects were employed in various religions and other cultures. These
factors make it seem likely that, had she lived a longer life, she may have decided to
return to the project eventually. Other examples of Deren’s writing, including her
article on trance states in dance,
84
illustrate the fact that at times her work remained
81
Deren suffered frequent and chronic outbursts of uncontrollable rage, now a known side
effect of drugs like Benzedrine, of which her doctor had prescribed her daily injections.
Ironically, Deren referred to them as her “vitamin shots,” and the irony is that her death was
brought about, in part, by malnutrition, and likely several vitamin deficiencies. Already in poor
health due to the abuse of methamphetamines that she had been legally prescribed, Deren flew
into a rage regarding a monetary dispute with the parents of her third husband; she suffered a
stroke from the episode that quickly devolved into a brain hemorrhage, from which she never
recovered. This is documented in The Legend of Maya Deren and in interviews included in In
the Mirror of Maya Deren.
82
Many artists, not just women, were being prescribed these “vitamin shots” in New York City
around this time. The Beatles’ song “Dr. Roberts,” based upon a character who is a doctor that
can essentially facilitate client access to any desired drug, legal or illegal, has been revealed to
be Dr. Robert Freymann (see Barry Miles’ Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now. New York:
Henry Holt & Company, 1997), who was in fact known for dispensing such “vitamin shots” to
wealthy and/or celebrity New York clientele (also see: Freymann’s autobiography, What's So
Bad About Feeling Good? Jove Publications, 1983). It seems likely that Deren was receiving her
vitamin shots from this popular source, as were Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Andy Warhol, and
several other artists, many of whom were male. However, it is also difficult to ignore the
historical context in which Deren was being given these shots: female artists, particularly those
who have worked in film, have a long and ugly history of being prescribed amphetamines
because their bodies are considered commodities by which they must use to help market their
art (by being thin and conventionally attractive, as thinness is one effect of methamphetamine
usage). The film industry is rife with examples of this, perhaps one of the best-known being
Judy Garland. As Deren, too, was a female film artist who received a substantial amount of
attention for her looks, it is difficult to completely divorce her from this narrative of women
being given dangerous medications they didn’t need as a form of marginalization or erasure—
even if, at this point in time, the same drugs were also being offered to Deren’s creative
counterparts who were men.
83
According to a medical study that surveyed family practitioners and their prescription trends,
conducted in 1961—the same year in which Deren died—about one-third of amphetamine
prescriptions were for weight loss, and 85% of all amphetamine patients in the USA were
women. Per doctor visit around 1960, a woman was twice as likely as a man to receive an
amphetamine prescription. Further details regarding the study can be found at:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2377281/
84
TLMD: scholars note, correctly in my estimation, that Deren’s language in this article was
“lifeless”—dull, less expressive than one might have expected—in writing about Haitian dance
before she actually went to Haiti to observe and participate in such dances. In particular, they
critiqued her 1941 article, “Religious Possession in Dancing,” which was published in
Educational Dance in 1942.
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lackluster in its execution until she was able to garner the real-world experiences
necessary for her to illuminate her work in that given vein. It stands to reason, then,
that perhaps this is another example of when the artist/auteur needed more lived
experience before she could more effectively construct the kind of art she wanted to
around such concepts. As such—and because these concepts and the making of this
work were so crucial to the core concepts that drove Deren’s later work—it is difficult
to consider The Witch’s Cradle an entirely failed project, despite the fact that Deren did
not live long enough to complete it. However, it is also impossible to consider the
project a successful film, due in large part to the fact that it was never completed. How,
then, might we otherwise evaluate its successes and failures?
CONTEMPORARY NOTIONS OF THE VIDEO-POEM, AND A NEW AXIS FOR EVALUATION
Even in Deren’s own lifetime, her work was sometimes described—in terms of
praise—as visual poetry, including by well-established academics and poets such as
Kimon Friar
85
, who ran the Poetry Center at the historic 92
nd
Street Y in New York
City
86
—and, at times, even by Deren herself.
87
Among several instances of this
occurred when Deren was interviewed, and her life and films written about for the
New York Post in 1946. Although the article rather gratingly focuses on Deren’s
ultimate success in finding a husband (“THE BOOK FELL THROUGH, BUT SHE MET
85
Friar and his partner, James Merrill, became very close with Deren in 1946, a few years after
The Witch’s Cradle had been filmed. She and Merrill frequently supported each other’s work,
and published in the same literary journals and magazines. Their bond was lifelong, and after
Deren’s death, Merrill frequently contacted her (or thought he did) using a Ouija board; these
experiences are documented in much of his poetry. See Langdon Hammer’s James Merrill: Life
and Art (Knopf, 2015).
86
Deren delivered her first lecture at the 92
nd
Street Y in March of 1945; the event was
sponsored by its Poetry Center. Kimon Friar, who ran the Poetry Center and who had invited
Deren to deliver a presentation at the Y, recalled his impressions of her work and the lecture: “I
do remember Maya’s presentation very well, and how excited I was about the poetic quality of
her imagery and her symbolism, the mysterious nuance of it all, the condensation, the lyrical
yet brooding atmosphere. It was truly visual poetry, with all the suggestivity and
indirection of the best modern poems.” TLMD, Part I, Vol. I, p. 260. Emphasis mine.
87
In a letter to The Legend of Maya Deren Project in 1981, Friar recounts how he came to
invite Deren to show her work at the lecture that was sponsored by the Poetry Center: “She . . .
talked in terms of symbolism, and perhaps surrealism, enough for me to see that her work
would fit into a concept of poetry. I then invited her to show her films at the Y.” TLMD, Part I,
Vol. I, p. 260.
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HER MAN”), it also describes Meshes of Afternoon and includes a few of Deren’s words
on her work, and regarding her hopes for its influence:
They met at a Hollywood cocktail party, had a vigorous anti-
Hollywood conversation about film-making and five days
later were married. Maya made her first picture in their
Hollywood house in 1943 with her husband’s expert help.
It concerns a man, a girl, a knife, and a strange dark figure
with a mirror for a face . . . [Maya Deren] hopes that her
work, which which she carries on at comparatively small
expense, will encourage other people to try “poetry
in film. [. . .] I know from experience,” she stated,
“that there’s an audience [for my films]—just as there is an
audience that keeps art galleries open . . . and poetry books
being published.”
88

Deren’s own description of her films as visual poetry, complemented by similar
evaluations from respected poets of her time such as Friar and Merill (and other writers
and artists, too, such as Anaïs Nin—at least, until their falling-out), seem to suggest an
alternate reading of The Witch’s Cradle than simply an incomplete failure of a film. It is
in fact both of those things—an unfinished short film and a film that fails to fully
execute or express its intended concepts and themes. However, we might also read it as
a fragmented visual poem whose fragmentation heightens and enhances some of its
visual vocabulary. This, too, reveals the influence of earlier Surrealist film experiments,
particularly works by Germaine Dulac and Man Ray: Man Ray notably employed tropes
of disappearance and reappearance in order to enact a sense of fragmented reality or
consciousness, and Dulac utilized fragmentation of narrative to emphasize the symbolic
value of specific images—both elements that are aesthetically crucial to The Witch’s
Cradle, and which Chapter 3 will address in greater detail. However, tracing Surrealist
influence will not, by itself, provide adequate foundation for understanding how The
Witch’s Cradle meets the criteria to be considered a filmic poem, rather than simply a
Surrealist-inspired, unfinished film experiment. The viability of The Witch’s Cradle as a
filmic poem, once established by a brief discussion of contemporary filmic poetry and
its evolution, will then be further augmented and refined by the identification of
specifically Surrealist influence—letting us know what kind of filmic poem it is.
88
Braggiotti, Mary. “Classicism on a Shoestring,” New York Post, October 28, 1946. Emphasis
mine.
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What, then, is the difference between a film and a visual poem, by
contemporary literary standards? There appears to be some measure of overlap. “Poetry
videos” have become a popular vehicle for advertising new books of poetry, in the same
vein as a cinematic preview for a forthcoming studio film; they are often described as
“book trailers,” with an out-loud recitation or reading of a single poem, in whole or in
part, serving as a “soundtrack” of sorts to a short film that, whether through direct
representation or more conceptual/visual associations, attempts to communicate to
viewers (and potential readers) some sort of essential quality of the book. For example,
the contemporary, Los Angeles-based poet Jessica Piazza created a poetry video using
her sonnet “Automatonophilia,”
89
which combines music with a reading of the poem to
create a soundtrack for the onscreen representation, provided by actors, of the physical
relationship and emotional dynamic that the poem describes. The poem is from a larger
collection, Interrobang, which focuses heavily on clinically obsessive loves (“philias”)
and fears (“phobias”). Piazza’s video version of this poem offers a direct, narrative
representation of what the written poem describes. We can see some variation in the
poetry videos of other contemporary poets; Diana Arterian’s book trailer for Death
Centos features the poem in voiceover, with a series of close-up shots that focus on a
single human eye at a time.
90
The representation here is less direct than in Piazza’s
video poem; the concept and literary tropes of the eye are called forth in the
reader’s/viewer’s psyche while lines from the Death Centos—the last words of both
famous and non-famous people before their respective deaths—are presented for a
loosely-correlated consideration. The differences in these two examples make readily
apparent that linear narrative is not necessary criteria for a contemporary poetry video,
in much the same way that popular music videos do not always require a clear-cut
narrative. And, as with popular music videos, the role of the images are subordinate to
the role of the art being primarily showcased—the poem or the song, respectively.
Combinations of video and poetry that fit this relationship do not seem to merit being
89
Jessica Piazza: “Automatonophilia”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDjMG2TzzjQ
Although this video was originally created as part of a feature of Piazza’s work for an online
magazine, it became useful in online marketing of the book.
90
https://vimeo.com/63867240
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called filmic poems, however; without the filmic aspects, the poetry would remain
viable. Without the poetic language in voiceover, the significance of the video elements
would dissolve. As discussed in Chapter 1, the widely accepted definition for filmic
poetry, articulated by William Wees, stipulates that the synthesis of these two elements
must produce “associations, connotations, and metaphors” that neither the poetic use of
language nor the filmic images would produce on their own—that is, neither is
privileged above the other.
An example of this might be found in the poetry videos of ASL poet Ayisha
Knight-Shaw; for example, “Until,”
91
which was featured on MTV Def Jams, and
“Standing on Wood,”
92
which is featured on the poet’s own YouTube channel. An
interesting shift occurs in these two poems, that brings us away from the linguistic
criterion set up by video-poems that function as Piazza’s and Arterian’s do. In the video
for “Until,” Ayisha Knight-Shaw performs the poem in her preferred medium—
American Sign Language—while a spoken-word poet translates the poem into English
in real time for the hearing audience. In the video for “Standing on Wood,” there is no
audio track; it is a silent film. The language of the poem is only ASL—a non-verbal
language couched in and communicated by the body. The same artist uses spoken
language in one video poem and then only her body to speak the poem in the other.
Both are clearly poetry videos. “Standing on Wood,” however, inseparably merges
language and image: the body’s performance of signifying gestures is the poem—and
this begins to realize Wees’ definition of filmic poetry, in which language and image
combine to create a transformative poetic experience.
We see this phenomenon develop in the video-poems of Monique Holt, a poet
and performer who creates ASL translations of famous Shakespearean sonnets. If we
read or view her video-poem of “Sonnet 24,”
93
we are greeted first with an English text
version of the poem (referred to many speakers of ASL as an “English translation”); this
well-known sonnet, with which some viewers may already be highly familiar, might be
91
Ayisha Knight-Shaw. “Until.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4py3SA4DVns
92
Ayisha Knight-Shaw. “Standing on Wood”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzLnJe6ve-
M
93
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJ1nN9Nx_hM
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said to “ghost” Holt’s performance of the poem. However, such “ghosting” is not
entirely dissimilar from Deren’s use of visual archetype in The Witch’s Cradle—the
cultural significances with which certain objects have already been imbued “ghosts”
our perceptions of them in the film. This might be said, for example, of Deren’s use of
the human heart, which has certainly enjoyed its share of acquired connotations in
Western literature. And it remains that, in both these video-poems and in The Witch’s
Cradle, the essential language is that of the body. Some might argue, and rightfully so,
that ASL is still a language proper, and, as such, that it is in many ways more similar to
spoken English than it is to an unwritten code of bodily gestures. However, the
meanings of ASL bodily gestures are arguably just as particular to American culture—if
not more so—as other forms of body language. These other forms of body language
include the art of dance, wherein complex plots, emotions, and character traits are
communicated by dancers using only their bodies—an art that we already know
heavily informed Deren’s own aesthetic, as her time with Katherine Dunham’s dance
troupe informed her earlier work and taught her the importance of the body’s
language.
In addition to the surface similarities between ASL and other types of physical
expression that we idiomatically term “body language,” scholars of semiotic theory
have established firmly that there are many different types of systems-of-signifiers, and
that all systems of signification might be considered forms of language. When Anne
Clark lies on her back, her hair entangled in the Giacometti sculpture Woman With A
Cut Throat, with a phallic-shaped object swinging in her face and a look of distress, for
example
94
: we understand her distress from her facial expression; we understand a
quality of helplessness from her prostrate position and the tangle of her hair that
renders her immobile and tethered; and we understand the implications of violation
that are suggested by the swinging phallic shape that hits her repeatedly in the face and
94
Clark was positioned on her back as though reclining in a bathtub, underneath the display
ledge that held the sculpture. The phallic-shaped appendage that appears to function in the
sculpture as a kind of forearm hangs down, touching her chest and face. Deren staged Clark to
have her hair pulled up as in a high bun or ponytail, and rather than being bound with an
elastic band or a pin, her hair is tangled in the statue above. See Appendix C for a stand-alone
image of this bronze sculpture, and a frame from The Witch’s Cradle that clarifies Clark’s
physical position in relation to the sculpture in the film.
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chest. Of course, we are also aware of the visual resonance between Clark’s body in this
vulnerable, frightened posture and the image of the statue itself—the visual parallel
suggesting that the state of the violated woman represented by the statue is a similar
state to Clark’s own. The fact that her character is rendered immobile by her hair
95

strengthens both the brutality and the sexual component of the metaphor—all
communicated through the body and without language. The official copy provided by
the Museum of Modern Art regarding standard interpretation of the sculpture bolsters
this reading:
Woman with Her Throat Cut is rigorously horizontal. In-
tended by the artist to be placed on the floor without a
base, it suggests the violent image of a woman raped and
murdered.
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When analyzing this frame of the film, that it would be difficult to argue that Deren is
not employing a visual language here, one that is at least in part based upon the
gestures of the human body.
In this light, Deren’s work appears to have effectively presaged the work of
contemporary artists such as Dawn Kramer
97
(who, incidentally, also has a background
in dance); Kramer’s silent video poems include work such as “Body of Water,” and are
deliberately orchestrated without sound and with the titular ‘poetry’ being located in
the expression of the body. Along with other, vaster elements, the body’s own language
communicates these poems. In Deren’s films, the added signifiers of lighting, makeup,
wardrobe, art, and architecture punctuate each frame; and the cut of the film functions
similarly to the way white space and enjambment are used to cut lines of written
poetry—or silence or music are used to “cut” poetry that is performed aloud in other
types of video poetry. The Witch’s Cradle is a silent film, but the poetic voices of objects
and experience are rendered audible through our visual experience.
95
Interestingly, Deren also received a lot of attention for her hair, which was distinctive and
unfashionable in its auburn color and wild curls. This is documented in numerous interviews
with surviving friends and colleagues, perhaps most notably in recorded conversation and
personal anecdotes in The Mirror of Maya Deren. Perhaps the focus on the protagonist’s hair, in
this particular context of The Witch’s Cradle, could be read as a subtle visual connection
between Deren and the protagonist.
96
http://www.moma.org/collection/works/81796
97
http://dawnkramer.info/Recentwork/SilentVideoPoems-UT.html
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Having gained an understanding of why it is reasonable to interpret The Witch’s
Cradle as a visual poem, we may begin an analysis of whether certain aspects of this
visual poem—the immediacy with which it communicates through semiotics and
bodied gestures; the fragmentary nature of what might be described as its narrative or
plot; the privileging of feeling over explicit narrative (i.e., even if we don’t fully
understand the backstory, it frequently happens throughout the film in any given
moment that we have an adequate number of signifiers instructing us as to how we
ought to feel about whatever is happening onscreen)— enjoy some measure of success,
as we parse them more fully in the next chapter.
For Deren, the connection between poetry and film was, and would remain,
enduring and vital; she would continue to mine this connection in her film aesthetic,
exploring and reinforcing it, for the duration of her career: at the time of her death,
Deren was working on the film Season of Strangers, a project suggested to her by a stay
at a particular inn in Woodstock, NY. Always fascinated by interior spaces and what
they might symbolize, Deren viewed the inn as an intimate yet mysterious space in
which individual travelers would all be housed, and yet never meet; to her, this
relationship among strangers and their transient presences was conceptually similar to
the way a psyche hosts transient thoughts—they all pass through the caverns of our
minds, and yet many of them might never mesh or find connection. This unfinished
film’s alternative title was The Haiku Project.
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Earlier, this chapter investigated the different objects and/or values that might
be signified by the phrase “witch’s cradle,” in order to evaluate what kind of weight or
significance it may have held for Deren personally, and what weight or significance it
might have been intended to carry as the title for her film. Having spent a latter portion
of this chapter discussing different types of signifiers in video-poems, it seems an apt
moment to now consider one other possibility of what the title might signify. It seems
prudent, while evaluating the ambition and redemptive value of this film-as-video-
poem, to note that the phrase “witch’s cradle” could also, for our purposes, signify still
98
TLMD, Volume I, Part II, p. 2.
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something else: an early-stage point of nurturing for tendencies (or even a woman)
both magical and feminine. The words “witch’s cradle” might be read, as we analyze
Deren’s video-poem and keep in mind the trope of the witch in literature—as an
invocation of the literary and cultural lineage of the witch—a woman of knowledge
and power. Perhaps, in our reading, this film/video-poem itself functioned for Deren as
a kind of “witch’s cradle”—the film and process of making it together served as an
incubator/vehicle that bolstered and nurtured her early talent and courage, and her
pioneering efforts. This video-poem may, as an incomplete project with which Deren
was never entirely satisfied, have helped Deren grow, helped her give herself further
direction as she cultivated her knowledge of and potential regarding the film
medium,
99
as well as her interest in magic/the occult and states of possession or other
altered psychic states.
In making the film, Deren created not only a documentation of her fascination
with these subjects, but a tangible artifact in the world that emphasized her fascination
with them—and provided a valuable touchstone, both conceptually and aesthetically,
for understanding her later work that continued this trajectory and would continue to
explore the depths of these mysterious topics. As her fascination with these topics
continued to express itself in her later life choices and her later film projects, it’s clear
that the creation of this film, and possibly the film itself, were not only the self-
expression(s) of a trauma-survival story, and not only the expression of an idée fixe
fascination with the occult, but also a means of self-reinforcement, both as a survivor of
trauma and a student of the psychological and the metaphysical.
99
For a thought-provoking discussion of the way incompleteness functions in Deren’s film
aesthetic, see Sarah Keller’s “Frustrated Climaxes: On Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon
and Witch’s Cradle,” Cinema Journal, Volume 52, Number 3, Spring 2013, pp. 75-98: “The
impulse toward suggestion without satisfaction . . . could even be said to be Deren’s modus
operandi. It prevents her from finishing a great deal of intended work, but it also directs her in
positive ways toward suggestive, unresolving tensions . . .”
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Chapter 3: A Poetics of Incantation
THE UNCANNY AND ITS RENDERING
Having articulated some criteria by which we might understand and interpret
The Witch’s Cradle as a type of poetry, we can now examine more specifically the
poetics by which it enacts a systematic derangement of the viewer’s senses, and to what
end it does so. This analysis will focus on a poetics of incantation that includes: the
repetition of visual images via montage; the temporal disruptions created by the use of
visual repetition in tandem with other factors; and spatial distortions that further a
sense of viewer disorientation, creating a rhythmic, atmospherically induced sense of
trance that encourages a state of mild dissociation in the viewer.
1

