WEBVTT

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"In a radio interview
about Blue Nights,

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Joan Didion states the
obvious in such a small voice.

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It wasn't about having
children in the abstract.

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It was about my child, and
that led to thoughts of death

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because she had died.

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Sometimes, he painted
on cigar boxes.

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Cigar Box Lid #5 reminds
me of stained glass.

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The upward-facing triangles
feel vaguely holy.

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The color is not so much
yellow as it is white

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that is infused by
brown, lit by it.

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'Brown light,' Wittgenstein
writes in Remarks on Colour.

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'Suppose someone were to suggest
that a traffic light be brown.'

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We went to the Catholic church."

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That was a quote.

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I don't know.

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I'll do this for quotes.

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I don't like "quote--

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brown light."

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"We went to the Catholic
church down the street

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from Juliet's apartment.

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Sometimes, my mother
would drop me off

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there before going
to Mass by herself.

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We would all go to a
Japanese restaurant

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of which I remember the blue
hallways before entering--"

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hallway, just the one--

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"which was like the dream
I had once of an airplane

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that traveled to outer space.

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She remembers going to
a Japanese restaurant

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with her son and
eating Asian pears.

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The owners invited them
over to their home.

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Everyone wanted to
be closer to Raman.

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He exuded something that
Juliet calls purity.

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My father calls it beauty.

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When he was very young,
his mother's friends

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would call and ask to--"
it's just every time.

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Looking up does not work for me.

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That's-- "speak with him.

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When he was very young,
his mother's friends

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would call and ask
to speak with him

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for advice about their lives.

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A woman from the Getty
explains of Diebenkorn's work,

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'I see them as altar pieces
in a sense from which

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the idea of a figure, a saint,
a person has been evacuated,

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so you have this
zone, this play,

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this field that is
surrounding you.

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It's almost as if you are
walking into or being embraced

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by an abstract altar.'

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I'm reading Wittgenstein
in a coffee shop

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with the intention
of understanding

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Diebenkorn's use of color
when I look up and see

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one of his paintings on
the front of a record album

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behind the counter.

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The album by the group Grizzly
Bear is called Shields,

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and the painting is Blue Club.

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In it, a small blue
club nests inside

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of a larger white spade
against a black background.

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If you look at a spade
in a club long enough,

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they begin to resemble the
outline of some explosion,

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different moments
of billow, sagging

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low in the case of the
spade, pulsing upward

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in the case of the club.

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'A vision dark and cloaked,'
Grizzly Bear sings,

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'and those figures through the
leaves and that light through

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the smoke.'

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The ace of spades,
according to Wikipedia,

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has been employed on
numerous occasions

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in the theater of war.

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In the Second World
War, the soldiers

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of the 506th Parachute Infantry
Regiment of the American 101st

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Airborne Division were marked
with a spade symbol painted

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on the sides of their helmet.

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In this capacity, it was
used to represent good luck.

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Diebenkorn was in the military
during the Second World War.

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He worked as a mapmaker.

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I try to find a
point of connection

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between him and the 506th
Parachute Infantry Regiment.

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Both he and they were about to
fly off to the Pacific Theater

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when the war ended.

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Clubs and spades repeat
throughout his paintings.

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When Juliet lived on 7th
Street, a bookish young man

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lived in the apartment
underneath them.

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She and Raman went to
lunch with him sometimes.

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After he moved out of the
apartment on 7th Street,

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Michael Silverblatt
began to work

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at a radio studio located on the
campus of Santa Monica College.

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While interviewing Joan
Didion for his show Bookworm,

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Silverblatt asks, 'How do
you avoid feeling sorry

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for yourself?'

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Didion-- 'Because it's been on
my mind as something to avoid

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forever, and so it's just
something I try to do.'

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Silverblatt-- 'Were
you taught it?'

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Didion-- 'Was I taught it?'

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Silverblatt-- 'Yeah.'

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Didion-- 'I was taught
about its value.'

