Aurelius×Kahlo

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   From the studio at Reborn Radio — next on STUDY HALL, Marcus Aurelius and Frida Kahlo. They take up On a teacher whose advice they ignored and now repeat to others.
2. 00:11
   Marcus Aureliusshare moment

   My first philosophy teacher was a man named Diognetus. I was perhaps eleven years old. He taught me to distrust spectacle—the theater, the games, the gladiatorial shows that consumed Rome. I thought him joyless.
3. 00:27
   Frida Kahloshare moment

   Joyless. Yes, I know that word. My teachers at the Preparatoria said I was making my pain too visible, too much blood on the canvas. They wanted me to paint bowls of fruit like a good girl.
4. 00:39
   Marcus Aureliusshare moment

   Did you listen?
5. 00:40
   Frida Kahloshare moment

   What do you think? I painted my broken spine as a column, my body opened like a deer carcass. I painted until they could not look away.
6. 00:49
   Marcus Aureliusshare moment

   I wore the philosopher's rough cloak to my lessons. I slept on the ground. I wanted everyone to see my virtue, to admire my discipline. Diognetus told me this was vanity wearing virtue's mask.
7. 01:02
   Frida Kahloshare moment

   But you kept doing it.
8. 01:03
   Marcus Aureliusshare moment

   For years. The cloak became a costume. Until my mother begged me to stop, until I saw her embarrassment and realized—the lesson had been right all along. Philosophy is not theater.
9. 01:16
   Frida Kahloshare moment

   Theater. That is funny, coming from someone who became emperor. The biggest stage in the world.
10. 01:22
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    Which is precisely why the lesson mattered. Every day I put on the purple, I heard Diognetus warning me. The robes are not the rule. The spectacle is not the state.
11. 01:34
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    My teacher at the academy, her name was Matilde Rodríguez. She kept saying: Frida, the self-portrait is a mirror. A mirror reflects. It does not interpret, does not bleed, does not accuse. She wanted surfaces.
12. 01:46
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    And you rejected this.
13. 01:48
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    I thought she was afraid. Afraid of real feeling, real flesh. After my accident, after the streetcar drove the handrail through my pelvis, I could not paint surfaces. I painted what the mirror did not show—the nails inside the body, the roots growing from the belly.
14. 02:04
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    But you kept painting yourself.
15. 02:06
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    Always. Fifty-five self-portraits, maybe more. And then one day, very late, I am painting myself for the hundredth time and I think: Matilde was right. The mirror had become a prison. I was performing my pain, not examining it.
16. 02:22
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    This is the bitter taste. The teacher's voice returning at the moment you finally understand it.
17. 02:27
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    Except now I tell young painters: Yes, paint yourself, paint your blood, your broken things. But ask why. Ask if you are showing the wound or showing off the wound.
18. 02:38
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    Diognetus would say you have learned to distinguish the thing from the performance of the thing.
19. 02:43
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    Maybe. Or maybe I just got old and tired of my own face. You spent your whole life writing about self-discipline. Did you ever get tired of yourself?
20. 02:53
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    Daily. The Meditations were not for publication—they were reminders to myself because I kept forgetting. The same lessons, the same failures, written again and again.
21. 03:04
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    You forgot what your teacher taught you.
22. 03:07
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    Constantly. I knew spectacle was hollow. Yet when my legions acclaimed me, when the Senate rose at my entrance, some part of me wanted to believe the applause meant something true.
23. 03:19
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    Did it?
24. 03:20
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    No. Applause is noise. The work—the judgments, the campaigns, the long nights of administration—that was real. But the work never applauded.
25. 03:31
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    No. The work just sits there bleeding on the canvas, demanding you look at it honestly. This is what I tell students now: Your teacher will say something that makes you angry. Paint anyway. Prove them wrong if you must. But keep their words in your pocket.
26. 03:45
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    Because?
27. 03:46
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    Because in ten years, twenty years, you will pull those words out and they will not sound the same. They will sound like they were meant for the person you became, not the person you were.
28. 03:56
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    Yes. Diognetus told me: Marcus, you will be tempted by power, by glory, by the crowd's love. Guard your inner citadel. I was too young to know I needed guarding. I thought I was already wise.
29. 04:11
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    The young always think that. I thought I was the only one who could paint true pain, the only one honest enough. Matilde would smile at me, very patient, very sad. Now I know that smile.
30. 04:23
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    The smile of someone watching you learn the slow way.
31. 04:26
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    The only way, maybe. You cannot hand someone experience. They have to paint their fifty-five self-portraits first.
32. 04:33
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    Or write their twelve books of reminders. But here is what troubles me: If I had listened immediately, would the lesson have held? Or do we need the years of error to make the wisdom stick?
33. 04:45
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    This is a dangerous question. You are asking if suffering is necessary.
34. 04:50
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    I am asking if the lesson exists separate from the learning.
35. 04:53
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    I do not know. My body taught me what Matilde could not. The pain made me look deeper, then deeper again. If I had been whole, if the streetcar had missed me—would I have painted fruit bowls after all?
36. 05:05
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    I do not believe so. The teacher recognizes something already present. Diognetus saw that I was drawn to performance. He warned me because he knew I had the capacity to mistake the costume for the self.
37. 05:19
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    And Matilde saw I would drown in my own reflection if someone did not warn me. She was right. I almost drowned. But I needed to go under first.
38. 05:27
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    Then what do we tell our students? Follow the advice you will inevitably ignore?
39. 05:33
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    Yes. Exactly yes. I tell them: Here is the thing I learned too late. You will learn it too late also. But learn it. That is the job.
40. 05:42
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    And perhaps that is enough. To name the trap before they step into it, knowing they will step anyway.
41. 05:48
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    At least then they will recognize the trap when they are inside it. They will remember someone told them. This makes the climb out faster, maybe.
42. 05:56
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    I wrote in my private books: We shrink from change, yet nothing is born without it. The student must become someone new to understand what the old self rejected.
43. 06:07
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    I painted myself as two Fridas—the one Diego loved and the one he left. But really it was the young Frida and the older one, sitting side by side. The young one thought she knew. The older one actually knew, which is lonelier.
44. 06:21
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    Yes. Wisdom is often lonelier than ignorance. Ignorance has such confident company.
45. 06:27
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    So we do the work anyway. We tell students what they need to hear, not what they want to hear. We repeat the lessons we ignored. What else is teaching?
46. 06:36
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    It is the only honest form of vanity. To say: I failed this way, perhaps you can fail differently.
47. 06:43
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    Or fail the same way, but recognize it faster. Either way, they have to paint their own broken columns. We just tell them where we hid ours.
48. 06:51
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    Diognetus died before I became emperor. I think of that often. He never saw whether his teaching held under the weight of absolute power.
49. 07:00
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    Did it hold?
50. 07:01
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    Some days. Not all days. But on the days it did not, I knew it was failing. That is perhaps the lesson's real gift—not perfection, but recognition.
51. 07:13
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    Matilde died before my retrospective at the Louvre, before Mexico hung my paintings in the palace. She never saw me learn her lesson in public. But I think she knew I would. Teachers know.
52. 07:25
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    They plant seeds in winter and trust the spring they will not see.
53. 07:29
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    Or they paint a small corner of the canvas and let us finish the rest, badly at first, better later. Either way, the work gets done.