Edge Effect: Trails and Portrayals

Outsider: Minnie Evans

Outsider: MinnieEvans Now, becauseof you, symmetry and asymmetryinterest me equally. Paints tinting the cisterns in which they mix slosh and overflow, but you tend the garden gate. You are so celestially symmetrical that if you have a sun rising from the sea on the left in your picture, you'll put the echo of a sun rising out of the same ocean on the right, an island for their hub. You draw portraits of spirits, mount them on suit-box board and carry the crowd as a deck. Those little wraith faces in leaves and fruit, cherrylike. Or heads in urns, one face channeling fire into the mind above. You were a domestic servant when you made these. "Draw or die," said a dream. A symmetrical thing measures itself according to itself. Shoulders make a vase. Wings have their own faces. Life-forms share surfaces and rally into medallions. Because of the admonition— which didn't say, "Draw and live." 25 Jan 92: I've been in depression for days but felt a sudden rush o change—like the push of caffeine—upward—and the whoosh is associated with the draft offireup onewoman's head through her hair to the neckof the woman's face above—pentecostal chimney! The flame my cremation creates! Thewings lifting me, the urn by its handles soaring. I am the headof the flame. I am handing it up, up, the expression ofeach wing, the stomping and clapping, the women in tongues, the women holding the women falling backward and upward, glossy glassy glossolalia, their eyesup where the flame goes, the hats dropping to the floor, decoratingthe hearth on which we dance. 24 Outsider: MinnieEvans / 2^ Handles have to bewings—to lift theirburden on their own—handles have to bewings. And the path out of the vision is asymmetry. There it goes, all by itself, daring its route away. And out there facing the single fire, the single sun, is the one person who is but one. ...