"The poet is of no party." Baudelaire
Editor’s note: Karla Kelsey’s Transcendental Factory is a novelistic exploration of the life of Mina Loy (1882–1966), a writer, artist, and designer whose creative work and extensive travels brought her into modernist circles in Paris, Florence, and New York. “1918” covers the period of her brief marriage to Arthur Cravan, their time together living in Mexico City, and his disappearance during the journey to reunite in Buenos Aires. This selection appears with the permission of Winter Editions, whose publication of Kelsey’s Transcendental Factory was released in November 2024.
Mina’s in the last train car rolling through twilight at December’s end, 1917. New York City to San Antonio: 1,800 miles. Solitary, although the train is quite crowded, and the woman next to her is paging through a magazine. Satin-quilted mules, a chiffon handbag, green alligator manicure set and matching passport case. At the border Mina takes her seat in an armored car for eight hundred more miles past mines of silver, opal, crystal, amethyst to Mexico City. A touch of metal on the tongue, sand in the throat. Gold vibrates before the snowy peaks of Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl—volcanic lovers.
The Aztec princess Iztaccíhuatl had been promised in marriage to the warrior Popocatépetl upon his victory in battle. Coral wrapped around her wrists. But before he returns, a jealous suitor tells her that Popocatépetl has died, declares the beloved’s soul a hummingbird following the sun. Grief-stricken, Iztaccíhuatl’s body contracts, shatters opals from rock. Returning in glory only to find his betrothed prepared for burial, Popocatépetl piles ten hills together, constructs a tomb close to the sun. Carrying her body to the summit he kneels before her with a torch, shaking and smoking steam and fire and ash.
The same violet sky, soft ash sky, hovered above Spanish conquistadors led by Pedro de Alvarado as they killed thousands of Aztecs during a ceremonial dance. And the Spaniards spreading the European disease: a Franciscan monk notes the impossibility of burying the dead, too many, and so pulling their houses down around them.
Light rain, and the train pulls into Mexico City’s Terminal Buenavista where Arthur Cravan, a.k.a. Colossus—poet, proto-Dadaist, pugilist, draft-dodger, and Oscar Wilde’s nephew, no less—has been waiting.
As she descends from the train car, silver and marigold fill Mina’s nose, push into her mouth.
Onto the streets of Mexico City she steps with a hummingbird necklace nipping at her neck.
–o—O—o–
Loy arrives in Mexico City in time for the new year, marries Cravan in January 1918, is pregnant by July, and by November arrives alone in Buenos Aires via Valparaíso and a Japanese hospital boat. Upon her arrival: news of the ceasefire between the Allies and Germany. In fall of 1918, Cravan, who doesn’t have the papers necessary for official travel, will repair a small boat and set sail from Salina Cruz. Although he’s supposed to meet Loy in Buenos Aires, he’s never heard from again.
–o—O—o–
There are no known photographs of Loy in Mexico City. No record of drawings or writing she might have done there, but one of my favorite photos is taken the spring before she leaves. It is May 1917, and she’s lived in New York City since the previous October—ten-year-old Joella and eight-year-old Gilles staying in Florence under the care of the headmistress of their school. Others has just devoted the entirety of Volume 3, Number 6, price 15 cents to her scandalous long poem “Songs to Joannes,” and Loy is caught mid-gesture turning toward the camera, her arms extended, hands flexed as if dancing. She wears a white coat part Pierrot, part galleon’s captain. Her face uplifted, expression strong but indefinable. Long silver earrings dangle from her ears. In the background are her studio and the only known photographic evidence of the lampshades she made and sold in New York. Three of the four shades with their tapered empire shape decorated with polka-dots, stripes, and scallops could be found today in Target, Anthropologie—on Amazon. The fourth, rectangular with rounded edges, features knots of flowers—neo-Victorian.
Dressed for The Blind Man’s Ball—“The dance will not end till the dawn. . . . Romantic rags requested,” as advertised in the second and final issue of The Blind Man, the little magazine put together by Marcel Duchamp, Beatrice Wood, and Henri-Pierre Roché. Four of its fifteen pages are by Loy, and the issue centers around a defense of Mr. Richard Mutt’s Fountain—the Buddha of the Bathroom—suppressed from April’s Society of Independent Artists show where Loy exhibited Making Lampshades alongside Wood’s Un peut (peu) d’eau dans du savon. A headless nude with a bar of soap affixed over her sex, men leave calling cards tucked into the painting’s frame.
