Carole Maso - Beauty is Convulsive - The Passion of Frida Kahlo

River of—

Smooth and perfect thigh tonight.

A furred thing in the dark — stars … A rubbing all over with earth and leaves. Furred lip of the open fruit. She reaches for her palette. The way color. Let me live, she begs. In pain and dread she is desiring, devouring time and—

There’s a fire in the earth where you lay.

Swear my linda, swear. My juiced up plum, plump … my little goose — my gringa. Swear you will — swear: And she is drawing all the fruits of this world.

Hurt of the earth convulsive beauty bride tonight. Free. Free of—

that odd exaggerated step.

No blood

No blood

And pain is a rose beneath your tongue dissolving.

And pain is just another way there.

You walk. The road of tears is broken. So love me again until we’re left for dead. Exhausted, unmoving, bereft. She opens one eye and laughs like a wild thing. Bats her lashes. Takes the little spoon from around her neck and feeds me earth. She writes Diego, my love all over my body in mud. Mischievous one. She writes Viva. Viva la vida

You write Diego all over my body. And as night approaches you write luz , you paint light in fury. And she is devouring everything, everything with her eyes. I beg of you she whispers. If you want me to go, take my sight

Once again desire has made a ruin of us. A pile of loamy soil — a dome; or concave — a grave. And sweet pain is a tablet in your hand dissolving, a host beneath your tongue. A sugary skull. A rose. Where does your life go?

No

No

No blood

No blood

No blood shall be shed

No blood shall be shed

You are walking down a dirt road your people, body broken.

No blood free for a moment

a little free.

No blood shall be shed

She presses me up against an earthen wall.

World tonight.

Blind tonight.

Smooth and perfect — you are walking.…

Knife through the succulent melon knife through—

She closes her eyes and touches my unbroken body, my smooth and perfect thigh. She trembles, whispers, bites my ear but gently, blurs. Take me to the other side.

And the workers singing working songs.

And the women singing freedom songs.

And a woman outlining an image of herself with extreme care, tenderness, and filling it in.

No blood shall be shed.

No blood shall be shed

Love me gently this time.

No blood shall be shed anywhere in the world tonight.

Beauty is Convulsive began after reading the extraordinary diary Frida Kahlo kept at the end of her life. I was struck not only by her last images, but by the power of her language: hallucinatory, dream-ridden, desperate, tender, written at her most vulnerable and open and perhaps most furious. I wanted in some way to be close to it — that trembling, defiant, beautiful, vibrant, wholly living page. I have tried to write a work of intimacies mingling the voices of Frida: the Frida of the diary, the Frida in her letters, in her Guggenheim application, with those who loved her and those who disdained her, with the doctors who cared for her — and, of course, her biographer. Beauty is Convulsive is utterly reliant of Hayden Herrera’s Frida . How moving is her careful, judicious eye, the language of her attention, the sense that she too is changed in the end by her subject in that stunning act of retrieval — this voice became an essential one. I see Beauty as a book of devotions. At its heart is Frida’s devotion to the image, to the vision, to the broken self, and to the dream despite everything to be free.

As my own words and concerns intertwined with hers, the book also became a deeply personal meditation: an attempt to be in some kind of dialog with her across time and space — and with myself. The desire was for the distance and earth to diminish between us. I experience Beauty not so much as a book but as a communion. And it did feel that way at times, through the miraculous months of writing — it did feel something like being alive together, for a little while.

Carole Maso. Photograph © Dixie Sheridan

Carole Maso is the author of ten books, including the novels, AVA, The Art Lover and Defiance; Break Every Rule , a book of essays, poems in prose, Aureole and Beauty is Convulsive , and a memoir The Room Lit by Roses . A new novel, Mother & Child is forthcoming in 2012. She is professor of Literary Arts at Brown University.