The Incantation of Frida K....read it....it is that good.

[Alaskan Rover]

There are novels that you read and then forget. There are novels that entertain you for a moment or two, but then wither into mediocrity. Then there are novels like this....that capture you and take you on a journey into sharp-thorned, thicketed undergrowth of life itself...that kidnap you with the raw biting beauty of their words.

I came across these words first in a painting...the opening sentence of this book...someone had shellaced the first sentences onto canvas and framed it. The words stood out amidst the watercolor flowers and paintings of sailboats at the art fair. I had to read them again and again until I'd memorized them...so I could later find the book they came from.

Here's an excerpt....long, yes....but damn good:

The Incantation of Frida K by Kate Braverman




Excerpt:

"In this net it's not just the strings that count
But also the air that escapes through the meshes."

Pablo Neruda


I was born in rain and I will die in rain. Know me as river, as harbor. They will say I was a slut with a brazen sailor's mouth. They will not remember my elegance and restraint. They will say they looked in my eyes and counted one hundred forty-six pelicans flying in a wavering line into a marina at sunset.

Men don't have the vocabulary for such eyes. Brown, calculating and predatory. Men lack the spectrum, the palette. It is not the eyes themselves, but rather what they contain, the vision. Diego Rivera is like that, with his compulsion to categorize. Men prefer primitive bodies outlined with hard black edges like the Maya painted.

I resist the obvious borders. For this heresy I have been categorically penalized. Did you know they sealed me into a cast for one entire year? It was a premature burial where I kept breathing under dirt. They did this repeatedly, gathered my crushed bones like wildflowers and used plaster as a vase. They sought to make an object of me. There was no composition. It was vandalism.

I learned, in a hospital, in one solitary confinement or another, that it is still an era of barbarism. In surgery and convalescent rooms, laminated by electric light, I recognized their limitations. They are bloated with ambition, but their methods are inadequate. This knowledge is an illumination that burns. It is the essence of genius and affliction.

In this way I transcended them. I defied gravity. I should have died in the gutter like a barren dog, a hit-by-trolley-car bitch. I should have died in Diego's overwhelming shadow, curled into its shallows and currents. Its bloodstained coral reefs. Who but a water woman could have navigated his mined ports? He was a lady-killer. He murdered me slowly. It took him decades of sabotage. But wind and infection outwitted him.

This is the reason for the grief he will flagrantly display. He will mourn, but it will be with a theatrical and unsettling ambiguity. He will recall my parrot cage torso and nights of sleeping on razors and barbed wire. He will find the place where they sawed off my leg. He will dream it, how it smelled like decayed meat in a dirt alley at noon in a region of drought and plague, dust, piss of goats, rot of hibiscus. Diego will recognize the trolley car has stopped. He may mistake my absence for freedom.

They will say I smoked cigarettes and marijuana, cursed hoarse as a crow in all my languages and loved morphine and Demerol, tequila and pulque, women and men. I will shrug my illusion of shoulders and answer that I am a water woman, not a vessel, not something you can sail or charter. I am instead the tributary, the river, the fluid source, and the sea itself. I am all her rainy implications. And what do you, with your rusted compass, know of love?

Their grafts and amputations, the casts and operations, are without limit. They will not complete their excavations, for surely I am an archaeological site now, not a woman, not a human, not anymore. When you have survived the withering disease, when you have dragged your polio leg like an anomalous branch scratching the pavement behind you, when you have continued breathing after they left you for dead on a city boulevard, when you have lived with Diego, when you have looked into your face and seen your third eye, you know death is a reward.

When they have skinned me completely, I will be as water women freed of their unnecessary bodies. Men prescribe these structures, these female forms, for pleasure and convenience and the perpetuation of sons. They invent laws and rituals to enforce this. I have taught myself to become deaf to them, oblivious. Of course, it's been a mutual decision. Mine has not been a typical exile but rather a negotiated settlement. I left the world as it is ordinarily known and it left me. When they cease the medieval procedures they call medicine, progress, and technology, I will float like a leaf, a delinquent maple beginning to curl, to turn to tissue to be painted on. I could etch the surface. I have the tools. I am as intelligent as they are and more subtle.

