Last night I met my sister at Atlanta’s High
Museum of Art for an event in conjunction with the opening of “Frida &
Diego: Passion, Politics, and Painting”, a new tandem exhibition of the works of
renowned Mexican painters Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Most of us are familiar
with the story of their tumultuous marriage (which included a divorce and
remarriage a year later), a bond famously wracked by infidelity, substance
abuse, and a string of painful miscarriages.
We seem, as a general public, to be as fascinated
with the sordid details of the life of the couple Frida and Diego, as we are
with the work of the artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.
This exhibit catered to such a fascination, terminating
in a large room peppered with photographs of the artists in question – at home,
at work, together, on their own. I found myself feeling a little queasy and
reticent about the way the artists’ work was being framed so particularly by the
narrative of their private lives, and, moreover, by the voraciousness with which
we, the crowd, pored over their paintings and the photographic evidence of their
lives. I felt we were invading their privacy.
Which is to say that love is a mysterious and deeply personal thing.
Most of us define this mystery a little (or a lot) differently, I
believe. Some of us subscribe to the “one-and-only soul mate” theory
popularized by Hollywood movies and pop songs, in which you just kind of live
in hopeful wait for the day life brings you into contact with Mister or Miss
“Right”. Some of us are more aligned with Carolyn Myss’s theory of “sacred
contracts”, which holds that a choice number of people (lovers included) are
placed in our paths in order to help us fulfill key aspects of our purpose on
Earth. Some of us believe we just stumble along in life, bumping into people
we’re interested in from time to time and pursuing said interest when possible
to see where it may lead. Some of us may also feel intimate relationships are an
optional part of a fulfilling life, and are both not necessary to true happiness,
and not everyone’s cup of tea. And some of us are
still trying to figure it all out.
My larger point here is that many of us, when we
look at the story of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, ask Why?
Why would such a beautiful woman be drawn to a man two decades her senior, whose
physical appearance can be fairly described as grotesque, and whose infidelities
(particularly with Frida’s own sister) would have been an affront to even the
most open-minded wife? Why did a man with Diego’s looks and wandering eye hold
such sway over much younger, beautiful, powerful women? Why did Frida remarry
Diego one year after their divorce? At times, we seem more interested with these
questions (in a shallow People Magazine kind of way) than we do with the work
to which these artists devoted their lives. We pore over the details of their
personal story the way we stare in macabre fascination at a train wreck,
and I think we’re missing the point. I believe they were drawn to each
other for reasons that defy logic, physical compatibility, or a rigid moral code.
I believe their story suggests they really did have a “sacred contract” with
one another, and I don’t think it’s our job to understand this
completely or to critique it. If we are fascinated by their story,
can we use our fascination as a way to marvel at the
mysteries of love, and at the power of art as a
redemptive practice?
It seems clear that, had she not had her painting
practice, Kahlo would have imploded much sooner. The raw pain transmitted
through Kahlo’s works, especially in the unflinching self-reflexive gaze
captured in her most famous self-portraits, literally electrifies the air around
her canvases. The closer I stood last night to her face of white tears in 1944’s
“The Broken Column” (pictured above), the more those tears seemed to quiver off the canvas,
causing the five or so inches between us to crackle with a static sadness as heavy and
itchy as water-logged wool, and as ancient as the suffering of all those sad,
pointy Jesuses depicted in the altarpieces of the Northern Renaissance. Thank
God Frida had those brushes, those oils, those small-to-medium sized canvases, and
her various “easel” set-ups (including the one that allowed her to paint while
bed-ridden); these tools and this medium gave her power when she felt powerless
over everything else in her life. I have no doubt that she was saved by the
alchemy of pouring her agony into her canvases. I am both grateful these works
live on, and deeply sorry for the suffering that gave birth to
them.
Which brings me to one more point. Besides the
obvious irony of sifting through the creative work, personal affects, and
photographs of a very troubled couple on Valentine’s Day, another poignant irony
struck me as I waded through the veritable sea of fellow-oglers last night: many
of my fellow art-lovers were there, at this Valentine’s Day-themed event, alone.
Each time I would notice someone moving from painting to painting solo – deep in
studious attention to the individual audio tour playing on his headset, or
glancing around in a friendly, open, hopeful manner to see whose eye she might
catch –my breath would stop short and my chest would seize up. Wrenched
backwards in time, of a sudden, I would see myself in his or her shoes just
twelve months, or two years, ago, out at some art event, be it alone or with
friends, and overwhelmingly aware of my “single” status.
When you are single, if you hope someday not to be single,
going out to places where couples crack each other up, pick lint lovingly off
each other’s jackets, hold hands as they stroll shoulder-to-shoulder, and even
kiss (in public!), can make you, single-person, feel like you’re outside of some
lucky glass bubble, looking in. While you can see the happy spectacle unfolding on the
other side of the glass, from where you stand, there is no sound; you’re at a
critical remove and it’s as though you’ll never crack the code. Which can make
you feel like you missed the memo – you know, the one describing exactly
how to go about meeting “the right person”, and how we’re supposed to
know that the person who comes into our life and seems pretty
neat-o, is someone we can truly trust, someone who will have our best interest in
mind and heart, someone whose love will nourish even our individual goals and
personal growth? – You know, that memo? When we’re single,
people who are coupled can seem so nonchalantly confident about
the whole “couples” thing, as if finding their partner was such a natural,
effortless occurrence, making any of us who are single feel like clueless
schmucks for not understanding how to activate a similar occurrence in
our own lives.
While I was there last night with my sister, each
time I saw a solo museum-goer, I was struck by the still-relatively-new-to-me
thought that I had a loving, supportive, committed, kind partner to go home to
at the end of the night. I was reminded of what a paradigm-shift this – becoming
part of a loving, fully committed, happy couple – has effected in my life.
My heart quietly ached for each person who was there alone and
is still searching for partnership in life. I sent out
secret waves of empathy and hope to these people. On Valentine’s Day, in that
shared museum-space, Frida and Diego’s fraught relationship seemed to stretch
out before us as a reminder that love is a mystery, and that its mysteriousness
ought to be respected. While being single can make finding
or identifying “the one” seem like the hinge upon which the
door to a happy life swings, the reality, of course, is
that sailing a relation-ship is a co-creative journey with no “auto-pilot”
switch to be found at the helm. There are as many ways to look for love, as many
ways to find it, and as many ways to keep it buoyantly, richly afloat as there
are individuals on this earth.
I salute each of our searches for love. I salute
the beauty of all who bear loneliness with grace and dignity, and the beautiful
vulnerability of all who cry out longingly in their loneliness. I honor the
things in each of our lives – whatever they are – that make us feel loved. In
my loneliest moments, I have felt befriended by kamikaze lady bugs, caressed by
the hazy bellies of clouds, heartened by the reliable presence of sun through a
window in the corner of my studio at a certain hour each day. And I think maybe
there’s a responsibility we each have to each other, to be honest about what
love is really like – including our failed attempts, our searches for it, and
the challenging, unpredictable reality of living in a loving partnership from
day to day. Because for each of us, love is a never-ending mystery. We share in
its mysteriousness. This fact should humble even the most happily-coupled
amongst us, and it should break us open – open to the mystery of love itself,
and open, tender-heartedly, to one
another.