"On October 17, 1980, a newspaper
called The Reading Eagle reported
that five of the lifeguards who worked
on a heavily used beach next to a storm drain
suspected of spewing toxic material into Santa Monica Bay
had come down with illnesses including leukemia,
thyroid cancer, intestinal cancer, and Hodgkin's disease.
The one with leukemia had passed away.
Lifeguards had called the authorities
because the water in the drain was purple.
Surfers complained of an oily substance on their skin.
In Ocean Park No.
6, the colors are pastel, the palette kind of comforting,
but there's a sensation of a landscape that
is being drawn downward, twisting as toward a drain.
'Do you know that in the deepest part of the sea,
everything goes transparent?'
Anne Carson writes, quoting a character in a film.
When he was getting older, Diebenkorn
produced paintings that deviated from his most celebrated style.
A painting, for example, entitled Flotsam and Jetsam
has rash strokes and a kind of messy violence,
figures of people and Xs, liquids
that have spilled, weapons.
The cluttered space is not unlike a battle
seen from overhead.
Is it gray or beige, Juliet asks of Flotsam and Jetsam.
I tell her it's black and white.
She says, if his colors were not the blues, the greens,
the whites, and that sort of thing, I wonder if--
Diebenkorn's New York Times obituary
describes his physical form.
He tended to hunch his large frame to make himself less
imposing, and when he spoke, it was typically in a halting way,
frequently doubling back to what he had said to amend or correct
a remark.
When her son was young, Juliet went
to see a psychic, a man with cats who shook.
He told her that her son was going to die
while he was still a teenager.
I held my breath until he turned 19, she says.
'How can I describe to someone how we use the word
'tomorrow'?'
Wittgenstein asks.
'I can teach it to a child, but this does not mean
I'm describing it to him.'
On the plane from Tehran, his fingers began to bleed,
so they landed prematurely.
Please go faster, Juliet urged the taxi driver,
but he went what felt like 30 miles per hour on the Autobahn.
'Threat provides the sublime with its essential
structure,' Anne Carson writes, 'an alternation of danger
and salvation which other aesthetic experiences, e.g.
beauty, do not share.
Threat also furnishes the sublime with its necessary
content, dire things, volcanoes, oceans, ecstasies,
and dire reactions, death, dread, transport,
within which the sublime soul is all but lost.'
Not long after Raman died, the Northridge earthquake
sheared the balcony and stairs off of her building.
A homeless man moved in after it was condemned.
He lit candles in the bedroom, wore her cashmere sweater,
and wrapped himself in Hermes scarves.
She called over to him through her neighbor's window
across the way.
It's a wonder you're not wearing my shoes, she said.
He explained that her slippers were too small.
You have a ton of sterling, he called out,
and she paid him to bring down her photo albums and family
silver.
You don't drink much, do you, he asked,
noting the dust on her unopened bottles of liquor.
The actress in The English Patient who plays the woman who
takes care of the Hungarian fark--"
there should be a "far-tographer."
[LAUGHTER]
Almost done, OK.
"The actress in The English Patient
who plays the woman who takes care
of the Hungarian cartographer after he has been burned
is in another film.
In it, her son has died.
Willem Dafoe is a cowboy who guides the boy
down a wet Parisian street.
The actress in The English Patient
who plays the woman with whom the Hungarian cartographer
falls in love is in another film.
She plays a woman whose son she killed
to spare him the pain caused by his illness.
The worst prison is the death of one's child.
You never get out of it, she tells her sister.
In reality for the former, fiction for the latter,
both women are named Juliet.
Most people have memory threads that we
can remember of our lives from the time that we were young,
Juliet explains.
I have this instead of a thread--
barbed wire.
Oftentimes, that barbed wire became electrified with fear.
During an improv class, before she
married and started a family, Juliet
was called onto the stage.
Her stated instruction was to act as though she had been
stranded on a desert island.
She has no memory of what followed.
She was told that she began to weep uncontrollably.
One day, my dad happened to stop at the hospital on his way
home.
Don't leave me, he saw Juliet tell her son.
In his memory, she stood at the edge of the bed, shouting.
The boy kept receding.
Hold on, she'd say, pulling him back with her voice.
Before going abstract, Richard Diebenkorn's early work
featured women who gazed out at the ocean."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]