Complexity as a Liberatory Practice

Tara Anne Dalbow explores artist-poet Mina Loy’s thrilling embrace of contradiction.

By Tara Anne DalbowJanuary 2, 2025

• Poetry

• Gender & Sexuality

DURING THE 1920s, if you ventured into 20 rue Jacob in Saint-Germain-des-Prés on a Friday night, you’d find the likes of James Joyce, Colette, and Isadora Duncan eating tiny triangular sandwiches, drinking spiked punch, and listening to someone reading Sapphic poetry from a Grecian-styled stage. The host of these salons, poet and heiress Natalie Barney, knew everyone save for the ethereal entity her company whispered about. Widespread rumors claimed the person in question was not a woman but an illusion, a surrealist invention, a hoax concocted by the critics. Then, one night, a lithe, elegantly dressed stranger with striking patrician features and an inexplicable look in her eyes appeared as if from nowhere; the room went silent as she opened her mouth and said: “I assure you I am indeed a live being.”

Of this live being, it was also said that she was a “busy little mystic,” a woman “half-way through the door into To-morrow,” and “a true Other,” among other sobriquets. She has been grouped with the futurists, Dadaists, surrealists, and feminists and described as a poet, a painter, a critic, a model, and an art dealer. The woman was all of those things and none of them. She was Mina Loy—“a loy unto herself” (as Rachel Blau DuPlessis has called her). Attempting to label her further is impossible—she slips right through our categories. But then again, not even her name was absolute, considering how often she changed it.

Born in 1882 in a suburb of London, Loy spent her life in Paris, Florence, New York, and Mexico City. Despite her shroud of mystery, she appears with Zelig-like frequency in the memoirs and letters of the major artists and writers of her time. She wrote poems, manifestos, novels, autobiographies, social critiques, and philosophical treatises; she also painted, sculpted, made clothes, and designed commercial objets d’art. Loy had a formidable intelligence and was of unusual beauty; in 1917, New York’s Evening Sun heralded her as an example of the “Modern Woman.” She published obscene experimental poetry about masturbation and menstruation and enjoyed whirlwind affairs with renowned men, all while also being a single mother who worked tirelessly to support her children well into her sixties. She believed that love was all there was to know of the divine and that love was the ruination of womankind.

Her fans described her as an “interplanetary voice whose subtle vibrations only faintly pierce our smug-laden atmosphere” (Henry Miller) and as someone who could “understand without the commas” (Gertrude Stein). Critics wondered why, “if she could dress like a lady, [she] couldn’t […] write like one” (as her longtime editor, Roger L. Conover, paraphrased her contemporary, the American poet Alfred Kreymborg). Though she bristled at stultified gender codes and rampant materialism, she took immense pride in her rarefied social graces and refined aesthetic sensibilities. The upscale Paris boutique she kept for five years, a project financed by the great art patron Peggy Guggenheim, was stocked with her creations: unusual fashion designs, “l’Ombre féerique” (fairy lights), and ethereal surrealist-inflected paintings. She spent the final season of her life fashioning astonishing assemblage constructions out of foraged trash, art that critiqued both institutional hypocrisy and unchecked technological advancement. At the age of 83, after years of living in abject poverty in New York’s Bowery, she died peacefully in her eldest daughter’s home in Aspen, Colorado.

Loy was a host of contradictions, a riot of warring beliefs, and (as described by Conover) a “binarian’s nightmare.” But it’s this contrariety, this capacious incoherence and variability, that I suspect made her so modern, and it’s why I think her vision is more relevant and urgent than ever before.

Loy adopted complexity as a liberatory practice, refusing to conform to social expectations or strip down her expansive notion of the self. She fought against what she perceived as a compulsive tendency to “re-simplify” in an attempt to “forget what a complicated affair life has been mistaken for.” Perhaps there is value in following her lead and making a more concerted effort to resist the reduction of our lives to easy categorization and quick consumption. Could insisting on a little more complexity restore some degree of agency or integrity? As Loy suggests in her 1917 poem “Human Cylinders,” a solution can “Destroy the Universe,” especially if that solution is homogeneity.