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Silverblatt--
'Because I remember

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one of the most startling
things I've ever read anywhere

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was in one of your
essays in which

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you were told to consider,
instead of crying, putting

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a paper bag on your head.

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And you say, it was useful.'

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Both laugh.

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'It's kind of an amazing--

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I mean, at a time where
feeling sorry as a nation,

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as a culture, as an individual,
as a people seems to be

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the national mood.'

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Didion-- 'If you can find
yourself feeling better just

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by putting a bag on your
head, then you would do it.'

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Laughter.

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Silverblatt-- 'Does it work?

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Does it still work?'

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Didion-- 'It does.

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It cuts off the oxygen. It
does something physiological

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which works.

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It was explained
to me, actually,

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how valuable this would be.'

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Silverblatt-- 'That it
was an alternative, also,

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to taking a cold shower?'

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Didion-- 'Right.

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It's much more effective than
taking a cold shower and more

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available.'

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Around this point
in the interview,

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Didion reads what the radio
host deems the final fugue

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from Blue Nights.

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I play this part for
Juliet over the phone.

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'Let me just be in the ground.

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Let me just be in the
ground and go to sleep,

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and the fear is for what
is still to be lost.

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You may see nothing
still to be lost,

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yet there is no day in her life
on which I do not see her.'

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I have to go now, Juliet says.

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I feel strange for confronting
her with Didion's voice,

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as if forcing her back in
time to the moment when

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his absence first appeared.

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'Oh my,' Juliet's old
neighbor says on the air.

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'We are going to go as far as
possible to the edge in this

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book as it's possible to go.'

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Juliet sent me a copy of Michael
Ondaatje's memoir Running

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in the Family when
I was a teenager.

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She was the
self-appointed manager

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of my relationship
toward beauty and love.

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When I fell in love with a
gay male friend at an art camp

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in California, an
experience with which she

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was well acquainted, she
gave me instructions.

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Take a shower.

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While at art camp,
sick with infatuation,

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I would take
photographs of payphones

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in stark black and white.

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I made collages with quotations
from Ondaatje's books,

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like Coming Through Slaughter.

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They say that it's more likely
that we will fall deeply

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in love when we have embarked
on some kind of adventure.

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That movement out
of my childhood home

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into the world of art was
marked as much by love

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as it was by Ondaatje's words.

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I saw his name on the
poster for a writing program

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in upstate New York.

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The taxi dropped me off at
the dorms in Saratoga Springs.

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I came out onto the
quiet campus at dusk.

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A child of the ocean, I was
surrounded by dense trees,

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and I was late for a
reading by Ann Beattie.

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I glided across the campus
as you would emboldened

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across an ice-cold lake.

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That weekend, my friend
and I walked down

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the main street of the town.

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We looked behind us to
see Michael Ondaatje

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a few paces away.

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No matter how fast we
walked or where we turned,

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he remained behind,
though oblivious to us.

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We felt as if we were
following him backward.

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At the bookstore
where we all ended up,

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I put on a pair of
gigantic earphones

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and wept at the high
notes of a trumpet played

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by some long-dead man.

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Thank you, I finally said
when I approached the author.

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He was a stranger whose voice
had crackled from a cassette

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tape into my ears as
I walked along a jetty

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from a beach in Kauai.

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Two administrators
flanked him protectively,

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and he waited for me to finish.

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I can't say exactly
what else I came up

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with, something about beauty.

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What I do remember
is that his skin

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was dark against the glow
of his white hair and beard.

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His body was stout.

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His eyes were green.

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When we begin to talk
about her son's leukemia,

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Juliet brings up on Ondaatje.

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The emotions that are
beginning to overwhelm her

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bring his work, for
some reason, to mind.

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She says--" "timbre"?

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What is it?

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"Timbre."

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"Tam-breh."

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"Tim-breh"?

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Like when people sing,
they have that sound.

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There are some words I
need to work on from--

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[LAUGHS] "Archipelago."

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Yes, got it.

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OK.