Internal Improvements

I often paint young girls who are reading. It’s surely because I saw the act of reading as a way to enter life’s deeper secrets. Reading is the great means of access to myths. Green, Gracq, Char, Jouve, Michaux, and Artaud were frequent passageways, as well as the great holy writings of the Bible and initiates like Dante, Rilke, the Pléiade poets, the great Chinese writers, the mystics John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, not to mention Carroll, the pure German poet Ludwig Tieck, and Indian epics. All these texts and authors were landmarks in my life, and gave me another dimension of time to which I soon felt myself summoned. My young girls who read in dreaming poses are escaping from fleeting, harmful time . . . Fixing them in the act of reading or dreaming prolongs a privileged, splendid, and magic glimpsed-at time. A suddenly opened curtain sheds light from a window and is seen only by those who know how. Thus a book is a key to open a mysterious trunk containing childhood scents...

from Balthus: Vanished Splendors, the book here

Sharon Olds: (Guess the Title)

In the taxi alone, home from the airport,

I could not believe you were gone. My palm kept

creeping over the smooth plastic

to find your strong meaty little hand and

squeeze it, find your narrow thigh in the

noble ribbing of the corduroy,

straight and regular as anything in nature, to

find the slack cool cheek of a

child in the heat of a summer morning—

nothing, nothing, waves of bawling

hitting me in hot flashes like some

change of life, some boiling wave

rising in me toward your body, toward

where it should have been on the seat, your

brow curved like a cereal bowl, your

eyes dark with massed crystals like the

magnified scales of a butterfly's wing, the

delicate feelers of your limp hair,

floods of blood rising in my face as I

tried to reassemble the hot

gritty molecules in the car, to

make you appear like a holograph

on the back seat, pull you out of nothing

as I once did—but you were really gone,

the cab glossy as a slit caul out of

which you had slipped, the air glittering

electric with escape as it does in the room at a birth.
Speaking of Gaitskill's unique appropriation of Sade--I have always eroticized this poem, as speaker and object.

At six years old, I painted this house Grapeshake, and yes, the Pantone color exists.