Loy’s understanding of paradox and her tolerance for uncertainty were qualities she brought to bear in every aspect of her life. Rather than upholding or evading binaries, Loy nullified them, ratifying the validity of both sides. And yet, she took stands, asserted her beliefs, refused the paralysis of inaction. She often went too far. She often went so far that no one else could see what she saw. Always alert to nuance and multiplicity, she reached a point where complementarity existed beyond duality, establishing a continuum of ideals, identities, affiliations, and faiths. She lived on a spectrum, ever moving toward what André Gide described as the “limitless possibilities of acceptance.”

But let’s back up; to understand this capacity for contradiction, we’ll have to start at the beginning.

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On December 27, 1882, following an unexpected pregnancy, an English Protestant married to a Hungarian Jewish tailor gave birth to Mina Gertrude Löwy in a middle-class neighborhood on the outskirts of London. Where her mother, Julia Bryan, was austere, tempestuous, and explicitly antisemitic, her father, Sigmund Löwy, was imaginative, passive, and as proud of his material success as of his cultural heritage. The young Loy became yet another point of contention between her dysfunctional parents, absorbing the dissonance at the heart of their marriage. She saw herself, as she put it in her unfinished memoir-novel Goy Israels (ca. 1930), as a “confection of broken straws blown from the big hay-rick.” In her various autobiographical writings, she describes a childhood disfigured by guilt—over her failure to satisfy her mother’s expectations—and shame on account of her fragmented identity and increasing sense of unbelonging. “I have a different Cosmos every week,” she reflected in a letter to her daughter.

In her unfinished epic “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose” (1923–25), Loy describes two occasions that alleviated the painful drudgery of her life. The first was a visit from her Hungarian grandmother, dressed in fine silk and lace, who lavished praise and affection upon her. Loy likens their embrace to a “spiritual orgasm, the mystic’s admittance to cosmic radiance.” The second memory recalls an escape from her parent’s rage into their garden, where she encountered the wonders of her consciousness as it appeared intimately interconnected with the surrounding world. Beneath the “high-skies,” she saw how the “steadfast light” shone not upon her but from within her—a moment of “indissoluble bliss” that “illuminated” her connection to all things and the generative possibilities of creative invention.

Taken together, these two experiences composed her initiation into the spiritual realm “beyond the synopsis of vision,” where she bore witness to the divine force beneath the material surface: the continual metamorphosis that sustains the world. Loy had discovered her salvation and her sui generis talent: distilling the transformative energies of the invisible—sensual, spiritual, mystical—into poems, paintings, and objets d’art. Yes, the invisible could be contained—invisibly—in the visible. From then on, artistic expression became primarily an alchemical act: like gold from lead, she would wrest beauty, love, and light from the wretchedness of life. At first, from nothing but the turning of her mind, young Loy imagined stories and poetry; later, scraps of paper became tessellated bouquets (her Jaded Blossoms series) and cellophane and salvaged glass turned into calla lilies suspended miraculously in a lucent globe at the base of a lamp.

“I can turn my hand to anything that comes along and do it quickly,” Loy wrote to her literary agent Carl Van Vechten in 1915. And it was true. From trash came elaborate three-dimensional vignettes; from a thermometer, jewelry. And from the ecstasy and agony of the birth of her first child? “Parturition” (1914), perhaps the first-ever poem about the experience of labor.

After finding herself pregnant at 21, Loy was forced to marry her fellow art-school classmate, a photographer from a well-to-do family, Stephen Haweis. “I am the centre / Of a circle of pain / Exceeding its boundaries in every direction,” Loy wrote of the difficult delivery that her new husband missed on account of paying a visit to his mistress. Unable to exert agency over her subjugated position, she reimagined the world within herself: “Stir of incipient life / Precipitating into me // The contents of the universe.” Realizing her connection to the ultimate creative force, she imagines the creation of a new being as the creation of a universe.

