on a lighter note

Paul and I went recently to MoMA. They've moved some paintings since I was last there; I missed seeing Klimt's Forest but delighted in the Pollack room where my eyes feasted a long while. (above, detail from "Full Fathom Five")

Is it odd or fitting that it was in this museum of visual art that I discovered how easily the world can be deprived of color?

One hallway, on the third floor I believe, was drenched in yellow light. All other colors vanished. I tried to remember how colors work... Ah yes, blue lets in all the colors except blue which it reflects back. So what if there is no blue in the light? In this case, everything -- faces, clothing, hands -- was in gray scale of yellow to black. No orange, red, pinks, purple, blue, green or white. It was awful.

If I were ever captured and jailed in some distopian future, that would possibly be the worse punishment. I did not know this was possible without prior injury to my eyes or somesuch.

It surely made me hunger for color immediately -- Paul and I raced through the long pool of yellow light to the other side of the corridor where colors returned.

I need all my colors. The deep purples and the soft greens and sunny oranges. They feed my eyes and my soul. Sometimes I envy the birds' and the bees' ability to see even more colors than I do. Not one color less will do, no, not even one less.

random act...

Sometimes beauty hurts

Running to make a commuter train connection recently, I was accompanied through the station by Eric Clapton's Tears in Heaven. That extraordinary song goes right through me, undoes me. I’d like to see it come off radio playlists. Clapton himself says he 'can't play it anymore' because he does not want to manipulate audiences unfairly.

Rushing for my train, I had a choice -- keep my word and my appointment and shut down my emotion, or slow down and listen and mourn.

I caught my train. But I don’t like making that choice. I don't want to be sheltered from the sorrow and pain of the world. But the sorrow and pain of the world are not mild entertainment.

I feel a rant coming on now, one about societal de-sensitization, the exploitation of suffering for TV thrills and advertising dollars and the potential resulting loss of outrage and compassion when it counts.

But that’s not why I’m here. This blog is not for ranting – it's for finding beauty.

Deep breath. There’s something my mother used to say, when one of us hurt ourselves playing. ‘It hurts Mama!’ ‘That’s good,’ she’d say, as she put the bandaid on, ‘if you can feel it, that means you’re alive.’

Does that sound slightly depraved? It was confusing enough to get us to stop crying.

That said, her words are true: I’d rather hurt than be dead, in any sense of the word.

Because more than mama told me, I’ve learned that the places where it hurts, are the places alive to joy as well.

So if Clapton riles me in the train station, maybe I'll just Let It Rain all over my afternoon blues. Click there and join me, would you?