The Blind Man opens with Stieglitz’s black-and-white photo of Fountain, raised on a plinth and backed by a Marsden Hartley. The last spread is prose “compiled by Mina Loy,” titled “O Marcel—otherwise I Also Have Been to Louise’s,” a fractured textual collage of seemingly overheard gossipy snippets. A simultaneous impression presented in typewriter font—I don’t like a lady in evening dress and I want some cigarettes for Mina and You speak like Carlo and There’s always a sky in heaven and My ancestor is tall people—
For Mexico City with Cravan, Loy leaves nightly gatherings at Walter and Louise Arensberg’s apartment at 33 West 67th where she talks until dawn with Duchamp, Gabi Picabia, Berenice Abbott, and Man Ray. Dab Chypre behind the ears, at the wrists, to enter a room with African orange flower, Amalfi lemon, carnation, musk. For Mexico City, Loy leaves her reputation: not only a great beauty but a provocative poet whose writing and illustrations have appeared almost exclusively in American avant-garde magazines—Camera Work, Trend, Rogue, Others, The Blind Man. Profiled as the quintessential modern woman in The Evening Sun, a poet and painter traversing language and nation to talk Futurism, Gertrude Stein, and free verse in English, French, Italian, and German. Leaves acting with William Carlos Williams in the Provincetown Players’ avant-garde plays. Leaves a community of artists expansive enough to embrace even Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, the Baroness, who shaves her head and paints it vermillion, wears teaspoon earrings, a taillight bustle on her dress, her 1918 sculpture Limbswish a curtain tassel and metal spring attached to her belt, and in 1917 she turns a cast-iron plumbing trap upside down on a wood miter box, titling it God. And if God wasn’t phallic enough, casting an enormous phallus in plaster, carrying it like an infant, presenting it to unsuspecting women on the street. One image is lost, another circulates. In 1982 Robert Mapplethorpe will photograph Louise Bourgeois wearing a tufted monkey-fur coat with her own phallic 1968 sculpture Fillette tucked under her right arm.
What kind of life might Loy have made if she stayed? Observe the Baroness. By 1917 she’s a war widow, and at the age of forty-two lives in a small apartment in the Lincoln Arcade Building on Broadway—forty dollars a month, home and studio to artists until cleared out: demolished in the 1960s for the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and the Juilliard School. Play a little Satie, a little Stockhausen. Here Duchamp also lives, and he and the Baroness meet for late-night excursions across the city gathering discarded strips of celluloid, tin cans, toys, vegetables, iron, stamps, pins. Unable to make rent, the Baroness sets out for Philadelphia, offering her services as artist’s model. Entering the painter George Biddle’s studio she sweeps off her scarlet raincoat to stand entirely nude except for one arm covered shoulder to wrist with celluloid curtain rings stolen from Wanamaker’s. Over each breast a tin tomato can fastened together with green string. Between the tomato cans hangs a canary in a miniature cage. Biddle, the Baroness is to write, although quite rich, insists on bargaining over the price—“You all had money-safety but nobody paid me a decent price for the show he enjoyed.” She’s soon back in New York, supported by Abbott and then Djuna Barnes, whose own finances are perennially precarious. By 1923 the Baroness returns to Berlin, selling newspapers on street corners. She spends the last year of her life in Paris where at the age of fifty-three she dies of gas asphyxiation.
–o—O—o–
To disappear, as Haytham el-Wardany instructs in his little blue book titled How to Disappear, sit in a public place and tune in to the sounds around you. Observe not only the words of a conversation but their textures. Become so entirely absorbed in those sounds that your thoughts, your self, your language melt away.
–o—O—o–
Loy, nearly thirty-five years old, leaves New York and the financial security—or what in her life of insecurity will pass for security—of her modestly successful lampshade business. Leaves her apartment on West 57th not far from the Arensbergs, and on my way home from Central Park I look up at the Steinway Tower, wondering if her building was replaced by this skyscraper, one of the tallest in the United States and among the thinnest in the world.
Ear of corn, sickle, and bandolier. Mexico City, 1917, is not the post-revolution community of national and international modernist intelligentsia it will become in the ’20s with the likes of Edward Weston and Tina Modotti with their rooftop azotea fitted out with a woven rug, a few old chairs, a writing desk, and a view of Mexico City’s cupolas. Is not the refuge it will become in the ’40s for Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, and Kati Horna, fleeing the Second World War. In 1917 Mexico City is ravaged by poverty and civil war. Sickle, bandolier, and guitar. There, apart from Cravan, Loy knows only Bob Brown from the West Village who has holed up with his fellow ex-pat bohemians in an ancient hidalgo mansion a far cry from the Arensbergs’ duplex with its Matisses, Picabias, Brâncușis, African and pre-Columbian art.
