I woke up this morning before the light and thought about Kandinsky’s The Blue Rider. Art history class, I was 21, and my professor showed us that painting and told us about Kandinsky and Klee and the whole Bauhaus movement, and that was first moment I can remember in my life wanting to be anything other than a writer and a poet, and I didn’t want at that moment to be an artist. I wanted to be an art historian because it seemed to me that understanding art was my way into understanding all of humanity. As I lay there this morning, I thought about that moment, and I wondered if I should have studied art because now, I don’t understand anything.
All this morning, The Blue Rider ran through the back of my mind, just galloped and galloped and sometimes she was a woman and sometimes a man, but she was always urgent in whatever she was doing, and her actions gave me urgency. I made breakfast and mowed the lawn and put away the clean dishes urgently to the sound of hooves.
Later, I zoomed with my daughter who talked about her eating disorder and her dog whose needs are endless and about the genocide in Palestine and about the family of baby woodchucks that live behind her and about how anxiety emerges from the body, not the mind sometimes, and the way that the weather has changed and about the protests in California where she is from, and I lived for 45 years, so I’m kind of from there too, and about how I feel unrooted in my life, and then we talked about a book review she was writing which was the original purpose of the conversation, and she wanted my advice, but her insights were much better than mine so I told her to ignore my ideas and go with her gut, and this all took maybe 15 minutes and then she had to go because her dog had his needs.
The Blue Rider kept galloping in my mind, and someone showed me the video of the dance those kids did to M’s “Pop Muzik,” which was good. The Blue Rider galloped through this to M’s various meters, mostly iambic, bacchius, and antibacchius, but some variations on that, and the kids’ dance reflected the music, yes, but the poetic meter too, and I stood before a classroom in my mind (as I often do) and explained all of it to them.
In another stage in my mind there was The Blue Rider. She was a woman now, clearly a woman, and she was watching me and judging me, and I don’t know if her judgment was positive or negative. She just watched me a while and did not smile or frown. I wondered if she thought I should have been an art historian or what.
Then I understood that she simply didn’t care. She had more to do than worry about my life. That’s when she galloped off, and I was left alone to deal with my choices.
— John Brantingham is currently and always thinking about radical wonder. He is a New York State Council on the Arts Grant Recipient for 2024, and he was Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks’ first poet laureate. His work has been in hundreds of magazines and The Best Small Fictions 2016 and 2022. He has twenty-two books of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction.