List and New

When I was a senior in college, I would wake up early on Sunday to meet my friend and pick up her 1.5 year old daughter for the morning. Her daughter and I would walk the path from the main building to the particle-board senior housing apartments, past beer cans and cigarette butts perhaps still smoldering. Yet in the morning dew, no one was around, and it was so quiet and green, it almost felt like hallowed ground. We walked loops around the apartment houses and name the trees or a bird or a cat, but one-day, my little babysitting charge pointed out that the doors of the apartments were different colors - red and yellow and blue. In four years, I'd noticed a lot of other things - I could do a blind walk to the campus - but never that the doors were primary colors.


The frame of the world grown dull and invisible to me - the color of a door - was a new word, a new way to classify what my 1.5 year old friend saw, an exciting moment to lay claim and stamp an order onto the world cresting around her.


Perhaps because she pointed out something I'd never noticed at the moment I was supposed to be really projected into adulthood (own apartment, own shopping, own groceries), it left an indellible impact on me. One in which I remind myself of as I try not to be inured to the basic - but not base or ignoble - elements around me. Francis Bacon said, "Nine-tenths of everything is inessential. What is called 'reality'....can be summed up in so much less." Instead of a scummy buildup of so much unnecessary, perhaps I need to scrape down the excess to the, if you'll pardon the triteness, primary - to the bone.


Yesterday, I saw the Francis Bacon retrospective at the Met. His painting after Velasquez's portrait of Pope Innocent X was my favorite at my college's museum, and I have been eager to get uptown to see his work together. Although much of his work depicts animals and people and slabs of meat whirling and wharping into a middle space of the canvas, his pieces often contain not only the grotesque or tawdry (though the placards might have me thinking otherwise), but also tenderness, longing and despair.


My favorite painting was one created shortly after the death of his lover, George Dyer, who died from a drug overdose, alone on the bathroom floor of their hotel room. The painting was taken, I believe, from a John Deakin photo of Dyer on a bike. Beacon's outline of the body riding the bike is like a silhouette cutout, Dyer's broad nose pointed left. But inside the dark figure, there are pieces of flesh and bone and the most sad remnant of a face which faces the viewer straight-on. Religion and faith and afterlife need not enter into it (Bacon was famously an aetheist whose studies after Velasquez's Pope are often seen as a critique on the regnant humans who issued edicts - as from the divine - from their dais...A nod to the notion that no one can cast the first stone). In the portrait, Bacon's lover is hauntingly present, as man made flesh and blood on canvas, in spite of the death of his body. It is almost odd how much intimacy is impressed on the piece (or maybe it's me falling victim to the tragic story and seeing that story, laid out to me by the curator, culminate in that work).

Whatever. The primacy of emotion is the ember that still pulsates fastest and shines brightest amongst all the other works I saw there - even while particular typtichs had me transfixed for seemingly endless moments.

But, maybe it's so much striving for meaning, getting bogged down in the idea that each experience needs to cut out its own precious little souveneir to mark the importance of the moment (like the postcard of the Dyer portrait I bought after I saw it - as though I needed something tangible to bring me back to that one moment of first meeting the painting). I know that some of the things I want to do will not make me a "better person", will not enrich me in intellectually or socially sophisticated ways - and yet, it's the small, elementary moments that define me the most. I do want to continue flying, to spend time in Thailand, to mark my footprints in different places, but even when I do or if I don't, it will be the moments seemingly less profound - the marking of primary colored doors on a glittering spring morning - that are the most salient, the most important.

Nevertheless, it doesn't mean I should stop striving or trying to cross off that check-list. 9/10ths might be superfluous, but I have the strange feeling that without those, I wouldn't appreciate the other slice.