2

I will argue that this sense of visual incantation in The Witch’s Cradle, by
interrupting the viewer’s ability to effectively construct and navigate a linear narrative
in real time, renders familiar objects and images unfamiliar or difficult to recognize,
increasing the viewer’s sense of a trancelike, intuitive experience of the film. I will
argue that all of these aspects work together to create the poem of The Witch’s Cradle,
and that Deren’s poetics render for the viewer, via interruption of normal sensory
stimulation, a state of uncanniness; and that, as the familiar is rendered unfamiliar and
the viewer becomes more disoriented, an encounter with “the unknown” is facilitated,
1
Deren is, after all, considered to be one of the main originators of trance film. See Adams P.
Sitney’s Visionary Film: the American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000 (Oxford University Press,
2002). Additionally, Deren’s reputation as the “Mother of the Trance Film” is upheld today via
established art institutions such as the MOMA. See their official copy regarding her
contributions to the trance film genre: http://www.moma.org/collection/works/89283
2
The relationship between trance and dissociation is well established in the DSM-V, as well as
American medical practice. The DSM-V specifically lists trance states and trance possession
states as enacting a form of dissociation, although allowances are made for “culturally
approved” rituals in which possession and trance states are enacted for religious purposes by
recognized cultural groups, and do not generally interfere to a substantial degree with an
individual’s daily life. One example of one medical article that draws on this DSM-V
categorization in attempt to apply it to the American practice of medicine can be seen in James
Elmore’s “Dissociative Spectrum Disorders in the Primary Care Setting,” Primary Care
Companion to The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry 2.2 (2000): 37–41. Elmore writes: “Many of
our center's clients . . . maintain voodoo-derived beliefs . . . Voodoo possession, a culturally
sanctioned phenomenon occurring in normal individuals, involves trance-like behavior with an
alteration of perception, memory, and identity . . . a culturally approved dissociative trance
state. . . . associated with the development of dissociative [psychiatric] defense mechanisms.
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during which the viewer must employ a sense of negative capability.
3
This process, I
will argue, allows new ideas to form in the viewer’s mind, via this instilled sense of
alienation or dissociation, and ultimately results in the production of new knowledge or
insight, created by a sense of lived experience.
ON THE PRESENCE AND SIGNIFICANCE OF THE UNCANNY
Freud wrote rather prolifically regarding the ways in which repetition,
particularly the repetition of an image, could create an uncanny effect; his ideas may
provide some foundational illumination for our understanding of how this framework
functions in Deren’s visual poem:
. . . an involuntary return to the same situation . . . result[s]
in the . . . feeling of helplessness and of something uncanny.
As, for instance, when one is lost in a forest in high altitudes,
caught . . . by the mountain mist, and when every endeavor
to find the marked or familiar path ends again and again in
a return to one and the same spot, recognizable by some par-
ticular landmark. Or when one wanders about in a dark,
strange room, looking for the door or the electric switch, and
collides for the hundredth time with the same piece of
furniture . . . it is only this factor of involuntary repetition
which surrounds with an uncanny atmosphere what would
otherwise be innocent enough, and forces upon us the idea
of something fateful and unescapable where otherwise we
should have spoken of “chance” only.
4

Several important elements seem to be at play, under the surface, in this
definition. First, it appears that an extant sense of disorientation or being “lost” must be
in play early on. Deren’s film provides this almost immediately; though the opening
scene on the sidewalk café is rendered as approachable, non-threatening narrative, that
sense is quickly eliminated in the first scene change, when a different kind of
experience begins for both the protagonist and the viewer. We enter a dimly-lit,
cavernous, interior space—a visual metaphor for the subconscious mind, contend The
Legend of Maya Deren scholars, and I tend to agree: the visual cues and symbolic
3
John Keats, in a letter to his brothers George and Thomas, in December 1817, wrote: “I mean
Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts,
without any irritable reaching after fact & reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a
fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of
remaining content with half knowledge. This pursued through Volumes would perhaps take us
no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other
consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.”
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/essays/detail/69384
4
Freud, “The Uncanny,” p. 11.
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imagery Deren uses here to suggest that the woman’s subconscious mind has now
assumed command of this (non-)narrative filmic poem can be traced to the opening
sequence of Germaine Dulac’s The Seashell and the Clergyman, in which the camera
pans down a darkened corridor, towards the uncanny image of a mysteriously backlit
door that will lead us inside—to elements of the unknown, which are obscured by the
artificial construct of the door and the building on which it hinges, just as the chaos of
experience is obscured by the artificial narratives and social constructs of the ego and
the conscious mind.
5
In Deren’s filmic poem The Witch’s Cradle, this shift into
subconscious territory is signified by Anne Clark’s character (and, vicariously, the
viewer—and, symbolically, Deren herself) wandering alone in darkness through this
interior corridor space. It is revealed within a few seconds to be a deserted museum,
filled with strange objects—another apt metaphor for the weird chaos of the
subconscious mind, where snippets and artifacts of our taboo,incomprehensible, and
unshared experiences reside. Secondly, most of these examples include some element of
visual obfuscation—darkness, mountain mist, unfamiliar or difficult-to-navigate
surroundings. These might be termed elements that distort the viewer’s (or querent’s)
perceptions of the space, obfuscating or obscuring it to some degree. Deren’s film
provides this as well, particularly in the scenes of the museum interior, which include
multiple elements that also act as disruptors of the viewer’s normal ability to apprehend
and interpret a space. Finally, all of the examples Freud provides above include
repetition as a reflection of the wanderer’s helplessness or lack of agency in the
situation—the repetition is marked by a feeling of uncertainty, a feeling of not being in
control. The repetition of images begins to build hysteria and a sense of the uncanny
because the wanderer does not wish to be repeatedly confronted with these sights, but
rather wishes to escape them. This, of course, is the crux of Deren’s film—the desire to
escape unpleasant and frightening surroundings, and the inability to do so, but rather
the frustration of each escape attempt and the repeated confrontation of both
protagonist and viewer with the same scenarios, over and over again. Perhaps
5
This work by Dulac is widely recognized as the first Surrealist film, further cementing the
question of Surrealist influence on Deren’s filmic work.
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specifically regarding the “return” of the string in Deren’s film—its constant
reappearance in increasingly ominous ways—Freud’s example of the recurrence of the
number 62 is an apt analogy:
For instance, we . . . attach no importance to the event when
we give up a coat and get a cloakroom ticket with the number,
say, 62; or when we find that our cabin on board ship is
numbered 62. But the impression is altered if two such events,
each in itself indifferent, happen close together, if we come
across the number 62 several times in a single day, or if we
begin to notice that everything which has a number—
addresses, hotel-rooms, compartments in railway-trains—
always has the same one, or one which at least contains the
same figures. We do feel this to be “uncanny,” and unless a
man is utterly hardened and proof against the lure of super-
stition he will be tempted to ascribe a secret meaning to this
obstinate recurrence of a number . . .
How exactly we can trace back the uncanny effect of such
recurrent similarities . . . is a question I can only lightly
touch upon in these pages . . . It must be explained that we
are able to postulate the principle of a repetition-compulsion
in the unconscious mind, based upon instinctual activity
and probably inherent in the very nature of the instincts—
a principle powerful enough to overrule the pleasure-
principle, lending to certain aspects of the mind their
daemonic character, and still very clearly expressed in the
tendencies of small children; a principle, too, which is re-
sponsible for a part of the course taken by the analyses of
neurotic patients. Taken in all, the foregoing prepares us
for the discovery that whatever reminds us of this inner
repetition-compulsion is perceived as uncanny.
6

While Freud’s discussion of the repetition-compulsion is explored at greater
length in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the relation he brings it to bear upon his
concept of the uncanny is best developed in this essay. This helps us understand,
perhaps, why incantation exists in the first place—we are wired, as Freud argues, to
ascribe greater significance to that which is repeated. When the repetitions we observe
are not of our own devising and are not under our immediate control, we not only
ascribe greater significance to them, but a greater potential for harm, because we
assume that someone else (or, in the case of Deren’s film, something(s) else) is wielding
control and creating a pattern of significance that we don’t yet understand. Our lack of
understanding, combined with our lack of agency in the situation, often yields fear,
translated by these circumstances into a feeling of the uncanny.
6
Freud, “The Uncanny,” pp. 11-12.
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This reading of Freud’s repetition and repetition-compulsion are supported by
his own explanation of the cultural trope of ‘the evil eye,’ and how that, too, contributes
at times (when that cultural mythos is employed) to our greater communal
understanding of the uncanny:
One of the most uncanny and widespread forms of super-
stition is the dread of the evil eye. There never seems to
have been any doubt about the source of this dread. Who-
ever possesses something at once valuable and fragile is
afraid of the envy of others, in that he projects on to them
the envy he would have felt in their place. A feeling like this
betrays itself in a look even though it is not put into words;
and when a man attracts the attention of others by noticeable,
and particularly by unattractive, attributes, they are ready
to believe that his envy is rising to more than usual heights
and that this intensity in it will convert it into effective action.
What is feared is thus a secret intention of harming some-
one, and certain signs are taken to mean that such an inten-
tion is capable of becoming an act.
7

By this definition, the concept of evil eye stems from the fear of (one’s body, and
therefore one’s consciousness and one’s identity) being positioned as an object which is
seen, rather than as the subjective agent who is doing the “seeing,” or whose viewpoint
carries enough dominance to set the narrative. This, at its root, is the fear of not being
able to exercise agency over how one is seen by a potentially malicious or malevolent
other—perhaps, in objectification, we might be reduced to the status of another’s prey.
In The Witch’s Cradle, this anxiety is fully realized in the protagonist’s dilemma—
although she is “beheld,” and held against her will, by enchanted or supernaturally-
powered objects rather than by humans. This arguably furthers the uncanniness of the
situation: the feeling is familiar and recognizable, and yet the physical details of the
situation are quite surreal. We know from Deren’s contemporaries and those involved
with the making of The Witch’s Cradle—and from Deren’s own accounts of herself—
that she was highly interested in the power of ritual objects, both natural and
supernatural, to set or heighten atmosphere in a way that would alter human
perceptions, thought, and behavior. And, moreover, she sought out Duchamp for this
project particularly because she admired his ability to depict object immanence through
his art—the power with which his work was able to imbue objects through the viewer’s
7
Freud, “The Uncanny,” p. 12.
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eyes.
8
This interest Deren took in Duchamp’s work speaks to her early attraction to
Surrealist aesthetics, though later her feelings about Surrealism would become more
conflicted. Although Deren was often impatient with the Surrealists and their aesthetic
tendencies later in life
9
, it is impossible to ignore the influence they exerted over her
work—including by her own admission in her writings about The Witch’s Cradle. In
addition to the ways that Deren recognized their influence, it is easy to see that the
unsettling moments during which magically-charged objects disappear and reappear in
The Witch’s Cradle provide visual echoes of these tropes as employed by Man Ray in
films such as his Le Retour à la Raison (1923), in which abstract images created with
salt and pepper, a drawing pin, and a collection of nails all disappear and reappear.
10

Similarly, there are many readily identifiable parallels between Deren’s use of
fragmentation to emphasize a more lyrical sense of symbolism or metaphor for given
objects or images and the film work of Germaine Dulac; for example, in L’invitation au
Voyage, the 1927 film that Dulac crafted in response to Baudelaire’s poem of the same
title, a fragmented narrative is enacted in which an unhappy female protagonist in an
unfulfilling romantic relationship repeatedly imagines the ocean (another image which
disappears and reappears, to the viewer’s eye), but when looking out the window of a
nautical-themed nightclub, is confronted with a view of refuse and what appear to be
construction scraps. Obtaining a new life with a lover is a difficult, arduous
undertaking, Dulac seems to be reminding us with this imagery, as our protagonist
continues to imagine the sea. There are, in reality, no waves to sweep this unhappy
woman from her situation; there are not even enough tools present to help her fashion
a vehicle of escape for herself—rather, only scraps of material that are as ugly as they
are useless. Dulac deliberately moves away from a traditional narrative expression of
8
As Deren’s colleague and friend Stan Brakhage writes, Deren’s project in The Witch’s Cradle
“was to show the charge and the power for perfectly ordinary household objects in relationship
to the history of magic. She singled out—and especially respected—[Duchamp] because she felt
that [he] had created objects of magic from daily household things.” Film At Wit’s End
(McPherson & Co., 1989): p. 97.
9
In the 1950s, Deren penned warning letters to cinema curators, insisting emphatically, “under
no conditions should [my] films be announced or publicized as Surrealist or Freudian.” TLMD,
Vol I, Part 2, p. 402. Original emphasis retained.
10
See Kim Knowles’ detailed analysis of the film’ moment-by-moment experience in A
Cinematic Artist: The Films of Man Ray (Peter Lang, 2012).
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events, and in doing so she imbues these images with a more lyrical, symbolic
significance. Deren’s treatment of several images within The Witch’s Cradle mirror
this—particularly, all the different ways in which the string manages to disappear and
reappear in new forms, continuously acting as an aggressive presence.
Part of the Surrealist project was bound up with the desire to dismantle the
architectures of the rational, in order to allow what D.H. Lawrence referred to as
“blood knowledge” to filter through the psyche and inform the was the conscious mind
formulated and structured knowledge. Surrealism, and Deren’s work as well,
particularly in The Witch’s Cradle, marked an exciting, uncertain cultural moment in
which European and American poetry were beginning to evolve past and playfully
subvert the “poetry as theater” metaphor suggested by Wallace Stevens in “Of Modern
Poetry,” and to play with the possibilities—psychological, aesthetic, and metaphysical—
of poetry identifying with the newer, less-familiar medium of film. Deren’s timely,
cinematic interest in object immanence and the Kabalistic power of shape, color, and
other physical properties to act upon the psyche and produce altered states of
consciousness is clear in the makeup of The Witch’s Cradle; the tandem anxieties of the
viewer (and perhaps of Deren herself, in investigating these altered states) are also
present, although without Freud’s work we might lack the vocabulary to readily
delineate them.
In discussing this cultural trope of the evil eye, Freud also introduces his concept
of ‘omnipotence of thoughts,’ or the belief (usually a fear) that one’s own thoughts and
energies—especially, perhaps, those that are unpleasant or uncontrollable—will come
to govern our reality. (This notion is enduring, and finds perhaps its most familiar
latter-day manifestation in highly popular books such as The Secret.) Freud relates this
fear of “omnipotence of thought” to his ideas regarding the castration complex and
suggests that these two things might, together, be taken to mean a feeling that one’s
thoughts (or fears) are reflected and actualized in external surfaces, and that the
autonomy of the self is reduced to the point of powerlessness to resist adverse forces.
On the concept of omnipotence of thoughts, Freud writes:
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These last examples of the uncanny are to be referred to that
principle in the mind which I have called “omnipotence of
thoughts,” taking the name from an expression used by one
of my patients. And now we find ourselves on well-known
ground. Our analysis of instances of the uncanny has led
us back to the old, animistic conception of the universe,
which was characterized by the idea that the world was
peopled with the spirits of human beings, and by the nar-
cissistic overestimation of subjective mental processes (such
as the belief in the omnipotence of thoughts, the magical
practices based upon this belief, the carefully proportioned
distribution of magical powers or “mana” among various
outside persons and things), as well as by all those other
figments of the imagination with which man . . . strove to
withstand the inexorable laws of reality. It would seem as
though each one of us has been through a phase of individ-
ual development corresponding to that animistic stage in
primitive men, that none of us has traversed it without
preserving certain traces of it which can be re-activated,
and that everything which now strikes us as “uncanny”
fulfills the condition of stirring those vestiges of animistic
mental activity within us and bringing them to expression.
And on the castration complex:
We know from psychoanalytic experience, however, that
this fear of damaging or losing one’s eyes is a terrible fear
of childhood. Many adults still retain their apprehensiveness
in this respect, and no bodily injury is so much dreaded by
them as an injury to the eye. We are accustomed to say, too,
that we will treasure a thing as the apple of our eye. A study
of dreams, phantasies and myths has taught us that a morbid
anxiety connected with the eyes and with going blind is often
enough a substitute for the dread of castration.
11

