Review of Carole Maso's Beauty is Convulsive: The Passion of Frida Kahlo

For the new year, let's revisit a great writer and a great painter:



Beauty is Convulsive: The Passion of Frida Kahlo
by Carole Maso
2002, Counterpoint Press
hardcover
170 pp.


Whenever I read Carole Maso, I start writing like her. And so it’s the words and impressions that linger, hovering above the page, insistent, repeating: Broken. Fragment. Meditation. Accident. Votive.

Composed in Maso’s unique poetic and fragmentary style, Beauty is Convulsive: The Passion of Frida Kahlo is many different things at once: a highly condensed biography of Kahlo’s life, a voice for her words, and Maso’s artistic “conversation” with Kahlo.

Beauty is Convulsive samples freely from biographies of Kahlo among Maso’s own writing and impressions. We’ve become used to this style from filmmakers and rap artists, but it is still unusual in books, where we’re accustomed to more singularity of voice, clear quotes and citations with footnotes and page numbers. Maso’s rendering of Frida Kahlo requires a certain suspension of disbelief, a willingness to experience Kahlo’s life as we abandon our usual literary constraints.

The book focuses on three defining elements of Frida Kahlo’s life. The first is a serious bus accident in her adolescence which had repercussions throughout her entire life, including chronic pain in her back, legs and feet, and an inability to have children. Her subsequent miscarriages make up another recurring theme. And the third is her marriage to fellow painter Diego Rivera.

Maso’s sometimes halting, disjointed writing style suggests a life lived in fits and starts, as in Votive: Child:

“Its birth certificate filled out in elegant scroll His mother was
Frieda [sic] Kahlo

take this sorrow: child

I would give you fistfuls of color
if only
alegria

I would have given you.

Because I wanted you come to me

the cupped butterfly, painted black.” (19)

One of the hallmarks of Carole Maso’s writing is repetition of words and phrases, and Votive features in the title, as well as in the text, of many of the pieces in this book. Votive: Vision, Votive: Courage, and Votive: Sorrow, are among the pieces that lead the reader on a meditation, a wish, a prayer on elements of Frida Kahlo’s life, almost as if you are walking the stations of the cross. In between the Votives and other pieces are short epigrammatic quotes from Frida herself, each entitled “Accident”, which serve as interludes:

“I am not sick. I am broken.
But I am happy as long as I can paint.” (65)

“Nevertheless I have the will to do many things
and I have never felt “disappointed by life”
as in Russian novels. (75)

In her choice and placement of text from her journals, Maso not only gives voice to Frida Kahlo, but also highlights Kahlo the poet, particularly when writing about Diego:

“From you to my hands I go all over your body, and I am with you a minute and I am with you a moment, and my blood is the miracle that travels in the veins of the air from my heart to yours. . . Diego, nothing is comparable to your hands and nothing is equal to the gold-green of your eyes. . . .”(34-35)

Lest you start to believe that Maso is merely a collage artist, arranging the words that Frida has written and what others have written about her, Maso intertwines her own meditations on the artist’s life and her work:

“She remembers when her mouth -- pressed to the ear -- to the
hum of the paint the blood:
don’t kiss anyone else
magenta, dark green, yellow
And she watches him.” (91)

Add to this quotes from others who knew Frida Kahlo, including Diego himself, Alejandro, who was involved in the accident with Frida, and notes from her doctors, and gradually, contemplatively, you get a picture of the woman and the artist, and the effect she has on those who wish to enter her world.

The Function of Poetry as Painting et al

We now take a break from my accursed novel to bring you the following reflection upon poetry:



Once upon a time poetry was pretty much the only literary medium. All theatre was written in poetic forms, there were no novels or journalism, etc. There was only poetry. In those days, it was important for you poetry to say things, to speak truth, whether literally or poetically through image. Over the centuries, new forms have opened up--prose in the form of fiction and non-fiction, creative non-fiction, and drama. So with all forms and genres, we have to continually ask ourselves, what is the function of the genre we are writing in at this time.

I believe that poetry, more than any other written form, has the power to open up the imagination to altogether new realities that we could not have otherwise imagined and in my mind, the best way to do so is by experimenting with language, scrambling reason and reading, and yes, to be a literary form of visual art.

Bryon Gysin has said that poetry is 50 years behind painting. Poetry can and should embrace the image in all forms by being abstract in meaning and form as well as by presenting us with literal and literary pictures of things.

I tell the students in my poetry class that things like metaphor and simile exist to explain what we do not know in terms of what we do know. With medical students, I use the metaphorical example of "the human body is like a machine . . ." because that is a simile that they have heard so much they don't even think of it as a poetic sentence. All of those things that are not tangible -- love, freedom, justice -- must be represented in terms of something that we do know and can visualize.

In the same way, we can strive towards things -- emotions, conditions (like freedom), even social structures -- without having them all thought out, but by describing them to people in terms both strange and knowable, that will make readers want them too. Poetry, rather than being proscriptive, can encourage people to desire something and then think for themselves about what that might look like.