For my dad, who quit flying little Cessnas for safety when I was born, but can still teach his daughter a thing or two about planes

I.

If I had to tell you how to land a Mikoyan-Gurevich-29 fighter jet, I’d tell you they come in hot. Not like landing on a carrier hot, but still, with a high stall speed of 250 kilometers per hour, pilot, you’d better stay on that throttle until you’re damn close to the airstrip, even if you need to use the chute in the end. Granted, I am a thirty-something year old effete Brooklyn writer who would probably piss herself even just riding in the second training seat of MiG-29’s American equivalent F-16, and also can’t even drive, so you probably shouldn’t trust me on that one too literally. Metaphorically though, you should, because I’m doing a similar thing today. It’s 90 degrees Fahrenheit and the asphalt is spongy, and I’m heading to MoMA a little headachy from staying up late re-watching both Top Gun movies back to back. The room I’m going to is a small one that wouldn’t even fit a MiG-29. Gallery 515 houses three late Monets instead: Agapanthus 1914–26, and Water Lilies 1914–26 (the name of two separate works on facing walls). But a late Monet is like a MiG-29 in lots of ways, and here I’m telling you, you can watch him ride the throttle until the last possible second.

In Agapanthus 1914–26, Monet’s brushwork is the larger, cataclysmic version of his usual controlled small strokes. He comes in hot here too, skid marks on the runway. The degree to which Monet’s work as a whole acquired institutional legitimacy, even within his lifetime, makes it seem less daring, more dorm room poster in historical retrospect than it does in person. Strangely, late Monet retains the kind of shock jock seat-of-the-pants capacity his earlier work—though also done plein air and in short periods to capture real-time shifts in light—has been stripped of in its normative, unthreatening status as a museum stalwart. This is an unfair perception, but it just looks risky even when, because at this point Monet had a master’s control of his work, in some senses it technically isn’t. It’s like the stall, the moment in the air when forward speed is insufficient to sustain lift and the plane’s engines cut out. This seems like a catastrophe or a high-wire stunt, but it isn’t at all.

Stall speed is an important thing to learn for a pilot, especially the pilot of a MiG-29 that pulls tight moves in air-to-air combat. Fighter pilots learn how to specifically stall a plane on purpose and use the mechanism of pulling out of the stall to their advantage all the time. To stall a MiG-29 on purpose you pull the stick all the way back so that the pitch of the plane is near vertical in the air just as you decrease the throttle close to 250 km/h, while the drag on the front of the plane’s full face slows your speed. To pull out of the stall you change the angle of attack back downward again and, using the acceleration of gravity to your advantage, you go full throttle all at once, fast, and speed back up to closer to 500 km/h. In the terms of my normal world: this looks like a drag queen doing a death dive on stage, and is kind of a similar thing, but in a plane and with less eye makeup. In Monet’s late work, it’s where you can see those giant strokes on Agapanthus 1914–26 terminate without disappearing into the background paint, just the faintest tail end of acrylic clinging on to horsehair and the white primed surface of the ground. Pure stall, dead in the air.

And then again, he comes back downward, into the flower, thick and fast, slick spit-up green stem, full speed like it’s nothing. In both the MiG-29 and on the canvas, this is happening in real time. In the moment of an afternoon, Monet captures the Agapanthus in its flickering, flowering, hot-wet radiance in some field, and the room for error is pretty close to zero here. Except there’s no ejector seat on an easel, and once it’s set, oil lasts hundreds of years, so in a way, Monet can risk more than quick, explosive death. His risk is a posterity, and by the end of his career when his works were received with relative acclaim, he knew it. And he took the risk anyway, because he believed he was good enough to pull it off. That’s where brush jockeys and stick jockeys meet; a kind of brashness, a good gall, an overmuchness of faith in one’s self that could be really annoying if they didn’t manage to do what they did.

II.

I’m going to pull a stick jockey kind of move myself and swing to Rilke instead of Mallarmé, the expected water lily poetics for when it comes to Monet. In a dogfight, surprise is your ally. So too, in capturing the vagaries of light. In a volume published just after MoMa’s Water Lilies 1914–26, the one that curves around the small side-gallery’s wall, Rilke writes this:

Nénuphar

J’ai toute ma vie, mais qui la dirait mienne
me priverait, car elle est infinie.
Le frisson d’eau, la teinte aérienne
sont à moi ; c’est encore cela, ma vie.

Aucun désir ne m’ouvre : je suis pleine
jamais je ne me referme par refus, –
au rythme de mon âme quotidienne
je ne désire point –, je suis émue ;

Par ce mouvement j’exerce mon empire
rendant réels les rêves du soir
car à mon corps du fond de l’eau j’attire
les au-delà des miroirs …

Water Lily
(transl. Alfred Poulin)

My whole life is mine, but whoever says so
will deprive me, for it is infinite.
The ripple of water, the shade of the sky
are mine; it is still the same, my life.

No desire opens me: I am full,
I never close myself with refusal—
in the rhythm of my daily soul
I do not desire—I am moved;

by being moved I exert my empire,
making the dreams of night real:
into my body at the bottom of the water
I attract the beyonds of mirrors…

Nénuphar—unlike the English «water lily» or the German «Seerose»—is not a compound noun formed out of existing French words. If it sounds sensuous, foreign, exoticized, it’s because for Rilke, and Rilke’s particular French, it is: it ultimately comes from the Sanskrit. French Rilke feels more open and louche than German Rilke to me, the body at the bottom of the water splayed out to the sensibility of the world beyond. The MiG-29 has special intake vents on the top of the wings so that it can land anywhere, even on dirt runways, while an F-16 needs a spotless carrier deck or tarmac, clear of even a screw. There’s an intimacy there, the way Water Lilies 1914–26 has huge, rough white strokes that plumb the depths of its water, picking up the grain of the canvas beneath, an intimacy in and with the landscape’s light made possible by Impressionistic form. There’s an intimacy there, a cold metal thing of the sky wheels down in the earth of some makeshift field airstrip, with grass stippled like paint.

A sideways-ness applies to this same intimacy, to the glancing of light off of Giverny’s ponds. As for Rilke with nénuphar, there’s no lower deck cutoff, no closure of the self with refusal; the MiG-29 can fly low, engines as open as lily blossoms, closer to mountains, cliffs, and cities than any other comparable fighter plane. That is what supermaneuverability means; an «angles fighter» can take the edges of the landscape in stride, accommodate their difficulties, and render them an advantage. The way for me to know this, is in sideways language too: the manual for the MiG-29 is only declassified as the MiG-29E, the export version once flown by NVA pilots in East Germany, then used as part of a reunified German air force in the 1990s and translated again into English for American fighter pilots, who travelled to Germany to try them. NATO MiGs have a slightly different weapons and cockpit configuration. It’s the translated one we came to know; the normalized exotic, nénuphar from Sanskrit into French into German and English, those lilies on the wall at MoMA in big fat, round to ovoid, almost alien strokes, because immediacy has no literal translation either. They may look like lilies, too, but not if you come too close to the wall, when the red-pink blotch in the middle is like a targeting acquisition circle lit up and ready for missile lock. Then they look like they might be abstraction, infinite ripple, nothing that resolves into lilies at all, but remain just paint.