Is a witch a polymath? At Experience of Vastness, a panel held at the Upper East Side gallery Fleiss-Vallois in partnership with The Whitney Review of New Writing, the question, posed by Whitney Mallett, flipped tales of feminine resistance inside out to expose its intestines. The panelists, poet Ariana Reines, writer Alex Auder, and perfumer Marissa Zappas, held court as both accused and adjudicators in a trial that never reached a verdict but held conviction and acquittal together, at once. What spilled out was the grotesque and the beautiful; rage, joy, and most of all, love.

On the lower floor of the Madison Avenue gallery, as an intimate audience formed a semicircle hugging four awaiting wooden thrones, I wandered through paintings, sketches, and video works assembled in the exhibition Elles. The show was conceived by Galerie 1900-2000 and Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois, two Paris-based galleries that have partnered to make a home in New York since 2023. Upstairs, I encountered fifty sketches by a 17-year-old Leonora Carrington, which had been found within a bundle of seven sketchbooks left in a house she shared with Max Ernst before he was arrested by the Gestapo and she, sent to a sanitarium. Her sensitive study of human behavior, installed on a crimson red wall in the exhibition room, conversed with Spanish feminist artist Eulàlia Grau’s Ethnographies—a series of collages made in the early 1970s in response to Franco’s fascist regime.

Downstairs, in the presence of Niki de Saint Phalle’s La Cathédrale Aux Aigles (1962), a painting made by shooting at plastic packages of paint on a relief with a .22 rifle, celebrations commenced for The Rose, Ariana Reines’ newest poetry collection. She credited the title to her ex’s “exquisite” grandmother. “She told me I should write about beautiful things. I was so humiliated by that. I only write about ugly things, about slaughtered animals… I’ve made this whole career, just hideousness, ugliness, and cruelty.” Robed in a silk, floral dress she said she hates, Reines laughed before jesting that performing poetry is “like comedy but not funny, entertaining but still humiliating.”

Reines’ book is an examination of the age-old story of seduction, and contemporary discourses around sex, love, and attraction. Her creative process, she shared, is like love, and life—consisting of both surrender and choice. “There’s a falling-ness that’s already happening, but there’s also this inner consent that’s active. It changes the quality of reality, and that’s when art begins. Then I can work with it a bit.” To the girl who complains of being seduced by a narcissist asshole, and consents to be seduced as an adult, Reines said, “You bought the ticket, take the ride!”

Framed this way, I think to myself that being a polymath is not so much about being crowned with the epithet “Renaissance Man,” and jacking yourself off in a room full of laurels, but learning and maintaining an unquenchable curiosity towards the world we hold inside of ourselves. It is possible, Reines’ poetry teaches us, that two can exist at the same time; to say yes and no—which comes from a radical embrace of our desires rather than a rejection of them. Later, at the Mark Hotel, I would overhear LA/NYC-based internet girl and self-professed “jack-tress of all trades” Mackenzie Thomas drawling over martinis and caviar. “Everyone has a Nosferatu,” she said—and one need not sacrifice themselves to it. “You have a desire? You say yes to it inside but refuse to approximate it. That’s the erotic charge,” Reines reminded us.

Though the story of the male creative narcissist looms over our cultural memory with a mythic status, women who are devoted to their art and feel consumed by their creative process are often narrativized with sacrifice and loss—of what could have been. At the panel, remembering her nascent years in the Chelsea Hotel among burgeoning New York avant-garde artists, writer-actress-filmmaker-producer-somewhat closeted yoga instructor Alex Auder confessed: “When you grow up in a precarious situation… Choices? I never feel there were any choices made in my lineage. Every single mom in downtown New York was a polymath.” To work in multiple modes at once and channel creative compulsion through wayward channels is both a means of survival, through deadbeat husbands and financial precarity, and an expression of joy: a “playfulness with reality,” Zappas quipped.

Marissa Zappas, a perfumer and poet, asserted an erotic competitiveness between her creative process and her romantic relationships. She held sacred her creative process: “If I’m making a perfume, it’s the tip of the iceberg. I’m probably also writing about it, dancing about it. Probably getting a dog about it.” Our eyes followed hers to the baby dalmatian named Gogo Schiaparelli, Gogo for short, who’s consumed her world for the past two months. “I’ve been prioritizing this living creature and not myself, and it feels so good. It made me realize I don’t want to be in a creative process all the time, at all. I just want to give myself to something else.”

This surrender to our deeper desires, like Niki de Saint Phalle’s courageous renunciation from her overlords that haunted her “shooting paintings” to expressions of total fecundity and joy in her Nanas sculptures, is attuned to something larger than ourselves. The task of taking responsibility for oneself is in simultaneous tension with the frailness of our bodies, the precariousness of our existence, or our connection to a cosmos. It is a tension that cannot be resolved by a mastering, or a conquest of self, that the machine of capitalism demands of us.

This tension is most clear when grief and rage make silly of our cognitive capacities. Writing in the aftermath of her mother’s suicide, Reines was gifted a bottle of perfume from Zappas. “I was really, really disoriented and felt that through your work I can feel my grandmother, I can feel my mother, and that was very centric for me,” Reines said as Zappas confided that she listens to a ten-minute voice note from Reines regularly. I am reminded of listening to my friend’s voice, cradling my phone up to my ear like a seashell, smiling and laughing. In spite of the spatial and temporal distance, or because of it, voice memos carry an uncanny intimacy—like letters from a lover but unedited, untouched, and raw; a message from a voice from another time.

“I wonder if Leonora and Niki had friends like us? It can be quite isolating…” Zappas started, “…to be a polymath witch!” Reines finished. As Zappas passed around a scent she made for the occasion—rose oil mixed with seaweed absolute—an intimacy thickened with each touch of our hands, ballooning in the spaces between our bodies. For a moment, perhaps under a spell, the insanity and delusion it takes to live in this world are transmuted into what could be called an experience of vastness. In her 2019 poetry collection A Sand Book, Reines writes: “There are nectars hidden in your body. Suck. Your own. Tongue.”