"In a radio interview about Blue Nights,
Joan Didion states the obvious in such a small voice.
It wasn't about having children in the abstract.
It was about my child, and that led to thoughts of death
because she had died.
Sometimes, he painted on cigar boxes.
Cigar Box Lid #5 reminds me of stained glass.
The upward-facing triangles feel vaguely holy.
The color is not so much yellow as it is white
that is infused by brown, lit by it.
'Brown light,' Wittgenstein writes in Remarks on Colour.
'Suppose someone were to suggest that a traffic light be brown.'
We went to the Catholic church."
That was a quote.
I don't know.
I'll do this for quotes.
I don't like "quote--
brown light."
"We went to the Catholic church down the street
from Juliet's apartment.
Sometimes, my mother would drop me off
there before going to Mass by herself.
We would all go to a Japanese restaurant
of which I remember the blue hallways before entering--"
hallway, just the one--
"which was like the dream I had once of an airplane
that traveled to outer space.
She remembers going to a Japanese restaurant
with her son and eating Asian pears.
The owners invited them over to their home.
Everyone wanted to be closer to Raman.
He exuded something that Juliet calls purity.
My father calls it beauty.
When he was very young, his mother's friends
would call and ask to--" it's just every time.
Looking up does not work for me.
That's-- "speak with him.
When he was very young, his mother's friends
would call and ask to speak with him
for advice about their lives.
A woman from the Getty explains of Diebenkorn's work,
'I see them as altar pieces in a sense from which
the idea of a figure, a saint, a person has been evacuated,
so you have this zone, this play,
this field that is surrounding you.
It's almost as if you are walking into or being embraced
by an abstract altar.'
I'm reading Wittgenstein in a coffee shop
with the intention of understanding
Diebenkorn's use of color when I look up and see
one of his paintings on the front of a record album
behind the counter.
The album by the group Grizzly Bear is called Shields,
and the painting is Blue Club.
In it, a small blue club nests inside
of a larger white spade against a black background.
If you look at a spade in a club long enough,
they begin to resemble the outline of some explosion,
different moments of billow, sagging
low in the case of the spade, pulsing upward
in the case of the club.
'A vision dark and cloaked,' Grizzly Bear sings,
'and those figures through the leaves and that light through
the smoke.'
The ace of spades, according to Wikipedia,
has been employed on numerous occasions
in the theater of war.
In the Second World War, the soldiers
of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the American 101st
Airborne Division were marked with a spade symbol painted
on the sides of their helmet.
In this capacity, it was used to represent good luck.
Diebenkorn was in the military during the Second World War.
He worked as a mapmaker.
I try to find a point of connection
between him and the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment.
Both he and they were about to fly off to the Pacific Theater
when the war ended.
Clubs and spades repeat throughout his paintings.
When Juliet lived on 7th Street, a bookish young man
lived in the apartment underneath them.
She and Raman went to lunch with him sometimes.
After he moved out of the apartment on 7th Street,
Michael Silverblatt began to work
at a radio studio located on the campus of Santa Monica College.
While interviewing Joan Didion for his show Bookworm,
Silverblatt asks, 'How do you avoid feeling sorry
for yourself?'
Didion-- 'Because it's been on my mind as something to avoid
forever, and so it's just something I try to do.'
Silverblatt-- 'Were you taught it?'
Didion-- 'Was I taught it?'
Silverblatt-- 'Yeah.'
Didion-- 'I was taught about its value.'
Silverblatt-- 'Because I remember
one of the most startling things I've ever read anywhere
was in one of your essays in which
you were told to consider, instead of crying, putting
a paper bag on your head.
And you say, it was useful.'
Both laugh.
'It's kind of an amazing--
I mean, at a time where feeling sorry as a nation,
as a culture, as an individual, as a people seems to be
the national mood.'
Didion-- 'If you can find yourself feeling better just
by putting a bag on your head, then you would do it.'
Laughter.
Silverblatt-- 'Does it work?
Does it still work?'
Didion-- 'It does.
It cuts off the oxygen. It does something physiological
which works.
It was explained to me, actually,
how valuable this would be.'
Silverblatt-- 'That it was an alternative, also,
to taking a cold shower?'
Didion-- 'Right.
It's much more effective than taking a cold shower and more
available.'
Around this point in the interview,
Didion reads what the radio host deems the final fugue
from Blue Nights.
I play this part for Juliet over the phone.
'Let me just be in the ground.
Let me just be in the ground and go to sleep,
and the fear is for what is still to be lost.
You may see nothing still to be lost,
yet there is no day in her life on which I do not see her.'
I have to go now, Juliet says.
I feel strange for confronting her with Didion's voice,
as if forcing her back in time to the moment when
his absence first appeared.
'Oh my,' Juliet's old neighbor says on the air.
'We are going to go as far as possible to the edge in this
book as it's possible to go.'
Juliet sent me a copy of Michael Ondaatje's memoir Running
in the Family when I was a teenager.
She was the self-appointed manager
of my relationship toward beauty and love.
When I fell in love with a gay male friend at an art camp
in California, an experience with which she
was well acquainted, she gave me instructions.
Take a shower.
While at art camp, sick with infatuation,
I would take photographs of payphones
in stark black and white.
I made collages with quotations from Ondaatje's books,
like Coming Through Slaughter.
They say that it's more likely that we will fall deeply
in love when we have embarked on some kind of adventure.
That movement out of my childhood home
into the world of art was marked as much by love
as it was by Ondaatje's words.
I saw his name on the poster for a writing program
in upstate New York.
The taxi dropped me off at the dorms in Saratoga Springs.
I came out onto the quiet campus at dusk.
A child of the ocean, I was surrounded by dense trees,
and I was late for a reading by Ann Beattie.
I glided across the campus as you would emboldened
across an ice-cold lake.
That weekend, my friend and I walked down
the main street of the town.
We looked behind us to see Michael Ondaatje
a few paces away.
No matter how fast we walked or where we turned,
he remained behind, though oblivious to us.
We felt as if we were following him backward.
At the bookstore where we all ended up,
I put on a pair of gigantic earphones
and wept at the high notes of a trumpet played
by some long-dead man.
Thank you, I finally said when I approached the author.
He was a stranger whose voice had crackled from a cassette
tape into my ears as I walked along a jetty
from a beach in Kauai.
Two administrators flanked him protectively,
and he waited for me to finish.
I can't say exactly what else I came up
with, something about beauty.
What I do remember is that his skin
was dark against the glow of his white hair and beard.
His body was stout.
His eyes were green.
When we begin to talk about her son's leukemia,
Juliet brings up on Ondaatje.
The emotions that are beginning to overwhelm her
bring his work, for some reason, to mind.
She says--" "timbre"?
What is it?
"Timbre."
"Tam-breh."
"Tim-breh"?
Like when people sing, they have that sound.
There are some words I need to work on from--
[LAUGHS] "Archipelago."
Yes, got it.
OK.