art is a track around which one pursues one’s best self.
The author in the process of awakening the morning after speaking with Eileen Ramos.
In September, a friend, the artist/electrician/musician Fran Holland showed me a work by Ramos, a Filipina-American from Piscataway, New Jersey, which he had purchased at the just-concluded San Francisco Zine Fest. After he did, I ordered an assortment of ten ($50, including postage) from her web site [https://eileenramos.com]. They arrived in a 6″ X 9.25″ bubble mailer. On both sides, black magic marker instructed the USPO not to bend.
I.
Ramos was born in 1988. Her father, while medically schooled never practiced but worked for an insurance company. Her mother was a cardiac nurse. A younger brother became a sheriff, an even younger sister a corporate consultant. None practiced any of the arts.
Ramos describes herself as a “voracious reader,” who carried home arm loads of books from the library she could not finish before they were due. Harry Potter. Shel Silverstein. Lynda Barry. Romance manga. Time travel novels. Fantasy graphic works. She was a fan of anime and of public art, from murals on building walls to statues in parks. She had also become, by the time she reached middle school, extremely quiet, pathologically shy and dehabilitatingly self-conscious about her looks. She had acne and a too-thick eyebrows and believed herself – and heard others describe her as – “ugly.” She faced constant reminders she fit neither “the white American ideal nor the tall, lithe, pale-skinned, narrow-faced one… on Filipino TV.” She considered suicide.
Sophomore year of high school, a course on improvisation provided relief. Ramos found that by poking fun at herself or others, through goofy actions or weird expressions, she could create characters who made people laugh. She could cheer people up.
A seed had been planted.
But first…
…
In the fall of 2006, Ramos entered Ramapo College, majoring in communicative arts (writing) and minoring in literature. She did well, but a mistake in paperwork made her think she had failed a class and would lose her scholarship. Before that mistake was corrected, she became deeply depressed. Counseling was recommended – but refused. She suffered a spiraling decline, including three psychotic breaks (2007, 2010, 2012), several suicide attempts (most recently, 2012), and a 30-day hospitalization (March 2010).
At time, during these years, Ramos felt unwanted and unloved. At others, she felt herself the center of all conversations and schemes. Once, on vacation, she believed that every tray left outside a hotel room represented a meal paid for by her parents, that white SUVs tailed their rental car, and a mall had been opened especially for her. At times, she could not eat or sleep or, even though she was in the honors program and valued by professors, complete assignments needed in order to graduate. Dickens’ Great Expectations reminded her of expectations she had not fulfilled. She believed herself the cause of 9/11. She was the anti-Christ. Her loved ones, near and far, were being tortured and killed because of her. Newspapers, TV and strangers’ whispers condemned her as a horrible person, She feared nurses would kill her on some occasions – and on other asked them to kill. She begged her family to euthanize her.
One winter evening in 2012, she snuck out of the house, determined to sacrifice herself for the world’s safety. “But my willingness and bravery to save everyone, even my enemies, despite the torture and cruel death that awaited me, even though I was terrified and sobbing, saved me. I had proved there was good within me. Even as I walked through the snow, voices taunted me, telling me how empty I was. But after that walk I knew that couldn’t be true.”
Ramos told her family about her delusions. She ceased believing they were powerful and evil and wanted her dead. She resumed contact with her psychiatrist, whom she hadn’t seen for two years, and was placed back on meds. As they kicked in, she became more lucid. She began to question her paranoia and delusions and hallucinations. Their frequency diminished and their hold on her loosened.
On her doctor’s recommendation, Ramos ceased going out, except to their appointments. She cut off contact with all media, including books and newspapers, to avoid triggerings. “Once I got used to my meds,” she says, “saw my doctor more, talked more with my family, and interrogated and deconstructed the delusions to the point where I realized they were unplausible and impossible, I became better.”
Ramos still sees her psychiatrist. She takes an anti-depressant, an anti-psychotic, and a third pill to manage side effects of the latter. She has a steady job as an assistant at a law firm. She’s had an artist/poet/writer boyfriend for two years. In phone conversations with an interviewer, laughter bubbles from her.
