I Don’t Get It
On the pleasures on non-critical thinking
L. and I go to the museum. We inspect and discuss. We wend our way up the ramp of the Guggenheim. You’d think we were mountaineering, delirious from the lack of oxygen. The paintings are installed in chronological order, and Agnes Martin had a long life, so by the time we reach the summit, she’s in her ninth decade, and the paintings have rapturous titles, like “I Love the Whole World.” That particular painting is like so much of the rest of her work: a series of lines across a perfect square canvas. Maybe it’s the title, the thought of an eighty-seven year old woman making essentially the same painting she’d made dozens of times before, somehow still filled with the optimism of love for the entire planet. We’re almost in tears, for some reason.
Only crazy people go see movies on weekday mornings but the book I’m supposed to be writing has driven me to that point. I persuade L. to go with me, though the only thing I know about this movie is that Robert Pattinson is shirtless in the trailer. We eat popcorn. I can hear the subway rumbling just underfoot during the show — and there’s a small mouse frolicking in the aisle — but the film is hypnotic, bizarre, and, as promised, Robert Pattinson takes his shirt off quite often. We walk downtown, an hour to kill before we have to pick up our children from school, and we talk about…
