Retirement Fragment

Retirement Lesson 6 – It is books, paintings and poems which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise not have thought to acknowledge – Alain De Botton

FRIDA.

I do not know when I became aware Frida. Initially I was entranced by photographs in fashion magazines of her exquisite face, daunting eyebrows and jewellery and think perhaps she entered my soul through the lexicon of fashion. Somewhere there is a stylist who went to Mexico and found a way of translating the style she found there into the awareness of Frida I have today. Her jewellery is of course magnificent. Her style, emulated as if it were her personal style. She , I understand made a virtue , of wearing traditional Mexican dress and it was this habit which made her so loved in her own country .Frida showcased Mexico with chutzpah and her unique beauty.

I have always been captured by that femininity, her fierce womanhood, and wondered at her celebrity. Of course, her eyebrows , adopted as a fashion trend by the supermodels of the day and her moustache, notably not adopted and celebrated in the more feminist depictions of her, ( but not the hauntingly beautiful portrait that adorns a cushion on my couch ) is a poignant reminder of the reality of being female and for me , the manufactured nature of beauty. And perhaps she is cast into high relief because the man she loved was a very ugly man, Diego Riviera …I think he was called a frog, perhaps she called him that. and there was no doubt that their love story brought into focus , the passion and fire of her character.

And the pain. I cannot think of her without experiencing viscerally the vulnerability and disability caused by her injuries from the accident with a bus which almost killed her. This imagining of her comes from an exhibition of her work I saw in London many years ago, in which she highlighted her experience of pain in a series of childlike works which depict her stretched figure on a bed in a room with contraptions to manage mobility and activities of daily living. There was a strange innocent sexuality in the racks and corsets she depicted. In subsequent readings this vulnerability has been juxtaposed with the fierce, determined, forceful self she demonstrated in her tempestuous relationship with Diago and her fated affair with Trotsky. I have a sense of Frida overwhelming these great intellects of their time with her indomitable spirit and the whirlpool of emotional energy she generated.

There have been times in my life when I have been the stylish partner of very ugly men but not at the heart of the centrifugal energy which swirled around them. When I reflect on Frida I pay respect to, and envy , the force of her personality which placed her at the heart of her life, and made her fight so for the man she loved and the country she loved and for herself, the woman she loved.

P.S There is a part of me that thinks some of this story was written by someone else. I have a memory of saving an excerpt about Frida from somewhere and using it to begin my thinking for this story. Where and when this happened however eludes me and I can find no reference in my archives. So it may be my own fiction. If it is partly someone else`s I apologise.