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

Just a girl at the Prepa.

Incessant dreaming: a fat man with a palette

on a scaffold casting

beauty, casting appalling

possibility on her—

childish pranks — to dispel the strangeness.

Her sexual halo even then. You must have been an angel. He mutters from the height.

Heat and light.

And one day she shall marry it.

But for now. And you return to the frame. And posing is like freedom some — sometimes.

Her dreamy teenage dreamboat, Alejandro — who will leave her— sorry — loose, promiscuous one.

Incessant drumming dreaming

Answer me.

Voracious in the afternoon.

The girls say they are dying — incessant dreaming — asked to conform. In the thorned courtyard — exhausted — by all the tired forms.

Asked to believe those.

Assume those.

Revere those.

(Draw a blue door)

Preposterous sexual stances of modesty and silence—

A little free, a door. The girls liked to kiss in the shadows….

Smooth and perfect thigh tonight

World tonight

Voracious, irreverent — assume those postures of I’m sorry and silence — curious one, self-indulgent, mischief maker. Fulang Chang! she shouts with glee.

Answer me.

Who’s there?

Drawn to the vision.

Partially revealed. Voracious: microscope, lens, window, eye.

The girls say they are in those rooms of judgment and pronouncements, dying. In the hedges. And they leave the frame.

Sparklers. And she draws a blue door. Dips her hands in the

Votive: chalice

The girls liked to—

kiss sometimes and other things

The two girls loved to dance

Her charms and secret numbers — setting off sparklers. Fetish, altar, free a little— venga —Come to me. Blue world, magenta, red. The way color keeps opening flower chalice. Just a girl.

Mischief maker … drinking tequila like a real mariachi.

The girls say they are.

The two girls loved to loiter in the public gardens of the university district where they would listen to the organ-grinders and chat with truants and newsboys. The two girls loved. And the bells.

Tolling miraculous cup. Sun drenched. She dips her hands.

Beauty is convulsive, as Breton will say. As your friend André Breton will say someday— or not at all—

Incessant dreaming Answer me .

She is the alegría girl — the way beauty keeps coming — the way color vibrates — convulsive — drawn

to the swirling

drawn

to the light.

She is the alegría girl — incessant dreaming — sparklers— come to me —already on fire.

“… A short while ago, maybe a few days ago, I was a girl walking in a world of colors, of clear and tangible shapes. Everything was mysterious and something was hiding; guessing its nature was a game for me. If you knew how terrible it is to attain knowledge all of a sudden — like lightning elucidating the earth! Now I live on a painful planet, transparent as ice. It’s as if I had learned everything at the same time, in a matter of seconds….”

Nothing is comparable to your hands and nothing is equal to the green-gold of your eyes. My body fills itself with you for days and days. You are the mirror of night. The violent light of lightning.

The perfect flame of you.

Smell of oak essence, memo-

ries of walnut, green breath

of ash tree. Horizon and land-

spaces I traced them with a kiss.

Oblivion of words will form

the exact language for

understanding the glances of

our closed eyes.

==You are intangible

and you are all the universe which

I shape into the space of my

room. Your absence springs

trembling in the ticking of the

clock, in the pulse of the light;

you breathe through the mirror. From

you to my hands, I caress

your entire body, and I am with

you for a minute and I am with

myself for a moment. And my

blood is the miracle which

runs in the vessels of the air

from my heart to yours.

My Prince sapo-rana. Idol-mountain. Fountain flower. Child. My fingertips touch your blood.

it is coming. my hand. my red vision.

Red covers the page. And a kind of glitter.

Look.

The visible wings of the misshapen angel.

Because I wanted you with all my blood but it was not to be — because I wanted you with everything — little monkey, melon, swallow — color, color

Heart , I would have given you every color

but it was not to be….

In a 1930 drawing of herself and Rivera, she drew and then erased a baby Diego, seen as if by X-ray vision inside her stomach: the infant’s head is up, his feet are down.

Three more times she shall try to have a child

Frida had all kinds of dolls: old-fashioned ones, cheap Mexican dolls made of rags or of papier-mache. Chinese dolls are propped on a shelf near her pillow. Beside her bed is an empty doll bed where she once kept a favored doll, and three little dolls are enclosed with her baptism dress in a vitrine in her bedroom. One that she treasured, a boy doll that had been given to her by a cachucha (probably Alejandro) shortly after her accident, when she was hospitalized.

Because I wanted

The earth is a grave and the earth is a garden poor child rest there, poor child play there forever. The earth holds the tiny hands, the eyes, the little genitals, rest.

Its birth certificate filled out in elegant scroll His mother was Frieda Kahlo

take this sorrow: child

I would give you fistfuls of color

if only

alegría

I would have given you.

Because I wanted you come to me

the cupped butterfly, painted black.

The city and bay are overwhelming. What is especially fantastic is Chinatown. The Chinese are immensely pleasant and never in my life have I seen such beautiful children as the Chinese ones. Yes, they are really extraordinary. I would love to steal one so that you could see for yourself.

The central Frida is armless

the useless umbilicus

darling one: small votive, flickering in the dark—

I weep flowers, I weep song, I bleed

the ballerina was broken

the mute blue testimony. She sits at the end of the bed smoking utterly alone. Beside her a grinning doll — together on a child’s bed. Misery without end.

My painting carries within it the message of pain…. Painting completed my life. I lost three children…. Paintings substituted for all of this. I believe that work is the best thing.

votive: faith

You paint the dead baby, all dressed up with nowhere to go. Poor child, poor Frida. Feet first, the soles of his feet facing us — the milky eyes, the dribble of blood, Christ flagellated on his pillow — poor tiny loser, impossible, the never to be, poor thing. Holding a last gladiola. Dressed up for Paradise.