Yes. I am screaming. It's time for morphine. I hear cathedral bells through rain. It?s the hour for amnesia and invisibility I call being saved. Nurse better come.

I will be like a sheet of parchment on which is printed a chemical formula for immortality. Or perhaps it is a prayer by an adept, a bruja?s incantation for the end of pain. Or an American doctor?s prescription. Or a prophecy announcing the obliteration of obsolete forms, like promises and political systems of social justice, and the more exquisite personal savagery called marriage.

I understand what floats on rivers which conclude in harbors pale as the veins of infants. What you see from your veranda is not debris but entire texts rendered intelligible. This is what moves in the current, on the backs of stray fronds, the sodden bleached lily and old newspapers. Cures for insomnia and betrayal by man and accident. And methods to heal abscesses and find lost daughters.

I consider a journey through the fluid called a continuum. A physicist at a dinner party in London explained this to me. He said you could cross it, this construct, like a continent or an ocean. We have just not yet devised vehicles for the passage. We are too primitive.

I experienced joy then. It was England and I drank too much tequila and brandy. I wanted to remove my Tehauna dress with its stiff ruffles and embroidered stylized flowers. I longed to dance barefoot, skirt dropped to the floor. I still had two feet then. But my withered leg made me shy as a child. I wanted to tell the scientist it was still the Dark Ages. Perhaps I was too drunk. The ninth century, the nineteenth. A trivial difference. How many will there be? Incoherent centuries, ruled by irrational hunger? A thousand, perhaps? Ten thousand?

How can I know this, as rain falls and bells fall and dissolve, and petals and moths and stars? I am pagan. You cannot get to my birthplace simply by booking passage and having your passport in order. There are doors where your stamps and visas are rejected absolutely. Some points of entry are deceptive. The currency and conditions for admission are in constant fluctuation, like a woman dreaming. Perhaps you must offer human flesh, or gardenias out of season. Or butterflies in jars collected by crippled children in alleys dense with the scent of jasmine and urine and a sense that a woman has been recently slapped.

You can see this clearly in what I paint. This is not a journal imposed on canvas, not a chronicle of disasters. That would be banal. Instead, I revealed alternative ports of entry and exit. I crossed bridges where there were none. I possessed a fluid intuition like a stillborn ocean. I was singled out. I was taken to the place where no official papers are required.

They will say, what did you paint, Frida? What did you mean? What were your intentions? There are words you don't need a mouth for. I was investigating my numerous faces and chance identities. My transitory improvisational versions of myself. They were mere approximations, so peripheral and distant, so poor the translation, they had nothing to do with me. That is how you discover truth. In half-light, by accident, when you meant to simply reach down and retrieve a leaf. You notice it looks etched, engraved, ornamental as a religious script. Your fingers stutter. You drop the leaf to the ground and think, suddenly, of arthritis. Did I say stones know too much? Did I say church bells are ringing? Someone is supposed to bring me a vial, a crystal filled with amethyst. Is Nurse coming? They will say, she wore flowers, hair a bouquet of intricate ribbons. She dressed as if for a fiesta. Listen. That is not the case. I wore gardens pinned to my head like floral tumors rising from my brain. I wore orchids not in celebration, but in mourning. I prepared daily for my funeral. I painted myself with birds and monkeys, with a necklace of thorns, and with the well where my heart should be gouged out, as if by scalpel.

I was not painting my interior diary. I was not painting myself thinking. It had nothing to do with symbols. I lived as if posthumously. It's a gift, to slide through edges, to know the properties of light within pewter and silver like ordinary women know the geography of a country.

I was in perpetual pause. A stasis where I memorized lies. Insomnia is identical in all seasons, rancid as soiled bandages, the pus on gauze. I am opening my mouth to eat this night and the cathedral bells, which are dissolving like worthless artifacts. But Nurse is coming. She is bringing me amethysts and a sundial I can swallow.

Continued in the post below:

[Alaskan Rover]

Continued:

Did I tell you, Diego tried to kill me? Marriage was simply a context. It let me make my wounds specific. Diego made the world simple. He was cause and effect.

Diego had the heart of a butcher. He had the hands of an executioner before metal or bullets, when men killed with their fingers, for pleasure. But Diego moved slowly. His strategies were transparent. He was like his paintings, enormous but too obvious.

