September 17

 

1925


An entry in my diary claims to be for September 17th 1925, which is somewhat unlikely, as I was minus-thirty at that time. I had been trying to watch a documentary from the American PBS (Public Broadcasting Service), an extremely powerful documentary about the unutterably extraordinary Frida Kahlo, found on YouTube some while before, but at each attempt to watch it, the agony of her physical destruction at various moments of her life reduced me to self-scorn over my nothing-ailments in comparison with hers, and I lacked the composure to keep watching. So I tried to write, with wobbly brain as much as wobbly heart and wobbly hand. So the irrelevant mutilation of a mere time-statement, reparable with white-out and the surgery of a black pen.

Born in Coyoacán, Mexico, in 1906 (you can read a full biography here), she had already had polio by the age of six, which left her right leg somewhat thinner than the left, something she was able to disguise by the simple expedient of always wearing long skirts. Or it may have been spina bifida, or even both - either way it affected the development of her spine as much as her legs, and if she took up boxing and other competitive physical sports as a child, this was because she was a bloody-minded and determined young girl, as she would become in her youth and remain in adulthood, who simply wasn't going to have her life inhibited or ruined by the vagaries of intelligent design.

So she made it through the gangland that was school in Coyoacán, as she made it through the years of revolution that had begun when she was only three, and which rendered daily gunfire the normality of life. But then, on September 17th 1925, the date I mis-wrote in my diary... but I still can't find the emotional strength to tell this story. Instead, let me simply quote the description on the splendid blog of Lisa Waller Rogers:

It was a gray day. A light rain had just fallen. After spending the afternoon wandering among the street stalls of downtown Mexico City, Frida and her boyfriend Alex Gómez Arias caught a bus that would take them home to Coyoacán. The new bus was brightly painted with two benches along the sides. It was nearly full but Alex and Frida found seats together near the back. The bus driver sped off to cross the busy streets on his way out of town.

As the bus driver began to turn onto Calzada de Tlapan, a street trolley approached. The bus driver rashly tried to pass in front of the turning streetcar. He didn’t make it. Alex remembers the point of impact:

"The electric train with two cars approached the bus slowly. It hit the bus in the middle. Slowly the train pushed the bus. The bus had a strange elasticity. It bent more and more, but for a time it did not break. It was a bus with long benches on either side. I remember that at one moment my knees touched the knees of the person sitting opposite me. I was sitting next to Frida. When the bus reached its maximal flexibility it burst into a thousand pieces, and the train kept moving. It ran over many people... I remained under the train. Not Frida. But among the iron rods of the train, the handrail broke and went through Frida from one side to the other at the level of the pelvis."

Frida said that the "handrail pierced me the way a sword pierces a bull." Alex continues:

"When I was able to stand up, I got out from under the train. I had no lesions, only contusions. Naturally the first thing that I did was to look for Frida... Something strange had happened. Frida was totally nude. The collision had unfastened her clothes. Someone in the bus, probably a house painter, had been carrying a packet of powdered gold. This package broke, and the gold fell all over the bleeding body of Frida. When people saw her, they cried, ‘La bailarina, la bailarina!’ With the gold on her red, bloody body, they thought she was a dancer... I picked her up… and then I noticed with horror that Frida had a piece of iron in her body. A man said, ‘We have to take it out!’ He put his knee on Frida’s body and said, ‘Let’s take it out.’ When he pulled it out, Frida screamed so loud that when the ambulance from the Red Cross arrived, her screaming was louder than the siren. Before the ambulance came, I picked up Frida and put her in the display window of a billiard room. I took off my coat and put it over her. I thought she was going to die. Two or three people did die at the scene… others died later.”

Frida’s condition was so grave the doctors didn’t believe that they could save her. They thought she would die on the operating table. Her spinal column was broken in three places in the lumbar region. Her collarbone was broken and her third and fourth ribs. Her right leg had eleven fractures and her right foot was dislocated and crushed. Her left shoulder was out of joint, her pelvis broken in three places. The steel handrail produced a deep abdominal wound, entering through the left hip and exiting through the genitals. She convalesced for two years though she would never fully recover.

It was while she was confined to bed that Frida began to paint, using a small lap easel her mother bought for her. Frida had a mirror hung overhead in the canopy of her bed so she could use her reflection as a beginning subject for portraits.

