Friday

Friday, a painting by Leonora Carrington, is set in a bubble where stands a band of four. This painting is one of several days of the week that Carrington painted, including Tuesday and Operation Wednesday. I found Friday first at a disastrous writers conference in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico and set it as the background on my desktop. The only other images on my desktop have been an elongated toothy Daniel Radcliff and street art of a princess marrying a cockroach. This is my aesthetic and like the rest of the images, Friday connects with me now.

The characters are serious to the point of frivolity. I like those candy apple glasses in the center of the painting contrasted with the watery plum blue background. Despite being trapped in a bubble the action is blustery as hands move and smoke swirls throughout the scene.

The light blues and purples emit a transcendent, though improbable optimism against a sinister background. The blue membrane floats in a dark forest fraying dangerously against the canvas edge. Four figures mythically assemble around a table, the central three are uncomplicated triplets with white hair bowl-cuts and pale rounded faces. Each bowl-cut is preoccupied with their own activity made through illustrious hand gestures. One, a small version of the others, spilled a yellowish tea and peers prophetically into the curling liquid. The second, the one with candy apple gasses gestures with a cigarette as if there is thread between their fingers. Rings of smoke rise above their hypnotizing head.

The third figure stands to the side with a board in their hands. Maybe the board has scripture, maybe it has paper, either way, it seems to represent authority, held defensively at chest level. This figure is thin, thinner than the rest, maybe ill, but certainly saddened, maybe made so by this authoritative separation they hold in their hands, weighed down by its expectations.

I am in my Brooklyn apartment, gazing at New York City through dirt stained windows, making note of my trapazoid of sky between the buildings each day. The pandemic has swept the whole world and I dream of all of us in social isolation. Two months down and the future is unclear. Forecasts, predictions of how the world will recover blow and expand like bubbles through the streets, crystal balls of possibility. But nothing to hold on to - we can only watch the speculations, like the days, pass.

A popular post on social media illustrated three days of the week rather than seven: yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Personally, I forget about yesterday as soon as it passes. Today is so similar to the other days that it remains the only day: today: with a different name seven times.

It used to be that each day had a spirit. Wednesday was good, the favorite day in the eyes of providence. Thursday was kind. Sunday was sad and Saturday was young.

I was born on a Friday, an evening after tens of hours of labor, it was the beginning of my reluctance, a stubborn birth. My aunt and uncle recently stressed the griminess of the hospital I was born in - in New York City. This place is full of tiny joyous spaces surrounded by cement like raw gems.

Friday of Frigg, the broken hearted Norse goddess of sex and beauty, who knows the future and does not tell. She is sometimes perceived to also be the goddess Freya of death and fertility, and money: a putrid bunch of abstract nouns that smell about as salinated as the opaline fish under the table in Carrington’s Friday, where no legs appear despite the frank figures who sit at it.

No one in the painting seems interested in sex as they courtly look beyond, into their respective lives, a life, represented here in spindal fingers. They are not even interested in one another, except for the lonely one, who looks longingly beyond their board.

The only figure not in black gestures towards the fish below the table. They lean over, one hand extended towards the happy faced fish, the other grasps the table edge with vigor. This person is different, yes, still circled within the bubble, but unoccupied with their own activity and focused on the fish: the other life. There appears to be a moth on this person’s garment. Feet splayed on spry legs, one of which is black and one white. This person at least looks at something other than their own faults or creations. At least this one sees the fish. At least this one has legs, though uncoordinated.

I think of metamorphosis in this being who stands between two worlds: between the fish and the bowl-cut people, in a liminal space gelled by the very creature who symbolizes transformation, the lepidoptera unfurls into a mature version of itself, thick against the back like giant eyes of death of beating powdered wings. The butterfly, of course.

It’s an invitation.

Jesus died on a Friday in order to save a humanity of sin. Christians, Catholics, now eat fish on Friday.

Of course we are forsaken on a Friday. And yet, if I were to choose any day of the week it would be Friday. It’s the day to work and party, it’s the day to let crumble. It’s the collapse before it all of a five day work week, and yet it has the flavor. Even when I work on the weekends I feel the passion of Friday. Let it flow on Friday. Fuck around on Friday, take work half hearted on Friday. Fridays are for celebrations. Fridays are for socializing.

And the glorious fish under the table looks frankly forward.

This pagan day, the day of the seductive and desirous gods of lore, this most corporeal sinful one. What kind of monster promises to come through in the darkness between grotesque trees on Friday? What lives in that forest that the bubble attempts to keep out?

It’s a bubble. Bubbles pop easy, blown up by sheer will of breath that pulls the membrane apart, forces a new space in space, separate from a forest. A song is a bubble a story told is a bubble, a breath is a bubble. The barrier of a bubble is so thin, the bubble so sensual, these people don’t seem to belong, even to their own serious expressions.

Yet, in this pandemic. For who knows how long, our breath is caught in the mask, the bubble now so close to our faces, we used to breathe into the same room and share that space like a dream bubble against the forest. Now solitude is so much closer. Now the unknown approaches and we are alone, our bubbles don’t hold others, so be brave and look into the forest. You will see it is full of sacs like your own, full of life like pearls between the trees.

writing is labor!

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thanks!

Irene LeeJune 29, 2023