On the Road, Near Mesa With Mist
On Georgia O'Keeffe, crises of faith, and Existential OCD.
Today’s essay is long, different, weird, raw, very personal, and has virtually nothing to do with fashion. We will be back to our regular scheduled sartorial programming next week. Can I offer you this really sexy giant sweatshirt I want in this trying time?
LAST MONTH, I had a slippage with reality. There is no other way to describe it. What had been a buoyant, sound routine — up at 6:00 AM, then the gym, then work, then writing time, punctuated by little pleasures from errands to yoga class to learning to drive — suddenly deflated overnight. Nothing fell from the sky or fissured a visible crack in my foundation. It was a single thought, random and intrusive before bedtime, that sent me falling into a three-week-long crisis: One day, I am going to be dead.
The other thoughts, violent and vortical, fell somewhere in a gray zone between existential crisis and philosophical sadomasochism. What comes after death? Why do I exist? Why am I me? How do I keep going knowing I’m just going to die anyway? Why can’t I just forget about all of this? I don’t want to die. God, let me live forever. I felt like I was 17 again, sweaty and slack and annoyed in somebody’s basement, listening to an extremely high acquaintance yap for hours about MKULTRA. Nothing intelligible could stop the intensity and frequency of these thoughts, a dead-battery smoke detector. I spent days convulsing under my coverlets, thrust into all-day panic attacks; I lost a frightening amount of weight; I could not get through a shower or a trip to the grocery store without crying. There were only a few compulsions that brought me comfort, and all felt deeply embarrassing: thinking about the nature of death until I could not think of anything else; closing my eyes and attempting to recreate the future flash-second moment of my death; looking up how old my favorite artists were when they passed away; obsessively reading about near-death experiences and longevity medicine and the psychobabble on r/Mediums. I believed that if I could think the right thought, or find and read and hear the right arrangement of words, the thoughts would disappear, and I would be healed.
In a circuitous way, I sort of appreciated this newfound attention to the cosmic. A half-irreligious Southerner — my parents believed in letting children decide their own faith, but also gleefully signed us up for Awana and Vacation Bible School — I grew up around Protestant culture but not firmly entrenched in it. My catechesis extended to the children’s basics, all Ark and sling and rainbow coat; by college, I’d bookmarked the Old Testament SparkNotes page because I frequently didn’t understand the more esoteric references in John Donne and Elizabeth Singer Rowe. Somewhere down the line, I told myself that I’d magically figure out my beliefs by the time I got married or had children, like some dove-shaped token would jingle into my head. Now, suddenly, I believed that I had to figure it all out lest I be stoned. It wasn’t as if I’d never thought about the nature of death or faith before or hadn’t gone through private grief, but suddenly all those things became deeply real, to the point I struggled to make sense of the act of living. The unwanted thoughts only served to outstretch my suffering, and I could not control their immediacy and incision. Belief was a balm I dared not apply.
Existential OCD — or “Pure O” — is a rare form of the disorder, so much so that its inclusion in the DSM-5 remains contentious among psychologists.1 This past month, I was informally diagnosed with it, which has been, in all of its terror, a profound blessing. What was nebulous now has contours. I was not, as I was told growing up, merely a “deep thinker” or “overly sentimental,” but instead a sufferer of a treatable condition. The difference between typical OCD and Pure O lies in compulsion: while typical OCD proffers physical compulsions, like counting, handwashing, or hoarding, Pure O compulsions lie almost entirely in the mind — excessive rumination, daydreaming, and overthinking. No one can see when the compulsion happens. It can only be felt.
That conceit mirrored a Flannery O’Connor quote introduced to me by Audrey Robinovitz: “What people don't realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.” Feeling is both dire burden and divine responsibility. We owe it to ourselves to lace and unlace our beliefs, or lack thereof, time and time again, not because it will release us from suffering but because it will teach us how to exist — a procedure both grueling and beautiful. I don’t know what I believe just yet, and the token hasn’t jingled in, but I feel far less reticent to undo those laces than ever before.
I cannot tell you the first time I saw “Road — Mesa with Mist” (1961), but I can tell you it has epoxied itself in my brain ever since. Here is a thin salt road, like the tail end of Spiral Jetty, jutting out of the badlands and into a transcendental fog, the flat peak of a mesa tickling the clouds. Wherever this place is, it is most likely near painter Georgia O’Keeffe’s former Abiquiú, New Mexico home, Ghost Ranch, a trunk road nestled between Española and Santa Fe. Speaking about the painting with the Denver Museum, O’Keeffe stated:
Two walls of my room in the Abiquiú house are glass and from one window I see the road toward Española, Santa Fe, and the world. The road fascinates me with its ups and downs and finally its wide sweep as it speeds toward the wall of my hilltop to go past me. I had made two or three snaps of it with a camera. For one of them I turned the camera at a sharp angle to get all the road. It was accidental that I made the road seem to stand up in the air, but it amused me, and I began drawing and painting it as a new shape. The trees and mesa beside it were unimportant for that painting — it was just the road.
