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| Rebecca Stewart - October 2007 |
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| Rosa 'Darcey Bussell' 5 September 2025 and my mother's red rebozo |
Ever since philosopher/writer Ramon Xirau exposed me to the teachings of Plato in 1962 in Mexico City, I have been affected and influenced by Plato's concept or the perfection of reality and that we humans are not able to see it. We are in a cave, tied to a stone bench, watching the reflections from the outside (the perfect world) on a wall.
When I read Aldous Huxley’s The Door of Perception and Heaven and Hell, I was jarred by what seemed to be an exception to Plato’s dictum. Huxley presented the idea that certain drugs could remove from our brain a filter that enabled us then to see reality unfiltered..
I have written about this a few times. Here is one link to the very few times I took drugs: Sister Icee
Through the years I have avoided drinking or taking drugs. There are instances in my past life where I thought I was seeing absolutes. In the late 60s Rosemary would drive our VW Beetle from Mexico City to Veracruz on Friday afternoons to visit my mother who lived there. The drive took us from the high altitude of Mexico City to an eventual sea-level. It was before Veracruz, in Córdoba, when it was close to nightfall when I would stop the car and change a little device in the carburetor that gave it more fuel as there was more air for it to handle. It was there where we would notice the green of the landscape and the smell of the humidity. I must have told Rosemary more than once that the green was an absolute green.
In San Francisco in 1967 when I went to see Jefferson Airplane, I saw a young woman sitting in a corner staring at a wine glass of what must have been crème de menthe. I suspected that she was dazzled by the intensity of its greenness while she must have been on the influence of LSD.
I am now happy to report that I have found another valve that can be removed from our brain that is drug free.
My roses (and perhaps other plants) when I scan them have an intensity of colour that I do think that my red roses are a perfect Platonic red.
My now gone Argentine artist friend Juan Manuel Sánchez painted every day. He began with a blank canvas. He told me that he wanted to resolve the problem of finding the absolute perfection that was woman. One day I told him that would it be that in some future morning he would simply put a dot in the middle of the canvas and that would define woman in perfection. With a smile he nodded affirmatively.
It was only a few days ago that in an old blog I noticed the portrait I took of my granddaughter in my studio in 2007. To me the dress and her expression combine to what to me is a Platonic perception without any filters.
The first scan features my mother's red Mexican rebozo. In 1952 when my grandmother, mother and I were living in Buenos Aires my grandmother became uncomfortable with the fact that Perón was burning churches. She sent my mother to Mexico City, where my mother's sister lived with the idea of reporting back if we should move. My mother returned with the rebozo (it is made of heavy and rough cotton) which was given to her by my Aunt Dolly. It significance is that it was dyed with the red produced by a special Mexican sow bug. The story behind that is in this blog below.
We did move to Mexico and the red rebozo has been with me since. It is in perfect shape. But then it is perfect.
