Prose Pair

Body

Simone de Beauvoir had a rather long forehead and Sartre had a rather haunting glare. Sometimes the two would not let me speak for days.— Although, Emily Dickinson lets me sit in her parlor night after night, her faint hearted lisp branching from one topic to the next, the way friends, comfortable in each others company, can always work that bit of magic between them.

I never think of myself as stealing, and yet I love books. It is how I take up the mantle of otherness. What makes a book beautiful is its spine. No doubt, the possibility of a book gets to the central nervous system, a space where the real and the surreal get mixed up.

Yet, there is something pure about this trying to pour one’s body over pages and into pages. And most times, someone is rising up out of a book, first one face and then another.

Sylvia Plath asked, “Will you marry it?” Perhaps, self-expression is akin to Cubism, as marriage is to image. What can’t we conjure on a blank page with the right combinations of juxtapositions?

I suppose, I like to memorize those I love best. It is a way to consume, to merge with what I value. And, if thoughts swing like apes on vines, maybe the most sincere discoveries are also the most primitive. For what could be more basic, more elementary, than the reduction of a man or woman to his or her own chosen symbols?

Strategy

After having an argument with a friend, I decide to take a bath. Splashing in the water, I am downright troubled by what she has said.

Why after looking at my canvas did she say, “If you paint a chair, it is not a chair. It is only paint.” Art is a private battle. Why must it only be considered as public act? Can no one see I am making a chair in my head?

What is left on the canvas? Remnants. I think and yet no one hears me. I am just taking a bath. I get dirty and bathe. Out of necessity, I lay down in the water. In the silence, I languor in an almost amniotic fluid, while my mind drifts into other rooms.

When I get out of this funk, I will tell her: When I paint a chair, I am making a chair… When I get out of this tub, I will drain the tub and feel better.