More impossibilities followed. Pregnancy both fettered her to her husband, who would soon force her to move to another country, holding her hostage to the restrictions of her dowry, and initiated her into the divinity of the “infinite Matern[al].” When her daughter died just after her first birthday, Loy had no choice but to become acquainted with death as inseparable from life. While such conditions could render even the most resilient of us embittered or austere, Loy extrapolated from these experiences a firm belief in opposites as complementary—that somewhere the “positive and negative poles,” the “opposing and resisting forces,” were united. For her, a position never ceased to imply its opposite; there could be no joy without despair, no man without woman, no love without loathing. Supposed binaries such as thinking and feeling, spirituality and sexuality, or ethics and aesthetics could simply be regarded as aspects of each other.

Indeed, she loathed the “prison” of the female/male binary. Even more so, she detested the oppressive dualities a patriarchal social structure impressed upon women: mistress/wife, lover/mother, artist/mother. Considering her circumstances, it’s unsurprising that she railed against the conflation of a woman’s value with her sexual purity. She refused to see herself as society saw her: a woman divided, cleaved from her “cosmic” libido the moment she married and gave birth to a child. “[E]very well-balanced & developed woman knows that [the division of women into two classes] is not true, Nature has endowed the complete woman with a faculty for expressing herself through all her functions,” Loy asserted in her “Feminist Manifesto” (1914). She concluded that a liberated attitude toward sex was the basis for all social regeneration, the only way to shake off the stultifying muzzle of Victorian codes of conduct. She believed, as Sara Crangle puts it in Elevated Realms: An Anatomy of Mina Loy (2024), that we can “right the historical wrongs of Western socio-sexual morality by authenticating lust as a ‘sane impulse.’”

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Early in her writing career, Loy used satire to perform paradox and undermine authority. Satirizing the hypermasculine Italian futurists’ primary mode of address, her “Feminist Manifesto” oscillates between collusion and resistance, mockery and admiration. She turned their arrogant posturing and jarring concision against them, censuring their unbridled egotism and misogyny. That she had a natural aptitude for the futurists’ urgency and intensity is an understatement. She didn’t stop there but turned the same critical lens on feminism as “at present instituted,” criticizing its “half-measure[s]” and passivity. Loy advised women to adopt many of the modes of behavior—audacity, bombast—that she had only just condemned, and she called for them to behave more like men when it came to sex. “[D]estroy—for the sake of her self respect […] the impurity of sex,” she advised, urging women to deny “the desire to be loved” and “the desire for comfortable protection.” (These concessions recall the seminal line from Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’s 1619 play The Maid’s Tragedy: “Since I can do no good, because a woman, / Reach constantly at something that is near it.”)

To that end, Loy’s conception of identity was exceedingly fluid, relational, and indeterminate. What is a person but a locus of shifting expectations and adaptations? She felt that all people should express an “easy & ample interpenetration of the male & female temperaments” and was known for her belief that to have two genders was far more interesting than to have just one. Elsewhere, she follows this thought to its apotheosis, asserting that “we shall come to realize that the body is merely an instrument.” Her notion that gender is ineffable if not nonexistent was a radical sentiment in 1914, and uncannily prescient.

Loy constantly reimagined her subjectivity, a pursuit aptly symbolized by her compulsive use of pseudonyms. Imna, Nima, and Anim are just a few of the names she published under—all anagrammatic: the same but different. This ongoing project of personal transformation was motivated as surely by self-negation as it was by affirmation. Her extensive body of autobiographical writings and romans à clef also showed the poet inventing and erasing, working and reworking her narrative. Well, not the poet since, as she stated in a letter to Van Vechten, she “never was a poet.”

This compulsive slipperiness undergirds her resistance to categorization. She chose instead to be an interloper among various art forms and movements—to be claimed by all so as to be claimed by none. In his introduction to her first and only poetry collection, Conover describes this evasive tendency as “her anti-career,” which was filled with “so many seeming contradictions, counter-allegiances, and inconsistencies that she was often considered unbalanced.” It’s only when I recall the occasion of Loy checking her unbalanced self into a sanatorium for a brief stay and writing, in a letter to a friend, of her hope to come out cured, perhaps as a real estate agent, that I think it’s possible that mystics are in fact just like us.