The question of why Loy would leave New York inspires speculation over the intoxicating effect of Cravan despite—or perhaps because of—his untamed nature, picking fights, insulting people, collecting and discarding women. Loy had known him less than nine months, but already he was expensive Siamese kittens, old leather, a cockfight feather—torn and bloody. Added to this: four days prior to the April 10 opening of the Society of Independent Artists exhibition, the US declares war on Germany. That summer Congress passes the Espionage Act, and as of June 15 any dissenter could be, like Emma Goldman, charged with treason, fines, deportation. The Blind Man is published solely under Wood’s name to protect Roché and Duchamp from deportation, and the editors distribute the issue by hand. The Arensberg circle disperses, Stieglitz closes his gallery, the Baroness, arrested as a spy, is imprisoned for three weeks in Connecticut. Loy’s divorce from Haweis is finalized, she’s granted custody of her children, and she’s allowed to resume her maiden name. She receives news of her father’s death and her subsequent small inheritance. And so, go to Mexico? What did Loy, artist, writer, immigrant, half-Jew, just-above-the-poverty-class-by-the-skin-of-her-teeth have to lose?
–o—O—o–
Loy’s archive includes typescript manuscripts and hand-scrawled notes on brittle browned paper and letterhead from the lamp shop she had established in Paris. Patent designs for toys, corsets, and window-washing devices. Sketches of faces, of dresses, of cats. Toklas could decipher Stein’s undecipherable handwriting and typed, edited, and organized her manuscripts. Loy’s handwriting is relatively neat—not much slant, closed loops. Strong crossbars and dotted i’s. I suspect Joella typed some of Loy’s drafts, but more likely Loy and a few unrecorded typists alone did this. A section-break marker she creates sometimes by hand—looping ribbons of o’s with delicate dashes, string of gems—and sometimes by typewriter—interconnects projects, forms constellations across the dark.
–o—O—o–
–o—O—o–
–o—O—o–o—o—
The manuscript for her novel Colossus is held in a private collection, but if it is a full draft, or fragments, or unfinished, and whether it is the only draft—nobody says or nobody knows, although excerpts appear in New York Dada, in 1986. The trace in Loy’s archive is only a few crossed-out pages, drafts of other manuscripts written on the back. Two hand-written sheets are housed in the Beinecke’s Carolyn Burke Collection on Mina Loy and Lee Miller. One page is on lined notebook paper, written in French, numbered at the top. The words Cravan and Colossus in a loose, large hand. The other, unlined, has rips along the left margin as if it had been kept in a notebook. Written in English, a small hand, the page features a character named the woman and another named Colossus.
After the woman and Colossus marry they settle in a tenement room—shared courtyard, kitchen, bathroom—near the Basilica of Santa María de Guadalupe. The woman does the washing, makes tortillas on the communal stove, and tends to Colossus when he falls grievously ill. Low on money, at times they eat only every other day, flavor coffee grounds with orange rinds. The woman looks after Colossus with more devotion than he has ever lavished on the green stockings of a countess in New York, where he—or, rather, where Cravan—played the salon game—according to William Carlos Williams’s Autobiography—of tracing the countess’s legs for hours.
“Pregnant on the shore,” Williams will write, Loy “watched the small ship move steadily away into the distance.”
But pregnant with her fourth child, Fabi, Loy had already boarded a Japanese hospital ship bound for Valparaíso on the way to Buenos Aires, where before hearing of Colossus’s disappearance she learned the Great War had ended.
The scent of stone and excreta overpower the marigold, the coconut grove, the tobacco, the chili. Of Colossus, Loy writes: He could push his entire consciousness into a wisp of grass.
Colossus—
—cool, locus, loco, cuss, sus, sou, solo, soul, loss, lo, o, so, sos, sos, sos, sos, sos—
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s the avant-garde salons of Paris and New York buzz with speculation, ongoing to this day: Had Cravan, upon disappearing in 1918, actually died? Or, bored of domesticity and Loy now pregnant, had he run off with her money, which he had kept for them carefully tucked in a leather billfold? And what of his other women? Someone will insist they’ve seen Cravan now manifest as this or that tramp, this or that counterfeiter, con artist, because, after all, he was much more those things than father material. Loy will speculate that he was murdered, inquiring at the British Secret Service and US State Department, who had found him of sufficient interest to keep a file: draft dodger, petty miscreant, once made Leon Trotsky’s acquaintance aboard a ship. Colossus’s lungs fill with water. Colossus sails to Puerto Vallarta to meet his lover. A switchblade cuts his throat. A prison guard laughs as he places food just out of reach.
