All the People in the World

Chapter 19: Being Unkind

I was working on a new piece. One with all the whistles and bells. It was a piece on women, as was the rage in those days. Every artist, it seemed, was thinking about women. Taking their stab at personifying them. Beautifying them. Freeing them. Humanizing them- which was an insult really when you think about it. That a woman would need some sort of assistance and didn't humanize herself by simply existing. It was a good movement at the start, as most movements are, which quickly turned sour the second that capitalism wrapped its grubby little fingers around it. I had learned that term in school- I had learned all the terminologies in school. But those pretty terminologies, by which I understood the world and the unlying cases and conditions of such a world, never came up much in my conversations. Because in school I had also learned that certain things are the way they are. Such as American capitalism, some varying degree of racism in nearly every civilization ever formed, rain falling down instead of up, each generation hating the next... you understand. And when things are the way they are, you must learn to play by the given rules. And the rules were that I must paint a series on women, freeing their bodies to a degree that pushed the boundaries ever so slightly- not to make any onlooker gawk but just uncomfortable enough so one could classify the piece as "feminist art."

To do this properly you could not free everything about the woman in question. You had to pick one. I chose to free their setting, placing them naked and posed in fields and trapsed on New York park benches. I freed them of a place they had to be, sure, but I sacrificed their bodies, their skin, their appearance. What was the appearance anyways? To care for one's appearance, well that wouldn't be very feminist of me would it? No, vocation and location, those were the things we should concern our minds with. The spaces we consume and the ones we hope to consume one day.

It was a wonder to me why I felt so compelled to paint them naked. A naked woman for so long, I suppose, had been perceived as such a powerless creature. She could not possibly hold any volition, any autonomy in such a state. And now the assumption was that it was my role, my responsibility, to paint them in that very state but claim they were strong whilst in it. To say they were stronger naked then clothed, more themselves, more liberated. But I think now, and I quietly thought at the time, that it seems foolish that heaps of cloth or lack thereof should have any bearing at all on the strength of a woman at all. I am weak all the time and strong all the time, bare and covered. I weep in the shower as two mighty legs hold me firmly upright. Strong and weak, naked and clothed, a woman is everything you see. And because of that a woman is also nothing at all.

I could never say these things to Reagan. He wouldn't understand. These were thoughts best expressed under lemon trees over a glass of peach juice. I would shove the glass of juice into the ground, held steady by the long blades of grass surrounding it, express my thoughts to my companion, and pick the glass up again for another sip.

And who is your companion? Leave me be.

I did attempt to show Reagan my new pieces and explain my reservations about them. On the day before the showing. He was picking me up from the studio to take me to dinner. I was hoping for somewhere decent, but in my hoping I also knew the chances of him taking me to a dingy bar to watch the Patriots pre season game were never zero. And once he arrived in his jersey, the dingy bar's chances were looking unfortunately favorable.

Perhaps I explained everything poorly to him out of frustration or perhaps he didn't care to hear me rant after a long day or perhaps I was simply nervous and being sensitive as I tended to be and as he tended to remind me I was being. For whichever reason it was, we entered into a tiff shortly after his arrival and stayed in it all through dinner (yes, in the dingy bar). And as his eyes scanned the tv mine scanned the remnants of his All American burger which were held captive in his beard.