In conjunction, these two elements that Freud identifies as integral factors in
the creation of the uncanny might well be considered the definition of the entire
essence of the plot of The Witch’s Cradle: the protagonist, and the viewer who identifies
with her, has her fears actualized by the objects around her that ultimately hold her
hostage/prisoner, and her autonomy, in the face of these objects that assume greater &
more intense power over her, is reduced to the point where she is helpless to resist. That
the film begins with the woman outside enjoying a beverage with a man and then,
watching him play with the string, slips into her private reverie about the string, which
quickly turns to nightmare in which the string and other objects imprison her, shows
that Freud’s description of “omnipotence of thought” is at work in this film. Naturally,
Freud’s theory of castration complex did not extend to women, but as feminists such as
11
Freud, The Uncanny, p. 7.
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Irigaray and Grosz and Young have been able to identify limitations in Merleau-Ponty’s
default (cisgendered male) perspective, so I identify such a limitation in Freud’s
perspective here: the essence of this “castration complex” that Freud identifies in men
could just as well apply to women who fear the reduction of their power or agency;
only the bodied terms in which Freud couches these ideas about power, autonomy, and
self-actualization would necessarily be different for women, based upon their non-male
physiology.
12 13
It merits note that Freud’s description of repetition and repetition-compulsion as
they relate to the uncanny is strikingly evocative, in its similarity to the psychological
phenomenon of semantic satiation (in which a word repeated too many times
temporarily loses meaning to the listener or reader, whose synapses that process
linguistic meaning become exhausted). Just as the effect of semantic satiation is that it
allows something known and familiar to be temporarily deprived of its meaning and
thus become strange again—allowing new forms of knowledge to filter through in the
reader or listener’s mind—so this effect of uncanniness in Deren’s film works to a
similar end. As images are repeated so that what would normally be easily interpreted
by our senses into a cogent narrative of experience, these images, through their
repetition, become temporarily strange to us. This can be seen especially in terms of the
human heart, the use of string, and the protagonist’s face and body when entangled in
the Giacometti sculpture Woman With A Cut Throat.
Freud’s theory of the uncanny has usually been interpreted in its relation to the
philosophical writings of Nietzsche and, earlier, of Schelling; since these ideas are
already entrenched in the canon of Western philosophical writing, it is perhaps not
surprising that later influential thinkers, such as Lacan, augmented Freud’s theory in a
12
McCabe, Susan. Cinematic Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 2005): p. 137 provides a
concise summation of Freud’s theory of the female castration complex: “If the female does not
accept her anatomical diminution, she inevitably compromises her heterosexuality, either
becoming a sexually inhibited hysteric or a ‘masculine woman,’ prone to lesbianism or
regression to maternal attachment.”
13
The concept of forced sterilization as a metaphor for loss of power perhaps hits too close to
home for some women, both in the States and abroad, who continue to battle for legal
protections of their right to autonomy over their bodies and, specifically, their reproductive
abilities.
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way that furthers its relevance to literary interpretation; in Lacan’s view, the observing
subject may be “seduced” by an image—already a curious interpretation, since this
suggests a certain amount of power on the part of the object being viewed. According to
Lacan, the agent who is performing the viewing of said object may experience the
sudden or unexpected revelation that the object that has “seduced” him is somehow in
its existence or presentation dependent upon some other object or some other factor or
influence. As the subject experiences this realization, he realizes simultaneously that he,
himself, is not autonomous.
14
Whereas Freud largely used case studies as his supporting
examples, Lacan notably relied upon a literary work, Guy de Maupassant’s “Le Horla,”
and from it extracts the significant example of a man who gazes at his own back in a
mirror. He recognizes the presence of his back, and yet the back itself appears
impervious to the subject’s gaze. The sight of this man’s back appears to him as a
foreign, external object—until he recognizes it as his own. In this unsettling moment of
clarity, one’s own body (or part of it), which is arguably the most familiar object to any
sentient being in our world, is rendered momentarily unfamiliar. Once the man
recognizes his back as his own, he is then aware of the subject’s gaze—also his own. To
Lacan, this moment of uncanniness—the familiar rendered unfamiliar, even as it
becomes familiar again—is the catalyst for the production of anxiety.
So we can see that the uncanny had borne out an established role in Western
literature and art for decades, perhaps centuries, before Deren created The Witch’s
Cradle. What is particularly innovative and interesting regarding Deren’s utilization of
the uncanny is that, in achieving this effect of uncanniness, Deren effectively—and, I
would argue, consciously—performs a violence upon the viewer that matches the
violence her heroine’s experience renders upon her (and the trauma that the Rhinebeck
episode—and, arguably, later experiences of spiritual possession, though they were
psychologically positive and empowering, whereas the Rhinebeck episode was neither
of those things—wrought upon Deren herself) that deranges these senses and
ultimately serves to temporarily obliterate the viewer’s ego, thus enacting a type of
possession of her viewer, and also thus giving the viewer an ecstatic, if unsettling,
14
See Lacan’s lecture series “L’angoisse” (trans. “Anxiety”),1962-1963.
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experience that mimics trance/spirit possession and communicates ideas and
knowledge in non-rational ways. Deren uses the uncanny differently because it is
integral to the execution and experience of the text. The viewer undergoing this
derangement of the senses and resultant experience of the uncanny is key to
experiencing or interpreting Deren’s visual poem with any hope of insight or accuracy.
VISUAL INCANTATION: IMAGE REPETITION AND THE UNCANNY
Perhaps the clearest example of visual incantation in The Witch’s Cradle and the
rendering of a familiar object unfamiliar—and foreboding in its new strangeness—is
the use of string. In the shooting script, its first appearance is innocuous enough:
Marcel Duchamp plays a man ostensibly on a boring date with a woman who is a love
interest, friend, or professional colleague; as they sit idly at an outdoor café, Duchamp
plays a solitary game of something like Cat’s Cradle, using a thick, white piece of string.
His female companion watches.
The shooting script then re-locates us, via the woman’s imagination, into an
interior space. Duchamp’s character sits in a chair, still appearing at first glance to play
with the string, but the string has a volition and direction all its own now: it slithers up
his pant leg, serpentine and a little frayed at the end. We see it move across his
shoulders and upper back; we see it around his neck, noose-like, the far end rising
above his body. Already, a familiar and innocuous object has been rendered unfamiliar
and foreboding. Later in the film, the string webs the room, preventing identification of
or access to a point of exit. The volition and direction the string seems to have possessed
has turned even more ominous as it imprisons the desperate protagonist.
There may be an additional component to Deren’s use of string in this film;
inasmuch as The Witch’s Cradle is clearly based upon some threads of her lived
experience with William Seabrook at Rhinebeck, there are other threads of experience
that perhaps seemed, a few years after the incident(s), to follow her—perhaps leaving
Deren herself with the feeling that these threads of experience were, much as the latter
use of string in the film indicates metaphorically, preventing her from escaping the
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harrowing ordeal mentally. In early 1943, VVV magazine ran an article by Seabrook
that detailed some of the “experiments” he had performed with a young Quaker
woman.
15
Perhaps due to her sheltered, pious nature, Seabrook was much gentler with
her (or so he writes) than with his other “Lizzies,” including Maya Deren. His writing
in this article does, however, “describe the quasi-spiritual, quasi-sexual ‘door’ that was
opened to both of them as he supervised the experiment.”
16
TLMD scholars posit that
Deren’s reading of this story was the likely catalyst for her sharing with Anne Clark and
others during the year 1943.
17
It may well have inspired some of the use of string in the
third “movement” of the film as well—the portion of the film in which the string webs
the room and prevents the girl’s escape:
. . . Against the north wall of my studio, beneath the high
window, stands an old museum piece, a throne, brought
out of Egypt by the late Maunsell Crosby. It was there she
proposed to sit, and go into the silence, if she could. Around
four-thirty in the afternoon, we arranged it. She sat, like a
statue or idol, while I spun round her and round the throne
a fragile web of fine silk thread, not cocoon or mummy-like,
but fragile, so that if she found she did not wish, or was not
strong enough to keep the vigil, she could break the web.
18

This curious act of webbing and entanglement seems to have had some sort of
grip on the collective consciousness of American and European avant-garde artists of
this time period: in 1942, Duchamp had created an installation piece for the French
Relief Society, entitled “16 miles of string,” and it filled the rooms of an art museum in
much the same way that Seabrook describes above—enmeshing both paintings and
spectators at the exhibit. It may have been this odd resonance between Seabrook’s story
and Duchamp’s art piece that prompted Deren—either consciously or
subconsciously—to read out to Duchamp and invite him to collaborate with her,
despite the fact that several times Deren had publicly dismissed the work of Surrealists,
going so far as to instruct cinema owners that her works were not to be associated with
15
TLMD, Vol. 1, Part 2, p. 152
16
TLMD, V1 P 2, p. 153
17
TLMD, V1 P 2, p. 151
18
William Seabrook, “The Door Swung Inward,” VVV, March, 1943, pp. 28-32.
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Surrealism at screenings or in advertising.
19
Duchamp, however, with his string
installation, had clearly latched onto the way objects could be used in art to stimulate
the psyche of an audience; Seabrook, on the other hand, had revealed to Deren by
example the ways in which objects could be used to affect the psyche “spiritually,” in
real-world settings. In terms of the art Deren had become interested in making, what
was the missing link between Seabrook and Duchamp—a metaphysically skeptical-but-
fascinated artist who understood the importance of experimentation, but who also
understood trauma from the side of a survivor and not merely a perpetrator? Naturally,
of course, Deren herself provided a point of interchange for the ideas displayed in
Duchamp’s work and the potential of Seabrook’s at-best-muddled actions that made a
semblance of fumbling towards occult knowledge through the manipulation of human
sensory deprivation. Surely in Deren’s own mind, at this point, the use of string and
binding threads in her own life, from these two influences, must have at times seemed
uncanny in its variations and unexpected repetitions.
20

A final note on the use of string in the film: the scholars of The Legend of Maya
Deren Project found it pertinent and relevant to include the following information in
their analysis:
The term “witch’s cradle” could refer to two things: it is
one of the stages in the string game, Cat’s Cradle; it is also
a torture device used in ceremonial magic. The latter is a
kind of web, constricted of string wound around pegs driven
into the ground. In this is placed a waxen image of the
victim to be tortured. The actual victim, the person, is held
captive in a café made of wire and leather which is sus-
pended from the ceiling. The human victim is supposed to
undergo the torture inflicted upon the waxen image below.
21

Of course, this conflation suggests yet another connection between a game that
humans play with string—Merleau-Ponty’s hand metaphor being recalled here, this is a
context in which both hands exercise agency over an inanimate object—and a use of
19
In the 1950s, Deren penned warning letters to cinema curators, insisting emphatically,
“under no conditions should [my] films be announced or publicized as Surrealist or Freudian.”
Clark, Veve and Naiman, Katrina. The Legend of Maya Deren, Vol I, Part 2, p. 402. Original
emphasis retained.
20
See Appendix E for images of Duchamp’s installation juxtaposed with the uses of string in the
film as they are described in this section.
21
TLMD, Vol. I, Part II, p.152.
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string that is intended to deprive human beings of their agency, involving a ritual that
“charges” the string with occult power, and also with psychological projection in
which the intended victim must absorb, through forcible sensory input (being coerced
to remain and watch the violence enacted against the wax figure that represents her
body), both a demonstration of the harm that others seek to inflict upon her physically
as well as the physically demonstrated desire of those others to cause her harm. Where
the magical method of causing physical harm may fail to deprive her of agency or
cause physical injury, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the psychological
trauma inflicted by such an abusive, traumatic ordeal may succeed in making a victim
feel trapped and therefore powerless—and result in psychosomatic injuries, wherein
the psychic injury is manifested physically.
22

23
To invoke these titular definitions upon
the use of string in Deren’s film is to add another dimension to them—one that
suggests, again, that perhaps Deren in some ways felt herself to be the victim who could
not fully evade Seabrook’s malevolent presence; though she was no longer at
Rhinebeck, his experiments continued to force their way into her awareness of the
world. And, interestingly, this information from the TLMD scholars’ analysis and
research is also suggestive of yet another reading of the film—that Anne Clark is a
“wax figure,” and the viewer who identifies with her is the victim upon whose psyche
the “torture” of the film’s unsettling is being actually (or vicariously, through the
psychological alchemy of projection) visited as we watch.
It would be difficult to discuss the uncanny and visual effects in Deren’s film
without acknowledging her use of the mirror, given Lacan’s focus on the subject. In The
22
Although many scientific studies have supported the existence and (limited) efficacy of the
placebo effect in various situations, neuroscientists have more recently been able to record
brain activity that illustrates the existence and the effect of the placebo effect. In a study
published in the August 2006 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry, UCLA researchers
examined data from 51 adults with major depression who were involved in two independent,
double-blind placebo-controlled trials. The subjects were treated with placebo drugs for one
week prior to receiving antidepressant medication. The scientists measured electrical brain
activity at baseline, and again at the end of the placebo lead-in period. The research linked
changes in activity in the prefrontal brain region during placebo use to less depression after
eight weeks of antidepressant treatment. This offers scientific support for the idea that
sometimes when people believe something is happening to them, their minds and bodies
respond as though these perceptions are accurate—even if they are not.
23
For scientific studies that support the power of suggestion to affect human perceptions and
the way we compose our narratives of lived experience, see, for example: R. B. Michael, M.
Garry, I. Kirsch. “Suggestion, Cognition, and Behavior.” Current Directions in Psychological
Science, June 2012.
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Witch’s Cradle, Anne Clark views her reflection in a mirror; the image of herself that
she sees is uncanny in that her reflection does not appear how it normally does—a
pentagram has inscribed itself upon her forehead, evidence of the spell the objects
around her have cast over her being, both psychically and physically. The pentagram,
which we will return to when we discuss Deren’s implementation of temporal
distortions to render uncanny effect, is inscribed with Kabalistic symbols and, in
English, the phrase THE END IS THE BEGINNING IS THE written in circular
formation—so that the sentence never ends, creating a temporal loop linguistically as
well as visually in the viewer’s mind.
When Anne Clark looks into the mirror, we recognize, instinctively, that she did
not draw this symbol on her own forehead; we understand, from her confused and then
horrified facial expression, that it is there against her will. The camera plays a funny
psychological trick here, too: the camera itself stands in for Anne Clark’s viewpoint. It is
the camera AS Anne Clark’s gaze that looks into the mirror and apprehends her image.
The camera, of course, is also the viewer’s gaze. In this way, Deren conflates our
consciousness and our experience directly with the consciousness and experience of
Anne Clark’s protagonist character. When she looks into the mirror, we look into the
mirror. We recognize that we are seeing her as we gaze into the mirror. Her reflection,
physically, becomes our own, psychologically. This, of course, doubles the uncanny
effect—not only do we understand the ways in which Anne Clark’s reflection appears
uncanny to her, but we also experience a sense of the uncanny very similar to what
Lacan described in his talk of mirrors: we see a physical object in reflection, and, after a
moment, we realize that we on some level identify that object—and that yet that object
(in this case, the body of Anne Clark’s protagonist) is somehow unaware of its
connection to us. It has no subjectivity in the context with which we are presented.
Again, this sensibility is duplicated: Anne Clark’s body and the protagonist character it
expresses appear to have no subjectivity in terms of not being able to recognize us, or
its relationship to us, as the viewer(s); it also lacks agency because it is, as we can see,
being acted upon by other objects against her volition.
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We are shown a montage of her repeating this action; either she has attempted to do
it many times or the same moment is being suspended so that it appears and feels
potentially infinite. At first, each time, due to the way the light falls across her pale skin,
the image written upon her body is obscured; as she tilts her head forward, shadows
appear—as does the pentagram with its ominous message of infinity. She appears
horrified every time, and every time she looks away from her own reflection in distress
(only to look again). As this image is repeated several times, the emotional intensity
increases, our identification with her increases (because we’re modeling our reactions
to these stimuli after hers—her reactions tell us how to feel about what’s happening in
the film—if she were laughing and joyously celebrating and dancing, we would feel
quite differently about it all)—and so while looking into the mirror is a familiar act,
and while her face has become quite familiar to us, in combination they produce an
unfamiliar, unsettling sensation—we should not look into the mirror and see her
distressed face.
And in these moments of the film, the poetic fascination Deren had expressed for
the function of the mirror in previous poems (and in Meshes of Afternoon, which she
created earlier in the same year) finds a new manifestation, a new energy, a new level
of expression. The mirror is the authority on visual reality in this context, much as it is
in Deren’s poem about the two lovers (and much as the mirror-faced woman will be in
Meshes). Anne Clark, peering into the mirror, is at once both subject who holds the
mirror and looks into it—she is the viewer, the subject, the agent—and at once she is
that which is defined by the mirror; her image is held by the mirror and a reality she
finds unpleasant is defined and forced upon her by the authority of the mirror—she is
that which is viewed, the object, that which must receive the action of a higher
authority (whoever wrote on her, too, perhaps, as much as the mirror—though the
mirror confirms the writer’s authority or agency as well, with what it reflects). And the
way she is positioned, we are both viewer and mirror (her face looks into the camera,
into us).
Again, the human gaze is turned back upon itself in a moment of unsettling
uncanniness.
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TEMPORAL DISTORTION AND THE UNCANNY
On March 3, 1945, Maya Deren sent a letter to Sawyer Falk that contained a
note on The Witch’s Cradle; as has been documented, Deren wrote the majority of her
own press releases and program notes, and this was no exception. (The note was
published in the Winter 1965 issue of Film Culture.) In it, Deren discusses what was at
stake for her in the film, aesthetically; she describes surrealist art as “cabalistic symbols
of the twentieth century,” and draws parallels between surrealist artists and “feudal
magicians,” as well as between “feudal evil spirits” and the human subconscious.
Deren had something very specific in mind in terms of creating temporal distortions in
her film in order to reflect in her aesthetic approach the concepts she was investigating
with the film’s content:
The magicians were also concerned with the defiance of
normal time (mainly projection into the past and divination
of the future) . . . so also the surrealist painters and poets. And
it seemed to me that the camera was peculiarly suited to de-
lineate this form of magic.”
24

