I own two small plates that I purchased from the MoMA gift shop. Snack plates. They’re Magrittes. One is light blue. In its center is the outline of a bird in flight, inside the bird, clouds. L’oiseau de ciel (1966) it’s called—Bird of the sky. The other is red with a large green apple in the center. Ceci n’est pas une pomme (1959)—This is not an apple. It’s an off red, maybe closer to magenta, a color I love if not quite as much as I love maroon, which might be my favorite color (I think of a maroon hat I used to own in elementary school, a granny hat similar to the kind of hat that Jim—later Roger—McGuinn of the Byrds once affected, in tandem, I suppose, with the granny glasses that gave him that signature vibe, a hat that I’d hoped, I imagine, might confer upon me some of that McGuinnian je ne sais crois) but still, a color for which I experienced a certain affinity, and even when I made the purchase I thought, I’m going to want to use the red plate much more often than the blue. In fact, I don’t like the blue anywhere near as much as I like the red. I’m drawn to the red. It’s hot, whereas the blue is…not cool, but bland, tepid, luke, and all that. Further, although I’m not 100% certain of this assertion, it may be that I like things that appear to be what they are but aren’t more than I like things that claim they aren’t what they appear to be but are, in some ontological sense, to be clear. At the register I had the thought, I’m going to put the blue Magritte back and take a second red, but somehow, in just the limited amount of time that the plates, the red and the blue, had been in my possession, my care in some sense of the word, that limited time from picking up, looking over, assessing and comparing, then getting in line, moving, moving up slowly, checking an e-mail or two on my phone, a headline (things were not going very well in Afghanistan at the moment, but I don’t think that had much to do with my struggle with the plates), somehow in that time of moving past the magnet bins and badge displays and other point-of-purchase temptations on up to the available register, manned by a woman who dressed like a man unless I’m mistaken, unless I’m so old fashioned (and I am old fashioned—how old fashioned? Well, I like the song “I’m Old Fashioned,” and I appreciate several versions of it, including Dinah Shore’s which never fails to break my heart since I imagine a woman singing it to her fiancé off at war somewhere in Europe, and Chet Baker’s, whose version doesn’t move me as much but whom I appreciate as a more significant artist) that my judgment of gender-appropriate costuming is irrelevant to the present century, somehow in that very short and utterly insignificant expanse of time I’d developed a protective sense about the blue Magritte, the oiseau, or l’oiseau. I bought both. I left MoMA. I walked through the park toward home, each step of the way wondering if I was already too far from MoMA to return and make an exchange of the blue Magritte I knew I wouldn’t like sufficiently for another red, which I would. (It never occurred to me, or it did but I didn’t dwell on it: how would I keep the utility of each red Magritte equal or sufficiently equal to avoid causing one or the other a complex, or to cause me to imagine that one or the other might develop a complex, since obviously…but I ramble.)
At home, I keep them usually, not always, but usually at the top of a stack of similar sized snack plates. I can identify the Magrittes by the white trim. The stack is on the second shelf of a high cabinet. I have to reach into it—I can’t see their surfaces. I try to ascertain which one I’m grabbing, which one I’m selecting. Say I’m going to have a banana. I like to lay the banana on a snack plate and cut in, one bite at a time, on a snack plate, while I what? Read, watch the news, drink coffee. I try to select the red, even while feeling sorry for the blue, but they’re both identical from the side. So I try to glean the color aura around the stack, around each individual plate. Which aura is hot red, which pallid blue, sickly blue, dead blue? Most times I guess wrong, select wrong, and I pull out the blue. Then I’m stuck with it. I’m not stuck with it, really. I could shove it back and take down the red. Who would know? Not the blue, not MoMA, not Magritte. Maybe someone might discern more use of the red compared with the blue if someone came over and happened to have both right in front of them, situated, say, on the chopping block, empty of items, someone with that kind of inclination and power of observation. But in order for that to happen, which would require the convergence of a lot of ifs, in order for that to happen someone would have to visit, and someone doesn’t, or no one does, and so the well-being, if such a concept applies, of the blue Magritte is dependent entirely upon me and my policing of my own peculiar predilections, for red or maroon or magenta or otherwise (McGuinn, Shore, Baker). (My ex-wife used to accuse me of lacking compassion, and I would say, OK, but what about the plates, and she would say, what plates? because I never told her about the plates, my struggles with them. I never told anyone. So I’d say, never mind and my ex-wife would accuse me of not sharing, too, to which I’d say, what about the plates? I share the Magritte plates with you. And she’d say, I don’t like the Magritte plates. I don’t even like Magritte. And I’d want to say, it’s funny you say that, because I don’t either, at least not the blue Magritte, and maybe Magritte more generally. But that would have opened up all sorts of Escheresque mazes I wasn’t about to spelunk.) So I use the plate I select, whichever one it is, and what happens is: I don’t enjoy the banana, my reading bores, the news depresses, the coffee goes cold. And why do I do that to myself? And why, too, do I do it to the red in the sense that: if I assign sensitivity to the blue, wouldn’t the red have it, too? And wouldn’t it feel ostracized, singled out, triggered? Wouldn’t it experience red feelings, fiery feelings, passionate feelings—again, if we accept the associations often applied to red. You must have had these discussions: what is red? I’ve spent long sessions in class discussing red as deployed by Zhang Yimou in Raise the Red Lantern, which is suffused with red, or by red. Red lanterns, red cheongsams, red flags, red tapestries and slippers and walls. Especially walls.
In the end I have to say I prefer Matisse, and I would have preferred Matisse plates. If I had two or more Matisse plates, I know I would select each equally for use, and/or I would be equally happy whichever one I selected. But MoMA didn’t have any that day, and there I was, and here I am, the coffee going cold.