Matisse and mystery

...A dispatch from bewilderness

Everything you look at is a window. You are the frame. You frame the way you look at it. Words can be frames, too.

As we get older, some of us might live in “insisted” living. Someone insisted on it. Some of us may live in “resistant” living. We resisted as long as we could. Some of us live in “assisted living,” because we’re no longer able to live as we did before. That was called “independent living” and seemed way better than restricted, constricted domains we may be in if someone insists.

A few months ago, I visited my old stomping ground. Although I was never a stomper. I had lunch with my first boss at Time Magazine. Her name is Vicki. I expected her to be the same age she was in 1972. She wasn’t. Of course, neither was I.

I had another lunch with my friend Phyllis. She helped me think of windows and frames. I don’t think she meant to, but when she showed me a photo of one of her paintings, I thought of windows and frames. In art, windows can mean freedom or confinement. Boundaries or transitions. Sources of light and hope. While frames can act as boundaries.

A window by Matisse

Or all the above. Sort of like walls. They can mean limits or protection. They can mean home as in shelter. Or “not home” as in “you are not welcome here.” They can mean you belong. Or you don’t. Full stop.

“This is the story I wouldn’t tell you when I was your girlfriend,” begins the frame of a story by Miranda July. The boyfriend assumes it will be a shameful, lurid story. Something she wouldn’t want him to know.

The truth is way stranger than what the boyfriend imagines. What the narrator did in small-town Nevada was teach three elderly people how to swim but in the absence of a body of water. She taught them in her living room, using bowls of water on the floor to teach them how to breathe while swimming. No one would imagine that.