darkelf105 | (no subject) (Reply)

Okay, so I can finally write about my experience in the Monet exhibit. This comes up because I was reading a passage from Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and I felt, so moved….but not moved in the sense of a Hallmark greeting card, more like removed, transposed from lying on my bed, being me, experiencing the world as I always do, and then suddenly, I’m not; the experience I am having isn’t like me, the words evoke something so utterly foreign, that I am changed, if only for a little while . And I was thinking about the beauty of the passage, about how O’Brien simultaneously punched me in the throat while soaring with me in the stratosphere and I was thinking about how this is what the Monet exhibit at the Cleveland Art Museum had been like for me, a romp in the clouds while having my rib cage cracked.

If you have never seen a real painting, a painting that is not some facsimile, then you have no idea what I am talking about. Until that day, I had never seen a real painting. I had of course seen “art”, even Monet’s, but they had all been reproductions, glimpsed through the filmy lens of my current pre-occupations: this class is boring, am I memorizing this painting right, oh, look, posters, flip through them, huh, there are paintings on these walls, back to my coffee, oh gee, my aunt picked up another painting at the garage sale and thus myriad pieces of “art” pass us by every day, veiled by our mundane world. I thought Monet would be the same and because I was so empty of expectations, I was filled with wonder when I finally rounded that first corner and saw my first real Monet painting. It was like being pierced in the lung. I lost all my breath and stood completely still. It hurt so bad, but at the same time was indescribably beautiful. My brain could not comprehend what it was experiencing. I have a word for it now, dissonance.

It’s almost impossible to put into words what that psychological dissonance was like. It was like having double vision. Reality had two layers and for the first time, I could see them both at the same time. One layer was what was literally there, the paint strokes and the canvas, the pigments, the dots, the whorls. Literally what I knew was there. But then there was the other reality, the reality that was trying so hard to make itself known to me that it hurt. It was this reality that was stealing my breath and causing my throat to shudder in shock.

There was paint and then the sound of the sea. There was color stroked, dabbed, swirled onto canvas, but I could feel the sun moving over the grasses and the shadow of the wind in trees. I was in the Cleveland Art Museum, but there was warm sun on my skin and I could smell raw stone. I was also in the French seaside. It was so physically real. An electric snap and movement through time in space in the blink of an eye--an exhalation of breath, and suddenly the world as you know is no more. You aren’t seeing what you think you are. A small square of canvas, brushed with paints cannot possibly contain a storm….and yet, here you are, the first rain spattering on your hair, the ominous clouds pressing down, their gray caught in your throat. I have never experienced anything like that outside of reading. It was like visual alchemy.

And thus I have my explanation of why I love to read. It isn’t just that the book I am reading transports me to somewhere different, it literally changes time and space, it transforms it. In a lot of ways it is like alchemy this double being we experience, the simultaneous being in two different places, the stringing of ourselves through two different worlds. Certainly, I remember tastefully cream and gray, high-ceilinged rooms with tidbits about Monet stenciled onto the walls in a curling font, but I also remember sunlight and seabirds’ calls and the swishing movement of grass, storms and the washing colors of sunset, turquoise seas and the gleaming white sails of boats. Two worlds, alchemy.

It was like the paint itself had something magical channeled into it. Each motion of the brush, frozen on the canvas, spoke of ghosts, of long forgotten energy and deliberation. It was like, because I could see the brush strokes, I was literally with Monet while he made them, but also simultaneously, I was in the world of his painting and standing in the air conditioning of a museum. It was dissonance, but also resonance. Something echoed back at me from those paintings, something spectral, but something vibrantly real, something solid enough to catch my breath and make me pause but also something elusive because until that day, I had never truly understood why people were so moved by art. Why people would die for beauty.

In further sundry news, I have a pimple and it won’t go away.