Artifact, Part 2
Back upstairs of our burned home, I carefully stepped through the remnants of ceiling that were now heaped on the floor of my brother’s childhood bedroom-turned-office-space. This is where I worked, where I kept my computer and writing. The roof’s skeleton jutted out, jagged beams reached skyward, and the computer monitors had melted away—my memory was the only evidence they had been there.
Postcards I’d collected from Iceland and Asheville that had been pinned up on the wall over my computer were gone. But an ink drawing of a cow that friend and photographer, Kasandra Torres, made remained: another treasure recovered.
This cow was my Humble Beast, and its memory took me to one of my favorite collaborations with Kasandra. Coincidentally, a few days after finding the cow drawing, Kasandra emailed me a copy of Humble Beast, the written part of our collaboration that I had lost.
I first wrote Humble Beast while living in Chicago. I was still in school, and I had been thinking a lot about a phone call I had with my Mom a few weeks earlier.
Driving along a winding, country road to The Plains, VA, my Mom noticed a black calf alone in a field. It was a hot summer day and he stood aimlessly in this vast, shade-less field. It worried my Mom. Where was its mother? Was it injured or sick? She drove on, but on her way home she saw the calf again. This time, her worry led her down the farm’s driveway, where she found a farmhand and asked after it. The farmhand assured my Mom that they’d take extra care because this calf was blind.
I’m not sure why, but the image of this lone black calf standing in a vast golden pasture and unable to see hovered in my head. I wondered what it must be like to be a blind animal—not only navigating the world without sight but without the understanding a human might have of their blindness from a doctor or parent. I also wondered how a blind animal might respond to a sudden, fleeting “vision”. I built the story of Humble Beast on this imagining.
As with most things I write, I wasn’t sure where this piece could live out in the world, and I didn’t know if anyone would want to read it. During revisions, I stripped away a lot of description and backstory, trying to keep it as minimal as possible without losing a sense of voice from the blind calf narrator. The story’s structure became a series of brief vignettes. I really liked this stripped-down draft; it felt like challenging the reader to piece together the story from what little there was, in the same way the blind calf pieced together its existence through its other senses. It also worried me that I might have made it too abstract or too vague for anyone to have anything to latch on to, to care about.
While reading up on cows for the piece, I stumbled upon some beautiful black and white photographs of cattle herds from a public domain source—these dark stars formed constellations in the fields where they grazed and the ethereal quality of these photographs from the early twentieth-century struck a chord in me. In admiring these photos, I decided to reach out to my friend, Kasandra.
Kasandra Torres and I first met and became close friends at the start of college at Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD). She was a photography major and I was an illustration-turned-art-history major. We worked on art projects together throughout those college years, but it had been hard to connect for a joint project since then.
What’s especially remarkable about knowing Kasandra and our friendship is that we learned a lot about our respective majors, artistic practices, and each other while traversing our coursework and creative trajectories. We built the foundations that would shape our work beyond the classroom alongside each other. We experienced our growing pains and inspired moments together. Navigating the highs and lows of those formative years forged an intuitive trust, respect, and enduring true-blue friendship. That’s why I sent Kasandra the Humble Beast draft without much else. I didn’t know what she would create, but I knew it would align with the writing and add a layer of richness to the story.
And did she deliver!
Kasandra took my writing and voice recording and created a short stop-animation video. She used clippings of photographs in addition to her ink drawings and even incorporated dried flowers!
Immediately, I was struck by the airyness of the visuals. Those ink drawings and collage elements echoed the minimal feeling of the vignettes, and she captured a childlike wonder that enriches the calf’s voice. I’m not sure I could have conveyed that sense of wonder and whimsy with the written draft alone.
Seeing the surviving drawing pinned to a charred wall (and the Humble Beast writing in my email inbox among the other artifacts I’ve recovered) was a welcome sight, bittersweet and comforting. It spurred me to revisit the short video piece and take stock of the experience of making it—the friendship that made it. And despite feeling overly sentimental, this is where a memory can be reassuring. It can offer the promise of something new. I’d like to imagine that, in that brief moment of first seeing the drawing, it might be what someone feels when they see a floral arrangement I’ve made on their doorstep.
I’d like to share Humble Beast with you here. It is a humble, little work, but I hope you enjoy it.
Thank you for reading (and watching)! I hope you’ll come back next time. For more flowers in your life, you can also find my podcast, Gathered: Storied Botanicals here. Also, here and here. You can subscribe and share it with someone who might want to listen. Thanks again and until next time…