A Day

(Self-portrait by Francesca Woodman)

It is hot.  No climate change.  This is just the normal variations in temperature.  Trust me.

The streets are empty.  Bare.  Even over at my studio where crowds of people are usually gathered in yards and move about like ants in the street.  Dead.  The cats dig deep into the dirt or in the highest grass they can find.  Driving home from buying things, I am aching.  I just want to take off my clothes and get onto the couch with the a.c. and a ceiling fan, just lying there naked until I am finally chilled.  A cold beer helps to put me down.  It is glorious.  I sleep and dream.  The air conditioner runs without stopping doing its best against the heat.  The sky is a bluest blue without a hint of a cloud.  The sun beats down on blacktop parking lots and blisters cars, a killing sun to be avoided.

By five-thirty, I am up.  I told my mother that I would cook this evening.  I will try to prepare everything outside on the one burner of the grill so that I will not heat the interior of the house.  Spaghetti, sauce, Brussels sprouts, a salad of mixed baby greens and garlic and avocado.  Peroni beer.  Red wine.

My mother arrives on time, as always.  She is usually just a bit early but never late.  I, on the other hand. . . .  As I prepare the meal, she has a beer and tells me about all the death and dying and suffering and disease that is close to her.  She chronicles her sister's decline from Alzheimer's as told to her by her niece.  A close friend dropped dead in his house.  They found him on the floor.  Heart attack.  Just like that.  When his son came over, they said, he just stretched out on the floor beside him and cried and cried and cried.  Seventy-five and fifty-two.  The approximate ages.  I am wearied by these chronicles of misery.

We decide to eat dinner while we watch a movie.  We take our familiar places on the big couch with t.v. trays before us.  I have trouble finding a movie, but we pick one from Netflix, "Two Days in Paris."  A romance, of sorts.  And as has been the custom of late, the movie is filled with penises.  O.K.  Not filled.  But every movie we've watched together in the last few months, it seems, has them.  "Jesus," I exclaim to my mother who just laughs.  Modern times.

I watch the movie and the clock.  I need scotch and the liquor stores close at nine.  My mother leaves at ten after.  I can do without, I tell myself and end up drinking Sailor Jerry's spicy rum.

I check my email, but it seems to be broken.  I check the stats on this site and see that I have killed it, cut the visitors to it by two-thirds.  Once a powerhouse of blogs, we are now relegated to the minor league again.

I go back to the couch.  When I was searching for movies to watch with my mother, I noticed a documentary on the Woodmans.  Francesca Woodman is a cult classic, a photographer who committed suicide at the age of twenty-two.  Her parents, both artists of some repute, have made kept her myth alive with books and films, though in truth, they could not do this without true interest.  Woodman's photos strike me as jejune, but that is not to say I don't like them.  I prefer her journals where she waxes eloquently and naively about her life.  Her life was all to her.  And as the documentary makes clear, her parents indulged this, perhaps even promoted it.

"There is a psychic danger in being an artist," one of them says.  I can't remember which.  But the statement resonates.  It is the sort of seemingly bullshit stuff that artists say, or at least I've always thought so until just now.  One shouldn't say such things.  But tonight, I know what that means.  To be revelatory to a dangerous degree and be oft criticized or rejected has a price.  It changes you in ways unexpected.  You could just stop it, of course, but no. . . you can't.  Francesca tried, and it killed her.  Her work was not accepted quickly enough to feed her needs, and despondent, she quit, first photography, then life.

I wanted to fall in love with her when I decided to watch the documentary.  I wanted to badly, but I couldn't.  For all the self-revelation, there wasn't enough of her there.  Funny, I kept thinking, that the depths of her soul were not enough.  What then?  Perhaps a full reading of her journals.

I saw some books yesterday that enchanted me.  "Interiors," was one, a simple picture book of rooms.  I watched a short piece on the blind photographer John Dugdale who was making photographs (not blind then) at the same time as Woodman just the night before.  In it, he spoke of living an aesthetic life.  So did Francesca's parents.  Aesthetics is about decisions.  Anyone can do it, but few do.  I used to, but the things that have beaten me have destroyed some of that.  "I will build it back," I said as I stood in the eclectic women's store looking down at the book.  Ethics and aesthetics.  Two branches of the same thing.

Documentary over, I turned off the television and made my evening ablutions.  "Don't rush them," I thought.  "Even this should be aesthetic.  Think about what you do."  In bed, my body still aching from some unknown disease, my mind too active, I tried to relax myself with yoga.  It felt good, but I needed more relief, so I went to the bathroom cabinets to find it.  An aesthetic choice, I told myself.  And then the bottom dropped and I fell with it.  Tomorrow would be work again.  There would be no aesthetics there.

(Self-portrait by Francesca Woodman)