Cay Bahnmiller RIP

Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966)

My Way (1940)

One goes in straightforward ways,
One in a circle roams:
Waits for a girl of his gone days,
Or for returning home.

But I do go — and woe is there —
By a way nor straight, nor broad,
But into never and nowhere,
Like trains — off the railroad.
–Anna Akhmatova

Tonight I heard my friend Cay was dead. Its hard to describe how her absence will be felt. She was an artist I admired, loved and wanted to document. She drew the observer into her world and the poetic, literate dreams she wanted to construct.

Cay had a passion for the city of Detroit, and maybe it was the city that partly destroyed her. She might have been more at ease in an artist garret in Europe or South America, but Detroit fed her energy. She loved the crazy cursing parrots of Bird City, the flamboyant trans-sexuals in the trawling bars along Cass Avenue, the burning sulfur and graffiti lined walls of downriver. The broken buildings, industrial bridges and scraps of rubbish in the streets and abandoned junkyards inspired and consumed her.

Detroit was at the center of her mind, and its rusted refuse became the palette for the compacted collages and found sculpture she created. Cay was among the best artists in the Cass corridor, even as she arrived at the end of its glory days. She daily roamed the neighborhoods and streets with a sharpened eye, an ability to see inside the city’s ripped and broken body. She painted and worked like a soldier at battle. At odds to her workshop intensity was a generous, soft and compassionate spirit. She gave her spirit completely, supportive to those she loved. Detroit is often ignorant, silent, and apathetic to its artists and storytellers–and Cay reflected that self-loathing attitude as well. 

Cay’s voice and postures could often be harsh, edgy, nearly impossible to deal with. But that was her sickness talking, a violent, combative, sometimes delirious nature she lived with and that finally consumed her. She tested people’s loyalty and patience. She was a generous, brilliant, witty and energetic person. Her phone conversations and letters were long and detailed. She could talk endlessly on art, books, nature, philosophy or her own illness and loved to gossip. She’d develop ideas in brilliant flashes and often sabotage them. Cay seemed to exist in another time, a more meaningful and deeper reality highly connected with past and that was lived out in emotional storms and symbols.

In Cay’s heart she was a romantic poetess, foot soldier and artist. She fought poverty, mediocrity and politics -out on the front-lines, smashing the state. A revolutionary thinker with a defiant nature, she fought alongside and sympathized with the underdogs, the bums outside her door and the soldiers in Iraq, the poets locked up in Siberia and executed in death marches. 

The Russian Odessa poet Anna Akhmatova was her heroine and adopted model and muse. She took on the poetess signature haircut; shortly bobbed with straight short bangs across her forehead, her aristocratic bearing and dark mythology. Cay’s fascination with decadence, personal history and self-criticism was mixed with inner feelings of censorship and neglect. Cay fell into her own version of Russian exotica. “No sadness, my soul’s no more of this world,” said Akhmatova. 

Cay’s death was not surprising. She spoke of death often, imagining various cancers, invented broken bones and rare blood diseases eating her insides. Extremity and death hung around her and fed the work, it was something you needed to get used to or left behind. Her cries for help held a core of truth: that Cay was always in pain. A pain that shared transference in her mind with the city’s own wounds. A pain that was part of the world. Detroit was Cay’s personal Leningrad, Fallujah and gulag; a city that both inspired creativity and constrained it. Many of her friends saw her pain and tried to help, but Cay needed a breakthrough to help herself out of the prison. She was way too smart to follow directions and advice from doctors and others.

The future will be kinder to Cay, as it was to the poet Akhmatova. There was much beauty and insight she had to offer, much that was overlooked, and more we can honor and learn from her life. We will miss you and pray that your journey now is safer and less troubled than before. Sweet dreams Cay. My sincere condolences to her friends and family.