This aesthetic motivation that Deren expresses for the project may also suggest another
reason—an openness to influence, perhaps—that led her to seek out a collaboration
with Marcel Duchamp in making The Witch’s Cradle: his Anemic Cinema seemed to
Deren to express an understanding of the relationship between temporal abstraction
and film.
25

24
TLMD, V1 P2 p. 149.
25
As Annette Michelson suggests in “Poetics and Savage Thought: About Anagram,” in Maya
Deren and the American Avant-Garde, ed. Bill Nichols (University of California Press: 2001),
p.32: “Filmic abstraction would require, as Deren has it, a temporal abstraction or composition.
It is for this reason that she nominates Duchamp’s single cinematic work as an interesting and
exceptional venture, astutely exempting it from her critical judgment of both abstract and
surrealist-inspired film. For Anemic Cinema ‘occupies, like the rest of his work, a unique
position.’ And her analysis of this work remained for another three decades the only serious
attempt to account for what has long appeared an anomalous object, a spanner throw into the
works of film history.” Michelson goes on to cite Deren’s explication of her attraction to
Duchamp’s cinematic tendencies: “Although it uses geometric forms, it is not an abstract film,
but perhaps the only ‘optical pun’ in existence. The time which he causes one of his spirals to
revolve in the screen effects an optical metamorphosis; the cone appears first concave, then
convex, and in the more complicated spirals, both concave and convex and then inverted. It is
time, therefore, which creates these optical puns which are the visual equivalents, in Anemic
Cinema for instance, of the inserted phrases which also revolve and, in doing so, disclose the
verbal ‘sense.’”
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A thorough analysis of temporality and its implementation in The Witch’s Cradle
can be tricky, however. Because the film was never finished, it was also never fully
edited, and many of the sequences written out in specific, minute detail in the shooting
script do not appear onscreen as they were clearly intended to appear in the finished
version of the film; rather, takes and outtakes form a disorganized, twelve-minute
montage. Due to the way the shots are grouped, several pieces of story and meaning are
still carried through—but in order to get a sense of the way Deren wanted to portray
this non-linear narrative, one absolutely must consult the shooting script as much as
the film that remains (if not more so).
In some ways, our sense of time is undermined simply by the lack of narrative;
while it seems evident that the woman in the first scene initially imagines the string
coming to life, the film lacks a clear timeline in part due to the obfuscation of narrative:
is this all a simple anxiety-driven reverie, held in the mind of a woman who sits with
her friend at an outdoor café? Does all of this madness occur within a few seconds of
abstracted thought she may privately be having about how the string reminds her of
her own veins, and then anxiety about what would become of her and her body, if the
string she views ever found a pulse of its own? Or are we to understand that somehow
these events actually transpire—which would require a very different sort of timeline?
Deren never makes it clear what our understanding of time should be within the world
of the film.
Deren further undermines any temporal anchors we might be able to find by the
incorporation of repeated shots and reverse shots. In shots 24-31, (sub)titled IDOL
SEQUENCE in the shooting script, Deren intersperses repeated shots of a heart beating
and Anne Clark’s face contorted in an “agonized” or anguished expression. The
repetition of these shots creates a protracted sense of time; this particular experience of
bodied anxiety and its reflection (via visage) may only last a moment in the
protagonist’s story—or may occur over many moments, in a more diffuse way—but
here the images are concentrated in such a way that our sense of time is suspended. The
heart beats in real time, a metronome for the body, a way that we understand the
passing seconds even without an external clock. As the heart beats faster, then faster,
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then is stilled—how much time has passed? Without regular beats or a linear narrative,
we cannot be certain. Use the heartbeat here because a heartbeat is a bodied unit of
time. We know when the heartbeat speeds up that it’s probably due to anxiety, but this
also distorts our sense of time because the natural metronome is no longer ticking
regularly. Similarly, when the heart stops, this is also confusing because again it’s not
helping us keep time anymore, and also it’s a startling rendering of something that
(when beating) is very familiar to us. But not beating, it seems startling, unfamiliar.
That Lacan-ian realization that the object we are seduced by is dependent on something
else—the heart is dependent on something else—and we are not autonomous not just
because the heart has “tricked” us and made us, in turn, dependent on other things—
but also because we literally depend on our own hearts. The realization/reminder that
it’s dependent on other things to function renders us beholden to those things—that
anxiety and fear is the uncanny that Lacan describes, but more intense. So the return of
these images, as they undo our understanding of standard notions of temporality,
become uncanny not only in their repetition, but in the way they make time strange to
us—as Deren says, her camera is peculiarly suited to executing this idea of medieval
magic.
Deren also employs other approaches to challenge the viewer’s sense of linear
time—methods that are perhaps on some level more obvious because they are
presented in literary terms, rather than sensory. There is the aspect of repetition here,
too: the pentagram and its words are constructed, both visually (in a circle shape) and
syntactically so that the reader will be compelled to interpret them in a continuous
fashion, bearing out a meaning of immutable continuity—the end is the beginning is
the end is the beginning . . . in perpetuity. If read this way, the pentagram’s message
would result in semantic satiation, causing the viewer to question what, really, is an
“end” and what really is a “beginning”—basic units of time by which we understand
narrative. As our synapses become tired and these words temporarily lose the meanings
to which we generally ascribe them, the equals sign that Deren has drawn in between
them is suggestive of a new meaning—one that cancels our normal understandings of
time. If the end and the beginning are the same, then everything is always happening at
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once, and we are all walking around in a constant state of déja vu. And, of course,
experiences of déja vu are emblematic of uncanny experience.
There is, too, the fact that image of Anne Clark’s face bearing the pentagram and
its message are repeatedly shown to the viewer as she looks into the mirror. The
experience of uncanniness might also be rendered in this way: an image that is
unsettling and alienating, and whose message makes no logical sense—through
repetition and semantic satiation, respectively, becomes familiar to us and begins to
make sense after all.
SPATIAL DISRUPTION AND THE UNCANNY
In the aforementioned program note she sent to Sawyer Falk about The Witch’s
Cradle, Deren also addressed questions of spatiality in the film, writing that she had
intended to reflect “defiance of . . . normal space,” which she also considered a
common interest between those interested in occult workings and those interested in
surrealistic aesthetics. Examples Deren provided as evidence of this proclivity included
“disappearance one place and appearance another, or the familiar broomstick.”
26

Presumably, the broomstick reference is mentioned to evoke the European-American
mythos by which witches were allegedly able to transcend the conventional limitations
of space by flying wherever they wanted on their broomsticks, usually under the
(visual) cover of night.
27

As we’ve seen, the element of spatial distortion, or the disruption of a viewer or
querent’s standard ability to apprehend and interpret his surroundings spatially, are
integral to Freud’s groundbreaking writings on the concept of uncanny experience.
Our first experience of spatial distortion within the universe of The Witch’s Cradle is
arguably the film cut that abruptly shifts us from the exterior scene at the outdoor café
26
TLMD, V1 P2 p. 149
27
Of course, this mythology is notable in almost innumberable examples of European and
American culture over the centuries; a few suggestions of where to read more include the
poetry of Anne Sexton, Grimms’ fairy tales, and accusations against alleged witches in both the
European and American witch-hunts, as well as family-friendly movies from the 1930s such as
The Wizard of Oz.
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to the interior setting. Like a witch upon a broom, the viewer is able to circumnavigate
the lengthy process of arriving at a destination that is markedly removed from the space
in which a journey originated. The interior setting is perhaps a little stranger and more
alien than it might seem if we had any direct indicator from the film as to how we
might have arrived as such an incongruous second setting from the first. A critically
engaged viewer can hypothesize that the woman’s subconscious mind has rendered the
interior scenes, but that reading is not conclusively supported by either the shooting
script or the film itself. It might just as well be magic—or, it might well be a
combination of subconscious thoughts and an experience of moving through an actual
museum; Deren chooses not to make surface events definitively clear in terms of the
film’s plot—because to her, the surface events are not what matters. As she wrote of the
film to Sawyer Falk:
I was concerned with . . . a desire to deal with the real forces
underlying events (the feudal evil spirits are similar to the
modern subconscious drives) and to discard the validity of
surface and apparent causation.
28

This desire on Deren’s part is further evidenced by the fact that objects do
suddenly disappear in scenes of the film, and sometimes appear or re-appear in a
surprising or inexplicable fashion—further satisfying the definition of the uncanny that
Freud expressed. This can be seen, for one example, in shots 51 and 53, in which Anne
Clark’s black scarf disappears and reappears, respectively. Given Deren’s own notes on
the film, such choices seem particularly significant to a greater aesthetic end, in terms
of dismissing traditional notions of space in order to cultivate a different state of
awareness and a different aesthetically-charged experience in the viewer.
However, Deren does not limit these disturbances in our interpretation of space
to a few specific objects and their appearances or disappearances, but rather makes
pointed efforts in the shooting script and in the film shot to disrupt our spatially-
oriented sensibilities on multiple levels. In Deren’s shooting script, the notes regarding
shots 45, 46, and 47 are far less specific than most of the earlier shots that deal with the
achievement of very particular images, such as blood spilling onto a floor, an eye
floating in blood, or lines/threads becoming animated against the backdrop of a
28
TLMD, V1 P2, p. 149.
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specific body part. Shot 46 mentions a specific object (the “magic square”), but only
insofar as is necessary to detail the spatial distortion that accompanies it—the fact that
it inexplicably splits into several pieces when the protagonist touches it—and the fact
that our experience of the space is to be deliberately slowed down by Deren’s camera is
also specifically noted. And the descriptions of shots 45 and 47 in particular are highly
conceptual in nature, as opposed to most of Deren’s very concrete images in other shots
of the film—they are clearly designed to further an overall aesthetic concept that is
heavily invested in creating distortions in our sensory perceptions of space and the
narratives that we as viewers are able to construct from our sensory spatial sensibility,
the better to create a sense of the uncanny, a sense of possession or altered psychic state:
45. Cuts with various displacements, coming into frame from various angles,
sometimes with paintings in background.
46. CU magic square as she puts her hand out to touch it and it breaks up into
all its blocks. Slow motion.
47. More displacements, boxes, games as magic objects, moving lights, camera
29
This happens in a more visually articulate way later in the script when, in shots
61-67, the immanent string—which has been visually equated with veins and arteries
earlier in the film—appears to make an aesthetic and psychological and physical leap
into the protagonist’s very body. As she picks it up in her hands, off the floor, it appears
to cast some sort of spell over her, and she realizes in horror that the string has begun
to manifest (again) on her body as the dark lines of artery. As the shots continue to
escalate, the dark lines spread like visible veins over her hands and up her arms. There
are no explanations offered, other than the “spell” evidenced by the pentagram that is
revealed upon her forehead by the moving mirror, moments thereafter. The string’s
magical ability to turn from object cast onto the floor to that which moves through the
protagonist’s body of its own volition cannot help but recall the character of the
silenced woman who mounts a symbol of domesticity and is transported, against the
laws of society and gravity, anywhere she wills.
29
See Appendix B.
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And perhaps the greatest spatial distortion that Deren creates in the film is again
done through her notable use of string, particularly towards the end—the room that
the protagonist and viewer find themselves in, webbed with string, is both
overwhelming and disorienting; there is no way we could interpret such a space
normally. The uncanny effect, if felt nowhere else palpably in the film, has surely
arrived by this late point in the experience, at which time repetition of the image,
temporal disruptions, and spatial distortions involving the use of string have all been
brought to bear in concert on how the viewer feels about the image of this room, with
no visible exit, draped in so many ominous and obfuscating threads that have begun
(perhaps like the threads of Deren’s own experience that altered her psychic states and
forced her to ask these difficult questions of herself, or helped to shape these
metaphysical preoccupations) to seem as if they will never leave us.
THE CREATION OF ALTERED PSYCHIC AND PHYSIOLOGICAL STATES IN VIEWERS
THROUGH SENSORY DISRUPTIONS VIA THE MEDIUM OF FILM
It is difficult to accurately discuss the relationship between physical stimuli and
uncanny experience—particularly as imparted by film—without a more articulate
discussion of the biological science that facilitates said relationship. In recent years,
scientists and doctors have conducted research that not only substantiates the
relationship between obstructed or distorted sensory input, the inability to fully
recognize familiar elements of our existence in normal/standard/familiar ways, and
the experience of the uncanny—it has also helped us understand the neurological
processes by which these effects are rendered in the human mind and body. Such
phenomena has been particularly noted and studied, as it happens, in the area of film.
Even popular circulations, such as newspapers, have, in the digital age, shared videos
and accompanying articles that explain how video or film that provide or enact certain
sensory elements can leave viewers with altered experiences of reality. For example,
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certain videos have now been proven to elicit brief hallucinatory episodes in viewers,
based solely upon their displays of black-and-white images of squares or waterfalls.
Such videos achieve these end results by employing a series of moving shapes that
essentially “tire out” the brain cells that recognize certain motions in a given direction.
When the viewer looks away, the brain cells that detect motion in the other direction
(the opposite of what has been shown in the video) have been rendered overactive,
highly sensitized—and respond even without stimuli. The hallucination that viewers
experience as a result of watching such films/videos causes objects in the real world to
be both recognizable and distorted. Objects in the world around them now appear to be
moving, or to contain moving parts, even though this is not accurate by normal sensory
perceptions. In this way, the sensory information delivered to us in the film medium
can literally alters our perception of the world on a physical level.
30
As one such article
elucidates:
The effect has confounded people for centuries, but experiments
that monitor brain activity have now been able to explain how it
works. When watching a waterfall, or the strobe illusion, the brain
cells that detect motion in one direction become tired. When the
eyes look away, the cells that detect motion in the other direction
are more active and a stationary object appears to be moving. [. . . ]
What is so strange about this after-effect illusion is its paradoxical
nature. Although the stationary object is being seriously distorted,
it also appears not to change. A sensation of expansion or con-
traction exists, but the contours of the object do not appear to
be going anywhere.
31

This description of experience that blends feelings of the familiar and the
unfamiliar, resulting from repeated exposure to specific imagery is, of course, strikingly
familiar to readers of this text, by now—in that it quotes Freud extensively using just
such language to define experiences of the uncanny.
Many studies have strongly supported the notion that sensory deprivation
frequently leads to intense hallucinations
32

