Rothko's Rolodex

In an Uber on the Cross Island. The sign for Utopia Parkway just came and went. That’s where Joseph Cornell lived and worked: Utopia Parkway. A superb biography of Cornell is entitled just that. Utopia Parkway.

In what would have been a short lifetime ago, I bought a poster of Cornell’s Medici Princess. This collage, which resembles a page of Talmud by way of layout, is probably my favorite artwork in the world (not counting nearly all Rothko).

Cornell is an artist of such extreme importance to me and my husband, I really can’t begin to say. Cornell is one of several levers of rightness, which, when pressed, brought our life into being ten years ago. Cornell likenesses. Cornell coincidences. Cornell geography.

Joseph Cornell was no mensch, but paired with a tuxedo cat, he shone as a matchmaker.

There’s a blue ink Cornell liked to use, a saturated Cornflower. We own a small box Cornell made for my husband’s grandmother, and behold, there’s the blue. It’s blotchy in a few spots. Water damage, from when I don’t know. There’s a white scrap of paper, with Cornell’s handwriting. A note to the recipient.

***

I’m away from home now, helping to take care of family.

Per usual, I’m wondering why I think of the past, so many times a day?

Why is my vision hijacked by a series of veils, stacked one atop another? I stand in my parents’ living room and I flip the veils. It’s 1975. 1989. 1982. I see the flowered couch as it was, the Maurice Villency sectional, the clusters of people in 1976 and in all the years. Holidays, bowls of black pitted olives, ashtrays heaped with pink lipstick-ringed cigarette butts. Flip flip.

I want to put these images in a shadow box, a la Cornell, to be kept in my peripheral vision at best.

How to live in the moment, fully in the today. I want to find out.

I go home tomorrow. Before I left, I bought a copy of that Cornell poster. The green background is wrinkled but not badly. My husband will frame it.