You Have To Say Thank You For The Paintings You Like

It’s December 2, 5:46 PM. I am sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee. Hayden is across from me writing in his journal, a large clear vase sits on the table with a dozen white roses I got from Trader Joe’s. They were so beautiful, I couldn’t not get them. They have just a hint of pink in the center of them. On the table with us is a stack of books I’m reading, my journal, and Hayden’s paints and paintbrushes, he was studying the roses. There is also a bunch of polaroids laid out, cookies, water, and a bottle of sweet Baby Rays barbeque sauce.

But let’s backtrack.

I watched the play adaptation of The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion on Nov 17. I told Hayden after the play that I still couldn’t pinpoint what it was I loved about her writing. The play is basically just a woman reading a condensed version of the memoir. I’m not sure it needed to be a play, to be honest. I’m not sure if it does anything for Joan’s work. I’m not sure really what the point was, but I still paid $57 a ticket, and I still enjoyed it, because I loved that memoir, even got it tattooed on my arm. So I discuss it later with Hayden in our backyard as he lights up a joint. “Is it her rhythm? Her smarts? I don’t know, I can’t name it. What do you think it is?” He takes a hit off his joint, and we watch the smoke as he exhales. There is silence between us. “Life before it all turned into a size this big” he finally says, squeezing his thumb and pointer finger together until the gap between them is small enough for a crumb. “But what is it about that time that I like? The slowness of every day? Time?” I say back in a hurry, I am racing to find the answer as if it will slip away from me forever. “Yes,” Hayden says slowly, calmly. “Time. Before we had access to every want and need we could think of.”

—

In the theater, the woman who plays Joan Didion is not how Joan would act at all. I say that as if I knew Joan as if I have even watched enough interviews to know her. But from what I have seen, I imagine her less… uppidty, PTA-like, and more skeptical, more witty, more sinister. The actress was too motherly, too smiley, too… not Joan. So it was fine. Probably not worth $57 a ticket. The journal she pretended was hers (Joan’s) was empty, which bothered me. Couldn’t they have at least written in to make it seem more real? But what do I know? Maybe that was how Joan was, maybe it was my perception of her that was wrong.

It was a 100-minute play with no intermissions, but drinks were allowed in, and everyone beforehand was at the bar. In the bathroom, I heard a woman say to her friend that this memoir is a little bit of a depressing story. “Well, I think especially in these times we are in, it’s nice to watch something like this…” a pause, “You know misery loves company…”

Which I thought was beside the whole point as I sat on the toilet peeing. The memoir isn’t about misery. The play isn’t about misery. It’s about grief and failure to control life, it’s about what you do when the people you love are no longer with you, how you act, and what was reality then is now a fantasy, a fiction, and how we struggle to make sense of new realities. Which I suppose maybe is like the times.

—

It’s I don’t know how many days since the play, and Hayden and I are watching the Van Gogh movie with William Dafoe. “Monet is still pretty great,” he says to Gaugin when they are talking about old masters and the new generation of artists. “You have to say thank you for the paintings you like.”

—

Most of life is processing is
understanding the hurt
feeling the joy
recognizing that no feeling is final
as conflicting and confusing as that may be
as opposite as that may feel
how one human can experience so much pain and
desire and depth seems both fantastic and
terrifying 
and yet we all stand here together
full of happiness and sorrow

—

Gaby: Why do you paint this?
Vincent Van Gogh: What? These flowers.
Gaby: Why do you paint them?
Vincent Van Gogh: Don't you find them beautiful?
Gaby: Well, they are beautiful flowers, no doubt. More beautiful than what you paint.
Vincent Van Gogh: You think so?
Gaby: Oh, yes.
Vincent Van Gogh: Maybe you're right. But these flowers will wither and fade. All flowers do.
Gaby: I know, everybody knows that.
Vincent Van Gogh: But mine will resist.
Gaby: Are you sure?
Vincent Van Gogh: At least they'll have a chance.

Nov 14th

I’ve been thinking again about what it means to be an artist, and who an artist is. To be an artist is in the way you do everything, your everyday life, the way you think. You can make art and not be an artist—you are then a sculptor, painter, or musician. And you can be both, but there is a slight distinction you see. An artist is someone who naturally has dedicated his whole life to seeing life through that lens. And I’m not sure if it’s something you can really choose. It’s the emotional over the analytical, but it’s not that black and white. I am not saying I am an artist, though I sometimes like to call myself one, and I’m not even sure it matters. One is not better than the other, simply a way of seeing. I have noticed lately, that I’ve been making a brash attempt to see all things art, trying to pull art closer to my chest as though it might be taken from me.

I used to never care for Rene Margritte’s work but lately, they have been speaking to me. I see them online and gasp. I feel the gaps in his work, the “absence of”— the silence. The emptiness and loneliness and the quiet. But not loneliness as in sad— maybe solitude is a better word—the simplicity and peace to it. In a world of chaos and clutter and sitting in traffic and talking to people all day, the emptiness in the paintings gives me room to breathe.

—

“Writing doesn’t improve by not doing it. I am rusty and dull and uneasy.” Tina Brown writes in The Vanity Fair Diaries. I underline this, and then write it in my journal so as not to forget, that it is possible to be a writer and there be periods where you are rusty.

-

It’s December 7th now, 8:00 PM. I find myself at the kitchen table again, writing and reading by the table light. It is cold and damp out. I am writing while Hayden plays the Rhodes. We spent the day doing absolutely nothing, eating, playing video games together, and lying on the floor in the living room with Gordy as long as possible. We started the day with a run in the rain with Gordy, racing inside the house out of breath and cold. It was one of those perfect December Saturdays.

-

Dec 8

I think we should concern ourselves less with merit and labels and technicals, sometimes thinking too much, looking too inward destroys a person. If you want to paint, paint. If you want to write, write. If you want to make music, or knit, or learn to play a sport, do it. Who cares about your background, and what training you have or have not done. Who cares if you’re good or if you are doing things “technically” right or wrong. All of that comes later, or maybe it doesn’t, maybe it doesn't always have to. We are allowed to create without these narrow, capitalistic rules, the ones we have invented, and demand others to follow only for us to judge. An artist should be free. A human should be free.

Zoomed shots of Hayden's painting, 'Hiatus'