33
; recently, as this has become a more
30
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2687639/The-optical-illusion-makes-screen-MELT-
Shape-shifting-video-lets-hallucinate-without-touching-drugs.html
31
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2687639/The-optical-illusion-makes-
screen-MELT-Shape-shifting-video-lets-hallucinate-without-touching-drugs.html
32
Donna M. Lloyd, Elizabeth Lewis , Jacob Payne, Lindsay Wilson. “A qualitative analysis of
sensory phenomena induced by perceptual deprivation.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive
Sciences. March 2012, Volume 11, Issue 1, pp 95-112.
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scientifically and culturally accepted truth that sensory deprivation can produce altered
states of consciousness, sensory “restriction” (a modified version of sensory deprivation,
designed to produce gentler results) has become employed as a “therapy” by trendy
spas in New York City and elsewhere; clients continue to return based upon the efficacy
of their desired “treatment,”
34
which seems to provide further anecdotal evidence in
support of the idea. There exists, then ample scientific, cultural, and anecdotal evidence
that altering sensory input even in small ways—such as restricting, obfuscating, or
distorting sensory input from the outside world—can lead to rather drastic alterations
in the physical and psychological ways in which humans develop a responsive
narrative of lived experience. Now, with such effects demonstrably rendered via video
and film, it seems that it would be increasingly difficult for anyone to argue against the
idea that Maya Deren achieves this effect in The Witch’s Cradle—and in many of her
later films/video poems as well.
Such effects from film and video as described above are by no means new; while
it is exciting that advancements in neuroscience have enabled us to better understand
the phenomenon by measuring the brain activity that corresponds to the qualitatively
described human experience of such art, and the altered states that result from it—we
must keep in mind that twenty years after Maya Deren created Meshes of Afternoon
and The Witch’s Cradle, experimental filmmakers such as Peter Kubelka and Tony
Conrad employed similar, though far less subtle, tactics in film—disrupting viewers’
sensory input in order to elicit altered psychic states—with perhaps less artistic effect,
and possibly less of an explicitly metaphysical mission in mind—but with more
physically acute, and perhaps more externally measurable, viewer reactions. In 1960,
Kubelka’s Arnuf Rainer utilized black and white frames, combined with a soundtrack of
“white noise” and silence, organized in what he described as a “metric” fashion—with
33
Cahill, Brian. “‘Isolation’ Tests At McGill Hold Brain-Washing Clues.” Montreal Gazette.
Tuesday, April 17, 1956. p. 18.
https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1946&dat=19560417&id=OI0jAAAAIBAJ&sjid=eJ
kFAAAAIBAJ&pg=7056,3281434&hl=en
34
http://mentalfloss.com/article/68721/science-behind-relaxing-hallucinatory-float-dark-
tank-water
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alternating frames of color and non-color displaying onscreen at specifically timed
junctures, to match up exactly with specific bursts of sound or silence; the overall effect
was intended to be “analogous to the values of musical notes.”
35
The film was
frequently reported to have, by virtue of its interplay of light and sound (and silence
and darkness), produced hallucinatory effects in viewers. These ranged from minute
experiences of synesthesia to the effect of “afterimages” which manifested as either
“halos of light” and/or as myriad colors and shapes swirling across viewers’ fields of
vision, respectively, after they had ceased watching the film.
36
In 1966, audiences
reacted perhaps even more strongly to Tony Conrad’s The Flicker: most viewers walked
out of the first screening.
37
It was widely reported by audience members and others
present at the theater that viewing the film induced headaches or vomiting.
38
Many
audience members also reported hallucinating moving shapes and colors.
39
All of the
later screenings of The Flicker at the Film-Makers' Cinemathèque in New York had a
doctor on-site.
40
The film itself opened with a written onscreen warning, which noted
that viewing the film could cause viewers to experience seizures and might also
“produce mild symptoms of shock treatment.”
41
Both Arnulf Rainer and The Flicker
received a great deal of attention from cinematic scholars and audiences in Europe and
the United States; both are now viewed as important pieces of work in the development
of American and European cinema. Both have been credited with expressing an
awareness of how to affect change in modes of perception and consciousness.
42

43
A
few decades later, in 2002, Gaspar Noe incorporated film flicker at the end of the
feature-length film Irreversible (which, in ways somewhat reminiscent of Deren’s
work, also toyed with narrative conventions) in a way that was termed “aggressive”
35
Gidal, Peter, ed. “Interview with Peter Kubelka,” Structural Film Anthology. British Film
Institute: 1976, p. 102.
36
Simon, Elena Pinto. “The Films of Peter Kubelka,” Artforum, p. 39. April 1972.
37
Mekas, Jonas. Movie Journal: The Rise of a New American Cinema, 1959–1971. Collier Books:
1966, pp. 295–296.
38
Mekas, Jonas. Movie Journal: The Rise of a New American Cinema, 1959–1971. Collier Books:
1966, pp. 230–231.
39
Joseph, Branden W. Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts After Cage. Zone
Books: 2008, p. 341.
40
Mekas, Jonas. Movie Journal: The Rise of a New American Cinema, 1959–1971. Collier Books:
1966, p. 228.
41
The Flicker, 1966.
42
Sitney, P. Adams. “Structural Film,” Film Culture. 1969, p. 47.
43
Le Grice, Malcolm. Abstract Film and Beyond. MIT Press: 1977.
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and “hostile” at its Columbia University screening,
44
and was described by some critics
as being an act of violence against the viewers of the film that was perhaps equally as
unsettling as the graphic violence that Noe’s plot and cinematography enacted against
the film’s characters.
It is interesting to compare Kubelka’s and Conrad’s uses of film, respectively, to
produce altered states in viewers, against the subtler, arguably more developed work of
Maya Deren two decades earlier. It is perhaps due to identity bias that Deren sometimes
does not receive, or, in past times, has not received, all the recognition she is due as a
pioneering cinematic artist and poet. However, it seems likely, too, that some of the lack
of recognition of Deren’s work in this particular vein may be partly because of the
subtlety with which she upsets the viewer’s sensory input and psychic states—that is,
the subtlety with which she achieves her desired goals. Such subtlety, of course, is her
victory—rather than vomit or have a seizure after viewing The Witch’s Cradle, we are
merely unsettled, perhaps a bit anxious—perhaps more predisposed to considering the
trance state, or viewing objects involved in religious or secular rituals—even everyday,
mundane, personal rituals—as exerting some sort of power over the humans who
appear to utilize them. We may consider our own relationships, respectively, to reality
and our lived experiences of reality—we may wonder how much, in our everyday
states, we truly apprehend. All of this is due to the subtlety of Deren’s work, and the
fierce intellect behind her art; were we nauseous, seizing, or having headaches after
viewing this film, we would likely have a different reaction to it (as in, possibly wanting
to avoid watching it again) and a different analysis (or, depending on the severity of
our reactionary symptoms, perhaps no analysis at all). The effects produced by The
Witch’s Cradle, and the way it integrates sensory disruption with altered psychic
states—towards a more philosophical or metaphysical end—are certainly subtler, and
also more dreamlike; they are, perhaps, less measurable than the severe physical
reactions to the other videos and films we’ve reviewed in this chapter. And it seems
44
Film screening and lecture delivered by Gaspar Noe, Columbia University School of the Arts,
January 2007.
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likely that those drawn to Deren’s work might have possessed certain proclivities or
interests for entertaining these thoughts before they even viewed the film—which
would, of course, make the effects of her remarkable poetics seem all the more subtle
and/or all the less externally measurable.
Ultimately, the measure of Deren’s success with The Witch’s Cradle—the
meaning of her encounters with “the unknown,” and the truth her work reveals—may
be what her work suggests regarding the impact of physical experience. The Witch’s
Cradle asks us to consider bodied knowledge—what we learn from our sensory
perceptions, and how our bodies affect our identities—and how the body affects our
consciousness and our respective worldviews—as Deren says, the film/poem asks us to
examine the truth of how we must come to know the world through our blood. It also
asks us to consider the ways in which traumatic experience can be used as a prism—in
both the mind and the body—to help us separate different qualitative threads of
experience and examine the ways in which they fit together in the human
consciousness to form a greater narrative. These elements of the incantatory, of
suspended or disrupted time, the distortions of space, the overall feeling of human
experience being rendered in a way that makes it seem strange, almost
unrecognizable—they prevail upon our private, perhaps unarticulated sense of the
importance of becoming—of developing our consciousness and ourselves as a
deliberate project. Despite Deren’s metaphysical preoccupations, this can be seen as a
belief system of the sacred for even the most secular-minded participant whose belief
system is humanism, or who worships at the altar of human creativity. As Deren
describes her work:
What I do in my films is . . . I think, very distinctively, [that]
they are the films of a woman, and I think that their character-
istic time quality is the time quality of a woman. I think that
the strength of men is their great sense of immediacy—they are
a now creature—and a woman has the strength to wait. Because
she’s had to wait. . . . Time is built into her body in the sense of
becoming-ness. And she sees everything in the terms of it being
in the stage of becoming. . . . Her whole life, from her very
beginning—built into her is the sense of becoming. . . . I think
that my films, putting as much stress as they do upon constant
metamorphosis—one image is always becoming another—that
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is, it is what is happening that is important in my films, not what
is at any moment. This is a woman’s time sense, and I think it
happens more in my films than in almost anyone else’s.”
45