…
The seed the improv class planted sprouted when Ramos answered an open call for monologues by Asian women for a women-of-color theater group. Her submission about psychoses and talking to televisions was published in 2016. The following year, she performed another she had written, “Psychotic Break,” again based on her experiences, in front of family, friends and strangers. Since then she has performed at open mics, on college campuses and at workplaces (Lumen, visit.org) “with the aim of making audiences aware of how we can use our fears to harm ourselves. How we should never be silent about our shared pain.”
Ramos attended her first zine festival in Newark, in 2017 and thought it “really cool. It was eye-opening to see the different topics and range of ways the zines were made and proudly shared. Freeing and enlightening and approachable for me to try.” She applied to be a vendor the following year as part of a group. Her solo work soon followed.
II.
Everything inside the unbent bubble mailer was paper. Books, pamphlets, letters – hybrids of Ramos’s imagination.
The earliest, “The Story of My Life” (2019, est.), is a single-sheet of paper folded and fixed into six (4.25″ X 2.75″) pages of black-and-white photographs and autobiographical prose bringing Ramos from smiling toddler, through self-esteem lacking adolescent and fractured young adult into someone transformed through art into being capable of believing herself “a good person,” “deserving… love.”
The shortest, “The Last Present Piece” (2024,) an 11-line contribution to the anthology “Event Scores for the End of the World,” instructs readers to take their “most precious book” and, in accordance with specific, ritualized steps, leave it on a park bench “with a prayer for the stranger who now has your heart.”
The longest, “You Can Always Move Forward” (2023/24), is a 16-page instruction guide for two art projects. The first involves creating a “Joy Box” “to counteract… anxieties, embarrassing flashbacks, doubt, worries, and detriment.” One collects in a cigar box (or similar container of the seeker’s selection) reminders of favorite past experiences – photos, fortune cookies, tea bags, pottery shards – that may lead to feelings of peace, love, forgiveness, and self-worth. The second project sets forth in six five-minute blocks a “divination run” to be performed in a Dunkin’ Donuts (or similar establishment of the seeker’s selection). On a paper napkin, while guided by the background music at play, one states a problem, lists options (good and bad) for its solution, depicts by writing or drawing the option of choice – and then discards (or keeps) the napkin.
“Close Call” (Undated) is a sealed envelope which, when opened, reveals a 24-word poem, in red ink on a blue-lined slip of pink paper, expressing gratitude to an unnamed other; three photographs of an abandoned blue mattress, on one of which the instruction “Hold On” appears; and a sheet of paper, blue-ish on one side, beige-ish on the other. The blue side explains that “ANY underlying substance… can be your paper, your canvas and composed (upon),” as, for instance, the abandoned mattress which has been rendered “guerilla art” by “Sky,” an alter ego of Ramos’s, and was available for public viewing until the Dept. Of Sanitation hauled it away. The beige side contains a “snowball construct” of 27 “bed-related” prompts designed to lead one to good feelings, with each one word longer than that which preceded it, concluding “forget the day. what lies you faced, the cruelties, tricks, and self-doubts lingering many years later. tomorrow morning you’ll start over: what is your first move?”
“Laced Letters” (2021) is a 2″ X 2.5″ mini-zine, which folds out, accordion-like, to 16 pages extending onto a 44-inch-long strip, each a different color and bordered differently, incorporating photographs and computer-generated graphics, while giving instructs on the order of “Don’t give up,” “Love your self,” and “Perfectionism hampers potential.”
“Here” (2024), a mini-zine, consists of a sheet of paper folded into eight quadrants and neatly sliced partially through the middle crease. On one side is a love letter and, on the other, a collage-like assemblage of swatches of color and snatches of texts from sources as varied as a Danielle Steel novel and book about Japanese bathrooms, such as “Let’s see what tomorrow brings” and “You never know what’s going to happen, do you?”