In lieu of identification, Loy’s approach involved osmosis, expansion, erosion, elision, and negation. She accepted nothing wholesale and designated preexisting belief systems as “ready-mades,” likening them to mass-produced prescriptions incompatible with authentic faith or meaningful comprehension. Increasingly fearful of the passive acceptance of systems such as nationalism and consumerism, Loy argued for restoring people’s volition. In her view, fully understanding anything required agency and enduring inquiry.

Nowhere was this more pertinent than when it came to religion. In “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose,” she argued that a passively adopted faith would actually “make apprehension of the divine impossible” and that people needed to be sensually and intuitively engaged with what was “beyond the constructed reality.” In other words, she wanted people to be galvanized by their beliefs—to feel their convictions in their bodies, not just in their minds.

It’s perhaps surprising then to learn that Loy was a practicing Christian Scientist from 1909—when members of the church saved her second daughter’s life shortly after she moved with her husband to Florence, Italy—until her dying days. That said, her practice was of her own devising, and her parsing of the doctrine was as transgressive as it was with other systems of belief. What’s not surprising, however, is the appeal of Mary Baker Eddy’s brand of Christianity. At its base, the church preached that people could heal themselves and use their minds to overcome pain, fear, suffering, and injustice. She wanted that strength for herself and for others.

Loy also wanted to affirm her exceptional genius and special role as an intermediary between the cosmic and terrestrial planes. According to Eddy, “Human philosophy has made God manlike. Christian Science makes man Godlike.” Yet Christian Science’s deifying of the mind come at the expense of the body: the faith’s ideals insist on abstinence and the renunciation of the corporeal “world of sin and sensuality.” It could be argued that Loy’s refusal and ultimate subversion of one of the church’s most cardinal beliefs rendered her continued practice impossible, or so divergent as to be wholly other. And yet, she met regularly with practitioners for one-on-one treatments, referenced her faith in conversation, and reappropriated much of their cant in her poetry (self-righteous and sanctimonious affectations that, even now, can be difficult to read). That she could accept such dissonance is a testament to her mind’s pliancy and alchemical changefulness. Perhaps also to her audacity.

Assimilating language from the Gospels—sacrifice, salvation, Holy Communion—Loy transformed the desiccated godhead of Christianity into a sensual, corporeal body capable of stimulating “spiritual orgasm[s]” and a seismic “cosmic radiance.” Not unlike the Catholic mystics, Loy confounded spiritual connection with sexual unification in her desire for a mystical oneness with God. “Orgasm = the microcosmic projection of the Paroxysm of creation,” as she writes in her fragmentary “Notes on Religion” (ca. 1940s). Sex transcends the body through the body, in much the same way as other forms of spiritual practice, such as prayer or Communion, do.

Loy communicated her words-made-flesh realizations in her many metaphysical treatises, such as the unfinished “History of Religion and Eros” (ca. 1948), where she contends that the “Creator” would never denigrate “the Flesh,” seeing as our desires are “not of our own contriving” but “from the Creator broadcast to us.” She sublimated these desires through seminal poems like “Songs to Joannes” (1917), with its “profane communion table / Where wine is spill’t on promiscuous lips” and its fully embodied crucifixion, or her mesmerizing collage Untitled (Surreal Scene) (ca. 1935) in which a woman’s womb is replaced by a chalice of red wine, merging menstrual flow with Christ’s blood, and her ovaries with two fulsome white flowers, melding fecundity and purity. As Christ was miraculously resurrected to save us from our sins, so too will the vagina rise again for our salvation.

As with satire, Loy used profanation, absurdity, and humor as tools to synthesize contradiction, undermine authority, and expose the artificiality or arbitrariness of “natural” social conventions. Loy found the 20th century’s correlation of scientific rationalism with “truth” to be deeply constraining. This isn’t to say she wasn’t well-versed in scientific inquiry, technological innovation, and the fervent intellectualism of her time. Atomic physics, electromagnetism, and biological evolution were all important topics for her, and she freely and frequently borrowed from their lexicons. In a 1924 tribute, she calls Gertrude Stein the ​​“Curie / of the laboratory / of vocabulary” who can “extract / a radium of the word.” Elsewhere, in “The Oil in the Machine?” (1921), a man seeking personal and spiritual fulfillment “invented the machine in order to discover himself” (cue AI).

