This is an old essay, one of my first published essays. It’s a bit rough and pretty angry, with an anger that comes from grief. Two sides of the same coin. I send it to you now so that you can get to know me better, and I send it to you now in a spirit of gratitude - genuine, practiced gratitude - for all the people and places in this essay. Even the people I wish I’d never met and the places populated by only smoke and sadness.
There is a slur in this essay. It’s a quote. It’s terrible. It’s meant to be terrible. And Picasso was a terrible person.
I, too, am terrible. So are you. Yet I love my self and I love you. Where does that love end? What are the implications? Big questions. I’m thankful for writers and readers and the dance between the two and the beauty we bring to the world.
This was originally published by Burrow Press as Sharp Angles and Shades of Blue.
I turned the page and the first thing I noticed were the angles, the angle of the head, the angle of the hand, the angle of his legs, the angle of the guitar, the angle of the fingers. And then I noticed the different shades of blues and the way they worked together to say to me, We see you are sad. There is a place in the world for sad men. See this man? He is sad, and the man who painted him was sad. You are not alone in your sadness. Sit down and rest. And it’s okay to cry.
I was looking through an art history book for a class I was taking at The Behrend College at Penn State’s Erie campus. If you have ever been to Erie, then you know that it rains there a lot. The sun is a thing most people have heard of but few people have actually seen. In my worst moments, I am still waking up to go to class in the morning, and the first thing I see is a window opaque with rain. Outside the window everything is colored blue. I was lonely in that city, at that college. I ended up there for lack of a better plan, and I was taking an art history class because—I don’t know. I didn’t expect to study Picasso’s The Old Guitarist; I didn’t even know he existed. Then one day, in the library, in the dark, almost certainly while it was raining outside, I opened the book, turned some pages, and he was there.