happiness is a state of uno chiyo

Whenever I read Uno Chiyo's story "Happiness" I think of the pictured Ukiyo-e tarot card -- and if you like tarot decks, the Ukiyo-e is a really beautiful one that connects with Japanese legend and symbolism as well as elements of nature. The opening of "Happiness" is:

Every time Kazue gets out of the bath, she stands in front of the mirror and examines her naked body for a moment...She thus notes her resemblance to Botticelli's Venus. There is the similarity in the way that she is standing although no sea shell supports her. She also has the same feet and slightly rounded stomach.

As you read on, though, you learn that Kazue is seventy and really not insistent that she resembles Venus at her age -- but she also doesn't seem to care. Kazue's detached, fairly oblivious optimism has served her well through many difficult years. She allows the possibility of still being Venus because of her failing eyesight and because the steam from the bath pleasantly blurs her mirrored view, and she otherwise "collects fragments of happiness one after another, and so lives, spreading them throughout her environment. Even what seems odd to other people, she considers happiness."

Uno Chiyo would have been 110 this week; she almost lived a full century, dying in 1996 at the age of 98. Married many times and fond of falling in love, she certainly did live fully and most likely thought of herself as resembling Venus after her bath even at the age of ninety.

georgia and eugene

This is a portrait of a young Georgia O'Keeffe, done when she was enrolled at New York's Art Student's League, circa 1908. The painter and Georgia's fellow student was Eugene Speicher, who had asked Georgia repeatedly to pose for him; when she kept refusing he noted that she might as well let him do her portrait since he'd probably become famous while she would just end up teaching art to girls someplace. Georgia took that insult quietly and sat for the picture; she looks really cute at that age and her hair is short and curly because she had recently gotten over a case of typhoid so severe that it caused her normally long straight locks to fall out.

So what became of Eugene Speicher? He was a success, particularly as a portrait artist, but I don't think he was honored with a U.S. postage stamp or made it to the White House to be honored by good old Ronnie Reagan. I wonder how he felt even back in the 1920s when O'Keeffe's floral paintings were fetching huge sums of money. Or whether she made sure to send him invitations to her exhibits, and whether he cared to receive them or not.

But you know, to this day there's always a lot of joking around in college and/or art school betweeen the sexes and maybe Speicher was just teasing Georgia. I like his portrait of her, and apparently he painted it rather fast--maybe because he was already quick and skilled with a brush, or maybe because he sensed Georgia really didn't feel like loitering around playing muse to his artistic presence.