“For Further Exploration” (2023) is a referral guide to internet sites (Free Little Libraries; art sold from converted cigarette machines; Open Access presses), which Ramos terms “amazing experiences” that will lift your spirits.
“A Pocket of Daydreams” (Undated), written by “Sky,” consists of a sheet of cream-colored paper folded into eighths, again slit through its middle. The text has been hand-lettered by Magic Marker or rendered through black dymo label tag “enhanced” by a white gel pen. Each portion reads top to bottom, but the sheet must be turned upside down for all to be read in full. Sample lines include “I am a bitter, severely hateful woman who is capable of so much more”; “If there is to be no magic in the world, I will make it”; and “All I want is to feel okay.”
“Please” (8-pp), 5 X 5″ X 8.5″ (Undated), is heavy on pink and purple, computer-generated pictures of castles, oceans, angels, and sunsets. Addressing a lover by whom she wishes to be chosen, Ramos promises “delectables” and that she will do/become anything.
“Words I Held for You” Vol. 0.5 (2024 approx.) is a seven-page, 5.5″ X 8.5″, off-pink, and watery blue pamphlet, which is part of a “compilation series.” It has two attachments. The first is a standard, letter-sized envelope, addressed to Ramos and stamped with the Queen of Hearts from the Disney animated (2010) Alice. The other is a manila coin envelope, which contains a blank rolodex card, a Classiky tag, and a plain bookmark-like strip. They are to be written upon and/or decorated and returned to Ramos in the envelope for inclusion in a future zine. If music is playing, while they are worked upon, she asks that it be identified. As a guide toward creativity, she includes “Prompts” (“We are nobody’s fucking things”); “Questions” (“In the moment – where is your heart?”); and “Definitions” (“aflatus …divine inspiration.”
III.
Ramos’s work floats from the mailer like feathers of assorted shapes and sizes, designed and weighted toward one end. Most lay out her history of mental illness like a biographical author’s note, while more traditional matters such as family, education, and employment are unmentioned. She wants her audience to know that she has been there, knows what crippling discontent is like, has overcome. The impulse behind each work is to make others feel better about themselves and optimistic about their possibilities.
Uplift is present in both form and content. Ramos’s words unflinchingly, unself-consciously, if whimsically, exhort for self-love and self-worth. The impulse to dismiss this heart/joy/peace-laden prose as touchy-feely New Age bromide is overcome by the insistency of her repetitions and the smidge of hopefulness lying within even the most deeply dark-shadow dwelling of us, waiting to grab hold of optimism like a receptor protein humming, Eliza D.-like, “Wouldn’t it be lover-ly.”
Creativity has cracked through Ramos’s blackened past into technicolor bloom. Each work seems a product of thought and dream and playful, though serious, execution. She offers works to be viewed individually in isolation; she reaches out to involve others in them; she suggest tips for enriching one’s days; she turns us loose upon the streets. She varies formats wittily, playfully and engagingly. She demonstrates that even the most commonplace can be treated as art and that a consciousness that can make these connections is a consciousness to be coveted and nutured, regardless of the internal (and external) woes and potential woes which may fall upon us.
..
I often ask myself and others, “Why do you do art?” Ramos answer was: “Ever since I wanted to die, I felt I was creating for my self, especially my younger self. I didn’t expect to make it to 22, to 25, to 30. I wanted to say ‘Thank you for keeping me alive.’ This is how I will make our dreams come true.”
In “My Ears Are Bent,” a collection of his work as a city desk reporter in New York in the 1930s, the great “New Yorker” writer Joseph Mitchell revealed that, whenever an editor assigned him a story which required a quote from an authority on any subject whatsoever, he would “head for the nearest saloon to interview the bartender.” I didn’t have to travel nearly as far as Mitchell. I had only to roll over on the bed and pass Adele the bubble mailer, to which in between reading “Flaubert’s Parrot” and watching the Billie Jean Cup, she reacted. Ramos, Adele said, “has made her life liveable with style and dedication for herself and others. Readers can identify what is dark within themselves and come back into the light.
It’s a wonderful gift.”