FRANZ ROSEN

Painting

I WROTE ELSEWHERE about my “greatest fear.” Perhaps this was hyperbole. In all events, an addendum is in order.

I spoke with Oksana once about her paintings. The airmen, the limpid Russian sky, a summer day. A kind of realism which doesn’t trust itself, which I feel is the only proper kind. She was one who appeared very definite about what she knew, yet her work was entirely about what she couldn’t know. The explication of a world, perhaps akin to Turner’s, where light is all. And light consumes. Explication of course has no value there. You are dooming yourself to a tragic defeat.

I said to her one day that there was a grandeur to her effort. As I later learned, she interpreted what I said to mean grandiosity. I’ve considered whether this was an error in comprehension or translation, but it seems unlikely. She was a keen student of language. She was alert to nuance. So I’ve come to ask myself: how is it, what was it about her, so keen, so precise and observant, that caused her, in effect, to twist my words into something so hurtful to herself and her efforts? Or more tellingly, about myself: how could I not have seen it coming? Not it precisely, perhaps, but some such defeat. Why was I not able to take greater care?

I remember being so admiring and I remember her nodding, in a noncommittal fashion, and saying nothing, until the subject was passed, until we had turned away from the wall where those lovely pictures were hung. One cannot force words out of someone. One cannot child-proof the world. And of course Oksana was the farthest thing from a child.

But I might still have imagined what a thin wire she walked. I might have seen more clearly behind the bravura intellect. I might have guessed, from the paintings themselves, how the landscape of her mind was laced with unmapped crevasses.

To turn the world against oneself is not rare. To be helped along by others in this accomplishment is a commonplace. Like the others, I am an agnostic about the cause of her death. But still, I can imagine myself shaking her, or my words, anyway, shaking her, “Oksana, please, why do you say that, that’s not what I said at all. It’s not what I said at all.”