-the space behind the eyes-

I spent the past two months in Paris.
I applied for a grant with "B," under her name. I stayed in Republique and Belleville and Le Marais. Each situation arose out of good-fortune, although I'm not sure how much longer such self-interest will keep me alive. Associations of my previous selves arose - my clothing at 15, my haircut, how the carpet felt beneath my feet, and how the walls smelled. I wrote "B" 30 letters (an homage to my age). Each platonic "love" written in adieu echoed hollow (as if, by narcissism, made void).
I have been making drawings that remind me of Robert Motherwell ["in gray and tan" "montauk montage" "in gray with parasol" "jeune fille" "the poet" "the wall in italy"]. I never much liked him: his connection with the Ivory Tower, his background in philosophy, his relationship with Helen Frankenthaler. I have been reading Anne Truitt's Daybook: soaking up her calm presence of mind. She started out as a psychologist and soon (at 24) realized it didn't suit her. She does what suits her, and sees that this can suit others too. She passed through marriage and birthed children and confronted financial strife. She visited Rembrandt's portrait at 52 at the National Gallery in D.C. when she herself was 52, in a state of personal crisis and fear. She looked at him and let him look back at her. I felt a tightness in my chest, and upon reading this, sought Rembrandt out, too, in order to look into his eyes to see if I could see what she had. I forewent control in my wandering of the great hallways and found myself with Rubens.
Standing, alternatively, in front of Hooch or Poussin or Ingres and the beautiful modest Corots, I became an addict. I purchased a Professional Pass, to go to the Louvre, and also l'Orangerie. Monet designed the space; the water lilies curve along the walls. He calls them wall-paintings: ever-deeper, ever-denser than something that sits on the surface. I felt half-dumb, staring into them as I did, waiting for my mind to reach a point of excited buzzing as water and sky devolved into body-movement. They are so many things at once, these paintings. Helen Cixous over-romanticized the painter's act. I read in the gift-shop, among the postcards and scarves (perhaps it's their intimate nature that makes them good scarves and postcards: disorder within a Sonia Delaunay) that he wished them to be a reprieve from daily life. Wearied from the city, one might enter the space of looking to still one's mind as one might enter a pastoral field: and more-so, for one wouldn't have to face heat or cold or the daily toil of the worker bailing hay. Anti-industrial or an antidote to industrialization. I found they did have this affect on me. Weary and anxious upon entering, twenty minutes later, I, unfailingly, acquired a deep state of calm. He designed Giverny to paint it. (Why in this case does it terrify me so?). He dances with what he sees until it's no longer what he sees [his surroundings] at all.
Hooch noticed that light falls in such a manner as to catch a young girl mid-step as she walks towards the door, while in the foreground, a woman threads yarn. He notices there's little difference (lacking light) between the pigment of the yarn and the air around it. One needn't think of him unless he turns his eyes back upon (and chooses to notice) himself.