I missed the words Walt Whitman and Leonard Cohen wrote, for I would never speak to anyone in that manner. Never before had I seen things the way they do, and never before had I written so sincerely about anything when I was its victim.
I’m envious of their knowledge, perceptions, cockiness, and impulse to analyze and overanalyze each inch of desire and discomfort.
Had it ever occurred to them that their exhaustive, pointless, and excessive analysis would rather than clear their thought but might, in the end, choke on its fire and stand in their way?
It was worthwhile to see people before my time practice what I’m still struggling to let go of. This kind of sincerity, self-conscious thinking, and lifting of layers is somehow disturbing to others, but somehow, it is what makes others desire them.
Discussing the art of overanalyzing is explosively morphing into the intimacy one can get with oneself because undoing all layers of conversation and deception itself is already obliquely erotic.
Like all the artists, without knowing exactly how, they opened a space in their work and invited me to furnish it with a window from my life.
I believe that’s how I initially came upon this unsettling road of reading into poetry, paintings, and people’s lives—I am not insignificant, but rather unexpected, even untenable, and crucial to their work.
Mattered to Walt Whitman, mattered to Leonard Cohen, mattered to all the artists, as if everything happening in my private life mattered to them to conclude their writing. For any artist, I was valuable because I gave their otherwise meaningless art meaning.
As unsettling as it may sound, when I was eighteen and alone, I was craving love, not knowing where to find it, and willing to take it from almost anyone and anything.
I would read into a painting in the hopes that it might speak to me, about me, or for me. But what I was looking for, what I was trying to grasp, was not there, and yet looking into those things is what turned me into part of their creation.
I was reading an English translation of an Italian book when it suddenly occurred to me. This Greek man from Alexandria, who was later polished by France and relocated to the States, would continue to touch himself to the Apollo statue while thinking about a woman he had met in the subway.
It wasn’t Apollo, it was never about Apollo.
As I try to understand my life, myself, and the world around me, art isn’t about those things but about interrogation, remembrance, interpretation, and perhaps even distortion of things—just as time is never about time but rather the inflection of time.
When I was nineteen, I saw a painting in golden acrylic about the cycle of life on display in honor of a German artist who had died and left his whole collection to his assistant, who had it placed on display to make sales. How tragic. I find that piece quite exotic and, at the same time, the most erotic collection I have encountered.
The painting spoke to me; I believe it will continue to speak to me in the same way fifty years from now, when I’ll be standing alongside my husband and child, telling them about the man I thought I could have spent my entire life with.
Looking at that painting, I care not for its meaning but for my own projection of it.
“Tell me things, tell me something.”
Is my lover in the sunlight? Or is he in the ocean? Is he in the void of green, hiding beneath the mountain? Is my lover the name of Golden Silver Flame? Does he speak the language of love? Does he walk on water, or was he a sailor too?
Have I been blindfolding myself to work around the unbearable truth to disclose my intolerable reality?
I saw footprints in his painting, not love, lust, sex, not light, resonance, not sound. It was about my love for that painting when I knew it wasn’t the painting itself that I loved.
The man in that painting was between life and death, between flesh and paint, but all that mattered to me was to conjure that man to be in my life. He was not alive, but I was looking at him then, and he was more alive than I was.
That painting spoke to me “Why are you here again? I am not real, I am not alive, but I am far more alive than you are. You are not dead, but were you ever really alive? Have you truly begun to live?”
That afternoon, I was confronted by the possibility that perhaps the truest thing about me was a twisted identity, my unrealistic self, a might-have-been self that never really was but wasn’t unreal for not being and might still be real, though I pray I would still be.
In that exhibition, I didn’t consider myself to be an undesirable, unpleasant young woman or a lonely middle child with troubled parents.
There I was, just another nineteen-year-old with time on her hands and stories to tell. She decided on an impulse to attend an art exhibition, seeing as she had no one to go with or anywhere to go, register for one person instead of two, and think nothing of it.
I began to take pleasure in penetrating the minds of artists through their creations, silently observing their personal lives, and intruding on their ignominious intentions.
casaneth 