What she railed against was what Rebecca Solnit would call the “tyranny of the quantifiable”—progress for progress’s sake, mechanized materialism, and the adoption of scientific rationalism to the exclusion of all other forms of understanding. Unlike her peers, Loy refused to subjugate knowledge wrought from the sensual messiness of lived experience or from ecstatic divine encounters. As ever, she declined to choose. So, along with scientific and technical concerns, she incorporated ideas from the popular fin de siècle occultism movement Theosophy as well as from Freudian psychoanalysis. In her signature paradoxical style, she used heterodox beliefs to undermine rationalist assumptions, reconciling the secular and the spiritual, the mind and the body, reason and intuition. If it’s the job of the poet not only to meet but also to surpass the demands of their moment, then Loy was an excellent poet. She was a master at synthesizing the preoccupations and anxieties of her world and extending them into the future.

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By the 1940s, Loy was issuing elaborate warnings regarding the dangers of relentless scientific and technological progress without “evolving an ethical antidote.” Her worst nightmare was a world where the quantifiable took precedence over the intangible, the utilitarian over the sensual, corporate profit over public good, and authoritarian rule over individual agency. Already, she understood the warped dynamic between macro and micro, public and private, as she expressed in her revelatory poem “Universal Food Machine”: “All evil thought, all cruelty, the paralysed vitality of loneliness, the crushed vibrations of drudgery and the bewilderment induced by enigmatic injustices are broadcast through our universe and received by the collective human organism.”

If the first half of Loy’s artistic career was dedicated to realizing the psychosexual needs of the body, the second was primarily concerned with its material necessities and the suffering and spiritual “decomposition” that occur if those needs are not met. While it would be fanciful to say that Loy, in her sixties, chose to move to a boarding house on Stanton Street in New York’s Lower East Side, it’s true that once there, among the immigrants, shop girls, entertainers, manual laborers, and indigent “bums,” Loy found a community and a sense of belonging for the first time in her life. Perhaps the most enduring and radical boon of her capacity for contradiction was her capacious, indefatigable empathy. For all her indeterminacy, she never lost sight of the fact that people carry a “universe of pain within” and that it was our responsibility to open our “arms to the dilapidated; rehabilitate them.”

Along with writing poignant poems of tenderness and sympathy addressed to the “heedless incognito // of shuffling shadow-bodies / animate with frustration” (“On Third Avenue,” 1942), Loy transformed foraged urban refuse into astonishing assemblage constructions. Preceding similar work by Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, her meticulously crafted constructions memorialized and elevated the abject poverty and destitution surrounding her. Among the assemblages not lost to time are Communal Cot (1949), a rendering of 10 tiny individual figures crafted from paper scraps and rags, strewn about the pavement, each body with a distinctive expression, gesture, and resting position; Christ on a Clothesline (ca. 1955–59), a trompe-l’oeil rendering of the savior’s disembodied face and limbs hung with pins on the roof of a tenement building; and No Parking (1959), with its “angel-bum” asleep beneath an overflowing trash bin, a butterfly constructed from a paper cup perched on its rim.

By binding evidence of the invisible to the remains of the physical, from scavenged rags, bottles, and clothespins to egg cartons and old tins, Loy sought to reanimate the divine force that is common to all beings. She sought to prove that God could be found not in the lofty cathedrals but on the humble wings of pigeons with their “​​striped crescendos / of grey rainbow” and in the face of an aged woman begging on the street corner, with her ragged dress “trimmed with one sudden burst” of “chiffon velou[r].” Perhaps, if we learn nothing else from Loy, this we can try: to see in the mess that we’ve made—the pollution, the garbage, the obsolete tech—something worth saving. To see in one another’s faces what is worth saving. 

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Featured image: Stephen Haweis, Mina Loy, ca. 1905, is in the public domain. Image has been cropped.