Dear everyone ever: Take heart, if you are toiling, if you have been derailed, if you are feeling crushed by defeat. Here is what Agnes Martin has to say about failure…
“It’s through discipline and tremendous disappointment and failure that you arrive at what it is you must paint.” —Agnes Martin
I miss the reading. Or rather I miss the way she used to lie on the pages I were reading. I miss the way she used to lie on things—old records, folded newspapers, coats, manuscripts. (If there was a rectangle in the room, she would come and lie on it.) I miss her being near me and nudging me to work. I miss the way she would sit facing the wall, staring at it in great contemplation. I miss her gentle bossiness. I miss her nightly need for warmth and reassurance and how this need filled and taught me. I miss her sensing my own need.
Mimi shared our story for seventeen years: the changing homes and furniture, the people who wandered in and out, the babies that arrived, the brother cat that died…
I wrote about “Mimi, My Muse” here.
It has taken me a week to stop seeing and hearing her everywhere. Now the silence is the hardest part. It’s as if a vital track suddenly went missing in the mix. Our familiar house song has lost it’s percussive (pitter-patter) heart.
It made me happy this week when my friend Brenda dropped off these photos. This is where our story with Mimi and Harpo began. In Brenda’s garden. On a warm spring day in 1997.
(Top: Mimi far left. Bottom: Mimi in the middle, fending off Harpo.)