I walked into my studio this morning not knowing what to write about. Marco just started school this week, and I have these precious hours in the morning again after he totes off to class in his little red uniform under the weight of his backpack. There are many things I could write about, and have thought about – what it is like to live in a foreign country and never really belong, but be in love with it anyway. I could write endlessly about living in a foreign country that gets a lot of bad press, that has a lot of real problems, that is unparalleled in cultural richness and diversity, that walks a tight balance between extreme poverty and extreme wealth with very little rest in the middle. This country is all about duality, as I have mentioned so many times before, about love/hate relationships, about fascination and fear, about being relentlessly attracted and viscerally repelled by it. I think those of us who are called to live here are kind of like mosquitoes buzzing up to a big blue light hanging from the eaves, you know, the kind that you hear on a summer night going bzzt, bzzt, bzzt, as the faithful fall charred into the breeze. But then again, I also thought I could write about the land itself, that I just recently saw spread itself out before me like a market basket of colors as we went on a road trip to Tula, Queretaro, Dolores Hidalgo and Guanajuato, a string of well-kept historical jewels hanging over the aching heart of Mexico. Or I could talk about the land here in Teo, how I climbed the hill up behind town and sifted my fingers through the moist soil of the rainy season, with thousands of little sprouts shooting up and thousands of ancient pottery shards prodding up corners into the sunlight.
So in any case I walked into the studio still thinking about what I would write, how I would write about all that: the land, the beauty, the duality. And I noticed a little postcard I bought years ago of Frida Kahlo had floated from its perch onto the ground. I’ve always kept it propped somewhere in my creative space, but I never really pay any attention to it, kind of like the infinite saint images I have tucked into every nook and cranny – they’re these silent guardians with whom I do not converse on a daily basis, but they’re always there watching. I picked up the photo of Frida and thought in many ways she is like one of those saint images. Certainly her very personal image (especially since the bulk of her work was symbolic self-portaiture) has taken on iconographic proportions. You find her image stamped on market bags, votive candles, Days of the Dead altars, and religious niches as if she were the Virgin of Guadalupe’s sister. I myself have followed the pilgrim’s path to her Casa Azul in Coyoacan numerous times to stand in silent awe of her paintbrushes and worn tubes of oil paint tucked into a glass vitrine, to be in the presence of her lacy tablecloth and solid green pottery plates laid out on the dining room table, to gaze upon the whimsical little pots nailed into the walls of her kitchen in the design up a fluttering dove.
And yet I look at the beauty of her very humanity on my dusty fallen postcard, one of my favorite photos of her where her eyes are shining, turned up, her face is filled with some kind of inner strength seeping to the surface, or perhaps reflecting pride and grounded will and decisiveness, firm and tender love, beaming onto her from some external source. She is as if illuminated. She is lit within and without. And yet it is her very humanness that allows her to be so illuminated. We could never be vessels for so much light if we were not first willing to wade our way through this hard muddy muck that is human life. Having seen first hand her home, having cooked the dishes from the cookbook Guadalupe Rivera Marin (Diego’s daughter) put together of Frida’s recipes, having admired the fine handiwork of her woven rebozos and dresses and filigree earrings, having seen all the movies and read all the books about her turbulent shitty beautiful human life, knowing that she is the very role model of duality, I was so struck by this image of her illumination.
I propped the photo up again right in front of me, just like one of those saint images, to look out over my work table and my half-assed in-process paintings and bare canvases. But unlike the saints, she feels recent and close to me. I know she was a woman who lived not that long ago, not that far away, who actually came out to Teotihuacan to visit the pyramids, to visit my father-in-law’s grandmother, to buy original pottery pieces from her, to pick some tuna fruit off the nopal cactus and suck the bright green meat out of its prickly hull, swallowing the seeds and all. I imagined how she might have wrestled with her thoughts and feelings in front of her easel, how she might have cursed her body but painted anyway, how she might have blessed her happy moments and raged against the bad ones, how she lived a life, an artistic prolific illuminated life, but a human life nonetheless. I imagined how she might have had to put her paintbrush down to go fix the rice and mole for that wayward hated and beloved man of hers, Diego. I imagined that while I idealize her, idolize her, romanticize her, desire her illumination, she was a woman just like me, and so I said to myself, looking at her eyes, that if she could sit down and paint every day, then I sure can as well. Frida was my saint today, looking over my painting and my writing and my creative real human life.
No comments:
Post a Comment