Brittany, Christina, and Roberto eat strawberries but don’t touch the ham I’d rolled up to look like flowers, while we talk about the writers we like, and the writers we do not like. Brittany says it bothers her that Leslie Jamison is constantly having other people call her “anorexic” in her memoirs, writing scene after scene about her long, thin body.

For some reason that makes me think about the artist Paula Modersohn-Becker and the nude self-portrait she painted, pregnant and beautiful, just a few months before she’d die in childbirth. Personally, I don’t mind Jamison trying to articulate the perverse line between beauty and ruination. We are most beautiful, maybe, when we are just about to break. 

Last month, I learned about a tree sap called mastic that only grows on one island in the Aegean Sea. A Presidia, maybe, Oona says, and then she explains that word: a communist-inspired system invented to unite all the struggles of discrete heritage foods under one world order. 

When my sister and I arrived on the Greek island, it had just rained. The ocean swelled with that excess — choppy, less reflective; while the soil poured out a distinct earthen scent. Everyone at the port was distraught, “the rains,” they told us, “are no good for our mastica.” The villagers put their fingers to the corners of their eyes. Later, we’ll hear that tear drops are the unit in which mastic is measured. 

The villages on the island are spread out over rolling hills, and they look medieval, with iron wrought gates, narrowing cobblestone streets and central castles. 

Sitting in a village called Elata’s central square, I’m disturbed by a fisherman arriving to sell minnows out of his pick-up truck. He bellows something in Greek and the words ricochet in every direction. Sound comes in from everywhere, creating a sonic commons. The village of Elata was built by the Genoese in the 1500s to enslave the island’s mastica farmers, and the sound tunnels were designed to pipe information to convalescent spies. I tell this to myself, quietly, as I try to stop idealizing the town square. 

How beautiful the villages looks, how violent the villages’ origins. Later, I learn mastic is very popular with alt-right podcast guys because it can be chewed to develop a more masculine jawline. 

Back in California, I went to "Opening the Mountain," which inaugurated the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art's temporary downtown San Rafael space. Housed in, very evidently, a former office building, the day-time opening felt mandatory, but also boisterous, like a company Christmas party. 

I saw Daisy’s parents there, talking excitedly to Martha Shaw. Jesse, whose careful maple column and yellow cube lined up perfectly with an electrical panel, peered over a glass vitrine of ceramics and carved wood by J.B. Blunk with such intensity it seemed like he was going to leave for the studio. Barry picked up one of Ruby Neri's pieces to check its date while in the other hand, he passed a bouquet of marigolds to his daughter Asha, the show’s co-curator. Looking at studied landscape paintings on the back wall, I expected to be told about some attic full of works by a forgotten Californian impressionist, only to learn they'd been painted by a 23 year.

The show’s premise, like most contemporary group shows in Marin, was vaguely related to Mt. Tamalpais — defined by reverent, but vague notions of ecology, a nostalgia for cultural relevance, and all the precious, gated tenors of an incredibly expensive region. But, this bothered me only briefly, as the feeling there was that these were artists who’d managed to hang on, to live in Marin despite the way the wealthy must both hate and fetishize them. The feeling in the room was good. 

When I got home, I spent a long time looking at my apartment: two rooms cleaved from an 100 year old Victorian. On either side of my studio, old door frames covered over with plaster act as thin membranes to the other unit, through which my artist-landlords send sound at a muffled distance. It’s dim in the mornings and iridescent a night: always set-off from the outside light.

Most importantly, the bedroom ceiling is torn and sanded against, fraying paint against a brassy plaster, repaired to create a great terrain of pictoral abstractions. A stranger says it looks like Il Giudizio Universale, but washed out, worn out by time and decayed, so the hands are gone and all that’s left is the thin crack separating man from God. This put the room in motion, a gentle wash, and when detoured trucks go down the small street, the ceiling world rocks. 

Recently, Anne brought it to my attention that there is no way to reply to these emails. This is both sad and relieving, as I'd been thinking it was just that no one wanted to write. 

Please write to me: theadora.walsh@gmail.com!