Feminist phenomenologists would probably be quite proud of Deren’s ability to
describe her work in such terms. I must admit that I find it difficult to accept it as a
priori truth that men and women necessarily experience time differently; it seems to me
that, especially now that our society has begun to openly recognize the existence of
more than two genders, perhaps such a binary classification of temporality, or temporal
conception, has outlived its use. However, I do find it important that Deren notes a
sense of time, and a sense of identity and of existence, that is present in her films and
was not, perhaps, considered the standard for the time in which she was creating her
art. Perhaps rather than continuing to express it in gendered terms, we might simply
say that this is a progressive view of temporality—one that invites us to participate in
an ongoing sense of human evolution. The idea of becoming-ness in Deren’s art is
essential to its core; it reminds us of the fact that there will always be more “unknown”
in our universe. As perpetual querents, we must continue to seek not only to collect our
small, respective slivers of truth towards our collaborative mosaic in the image of
Truth
46
—we must also continuously seek and test new methods of understanding and
gaining knowledge. This, perhaps, is why many of us are open to experiences of trauma
or pain in terms of viewing them as learning experiences—whether analyzing personal
experiences that caused us suffering in order to improve ourselves, or studying aspects
of the natural world that remind us of our own terrifying finitude, or engaging in the
sometimes overwhelming, punishing discipline involved in religious study—because
we know, on some level, that Nietzsche was right, than pain is a phenomenal
mnemonic device. This same motivation applies, I think, to the study of art that makes
us uncomfortable—whether we’re enticed to find out why a film flicker gives someone
a seizure, or why a spooky visual poem that makes us feel anxious and physically
45
Maya Deren, recorded interview, from In the Mirror of Maya Deren. Dir. Martina Kudlácek,
2002.
46
God, Ding-an-sich, total knowledge of our universe and every other universe in existence,
the noumenal realm—there are many ways of describing or naming all that we don’t know,
and all that we likely can never fully know. Rimbaud’s “the unknown” seems as apt a title as
any for Truth-with-a-capital-T.
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uncomfortable might be worth the twelve minutes it takes to watch. We surrender to
Deren’s violence against her viewers because we understand that we are likely to learn,
if nothing else, something about how we learn. We are constantly peeling back what
Freud referred to as our “psychic callous”—only for such brief moments as to not
internalize too deeply how truly chaotic our lives are. The ego, after all, remains a
necessary human adaptation for survival.
And yet stability and instability—in Deren’s work and in the greater human
condition—remain locked in a complicated, nuanced dance of balance. We might
recall Luce Irigaray’s subversion of Merleau-Ponty’s hand metaphor. Merleau-Ponty’s
hand metaphor, which we considered earlier in this chapter, posits one hand in the
position of holding another. In theory, either hand could become dominant over the
other at any point; and so identity as “subject” or “object” is not entirely fixed, but
rather in a constant state of variable uncertainty. However, each hand can only feel
itself, moment by moment, in one role or the other—as “master” or “slave,” to use his
terms. Irigaray responds by imagining two hands in a similar, yet slightly altered
position—so that they meet in a position of symmetry, with no hierarchy. Deren’s
repositioning of her ordeal with Seabrook, first into art, and then into bigger
metaphysical questions, seems evocative of the way Irigaray’s brand of phenomenology
undermines the assumed necessity of power structures that based upon domination,
hierarchy, and oppression. In pushing past the particulars of her own traumatic
experience to create art with it, Deren creates a new vision of the world for herself, and
for us. Rather than dwell upon the comparatively more minute realities of oppression or
violation in a personal sphere, Deren’s work undermines the mindset that places these
two metaphorical hands in a constant opposing struggle for power. Rather, the hand
that represents Deren—the one being held, the one initially objectified—finds stability
through its acceptance of instability. In accepting destabilizing realities, we can
sometimes—as Deren does in her creative work—create a new dynamic, rather than a
merely reactionary one. For Deren, that new dynamic is predicated on a presumption of
equality with influences that might be de-stabilizing or overpowering—perhaps
aggressive or ominous—and a desire to see what she can learn about herself from the
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experiences they impose in which she might on some level feel overpowered—and turn
it into a situation that empowers her—encountering the unknown, and seeing who she
is and what she has learned afterwards. We gain agency we integrate trauma or
destabilizing experience into our definitions of ourselves. For Deren, in this work,
encountering the unknown is, in a way, an equalizing factor.
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In Conclusion: Turning in the Widening Gyre
THE PRESENCE OF THESE IDEAS IN LITERATURE AND ART FROM TWENTIETH CENTURY
TO PRESENT DAY
The speaker of William Butler Yeats’ famous apocalyptic poem, “The Second
Coming,” identifies moments of bodied, lived experience in the physical world—a
falconer who has lost control over and communication with his trained bird; the
larger-scale “anarchy” that describes literal moments of political unrest—as
manifestations of what the speaker perceives to be greater metaphysical forces at work.
Arguably, some of the characters in the poem are experiencing mildly altered states
from what might be considered normal, in the extremity of their emotional pitch: “the
best lack all conviction,” we are told, “while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
A heightened portrayal of a reality proceeds from such details: those who hold the
moral high ground have succumbed to a paralytic depth of despair, even as the
personal and cultural capital enjoyed by those who lack moral fortitude enjoy immense
gains, furthering Yeats’ sense that there is a driving force behind the evil that seems to
be gathering forward momentum in his world.
As the poem builds, it becomes clear that the “widening gyre” of the bird in
flight is indicative of a spiral out of control, out of order, in which the threat of unrest is
a moral one as well as political and personal. These ideas of chaos and disorder, and
their frightening metaphysical associations that we have observed as extant in Deren’s
work are far from new; such ideas were predominant in the art and literature
generated during the twentieth century.
The obliteration of social order and the breakdown in integrity of the speaker’s
own ego, both present in “The Second Coming,” are presented as ominous. The tone of
lines such as, “Things fall apart. The center cannot hold.” contain terror without the
promise of transformation. The speaker receives a vision so intense that it “troubles
[his] sight,” interrupting his sensory ability to interpret reality and overtaking the
means by which his mind usually orders information from his senses in order to create
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the narrative of his lived experience. And what is this vision? “Somewhere in the sands
of the desert/ A shape with lion body and the head of a man,/ A gaze blank and pitiless
as the sun,/ is moving its slow thighs, while all about it/ reel the shadows of indignant
desert birds.” Even as this horrifying vision evaporates, the speaker invokes the
imminent presence of the anti-Christ: “What rough creature, its hour come round at
last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
In a literary and intellectual tradition that has held this outlook at the
standard—that social order and the lived experiences it privileges are part of a greater
moral order—Deren’s work creates an interesting psychic and aesthetic oasis. She
clearly recognizes the value of social order and of the sort of individual order that the
ego allows us each to implement; however, her lived experiences of trauma and
marginalization make it clear to her that there are already places in which our
narrative of moral order is not adequate to describing or interpreting reality—one of
the best possible outcomes alluded to by trauma theorists.
1
Further, her interest in
altered psychic states provides the impetus for her to investigate them as an artist.
Rather than relay in a linear, narrative fashion what sorts of vision her female-bodied
protagonists experience in their visions, Deren brings the viewer or reader directly into
the vision itself; when the darkness—this time, of the theater or room in which her film
is being viewed—drops again, the viewer knows what s/he has seen, firsthand.
In this scenario, the widening gyre of the psyche is more terrifying, perhaps, but
ultimately its immediate presence, and the investigation of that presence, seem more
productive than an orderly, removed re-telling of such a vision might prove. This is not
to discount the obvious value in poems or art whose aesthetic functions are similar to
“The Second Coming”; rather, it merely identifies the ways in which another aesthetic
approach to this important subject matter might offer different strengths. The
immediacy of Deren’s aesthetic approach offers a different sort of audience experience;
1
Robert Lifton, in his essay “The Concept of the Survivor,” writes that survivor’s guilt can, at its
worst, be fundamentally incapacitating to trauma victims, but that in more positive cases,
outcomes have been observed where memories and experiences of survived trauma can
function as a “powerful impetus for responsibility” and a transformative source of creative
energy (Survivors, Victims, Perpetrators: Essays on the Nazi Holocaust. Joel Dinsdale, ed.
Washington: Hemisphere Publishing Corporation, 1980).
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lack of control still renders terrifying slippages of the ego, and a breakdown in social
order—which, in some ways, perhaps invites demolition, and is perhaps neither as safe
nor as productive as other narratives might hold. In Deren’s work, reality is recognized
as inherently unstable; her work also contains a level of fear in response to said
instabilities. However, where Deren’s work differs from other works that may recognize
similar aspects of reality is: some of the mystery of the unknown—which gives it the
ability to terrify and to paralyze us—is erased by confronting it via direct experience.
The potential knowledge held by the opening spiral of consciousness comes, on some
level, to appear inviting at least as much as intimidating. We come, through Deren’s
work, to look that rough beast in the eye; should it take us into its teeth, we must wait
and see who we will be once it has released us.
HOW WITCH’S CRADLE HELPS US UNDERSTAND DEREN’S GREATER BODY OF WORK
Understanding The Witch’s Cradle as a visual poem that blends trauma and
interest in the occult is a useful starting point for understanding not just the film but
Deren’s greater body of work overall. As other scholars have noted, there are, in
particular, many aesthetic choices contained in The Witch’s Cradle that bear striking
similarities to the choices that comprise Deren’s famous Meshes of Afternoon.
2
In
framing new discussions about certain aspects of The Witch’s Cradle, including areas in
which it was ultimately unsuccessful, we can also find new points of interest and entry
in evaluating Meshes of Afternoon—some of which may have been markedly more
successful. Similarly, we can look at the resonances between Witch’s and Meshes and
extrapolate from our understanding of them a greater understanding of Deren’s overall
aesthetic trajectory and how it developed in her later films, from At Land to Season of
Strangers (alternatively titled The Haiku Project).
In particular, such future discussions of Deren’s work may be enlivened or
enlightened by a stronger understanding of the link between Deren’s literary writing
(her poetry, essays, and translations) and her writing for film, a quality that has often
been overlooked. This, of course, calls attention to some of the more cerebral, calculated
2
TLMD, Vol. 1, Part 2, pp. 153-155.
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aspects of Deren’s film work, which is one quality of her legend that often goes
unacknowledged. A richer discussion of her work could surely result from the
acknowledgment that many details in her film are not subconscious accidents, but
intentional literary and erudite cultural allusions.
3
Usually, Deren emphasized the role
of intuition in her thought and work—even arguing with those who described her as
cerebral or calculated, in terms of her artistry.
4
It is well documented, too, that Deren’s
own critical exegeses regarding her art have always been (and continue to be) heavily
incorporated into program notes and other critical (and even scholarly) descriptions of
her work.
5
Because the role of intuition was so emphasized, by her own insistent
branding efforts, many of the more intentional, calculated, or cerebral aspects of her
work remain far less frequently acknowledged. I hope that these chapters have
provided a new point of entry into Deren’s work, so that we may view and
acknowledge it from this new(er) perspective, and weigh the measure of these more
cerebral aspects in her overall body of work. In some ways, it feels like giving credit
where credit is (over)due.
And, in keeping with the recognition that Deren’s work operates in more
deliberately planned ways than has frequently been discussed, hopefully these sorts of
discussions about her work will also reveal, in a productive way, what her work might
have to offer outside of simply expressing narratives of bodied female experience
(including, but not limited to, expressions of trauma). Where the work of many other
authors toes this line but stops short of crossing it, Deren, even in her early work, seeks
to render a transformative effect in her work: trauma, both positive and negative, might
be used to jar the creator and the viewer into awareness of larger truths. Deren disliked
the Surrealists in part because she said they were content with simply unveiling man’s
3
In a currently unpublished volume of The Legend of Maya Deren (forthcoming from
McPherson Publishing Co., UK, publication date TBD), Margaret Mead mentions in an
interview that there are several gestures in At Land that are based upon anthropological
conversations she had with Maya Deren. The gestures are various signifiers of witchcraft,
occult influences, and potential threats against various characters in the film.
4
TLMD, Vol. I, Part II, interview with Mimi Ashram that discusses these social and professional
tensions and definitions, in-depth, pp. 440-442.
5
This started in the 1940s, when her films began to garner recognition, partly perhaps because
audiences felt they needed guidance in understanding her work, and cinematic curators were
afraid of “getting it wrong.” Deren largely “wrote her own legend,” as TLMD scholars put it.
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subconscious—which she wasn’t sure could even really be done—and it didn’t seem
like enough to her.
6
She wanted work that perhaps exposed hidden truths but then also
analyzed and interacted with the meanings, respectively, of those truths, in a more
practical application. This gives us a way of analyzing how her own work attempts
(and succeeds) in doing that, helps us to recognize how far, in multiple directions, her
work continues to reach.
And, finally, to frame Deren’s work in this way reminds us that it is truly cross-
genre. Which gives us new ways of talking about both art and literature, and the places
in which they overlap.
HOW WITCH’S CRADLE HELPS US UNDERSTAND EVOLVING NOTIONS OF POETRY
One of the things we gain from discussing Deren’s work in this way is that it
provides us fresh context for engaging with other works of art that may seem at first
glance to resist easy or standard classification by genre. If we can understand The
Witch’s Cradle as a type of poetry, this opens the door to bigger aesthetic discussions
about the definition of poetry, as its definition(s) and manifestations continue to evolve
in American culture and around the world. This, in turn, allows us new, perhaps more
expansive, understandings of work that is difficult to define in terms of genre: the
writings of Bhanu Kapil that seem neither poetry nor prose, exactly; the avant-garde
plays written by Gertrude Stein, which subvert notions of bodied identity, and the
cultural identities and significances of those recognized by religious institutions as
saints; and the book-length prose poems written by H.D.. It also gives us new, less-
reductive, frames of reference in which to locate work that is more easily categorized as
poetry, and which directly incorporates aspects of spiritual experience, such as the
incantatory but fluid verse of Sonia Sanchez, which incorporates religious and
6
See TLMD: this is extremely well-documented and repeated many times in Deren’s own
writings and in TLMD research amassed by the team of scholars that worked on the Project.
Mimi Ashram’s interview, Vol I, Part II, pp. 440-442 also mentions this tension with the
Surrealist aesthetic yet again—this time, in the context of Deren’s own conflicts: her personal
tendency towards working in a calculated way, “like a Talmudic student,” versus her interest in
the romantic sensibilities and personal expression of the Surrealists, and the Romantic poets
before them.
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4. Conclusion: Turning in the Widening Gyre
Fox Frazier-Foley 105
exclamations such as Ayibobo!, honoring an aesthetic of orality; and, for example the
Tarot-influenced work of contemporary poets such as Hoa Nguyen or Joanna Valente.
Too often, work such as this has been discussed in reductive terms that limit the
discourse to vague references about spiritual, occult, or mystical content. This
approach, rather, might perhaps begin to suggest ways of discussing how spiritual,
occult, or mystical preoccupations in works such as these affect the aesthetic decisions
of the artists who make them—and how those aesthetic choices affect the experiences
their readers or audiences have of the work, how they engage with it. In my own
critical engagement with these works on a scholarly level, it has helped me focus
specifically on aesthetic innovations and how they seem to have evolved from the
mystical preoccupations of their content, rather than focusing on content alone. I can
only hope that this adds needed levels of nuance to such discussions, at least in my own
writings on the subject.
HOW WITCH’S CRADLE HELPS ME UNDERSTAND MY OWN WORK
In addition to helping focus and add nuance to the perspective(s) from which I
approach my critical writing and scholarly research, composing these chapters on
Maya Deren’s early work and the formation of her aesthetic, through bodied
experience and a nearly paradoxical preoccupation with the metaphysical, has also
informed my own understanding of my creative work, which deals with many similar
themes and preoccupations as those that initially drew me to Deren’s work as a
teenager, before I could fully grasp or articulate what appealed to me about it.
In particular, one of the collections of poetry that I have pieced together while
living in Southern California, which was published under the title of The Hydromantic
Histories in July of 2015 by Bright Hill Press, deals in lived experiences of trauma and
in ecstatic connection with the unknown. These poems grew out of an initial interest in
altered psychic states, accompanied by a healthy amount of skepticism that was
ultimately overridden by direct, bodied experience in which the ego is displaced and
encounters with what Rimbaud termed “the unknown” are allowed to occur. Part of the
project of this book, which probably could not have been realized without these major
MOSAIC PILGRIM
4. Conclusion: Turning in the Widening Gyre
Fox Frazier-Foley 106
influences, was to question the usual dichotomies our culture accepts and perpetuates
surrounding pain and joy, darkness and light, suffering and that which is good.
7