"This is what I do. This is the work of a man", Diego would laugh from his scaffold when he was creating murals in Mexico City, or San Francisco, Detroit, or New York. "Your paintings are diminutive. You are like women who paint flowers on plates. Women who embroider pillows. You are decorative."

They are small but potent. They are a visual curare, I would answer. I still bothered to speak his dialect, to make my lips conform to the borders men insist are really there. "You are monumental but simple," I would say. "I am layered and cryptic. More deceptive than you suspect."

Diego laughed at me. He painted the status quo. He took their consensual point of view. He lacked spontaneity and daring. He did not invent his own perspective. Eventually, he would be unmasked and discarded. It was the force of his personality alone that made him famous. Poor Diego, convinced applause was a warm breath of echo, an embrace you can keep. When his face was gone, his voice and millionaire connections buried, when the edifice of his personal celebrity was erased, his canvases would be without surprise.

After the war, after Hiroshima and the concentration camps, the palette expanded in dimension. Diego did not notice. Then I knew murals would be as debris, ash, a flare of gray and then nothing.

"You idiot," Diego shouted, defending himself. "One must be a newspaper event to even become a footnote to history now."

I considered Diego's murals. It was an American autumn. The trees were like cathedrals in late afternoon sun, one cold snap and a rain from collapse. When Diego spoke of history, as if he owned it, I felt a serrated knife was gouging out my eye.

Perhaps it was Detroit. Diego stopped working, overwhelmed by his achievement, his engineering and architectural prowess, his buckets, ropes, measuring instruments, chemicals, blueprints, and paints. "Treated properly, they will last fifty thousand years."

Detroit. I could still see where I was, though it took an astounding act of flamboyant amber to do it. A colossal maple. It refused to compromise. It waited for me to come from Mexico. A maple, a staggering burgundy. I could get drunk from the bark. Oaks at the horizon. A stand with browning leaves, almost a dull plum, in a ridge like a spine or an anchor. Maybe I won?t drown.

"Frida," my new husband said. He pointed his arm. "Conceive of fifty thousand years."

How long will your murals last now, with the atom bomb? Is there even a construction of events now, as we once knew it? No, Diego. No more certainties. Only temporary pandering on a ragged machine-gunned stage, a few tunes and anonymous breasts in a grim dusk. Then they blow the candles out and with them, your canvases and newspaper clippings, even the cement walls and steel girders of your buildings.

Silence. Autumn let herself in. The air was crinoline, campanile bells, a hard rain like a glassy hail and women in song, opening their throats to Jesus. I refused to speak. There was the fragrance of street lamps and the stall of wind.

Perhaps it was later. We were partners in a family business. We could have been selling tomatoes and sacks of mangoes in a tienda at a narrowing in an alley below a plaza. We could have been squatting on muddy burlap, weighing out handfuls of cilantro.

Now our languages diverged. Diego and I were tribes living on different sides of a river. Our vocabulary had been minimal from the beginning, almost conceptual, really. Soon we would not speak at all, grunt and howl and hit each other with sticks.

I was a guerrilla. I struck from beneath my huipil and rebozo, my turquoise and silver squash blossoms, my amulets of Aztec deities. Coatlicue, Tezcatlipoca, and Tlaloc, mother of the brood. I was a sort of ambulatory tree. I was the home of parrots and monkeys. I was a festering nest. I painted myself with vines growing from my hollowed chest and seashells for organs. I put sharp points and hummingbirds around my neck. I drove more than sixty-seven nails into my hips and chest.

I deciphered a dialect for renegade women, exiled and escaped women. My paintings are postcards sent from ports not yet identified. I know where they are. San Francisco is one, Detroit, and New York. I put cactus in my heavens, agave and century plants. Heaven is a desert. The vegetation is sparse, brutal with concealed spikes. An occasional human passes parched and bereft. They open their palms, discover stigmata. Now they know what to eat. They stand like saguaro and joshua trees, amnesiac in the blaze, paralyzed, reciting litanies that feel like gravel in their throats.

Copyright © 2001 by Kate Braverman

[Tippster]

Yup....

[Alaskan Rover]

Yup....

Great writing like that and you comment on a 'unibrow'?

She actually doesn't have one, but she obviously painted herself one in that self-portrait above.



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