A year before that accident, Frida had begun occasionally dating the internationally renowned artist Diego Rivera, colleague of Braque and Picasso during his time in Paris, now chief muralist of Mexico City. In 1929 they married. In 1939, after both had engaged in numerous extra-maritial affairs with women, her extra-marital with a man proved too much for the macho "Elephant", and his with her younger sister too much for the crippled "Dove", and so they duly divorced, only to realise at once the unadult if not unadulterated stupidity of that decision, and so they remarried in 1940, promising to be more fastidious in their future choice of extra-maritals. Both were recognised as painters of world class by this time. But what Frida wanted out of life wasn't Art, or even Love, and certainly not Fame; what Frida wanted was the one thing that her shattered body was incapable of producing: a child.


Eventually I managed to watch the entire documentary, start to finish, though only just (my eyes were hurting, the scar in my back was playing up, a bad cold was the real explanation of my tears - and the pain in my ego, as my alter ego went on berating me for complaining, was simply torturous). The hardest of all was that moment when they amputated her leg, and then put her in a metal corset that looked like Skevington's Irons - the cruellest of all the many barbaric instruments of torture that kept the first Queen Elizabeth safe from Catholic plotters. How can a human being, a fragile human being, endure such torment - and that was just me thinking about me watching the documentary, let alone poor Frida, shattered Frida, ruined Frida, unutterably extraordinary Frida. But the art, the Art, the ART! “To create at the level that you wish to create,” had been my mantra for decades, “you first have to live at the level that you wish to create.” What? Like this? Did I too have to experience something of this order before I could produce genuine poetry? Impossible. Take up sport instead, even the worst injuries are nothing in comparison with this.

There are so many extraordinary paintings to choose from, but for me there is only one that truly matters, her final statement about herself really - the incredible creativity alongside the total inability to have her fertility produce human fruit - but also the one that matters beyond the artist who makes the picture, that matters in the world of icons, regardless of who made them. I am speaking of the painting she called "My Birth", made during her and Diego Rivera's four year stay in America; to be precise, her response to the loss of her child at what was probably her fourth attempt to have one (at least three therapeutic abortions and then this birth-and-death in Detroit), the one in which she is giving birth to her own adult self, the one in which a female response to the male Crucifixion is nonetheless watched over - though she's trying not to look - by what I assume is an aged Virgin Mary disguised as Frida's mother, or perhaps the other way around - it's that hapless and helpless ultimate male, God, who is looking uselessly on. It would, I am quite certain, be banned as obscene in most societies through most of history, including many in the western world today. And yet, is this not the real Crucifixion, far more potent as a symbol than some mere Jew tethered to a Cross? I would be happy to argue the case for this as the most important painting made in the 20th century.



There is so much more to say about her - and I have finally managed to do so, but at far too great a length for a blog entry. In March 2003 I visited Mexico City, and at last, twenty years after the event, I have completed my travel essay, which originally I called "Inside The Volcano" in honour of Malcolm Lowry, but is now titled "Staying for Frida", and will be published in my collection "Travels In Familiar Lands", very soon.





Amber pages


William
       Carlos
    Williams,
                      poet,
                          born today
          in
              1883

I believe this is the appropriate way to present that piece of information


Chaim Herzog, President of Israel, born today in 1918


Hank Williams Sr (Hiram King Williams), country music pioneer, born today in 1923


Ken Kesey, taker of the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and author of the cuckoo's nest, born today in 1935


The first 33-1/3 rpm recording was released, today in 1934 - and I am going to invite you to guess what was on that recording. Was it a) Beethoven's Fifth Symphony; b) Bing Crosby singing "June in  January"; c) a black gospel choir performing "Amazing Grace"; d) the recording engineer at the RCA Victor studio saying "testing, testing, 1, 2, 3"? You are free to phone a friend, or use a lifeline.


Anatasio Somoza, deposed Nicaraguan President, assassinated, today in 1980. Enrique Gorriaran Merlo, alias "Ricardo", was the man who carried out the "execution", not terribly subtly either, firing a rocket which tore off the roof of Sonoza's Mercedes limo, taking both the President's and his chauffeur's head with it. GER!



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