Trauma can come from evil and be debilitating; it can also come from higher forms of
experience—encounters with what Kant might have called the sublime, which both
inspire us and remind us of our finitude—and can, rather than debilitate or decimate,
inspire us to expand beyond our own limitations, to see ourselves as works in progress.
The way in which these poems—and the aesthetic approach that called forth
their genesis—encourage us to think of our current limitations merely as current
obstacles, and not as fixed or permanent aspects that will necessarily continue to define
us indefinitely, recalls Maya Deren’s description of what she saw as a feminine concept
of temporality: the idea that “a woman has the strength to wait” because time is built
into her body in such a way that she’s very invested in the process of becoming. These
poems are, indeed, written from a woman’s bodied experience—much of the violence
in those pages occurred on the basis of gender and/or other aspects of my bodied
identity—and from that investment in the sense of becoming that Deren associates with
female bodied experience. These poems, and writing them, have helped me understand
what it means to have the strength to wait, and why it is important. I envision the book
as likely having a quiet life; my immersion in Deren’s work has shown me that a work
can have a quiet life while still expressing metaphysical truths and questions that may
eventually draw a self-selecting audience. Perhaps as future readers wade through my
work, they may find pieces that mean something to them in their own mosaic
pilgrimage towards Truth.
7
I am grateful for the knowledge that the book has been received critically in this way—since,
unlike Maya Deren, I am not able to write the majority of my own copy! From Jennifer
MacBain-Stephens’ review in The Rumpus: “Throughout this collection, Frazier-Foley reveals
how humans can be both maker and destroyer. This book is vast in its acknowledgement of
fleeting goodness in the world and an ever-present darkness: the struggle for balance.” The
review also mentions the balance between the book’s representation of physical entities and the
perhaps less-tangible forces they seem to express, suggest, or signify.
http://therumpus.net/2016/03/the-hydromantic-histories-by-fox-frazier-foley/
MOSAIC PILGRIM
Fox Frazier-Foley
Appendix A
Poetry by Maya Deren
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
MOSAIC PILGRIM
Fox Frazier-Foley
Appendix B:
Shooting Script for The Witch's Cradle
Note for The Witch's Cradle, written by Maya Deren
114
115
116
117
118
MOSAIC PILGRIM
Fox Frazier-Foley
Appendix C
Giacometti’s Woman with Her Throat Cut
And
Anne Clark with Giacometti’s sculpture
in The Witch’s Cradle (still frame from film)
119
Woman with Her Throat Cut
Alberto Giacometti
Bronze sculpture, 1932
Anne Clark in The Witch’s Cradle, half-lying down below the display ledge
holding Giacometti’s sculpture, with her hair “tangled” (Deren’s word) in
the artwork.
120
MOSAIC PILGRIM
Fox Frazier-Foley
Appendix D
Cat’s Cradle Star/Pentagram
121
Cat’s Cradle star stage, which reads as a hand-and-string pentagram.
122
MOSAIC PILGRIM
Fox Frazier-Foley
Appendix E
Marcel Duchamp’s Installation
“16 Miles of String”
(also known as “his twine”)
and
Still frames depicting use of string in
The Witch’s Cradle
123
First Papers of Surrealism opening, curated by André Breton. Duchamp’s “16 Miles of
String,” also called “his twine,” is the string installation pictured.
124
Duchamp sits as the string winds itself into a noose around his neck, and begins to
float, drawing its pressure backwards, towards the camera.
The string has passed over the female protagonist’s body several times, “awakening” the
dark veins that were not initially visible.
125
The string, at first held in a Cat’s Cradle-like game, appears to develop agency: it seems
to begin to hold the hand, rather than vice versa.
Towards the end of the film, the camera pans centrifugally to show a room that is
entirely cased in a weblike maze of string, which prevents the protagonist, played by
Anne Clark, from escaping.
126
Anne Clark’s protagonist is again held by the string, equal parts fascinated with its dark
power and frightened by its apparently malicious intent.
127
128
Mosaic Pilgrim:
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135
MOSAIC PILGRIM:
POEMS
Mosaic Pilgrim: Poems
Fox Frazier-Foley
2
Note
These poems are a meditation on personal and cultural mythology. Humans have been
fashioning mythos and spinning creation narratives—of various sorts—for thousands of years.
These poems are preoccupied with illuminating by example: What do we gain from our myths?
What do they teach us, and what do they cost us? What freedoms, foci, and reprieve do they
offer, and how? These poems are interested in the alchemy that ultimately facilitates the
substance of our known universe: human darkness, in all its shades of cruelty, suffering, and
ignorance—and its constantly-shifting dance with the illumination of joy, kindness, and
knowledge. This collection of poetry interrogates the methods by which we express and navigate
the multiplicity of selves and realities that permeate our individual and collective human
experience—and hopes to suggest a continued trajectory towards some sort of higher
consciousness.
3
Contents
St. Gemini, Patroness of Aubrenwing, Recalls Her Feral Infancy in the Book of
Truth and Water 5
Litany to Erzuli Freda 6
Santa Ana, Patroness of Things Wrongly Ignited, Is Mentioned in the Book of Truth
and Water 7
St. Gemini Pens a Private Eulogy for St. Sunlight, Patron of Rational Thought and Love
of Knowledge, Occasionally Conflated in Some Histories with St. Thomas Aquinas 8
Papa Legba, St. Crossroads Keeper of Compass & Keys, Proctects St. Gemini Through
Turbulent Childhood 10
A Young St. Gemini Catalogues the Similarities Among Secrets, Swearing, and Prayer
in the Book of Truth and Water 11
St. Gemini Basks in the Light Cast by St. Caduceus and His Brass (Nor Stone, Nor
Earth, Nor Boundless Sea) 12
A Letter from St. Gemini to St. Heather, Patroness of Vermilion Sunrise, Tidal
Change, and Purpled Earth, Sometimes Conflated with St. Thekla 14
A Letter from St. Gemini to St. Icarus: A Record of Dialogue Regarding
Instructions in Estuary 15
St. Gemini Pens a Lament on Hydraulic Breathing in the Book of Truth and Water 16
St. Gemini Addresses La Marasa, With Particular Attention to Her Half, and Seals It to
Parchment for Her Estranged, Her Worker of Metals, St. Maker 17
St. Gemini Etches Several Walls During the Years Spent With St. Caduceus 19
St. Gemini Encounters Silibo Nouvavou, St. Revelation, Bathing Alone at the
Pool in Nocturne Courtyard 21
Litany to Erzuli Dantor 23
St. Gemini Looks at the Map St. Caduceus Drew Her One Cloudy Morning to Find
Her Way Home 24
St. Gemini Discusses the Ubiquitous Sacraments of Missing and Observation in the
Book of Truth and Water 26
A Letter from St. Gemini to St. Icarus: A Record of Dialogue Regarding Seasonal
Change 27
A Letter from St. Gemini to St. Sunlight, in Which She Mourns the Loss of St.
Sunlight, St. Kinetic Clement, and St. Requiem 29
St. Gemini Describes her Gift of Lachrymal, Tiny Bottle of Metal and Glass
Consecrated to Preserve Tears, in the Book of Truth and Water 30
St. Gemini Sketches a Crude Map for Her Estranged, Her Worker of Metals, St.
Maker, With Apology for Its Incomplete Nature 31
St. Gemini Ruminates on the Concept of Sluice as Poultice in the Book of Truth
and Water 33
An Unsent Letter from St. Gemini to St. Caduceus, in Which She Reflects on the
Arcane Rites of Navigation & Cartography 34
St. Gemini Collages Photographs of Distorted Dolls in Vulnerable Poses Together
With an Ancient List of Indigo-Colored Objects, and Glues Her Revelations
Inside the Book of Truth and Water 35
St. Gemini Hears the Call of Ayizan, St. Clarity, and Answers 36
Litany to Maman Brijit 37
A Letter from St. Gemini to St. Caduceus, in Which She Writes: I Should Have Known
When You Turned Up Your Palms Instead of Laughing 38
Santa Ana, Patroness of Things Wrongly Ignited, Is Mentioned in the Book of Truth
and Water 39
4
A Letter from St. Gemini to St. Icarus: A Record of Dialogue Regarding Shifts in the
Country Between Us 40
A Letter from St. Gemini to St. Valerie: Patroness of Unanswered Questions and
Overcast Skies, Sometimes Conflated with St. Sylvia 42
St. Gemini Pens a Defense of Thomas, St. Skeptic, in the Book of Truth and Water 44
A Letter from St. Gemini to St. Caduceus After He Kisses Her Again and Whispers:
Shine On, You Crazy Diamond 46
St. Gemini Writes a List of Questions Regarding the Holy Orders of Direction and
Velocity in the Book of Truth and Water 48
Ogou Feraille, St. Extinguisher of Dragons, Gives A Special Blessing of Love and
Protection to St. Gemini, and Restores to Her the Touch of Her Estranged, Her Worker
of Metals, St. Maker 49
St. Gemini Sways in the Combined Presences of Madame La Lune, St. Drawing Down
Truth, and Lasiren, St. Watery Vision Loosed 50
St. Gemini Pens a Psalm on Hydraulic Breathing in the Book of Truth and Water 51
St. Gemini is Posessed by Silibo Nouvavou, St. Revelation, and Begins to Breathe 53
Index of Terms 54
5
“A ruined house can fool the sun, but it cannot fool the rain.”
- Haitian proverb
6
St. Gemini, Patroness of Aubrenwing, Recalls Her Feral Infancy in the Book of Truth and
Water
I was borne cauled forth having absorbed
my twin before. Removed
by incision (turned breach) & keening at first
air: starred Gemini my Thou, my half gone
in me raven-haired ravenous
for sound for taut lung my own words (not enough)
would come within six months. Casting about for my Castor, my Saint
Cosmos in breath
sigh gasp howl into flesh: born into Fox
alone. Called after Gwenhwyfar turned
jagged to javelina of air Wanting to share myself with
wanting
to be consumed (removed)
by incision
I craved I, Damian I, Polydeuces I my own
fractured Marasa.
Distraught in orbit: tumbling unmoored.
Fumbling for Mercury.
7
Erzuli Freda: Lady
of Sorrows St. pinkened skin Our Delicate
Boat Within of saline
wound & ocean
(than pearl,
of bitterness, pinker than dream) of detritus
(from the world’s seams) Virgin transfixed, remedy in
perplexity
crystallized dove, calmer
of tempests fount of tears solace of the precipiced
wretched near-sinking ark
of the desolate
wrenched through the dark
O maiden pink frayed sharp
8
St. Anne, Also Venerated as Santa Ana, Patroness of Things Wrongly Ignited, Is Mentioned in
the Book of Truth and Water
I woke knowing: the Atlantic
quick with carnage, your mother
& you martyrs of spark
ignited by air—ascent
violently ended. Flung
far from Constance & floating
consanguine. Your saline
cemetery my salient
abrasion vacillation
taken pulse: How to trust
this air that rendered Ana your
last after barely a decade. How could it
come separate from these licentious,
contentious demands of flame. How
to bleed out my burgeoning
affinity for your
fluid comfort grave
9
St. Gemini Pens a Private Eulogy for St. Sunlight, Patron of Rational Thought and Love
of Knowledge, Occasionally Conflated in Some Histories with St. Thomas Aquinas
Truth like water, you said,
all around us you lie now (1, 2, 3)
like air. By you I saw
whatever the sun is
singing now it sings
you left
still warm The dying
season, I said
hills exploding
puce & vermilion amber your laugh forget
Silenus. Your wisdom is holding
your breath so the first
cardinal you see on snowy
branches waits a while
before flying off
(the monarch
floating around my face that morning
in September, minutes
before the buildings fell)
(the iridescent
blue wasp that landed on my
suitcase and scared me
from my room in the midst
of evacuation packing for Katrina)
(someone will enter
& complete you).
Light through clouds on Ambremerine.
This is Friendsville in springtime. I have spent
10
two lives here. Susquehanna
tribes knew these woods
even by night; the river and its
fog they traveled only by day, eyes
sharpened, lungs drawn taut
11
Papa Legba, St. Compass & Keeper of Keys, Protects St. Gemini During Childhood Turbulence
My driver parked at wooded crossroads dirt in the wet
air in his smiling tell no one a strange man fired
up to us tapped the glass companioned by red bobcat lit cigarette Don't let
me catch you back here flicked ash like scatter-
shot from a warning blast his bobcat bucked
snarling low That glowing cherry lit
my dreams for weeks He's watching you my driver said,
seeking a paved road Woke in the night to self-lit
candles whispering I know love would stay undarkened stay that blow
12
A Young St. Gemini Catalogues the Similarities Among Secrets, Swearing, and Prayer in the
Book of Truth and Water
Dart frogs, bright-skinned
and poisonous; axolotls,
emerging like curved blue
light from her jaws, lacing
their bodies together as
approaching sound.
Always a hand to stroke her
effusive curls back from her cheeks,
hovering, vigilant, for her sparkling
vomit: topaz, emerald, recurrent
pearls spilling from her,
precious as teeth.
Don’t swallow, her sister said, replacing
the turquoise under her tongue
with a snail. His shell
retreated enough for her to feel
his infant skin against the new rose
womb of her mouth. God, she tried
to gasp, and out he fell,
her sister smiling, palm
outstretched to catch him.
13
St. Gemini Basks in the Light Cast by St. Caduceus and His Brass (Nor Stone, Nor Earth, Nor
Boundless Sea)
Horns that don’t graze
the cape on their
way through the torso: my breath my yes
(Since the zipper of your jeans is in
search of a cure d’air– I hope she will be
sweet & keenless)
still with pleasure as you wound
you around me shed
your smell over me like when the stainless
spiral screws through
cork so deep its widest
wound is wrought by exit
(nor should we return to the Potsdamer Platz,
where we stood before the remnant preserving
that place where the Wall was first broken through).
Reeds bending
to baskets: we dry
against each other
(nor did the loss of a man we loved draw us
to the home his ashes found. Only your
wire-caked voice, the impotence of laughter)
so tight nothing between us but brilliant
chance smearing like
paint in a bone
(white room. Nor continue crossing the Atlantic and its cold green
thrashing, year after year. Nothing brings us
together—we don’t need to be brought) ⎯
I want you
in pieces
14
the size of
Babylon.
(nor keeps us separate.)
15
A Letter from St. Gemini to St. Heather, Patroness of Vermilion Sunrise, Tidal Change, and
Purpled Earth, Sometimes Conflated with St. Thekla
When the waves are burned
just right
they shine.
So I would pull myself beneath
this bruise
hued mantle
of our after sky: Call it learned
to read
the scattered
light too late. Call it land at last.
16
A Letter from St. Gemini to St. Icarus: A Record of Dialogue Regarding Instructions in Estuary
Deep in lung, and warm as summer flora,
your sound surrounds me as the branches might
(He watched me as he rolled his
sleeves past the elbows. The scars
were shiny strips of wax paper. I wanted)
when damp lilacs dip their sweet corpora.
Hybrid of Adonis & Pandora,
(to touch them. What do you
think? He asked. I was
quiet. Some wept. It got)
stroke my winter bones into angora
& let me change how you conceive of light:
(too easy, he said. He smiled at me, eyes
greening. Are you scared
off? He asked. I said,
No—
)
Breathing you from moon into aurora.
17
St. Gemini Pens a Lament on Hydraulic Breathing in the Book of Truth and Water
A new kind of snake in the chest. Just like. Leaves
bending towards me
& blurred. After the first wet breath,
more water. Open. & gold rendered
gaudy, without
autumnal burnish. I knew
(only dried
movement)
to reckon this
wreckage with colder teeth: sirens
cast their lariats & dire
18
St. Gemini Addresses La Marasa, With Particular Attention to Her Half, and Seals It to
Parchment for Her Estranged, Her Worker of Metals, St. Maker
Nothing was colder or bluer. Not your eyes
when I left. The first to love were also first
dead:
sugar & jagged
dagger, more
than stripped. During our silent decade,
I read your yellowed letters: inebriated
forest of sentimentia. My life
in our arboretum had been curled,
burning sky & thickened pond, fire
& water (I craved). I needed air-
conditioned metal & histories, stubborn
earth, what it could prove: I'd writhed
beyond us to find how things were slashed
& burned, how indigo insisted
just upon itself, how one could coolly
cut another to slack & blank and crown
himself alone. I stuffed my skull
with art & facts, cranial museum of
Let Me Forget. My heart kept, untended
crop on the wrong continent. Two
always equals three,
meaning not infant but your
leg, my leg, your leg—the human as
big rolling keg story where Zeus cuts us all apart,
making love: what's whiskey-numbed
between us every chance we get. I hadn't
learned much when I wandered
back through the trees. I didn't know
enough about the quick, silver rush
that comes when a knife darts past,
or how soil knows what to give as sun
blasts it to garnet blush, how cane
cuts and is cut to sweet. But it would
never be the same to hold a letter
19
opener & feel breeze move over me
like your slurred words. Or screw
my fingers into loosed, welcoming dirt & think
your name or crave your hands. That much
had grown differently. And would be.
20
St. Gemini Etches Several Walls During the Years Spent With St. Caduceus
Debonair chameleon my cellophane pulse rate
so handsome with your sandy laugh
I’d smoke a joint to put my tongue on your spit.
and there was Marlon Brando, glancing at me again
and again, from his cool
corner table. I thought of you
& thought be a mountain
to someone—
I sleep in the thermometer
when your health frets. I will boil
through this glass capsule, like light bleeding
onto the ocean floor.
Your regal silhouette. Every surface
of the Earth has become
duplicitous, bright
like the sun warming shut
eyelids through a window in winter.
21
Slip like fog: The quiet
of expired volcanoes.
No more creeks where I cut
my toes on the sharpest pebbles.
Like fast & burning rock. A child’s
spinning coin.
Burn hope burn cool skylines & opera slice up the marvelous twinkling sound of glass
colliding with glass smoke out your sorcery obliterate jazz luminous fields & the scent
of cut grass waste the aubrenwing above the ocean and my taste for lightning & starfruit
when summer thickens every vessel in me. Sizzle waterfalls evaporate comets incinerate
everything born & unborn disintegrate everything save the holy pulsing thing that blows
me open whenever I see you.
22
St. Gemini Encounters Silibo Nouvavou, St. Revelation, Bathing Alone at the Pool in Nocturne
Courtyard
she comes bathing
in the bluer-ing
bared heat of the sun: bluest
hour cauterizing the day's
detritus away. She roils
her igniting ocean she revels reveals
Silibo Nouvavou,
Saint L'histoire Nouveau
St. Cloaked in sun & laughing glow
she knows the sphere
of static bluing
in her throat
(and it stays there,
and it stays there.)
so loud she can't
hear it: she is
not dying she turns
to bluer light & enters
each muted pupil, each
spark flying fine as a lash
23
St. Revelations' flow
St. Archipelago of know
to smoke & blows
into the open
the gaping, fills
(to answer the )
24
Erzuli Dantor: St. scarred & hard-carving
knife in crude-nailed hand after whose touch I dreamed a man
wounding my mother & removed
his pale & mangled mound
of heart: Madonna
of red
candles & eyes serving plates peppered hoarse-sung with severed
tongue: riot & griot, all teeth
& arms, Mother of brave & saving
& forced him to burn.
Saw him a huddled
pile of ash, craven & scattered.
For those submerged
in deluge
or craving it Mother of Prompt
Succor, against destruction by fire,
against lightning & threats bellowed by thunder,
against destruction by flood Mother swathed in gold
for us: shipwrecked, noose-necked laborers,
loiterers in the Lord’s vineyard—
25
St. Gemini Looks at the Map St. Caduceus Drew Her One Cloudy Morning to Find Her Way
Home
Your understudy seduces me
like an aria grown redundant
until the mezzo hoarsens & you lean
in, knowing this could
get interesting — my precipice, antelope,
stone-cutting sloth. Establish your
estuary in me during sleep. Alarm like a lazy
cock, it doesn't wake me
from my dreamt botany, barely
midwifes me this monotony: I abandon
myself, an impotent boy plunging
into honeysuckle. Daybreak comes embarrassed
& bright as misplaced snowfall on some
Atlantic cape in autumn. We swim
less towards each other than through
the scent we fear
not missing. Sap from dying
maples reaches us as amber
congealing to glass. We will
mold a menagerie
of monsters from it.
Virus who taught me all unraveled
virtues of yearning, my mouth hurts for your curve. You will not spread
your calligraphy brush against me again
nor surface past this lake of curdled doubt.
As a child, I found
26
a rabbit in brush, stroked it, oblivious that its heart
had stopped at my touch.
This is how I learned
fear; abandoned
between tracks & graffiti underground, a mattress
must lend itself to vagabond bodies. Like a hound clenching
its kill until sinew
is pried from jaw: let inertia
testify, you whom I covered & left
sighing, sleep-eyed as a nightjar.
27
St. Gemini Discusses the Ubiquitous Sacraments of Missing and Observation in the Book of
Truth and Water
room heats a composed
drag from the unfiltered
between her toes the sweep
of her torso Venus
de Milo bearing the divine
signature of breath
when she plucks
a peach
elegant
as a wing everyone
wants to know
how it tastes
28
A Letter from St. Gemini to St. Icarus: A Record of Dialogue Regarding Seasonal Change
(& God-
quiet your how escaped me)
we were not vagabonds together we were you vagabond & I train stop
creek bed
cigarette. I wouldn’t
lie to you, the missing pins
me down quick as apples
brown & your
your name your name your name your name your name your name your name
I don’t remember much of you. I try hard. You said I’ll hold you facing the mirror
& with a hot iron remove all the things that make you lovely. Let’s be clear (forget)
a single hurt color
29
Let’s be
(the selves we saved
outside of ourselves)
waking reasonless breakless
your hand to mine & the white in trees now meaning spring
30
A Letter from St. Gemini to St. Sunlight, in Which She Mourns the Loss of St. Sunlight, St.
Kinetic Clement, and St. Requiem
Remember Keith, his clever grin,
the car that ran the stop sign. We laughed
about my auto accident two
weeks before it hit him. I was
anxious for weeks
before your bright-hilled heart
relaxed
Remember
empty chairs words like
moxie remember grief
became part of the way & why
I should have written
sooner: one day late is a very
long time to ache. I telephoned
you when I forgot
spilled my drink did all the
tritest things of course I lied & used
cocaine words like fine
breasts & biceps sweeter than answer
forgot like a champ, clinking
glasses with friends when I
heard Arthur lost, his body
greenhouse to the cancer.
His body the sun.
Remember letters, the way
we kept memory
sealed to a page. Remember try
to remember it’s done.
31
St. Gemini Describes Her Gift of Lachrymal, Tiny Bottle of Metal and Glass Consecrated to
Preserve Tears, in the Book of Truth and Water
My dogwoods waver in the cling
of August. The hanging
smell of rain like a cramp,
for days refusing to divulge
the hour of its
arrival, or with what—
The leaves knowing, penitent
undersides exposed, a few
honeysuckle still tight as pink & everything
waiting for light to web the sky
or that coiled, dark sound coming
flossy as a freight train.
However it reaches me,
I’ll take it, maybe not
graciously, but still
into my skin.
32
St. Gemini Sketches a Crude Map for Her Estranged, Her Worker of Metals, St. Maker, With
Apology for Its Incomplete Nature
halfway through our silent decade I knew I had absorbed you
I didn’t know you were in jail had lost a baby in New York I started
fucking the man I eventually surprised myself by marrying spent time
not knowing wishing for you a girl who kissed me
without warning who gave me my first pomegranate I breathed
holy holy holy at night before sleep and knew said I love you
into empty rooms and didn't know I was wishing he insisted
we buy a television wildfires accosted me from Los Angeles invading
my indigo hours
One of my neighbors was attacked
a man followed her home
forced his way inside
tied her to her bed
& yea, though I walk through these
shadows, I whispered, I fear I cannot move I didn't
Two nights later, I was chased by a man who spit on me
said he’d strangle me I ran I hid in a bar I knew I wished for
When we were sixteen, I broke your heart & you threw
a trash can at me. That it could have
hit me is absurdly funny
The girl without warning asked to spend a night with me to avoid, she said
a mental hospital The man insisting asked to spend his life with me I was
repulsed by his sweat when we fucked I didn't know she took
a bottle of sleeping pills slept for five days I love you
I said in my empty rooms I didn't keen, God of power & might & promised
somniloquies
My neighbor’s attacker
tied her to her bed
and cut off her eyelids
I said yes but we had to keep the engagement secret contained I knew
he had hit me once it didn’t really hurt he cried after I said
he wasn’t a bad person mostly I wanted him to shut up I watched
fires spread across Southern California while he slept heaven
& earth were filled
My neighbor’s attacker cut
off her eyelids then
then he forced
different parts
of his body
into every part
of her body
33
heaven & earth were stilled
Four nights later she slept I slept he choked me he lost his
erection He wrote a poem in which a prayer in which I not me developed
a fetish for his gut Bring your belly over here I said in his She wrote a chant
a second chance in which he helped her
build a white bed I stopped
I couldn't but I knew
six nights later gunshots from the bar below I was alone turned on
the television for light fires gleamed raged devoured molten
sheets of domino across the screen as sirens approached She gave me a ring, said
This is our secret engagement ring and kissed me I painted my lips
red as distraction from silence I couldn’t write couldn't the fires
made fifteen pomegranate-colored capsules of night I couldn't
I swallowed
My neighbor’s attacker tore
her body apart using his body
for nineteen hours
then he set the bed on fire
I heard you had moved in with your favorite angry-
faced waitress I didn’t know she kicked you down a flight of stairs I saw you
once from a distance & thought you were ugly happy
you must be
I refused I moved with my new
husband to Los Angeles the fires began again, red carpet of can't get away now
unmedicated, he drank more he & she fought she stopped speaking to me our new
neighbors grew pomegranate trees I would not cry return to me
out loud I knew I wished I considered once, spending fifteen dollars
without his permission he kept me in my car
for two hours circling screaming you goddamn spoiled cunt you get out
when I say you get out
I cried I cried
hosannah in the highest pitch I knew
my neighbor was gang-raped
underage at a bar anchors reported the attack
lasted for approximately one hundred and fifty minutes and dozens
of observers stood with camera phones
I couldn't
write I mean I couldn't talk I wouldn't cry I didn't wouldn't know I wished
for you I couldn't my sharpest note held steady I love you
in your human gown she said she my empty room you are my bitter
bitter and my heart I held you my breath
I wrote I know love is when you are ready.
34
St. Gemini Ruminates on the Concept of Sluice as Poultice in the Book of Truth and Water
my harmonies weave after
mourn
identify
find
that elusive thicket in which the every-
where of this
ceases
35
An Unsent Letter from St. Gemini to St. Caduceus, in Which She Reflects on the Arcane Rites of
Navigation & Cartography
Cave mouth dry wash whiskey tongue blown
from nowhere
deity of my
denouement blue
eyed relic
find me in my hasn’t
rained for months
36
St. Gemini Collages Photographs of Distorted Dolls in Vulnerable Poses Together With an
Ancient List of Indigo-Colored Objects, and Glues Her Revelations Inside the Book of Truth and
Water
Mountains
& dusk & learning the throat
as a deer part.
Heart
orphans the carcass:
spray of vessels & shells
of gilded metal gathered like a shaved
bowl of ice Iridescence
off the tail of a belle mer-

