Einstein×Kahlo

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   You're with Reborn Radio. Coming up: Albert Einstein sits down with Frida Kahlo for STUDY HALL. The subject — On the work that will outlive them, and the work they hoped would.
2. 00:11
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   You know, Frida, I was thinking about this question on the way here, and already I am confused. What does it mean, the work that will outlive us? All work outlives us. Even a grocery list outlives the person who wrote it, for a little while at least.
3. 00:24
   Frida Kahloshare moment

   Albert, you're being difficult on purpose. You know what they mean. They want to know about the paintings people will hang in museums long after I'm dust, and the equations they'll teach when nobody remembers you wore bad sweaters.
4. 00:36
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   My sweaters are very practical! But yes, okay. Though I must say, I never painted myself nearly as many times as you did. Perhaps you thought more about lasting than I did.
5. 00:46
   Frida Kahloshare moment

   I painted myself because I was the subject I knew best. Also the one who couldn't walk away when the session got boring. You think I was sitting there thinking, 'Oh, in seventy years they will write dissertations about my unibrow'?
6. 00:59
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   No, no, of course not. I am teasing. But tell me honestly, when you were painting, did you think about who would see it? After you were gone?
7. 01:06
   Frida Kahloshare moment

   Sometimes. When the pain was very bad and I thought I might not wake up, yes, I thought about it. I wanted Diego to remember me. I wanted my family to know I had been here, that I had felt things.
8. 01:18
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   For me it was different, I think. When I was working on the field equations, on general relativity, I knew it was important. I could feel it. But I was not thinking about Einstein the person being remembered. I was thinking, this is true, and truth lasts whether anyone remembers who found it or not.
9. 01:34
   Frida Kahloshare moment