–o—O—o–
Leonora Carrington plays a woman veiled in black and carrying an umbrella in Kati Horna’s photograph series, Oda a la Necrofilia, Mexico City, 1962. Photo by photo she traverses a small white room filled with a white bed, pillows supporting a white oval death mask. White light falls through French doors. Undressing, the figure pauses beneath her open umbrella to smoke a cigarette, her reflection casting back the polished image of a film star. The mask watches in each shot. By the end of the series Carrington sits naked on the bed, forehead bowed to mattress. Back to the camera, her vertebrae and ribs extend into the ripples of the sheets.
–o—O—o–
In 1918 Fabian Avenarius Lloyd a.k.a. Arthur Cravan a.k.a. Colossus drowns or is murdered or sails away or counterfeits himself a new identity. In 1918 the Spanish Flu is first observed in the US in Haskell County, Kansas; by October it courses across Mexico. In 1918 Maria and Julian Martinez revive the technique for black-on-black pottery, basing their designs on shards found on an ancestral Pueblo site. In the 1918 Battle of Bear Valley US troops engage Yaqui Indian warriors in one of the last battles of the American Indian Wars. In 1918 the Russian Red Army is formed, and in the UK propertied women over the age of thirty are given the vote. On March 6 the US Navy tests the first drone. In 1918 the Carolina parakeet goes extinct, Russia withdraws from World War I, the Spanish Flu becomes a pandemic and in its second wave the sick turn blue, their lungs fill with fluid, and they die within hours or days of developing the first symptoms. In 1918 German U-boats appear in US waters, and the Romanov family is executed by order of the Bolshevik party. In 1918 World War I ends. Roughly one thousand pilot whales strand in the Chatham Islands.
–o—O—o–
Grief-stricken, Iztaccíhuatl lies silent and cold. Paving stones and gravel are sharp through Mina’s gold-painted ballet slippers, passing the shady entrances to churches with their flickering votives. She’s passing market stalls of white linen embroidered with exquisite bestiaries, geometries, gardens. Passing children playing in the streets, passing Casa Azul where in 1918 ten-year-old Frida Kahlo is a flick of black braids, a yellow dress in a tree. Colossus gives Mina their last centavos to feed a starving dog.
I walk the neighborhood with a bag of stinking meat until twilight to look for the dog, his outsized skull, his chestnut body. He is not to be found, and other, stronger dogs fight for the meat. It is one hundred years in the future, and I by my own first husband am pushed face down on the bed in a luxury honeymoon hotel not far from this impoverished Mexican street. A raw splitting from anus to brainstem, claws digging the down bedcover, and from then on the sky had a streak of blood in it, regardless of the many sugar skulls offered up to the tarantula in her glass cage. As this happens and re-happens the dogs fight for the prize of meat, and it is still 1907, and Haweis still trains his pistol upon Loy as she walks across the room.
I watch the horizon, and sand pours from my body. I watch the horizon, and Colossus pours through a hole at the top of my head, slides a slow liquid gold through my chest cavity to settle in my womb. On the fortieth night I on the shore strip myself of dress, flesh, give myself over to salt and wave and wind until I am overcome by the image of a woman in a blue tunic decorated with woven flowers formed of feathers and little bits of gold. She wears gold disks in her ears and in her nose a gold ornament which hangs over her mouth. She is crowned with a garland of red leather woven like a braid, and from its sides emerge splendid green feather ornaments that look like horns. She touches my forehead, lips, belly as dawn slashes the clouds with unnatural orange.
–o—O—o–
Bending to meet my eyes in the mirror, Mina fastens a red coral necklace around my neck, and I ask her if she made peace with not knowing what had happened to Cravan. Or at least with the idea that he might have abandoned her, shed his identity. Wanting him to be alive no matter what, but also not wanting to have been left by her greatest love. No matter what. As if in response Mina says she’s recently read that neuroimaging suggests that careful contemplation of surrealist images helps people to process death. “O infinite passageways to the unliving, to the fourth dimension, the infrathin.”