To see the landscape this way is not just a byproduct of proximity to the natural world but the result of intense, decades-spanning self-examination. Georgia O’Keeffe, of all artists, was no stranger to backscattering. How had it happened, her and Stieglitz? She’d met him, nervous and gray and 23 years her senior, at his gallery on Fifth Avenue in the spring of 1916. Two years later, he’d leave his wife for her, and they’d barrel out of the city and into the real world from time to time — first at his family’s summer estate in Lake George, where they swam naked and painted horses and pretended to be younger than they were, and then onto Texas, where the neon flowers and cow skulls came alive. She painted what she saw, cloudscapes and petals and fecund and dead life, and he photographed what he saw, hundreds of cityscapes and stylized portraits and nudes, some of his wife, and some of the women he was allowed to sleep with without O’Keeffe’s knowledge. In 1978, almost three decades after her husband’s death, O’Keeffe wrote privately: "When I look over the photographs Stieglitz took of me — some of them more than sixty years ago — I wonder who that person is. It is as if in my one life I have lived many lives."
When she made Ghost Ranch her primary residence and felt compelled to paint the road leading out of it, Stieglitz had already died (she’d survive him by exactly 40 years); she’d begun wearing gender-neutral clothing, free of the frilly embellishments that turn-of-the-century women’s fashion wrought; and she’d developed a “close relationship” with Rebecca “Beck” Strand, a faithful companion until her death in 1968. O’Keeffe outlived all her lovers and pressed on, painting, teaching, thinking, doing, shushing the coyotes away. She never talked about death — or, at the very least, never talked about it in plaintive terms. To the Denver Museum, she again stated sometime in the 1970s, “It never occurs to me that [skulls] have anything to do with death. They are very lively. I have enjoyed them very much in relation to the sky."
O’Keeffe was similarly equivocal when it came to matters of faith. Raised lightly Catholic, she found creative blush in the decorative vestments and the heady aroma of ceremonial incense, but stopped short of belief. “I couldn’t be a Catholic,” she wrote privately. “The woman has no chance at all.” Her relationship to Eastern religion was less acrimonious, but still ill-defined: “I might be a Buddhist. I like the art that came out of Buddhism much more than the art that came out of the Catholic Church […] There is a tranquility and peace in Buddhist art that I don’t find in Catholic art.”
The closest O’Keeffe gets to talking about belief is when she speaks of Cerro Perdenal, or Hest'e'yanyik'othe, a towering, narrow desert mesa on the north flank of the Jemez Mountains, probably the exact mesa from “Road — Mesa with Mist.” Perdenal, where O’Keeffe’s ashes would one day be scattered, was what she loved painting more than anything else on Earth — more than cannas or calico flowers or floating ram’s heads. She would say, with both the finality of an enlightened artist and the innocence of a child painting in the backyard, “It's my private mountain. It belongs to me. God told me if I painted it enough, I could have it.”
O’Keeffe was one of the first people I clung to in my compulsions, desperate to make sense of how long her life was and how much time she got on Earth — a stone’s throw from 100 years. The portraits of her as a nonagenarian are more beautiful, at least to me, than any of the photographs taken by her husband. Her wrinkles are deep and sinuous and lovely, her eyes steely, a spiral talisman affixed in place of a brooch or, in O’Keeffe’s case, a bolo tie. And while there are certainly rituals and methodologies she followed to live such a long life — clean air, frequent travel, organic fruits and vegetables, herbal tea, Mensendieck stretching — the only thing that really mattered was her profound sense of purpose. That was her ultimate testament, art-making. “I’ve always known what I wanted,” she once said. “Most people don’t.”
At the onset of my crisis, I felt blinkered panic at the thought of getting older, another OCD thought that kept me perma-nauseated: You’ll never be as young as you are now. O’Keeffe’s life and work, much like O’Connor’s — who died far too young, at 39, from lupus, and was a devout believer contra O’Keeffe’s skeptic — provokes us, regardless of faith, to consider death not as a punishment but as the ultimate reward for a life well-lived. It is difficult not to be afraid of death, or dying, or getting older — it is baked into the experience of being alive and in love with life — but it is, in both of these women’s work, possible.
The are more things I have no opinion on, and do not know how I particularly feel about, than the things I do believe in. I can list the latter on one hand: art, writing, Georgia O’Keeffe, doing and doing and doing, and trying again.
I’ve been returning to myself these past few weeks, albeit slowly. It doesn’t take me hours to get out of bed or eat a protein bar or answer texts anymore. I can laugh, drive, shower, exercise, eat. I don’t start dry heaving if someone talks about death, or if I remember I’ll die one day. I can let the bad thoughts blink into existence, careen for a moment, and then ascend against the endless white lines of the freeway. And then, as if something much bigger than me hath commanded it, I feel the thoughts spirit away into the thick desert fog toward the mesa, slowly, epiphanically, and then gone, just like that. 𓇢𓆸
The belief by old-school psychiatrists and psychologists is that OCD must necessitate a physical compulsion. I hope medicine catches up to the opinions shared by many modern professionals — that even if a compulsion is invisible (like excessive rumination), it’s still just as vivid and distressing.