   That's very noble, Albert. Very pure. But you're lying a little bit, aren't you? You liked the fame. You liked the photographs, the interviews.
10. 01:45
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Well. Yes. I am human, after all. But the fame came later, and it was strange. Sometimes I felt like a charlatan, like they were celebrating someone who was not really me. They wanted Einstein the symbol, the wild-haired genius. I just wanted to think about physics.
11. 02:02
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    I understand that more than you know. After the accident, after the bus, people wanted Frida the tragedy. Frida the suffering woman. They still do. They love my pain more than they love my paintings.
12. 02:14
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    That is very sad. I am sorry.
13. 02:16
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    Don't be sorry, be honest with me. Is there work you did that you hoped would outlast you, but didn't? Work you thought was important that everyone forgot?
14. 02:25
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Oh, absolutely! For thirty years I worked on unified field theory. Thirty years, Frida. I thought if I could just find the right equation, I could show that electromagnetism and gravity were two parts of the same thing. I never succeeded. And now, I think, most physicists believe I wasted those years.
15. 02:43
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    Do you think you wasted them?
16. 02:45
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Some days yes, some days no. I was following what seemed beautiful to me, what seemed like it must be true. That the universe is unified, not fragmented. Perhaps I was wrong about how to get there, but I don't think I was wrong to look.
17. 02:57
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    I painted some things that I knew were not my best work. Things I painted for money, or because someone commissioned them. Pretty pictures. They embarrass me now, thinking about them hanging somewhere with my name on them.
18. 03:09
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    But you needed to eat, yes? There is no shame in this.
19. 03:12
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    Maybe. But I also painted things I knew were too raw, too honest. Things I thought no one would want to see. And now those are the ones they line up for. The broken spines, the bleeding hearts, all of it.
20. 03:25
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Perhaps that is because the honest things are the ones that last. The pretty things, they are nice, but they do not teach us anything new. The raw things, they show us what it is to be alive.
21. 03:35
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    You're being kind, Albert, but I think it's more complicated. They like my suffering because it's safely in the past. They can consume it without having to help me, to sit with me in the hospital, to smell the gangrene.
22. 03:47
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    That is dark. But maybe also true. People loved me more when I was an old man sticking my tongue out for photographers than when I was writing papers about light quanta that no one understood.
23. 03:58
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    Exactly. They made you into a toy, a friendly grandfather. Did that bother you?
24. 04:03
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Sometimes, yes. But I also thought, well, if being a friendly face makes people interested in science, perhaps that is not so bad. If one child becomes a physicist because they saw my photograph and thought science might be fun, then maybe the silliness was worth it.
25. 04:17
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    I couldn't do that. I couldn't make myself safe for them. Even when I was dying, I painted myself as a wounded deer, full of arrows. I wouldn't let them forget what it cost.
26. 04:29
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    You shouldn't have to. And maybe that is why your work lasts too. Because you refused to be anything but exactly yourself, even when it was uncomfortable for everyone else.
27. 04:39
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    Tell me something, Albert. If you could choose now, today, what work of yours survives and what disappears, what would you pick?
28. 04:46
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Oh, that is a hard question. Part of me wants to say, keep the relativity, throw away everything else. But that feels wrong too. Maybe I would want them to keep the letters I wrote about peace, about nuclear weapons, about trying to stop the war. I failed at that, mostly. But I tried.
29. 05:03
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    You think your peace work mattered more than your physics?
30. 05:06
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    I think the physics would have been discovered by someone else, maybe ten years later, maybe twenty. Someone would have figured it out. But the specific words I wrote, the specific arguments I made against the bomb, against nationalism, those were mine. No one else would have said them in quite the same way.
31. 05:23
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    That's interesting. I feel the opposite. I think my self-portraits could only have been painted by me. No one else had my body, my pain, my Diego. But my political paintings, my statements about communism and revolution, those could have been made by many people.
32. 05:41
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    And do you wish the political paintings would disappear?
33. 05:44
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    No. No, because they were true to what I believed, even if they weren't my best work. I painted Stalin's portrait after he died. That was a mistake, probably. But at the time, I believed in something larger than myself. I don't want that erased, even if I was wrong.
34. 06:01
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    I understand. I signed letters, I made statements that perhaps I should not have. But they were part of trying to figure out the world, not just the universe.
35. 06:09
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    What did you hope would last, Albert? Not what you knew would last, but what you secretly hoped?
36. 06:15
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    I hoped people would understand that physics is not just equations. It is a way of seeing, a way of feeling wonder at the universe. I hoped they would read my words and feel what I felt, that sense of standing before something infinite and beautiful and almost within reach.
37. 06:29
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    Did you write that down anywhere? That feeling?
38. 06:32
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    In letters, in some essays. But not the way I should have. I was better with mathematics than with words, I think. What about you? What did you hope would last?
39. 06:43
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    I hoped someone would look at my paintings and know they weren't alone. That whatever they were surviving, I had survived something too. And I hoped they would see that I was more than what happened to me. That I made something beautiful out of the wreckage.
40. 06:57
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    I think they do see that. I see it, and I am not even someone who understands painting very much.
41. 07:01
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    Thank you. But here is what frightens me, Albert. What if the work that lasts is not the work we wanted to last? What if they remember us for the wrong things?
42. 07:12
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Then they remember us for the wrong things. We cannot control it from here, Frida. We did the work we could do, with the time we had. Some of it was good, some of it was less good. All of it was honest, or we tried to make it honest.
43. 07:25
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    You're very calm about this.
44. 07:27
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    I have had more time to think about it. And also, I am dead, so worrying seems pointless. But when I was alive, when I was your age, I worried very much. I worried they would forget the work entirely, or remember only the mistakes.
45. 07:40
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    And now?
46. 07:41
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Now I think the work I did, it was my conversation with the universe. Whether anyone else listens to that conversation, that is nice, but it is not the point. The point was having the conversation at all.
47. 07:52
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    I painted my conversation with pain. With love. With my own body betraying me. I think you're right. Whether anyone understands it perfectly, whether they remember me for the right reasons, I had the conversation. I said what I needed to say.
48. 08:07
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Yes. Exactly. And maybe that has to be enough.