maid
drowning
& dream
those blue pine
needles near. You who so
list to hunt
I know
37
St. Gemini Hears the Call of Ayizan, St. Clarity, and Answers
Her holy whispers crystallize breezes beading breath in me
her sweeping palms shredding psalms harvest
internally. We mark it this ravine
St. Racine du clarté spreading molten petals Philistines
would pluck them clean away inhabited masks whose grains
will say what we are
inside these shapes
that drape us, style us from birth navigate this marketplace of bows
& scrapes to worth. St. Seeker or so conceived:
borne to swords suit metal tressed
in silver-ribboned sovereign breath with hotter
cast & hither-rushing slivers of regret. Her heatless
hands release their calm like silver
over me. Some trials
through fire are blessed: they birth you
deeper into earth, she says. I acquiesce.
38
Maman Brijit: St. healing
smith of holy
words & graveyard
petals’ rush & smooth.
Your velvet-scissor
wind: Protectress
of vixen, Mediatrix
of our sins,
rum-
dampened tongue, deliciously
fractured
cackle,
purple-veiled
lodestone, Mother
Poiesis Mother Death Mother Exultant Final Breath:
39
A Letter from St. Gemini to St. Caduceus, in Which She Writes: I Should Have Known When
You Turned Up Your Palms Instead of Laughing
Comfort in oxidizing copper,
these months: my favorite
lovers a ghost & the shriek
linking me to him. Get out of my sleep.
Look me in the eye, he warned,
glass raised, or it’s seven years’
bad sex for you. We came
trashed to the theatre once
again. Get out of my empty bottles.
Others emerged under my post-Prague
Metronome, sideshows & Brooklyn
burlesque by the beach. I got
tear gassed, you said, experienced
& indignant. Fuck you & your
revolutions—get out of my bookcase.
Lettered my unkind goodbye: Please
don’t bother, meaning, Please end
this for me. Black on red, distressed
bricks vamp in damp air: I live by
the ocean, now. I have new sheets
I wash myself. Get out
of my house. Get out of my house.
40
Santa Ana, Patroness of Things Wrongly Ignited, Is Mentioned in the Book of Truth
and Water
Miles of burnt
orange silence, capped by absolute
sky. Her range rising
against the horizon, finding us
hungry for sound & crowding.
Mother whose
children are self
or so claimed. Unifying wounds
whose height begets the wind
that shakes our windows like white-
nightgowned children laughing with unlit
abandon. Unbedded, we breathe
against our glass, eye the hills for telltale
glow, acrid shawl of ash rising
unmoved by the howls that deliver it.
41
A Letter from St. Gemini to St. Icarus: A Record of Dialogue Regarding Shifts in the
Country Between Us
I’m fissured for you. Frozen lake or San Andreas— the heat
& rupture, my feathered supernova, reach even
lowly me: gone the sieved rose
water I carried for you where I should’ve had
muscle. Now I’m cracked into
gibbous. Into arid blossom of sometimes
when this West
earth moves no one else appears
to feel anything I wake some nights knowing tremor & can’t
tell if it is ground shifting again, or my
more dissatisfied
body my heart barely
distinct from the vast
wall of rivulets in frisson below me Together we were a little beautiful
tangle of centerless appendage. I wouldn’t ask more now
than a single carved inch of your heart & know I deserve
42
much less . Apology is stolid, arval—love
a car abandoned & found in shallow
creek gravel many Springs later unclaimed
photographs taped near the wheel inside. The waste
of sundresses on adulthood, when we know we’re supposed
to cover ourselves. Learn from sunburn. I mean
I can’t blame you. I’ve looked to blue
myself. It was my idea to try leaving the things I didn’t
say as strips of faded film against my dash. They core me and I shake.
43
A Letter from St. Gemini to St. Valerie: Patroness of Unanswered Questions and Overcast
Skies, Sometimes Conflated with St. Sylvia
On the third day, they began to worry.
On the third day, they made
flyers, phone calls,
found your body
in your car in the flood-
ruined field more than
an hour from your home.
Air had recently healed
the town you drove to, absorbing
the Susquehanna uncredited
where earth lay sodden, exhausted, still
scarred as a burst lung: unable
& now able, drying, to give you
its wasted space to hide & die.
We don’t say suicide. We say
unattended death. We are careful
not to say the October wind
is burning: we say tenuis sub
artus flama demanat. The city
you died in had, for that month,
cleaved to the song you kept etched
in your skin: All we can do is keep
breathing. As schools began to
surface from the river’s rapacious
embrace. As animals swept away
in the current were kept from the blurred
gazes of those who’d lost them
or left them to drown. We don’t say God
damned all of us. Or ask why. We say Dona nobis
pacem. Dona eis requiem, sempiternam.
We don’t talk about your great
tap root tattoo. We make Valerian
44
root tea to relax, ease our hearts
into your choice to die. We toughen
and tauten our lungs like leather
knowing: we’ll keep you, keep
kneeling, exhaling these litanies.
45
St. Gemini Pens a Defense of Thomas, St. Skeptic, in the Book of Truth and Water
I could say narwhal nightjar
rune or horse or deer. I do.
I say these things & mean love
like everyone: I have my
ocean my albatross Fox my pink
and violet aurora. This is
not the point: whether pain
can be salved or if we
can be saved. I know God’s hand
opens for us. But sometimes
I can’t Look,
how I ignored the begging
dog, scraps of my meal
indifferent on the plate.
Sometimes I am a vial
of can’t. I don’t believe
in fearless. Show me your
whitest scar: I want to talk
to someone who knows
what makes the beast
the beast is that when
46
he opens his mouth, we lean in.
47
A Letter from St. Gemini to St. Caduceus After He Kisses Her Again and Whispers:
Shine On, You Crazy Diamond
Made me your Lara, your lyre. My cur, my anchor: mine
blended tender. Berlin was my snowy Styx my could I understand & stand
Zweifel
spelled out across the sky
I couldn’t:
I didn’t
think the loved
would ever come, my
(pear-skinned falsehood, my exuberant shaft
of green beneath the daisy petals. My quicksand, yes, and as well as that my quick-

silver my First
Matter my watery
purifier— you shaped my)
self such a rupturous
creature & beholden
(tiles into mosaic: the sandhill
cranes I saw strolling the banks of our lake in a siege
of six. Mostly grey, of course, but their red is somehow what I noticed
and was left with. Like the
feathered minutes you touched my hair & said you’re so beautiful I love
your let-it-be-ness I wish you hadn’t run away)
as a vase.
And after all: not my Mercury. Too close
48
against your body turned me
burning & now my I loved you
comes as cure d’air & not as air de cour
or coeur. Chilling (the slip from venal to venial):
this simplicity of release, the emerald of your hand
on mine sown & forgotten. I’ll keep
(this Savannah we’ve built
on our bones. This empty
snug as cool ceramic in your palm?)
(I curled over you again & again
as a fine long ribbon is corkscrewed by the rubbing of a blade)
with or without volition
this final loved & its tandem what
next
49
St. Gemini Writes a List of Questions Regarding the Holy Orders of Direction and Velocity in
the Book of Truth and Water
Delphinium winter made mirror-
edged, lakeside. Road:
antlers, discarded.
Cant-
icle
meaning frozen
in verb
implosion.
Ecclesiastes lasting
the entire night we
damned Finding we were born here
not enough
direction. Not
survival. Only phonetic
propane laced in place, for now
unmitigated & only
for now unmatched
50
Ogou Feraille, St. Extinguisher of Dragons, Gives St. Gemini a Special Blessing of Love and
Protection and Restores to Her the Touch of Her Estranged, Her Worker of Metals, St. Maker
Like smoke & opium
snow: body ( he is )
inside
quiet & light & blown
glass night
He has (always) known
how to finger this wounded
muscle like a yanked & tangled mane. In his hands,
metal becomes (quick)
that which can be held. Becomes a (silver)
flashing thing in his hands fire is slapped
to ash, traced against my skin: lime
burning to mortar. Cooling to phosphorescent
origin, to the wing of what comes next.
51
St. Gemini Sways in the Combined Presences of Madame La Lune, St. Drawing Down Truth,
and Lasiren, St. Watery Vision Loosed
Mist-dressed rune dark silver-hewn
washed orb beneficent regency kindled
new in salted-thick perfume
Stella Maris sings, hush-throated:
You will always find me
Midnight air: slow-burn kissed
by blue & glowing junes
electric through my body an azure-lit lagoon
Sirene, serene eternity where song
creates the binding amber pain in waves of sight
Marooned surrounded by your beams
my velvet, starred cocoon
gossamer & future-cast: I inhale sight & swoon
a ghost in what chamber, moving as if ordained
accident. As if by night.
52
St. Gemini Pens a Psalm on Hydraulic Breathing in the Book of Truth and Water
Gather water. Grasp my air
with juglike lungs & hold
each wave against my face, green
& golden coil closing
in : my eyes
open, breath
bubbling into brackish I
asked for this, kneeling
for drink.
Now I sink: his
child, as though I float:
Simbi
Saint Let me in
imbibe my limbs
transcribe what hymns
into my skin
Pull me down. Tear me clean
asunder I wish your stream your
well upon myself & fear
no drowning. No sense
of not yet howls. My secret now
53
now thrums I bow
ma Tet please
pull me under.
I trust what sight will come.
54
St. Gemini is Possessed by Silibo Nouvavou, St. Revelation, and Begins to Breathe
as a child, I set books
of matches ablaze (Deep calleth unto deep) my lungs convulse
to tautness. Known blue
in pools of water. She has
been me & I her daughter wasp breaks between
my fingers, now
(at the sound of thy waterfalls)
someone will enter—
her Self made flesh
again. O sacred Scarlet unwinged, its painless
splinter mangled
a birth of monarch
flutters through my throat Silibo—
(all thy waves and billows)
Woman cloaked in sun
& starry night. We are
come to burning. I feel
myself retreat: her swaying,
blued-rush entry. I find myself
complete: one in gasp
then laugh (gone over me) my borders
blurred with blue: burst
we know that which
we are we are
beyond my body’s private star
55
Index of Terms
Aubrenwing
ocean: breathing the sublime
unanswered.
sky: filled, and never filled.
their space between:
undoable yet not undone
Gemini
Two peach-colored roses grew next to a pool that stretched
between continents & facilitated breeze. One rose constantly
strained her tender, thorny throat into this wind; her fickle,
staid sibling was content to grow in all manner of directions
until he owned his trellis. Unmoored, our Seeker flower was
eventually snatched by the wind & carried into aubrenwing.
Her petals, torn from her, graced the briny gown of Creatrix
at its hem.
That night, a sailor lost at sea fell on his knees to Stella Maris,
who appeared to him in a cloud of St. Elmo’s fire, dripping
salty petals onto his weathered cheeks, and led him home.
He kept the petals pressed (as momento mori? for
remembered adrenaline? or grace) in his Bible, and
never spoke of them again. Upon his death, his granddaughter
inherited his Good Book & the petals they contained.
She found she could neither view nor touch those pressed petals
without hallucinating a trellised rose; nor could she enjoy the
staunchly anchored vibrance that blossomed in her grandmother’s
seaside garden without feeling the unique weight and texture
of those sea-soaked petals flowering against her face in the wind.
56
Anything Colored Indigo
Delphinium through brume inside l’heure bleu.
A bunting like a cardinal dipped in quiet
near-violet.
Clematis like a cluster of opening
irises. The slender velvet
throat of a peacock.
Salvia blossoms climbing: the body falls
into silence because the body wants
these lavender-tinted fingernails. Cold
turns your hands slowly
to bluestar: that only
color a hound can see.
Hans Bellmer’s Photographs
You couldn’t choose a better way
to feel free. Women bend
across pages: necks arched & twisted
to one side, torsos
flung forward, legs turned outward
& inward [as instructed]. Their faces are shadowed, slipped
& girdled bodies glistening in illustrative light. One pulls her skirt open
for us to view
[her] [the nylon casing her legs] luxuriously
sheer. Girled,
curdled: We don’t see a figure lurking hidden
behind a tree here, camera there but know he is
A secret worth knowing.
57
Hydromancy
She bathes in the fiery ocean of the sun: a virgin
initiated by tossing blue flame. She is the sacred
one who comes clothed in celestial
effulgence: She belongs to herself She is present
wherever water is found.
Her crown of twelve stars.
The moon at her feet.
She knows the secrets of everything
that wakes you in the middle of the night and holds
your psyche through the dark
in its cold cold hands. She laughs. She can
answer your questions. She waves. She waves away
Lara
Holly Golightly’s homeless, reckless, anonymous little pussy
cat abducted by Schroedinger (there was
the sealed room: We
were too visually
riveted by that caduceus
to open the door or check)
[except in stockings—with garter belt, even]
& of course not a cat at all
[& yet so feline]
58
Haitian Vodou
Who crawls on the ground (white)
Who arcs through the sky (color)
Who drinks egg & anisette
Who turns two into three. With laughter.
Who is mirror, mirrored, mirroring rune.
Whose slivers of silver knowing. Incandescence
that short-circuits solitude—
Who is champagne creatrix. Whose couché ship.
Who is laced up & lacy. What lady. Whose candied
perfumes, folding fan. All golden things.
Who opens the gates. Whose canine companion.
Who is fiercest mother. Whose scars.
What twenty-seven slither. What trees, what springs.
Whose camouflage, machete. Whose iron fire.
Who is absinthe starburst, whose love is star-
gazer lilies. Who enters & completes.
Who smokes a fat cigar.
Whose purple eyeglass.
Who tends the sacred langaj blaze.
Who speaks the smithcraft fire.
Who proffers panicked mane. Whose body
conducts the current. Who is one
among many or few. We carry
us to Bondye. Bon Dieu.

Abstract (if available)

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Asset Metadata

Creator Frazier, Jennifer (author), Frazier-Foley, Fox (author)

Core Title Mosaic pilgrim: Maya Deren’s The witch’s cradle as filmic poem, dissociative medium, and fragmented channel facilitating a pilgrimage towards ecstatic awareness through art; and, Mosaic pilgrim: poems

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Literature and Creative Writing

Publication Date 12/07/2016

Defense Date 08/30/2016

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag art,awareness,corporeal feminism,dissociative states,ecstatic,Ego,Elizabeth Grosz,feminism,filmic poetry,flicker film,Foucault,Freud,gender in art,gender in literature,immigrant artists in America,Iris Marion Young,James Merrill,Jewish artists,Marcel Duchamp,marginalized bodies,marginalized identities,Maya Deren,Merleau-Ponty,modernism,Nietzsche,OAI-PMH Harvest,occult,phenomenology,phenomenology through art,Spirituality,Trance,trance art,trance film,trauma,trauma theory,uncanny,video poetry,violence against women,visual poetry,Vodou,World War I,World War II

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor St. John, David (committee chair), Irwin, Mark (committee member), Ticheli, Frank (committee member)

Creator Email fox.frazier.foley@gmail.com,jffrazie@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c16-674943

Unique identifier UC11336371

Identifier etd-FrazierFol-4963.pdf (filename),usctheses-c16-674943 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-FrazierFol-4963.pdf

Dmrecord 674943

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Frazier-Foley, Fox; Frazier, Jennifer

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA