An afternoon at the MoMA
Perhaps I am starting to get comfortable again with museums, perhaps the Museum of Modern Art in New York City is just a really cool place to visit.
There was a big Dada exhibition at the MOMA: Sophie Taeuber, Marcel Duchamp, Jean Arp, Man Ray, Max Ernst, George Grosz and so many others. I wondered if Dada artists refused to take seriously art and power after World War I because they knew that no war or dictatorship is possible if people don’t take themselves and their leaders seriously. Alas, too many people took themselves, their nation, and their leader too seriously and the world was at war again.
The Paris section had a lot of interesting pieces. It made me remember of a high-school mate, whose nickname was Picabia, because he looked like French dadaist Francis Picabia (or was he a relative of Francis Picabia? I don’t remember). We were so cool and intellectual in high-school.
[Dont' miss the instructions on how to make a fauxtogram]
There are so many famous paintings at MoMA, one after another; it feels like being on a ring with Cassius Clay, and getting one punch in the face after the other. You want to get closer to each painting and get something more from it; the feeling of the brush strokes, the depth, the smell, whatever essence was left by the painter. You want to know that being in the presence of these paintings is much more than looking at a picture of them.
Because they don’t check your electronics, I had to walk around the museum with a white plastic bag that contained my iBook, iPod, Palm, and cell phone. The good and unusual thing is that they let you take pictures. Several people were taking pictures with their cell phone, so I started too.
This painting made me wonder: is it still art if it hurt your eyes when you look at it?
Technorati Tags: art, museum, MOMA, New York City, Dada, Picabia
Making peace with the voices in my head
One of my first blog exchanges was with with Jory Des Jardin discussing how women’s heads (or at least our heads) seemed continuously busy in an inner dialog about what’s going on, what we should or should not do, what’s right and what’s wrong.
Often, these annoying inner voices are talking about us. Like in those embarrassing situations in which a group of people talk in third person about somebody who is in the room, our voices discuss our performance, appearance, or an inappropriate comment we just made. Sometimes it’s just one loud voice, either disappointed with us, angry with somebody else, or sweet talking us out of taking a responsibility or achieving a goal.
It’s not always bad, though. A few years ago, I was going to a doctor appointment by subway. I was worried about the results of a medical test and I was trying to distract myself looking at the few passengers on the train. Suddenly, somebody was with me. Not a real person, but a real presence. She looked at me smiling and she told me not to worry, that everything would be OK. And she was right. It turned out that everything was OK.
At that time I was reading a lot about Kwan Yin, so I felt that she was a Kwan Yin kind of presence, loving and compassionate—she who hears the the cries of the world—who was reassuring me.
It was a strange experience. I’m a secular person. I was raised catholic in a country were saints routinely talk to people, but no saint ever talked to me before. I am into Buddhism, which is a non-theistic religion, and rather into the godless Zen version than the god-full tibetan version. Yet, that day somebody sat with me on the train, smiled, and told me that everything would be OK.
Of course the most likely and skeptical interpretation is that it was just me. If it was, it was a very different me than the voices in my head that I usually have to listen to, day in and day out.
Yesterday, I had another unusual aural experience. I was climbing a very steep hill on my bike, a stretch of road that only rarely I can climb without dismounting my bike. And I heard this voice, out of the blue, saying: “You can do it.”
Now, my usual voices would have said something like: “I think this is enough, maybe you want to get off your bike before you fall down or have a heart attack.” But this voice, firm yet supportive, just said “You can do it.” And guess what, I did it.
I feel that I’m still with the after effects of that experience. It’s a sweet supportive feeling that makes me feel good, gives me permission to love myself, and believes that I can do it.
My familiar bickering voices mean well, in their own ways. They are there to act out my fear of failure. Debating forever what’s right and what’s wrong provides me with endless justifications for all my actions. It’s hard for me to deal with the idea that I failed and it was my fault. I’d rather drown any perception of failure with the thousand reasons why I made a certain choice. Perhaps my choice was wrong, but I was right to make it.
Deep inside, I know it would work much better to take a little bit of time to weight the options, consult with others, do what I think it’s best, and learn how to apologize if it turns out that my decision what not the right one. Because in the end, all that debating doesn’t seem to produce better decisions, just better justifications.
But these other voices, the good ones, the loving ones, the supportive ones, the voices who believe I can do it, those I don’t yet recognize as part of myself. They talk to me with a different voice, one that I’ve missed for a long, long time.
You stopped and looked back
When, walking home from the party,
you stopped and looked back
were you making sure nobody was following you, or
hoping to see somebody approaching?
When you closed the door and turned the key
were you welcoming solitude, or
craving the world you left outside?
In the stone house in the suburbs,
were you cherishing the quiet isolation,
or missing the messy loud crowd of the city?
The sour-smelling dirty messy loud crowd
the intoxicating exhilarating
magnificent
crowd.
This so-called culture of life
Andrew Hinton writes a thoughtful and passionate post about George Bush’s first veto that will prevent the use of frozen embryos for stem cell research. In his post, Andrew questions where life starts, where life ends, and who decides it.
He also touches on the issue that I find the hardest to digest about this so-called culture of life:
This is a way for an administration that has championed so much death to doubletalk their way into being all about life, to hold onto their shredding political base by pandering to the ignorant, superstitious and misguided who keep putting them in office.
What does culture of life means for an administration that is perfectly fine with capital punishment, has started two wars, and at the present doesn’t seem particularly compelled to stop the killing of civilians (including children) in Lebanon? Why is the life of a fully formed human being worth less than that of a frozen embryo? Why is the concept of life so much more valuable than the reality of life?
It’s true, the practice of life is much less pure, innocent, and holy than the abstract concept of life. Real people live real lives, make mistakes, do stupid things, hurt, humiliate, threaten, and sometimes kill other people. Real people, differently from frozen embryos, do not symbolize the appealing concept of eternal life; they are born, grow up, get old, and die. They don’t represent the purity of the concept of life; they sweat, bleed, shit, smell bad, and get fat. Real life is a continuous dance with real death; growth is the other face of decay.
But real people also love, nurture, and protect other human beings. They are loved, nurtured, protected by other human beings. They miss other humans beings and they need closeness and physical contact. They are part of a net of relationships, human connections, and social exchanges. They line up in a temporal sequence of births and deaths for generations and generations and hold the memories of those who came before them.
Whatever philosophical reasoning or ethical believe we hold, we cannot dismiss the smelly, bloody, sweaty, and infinitely endearing nature of our messy life. This is the life that a frozen embryo, sadly, has never experienced and almost certainly never will. This is the life that we can and must protect.
There are a few things we can all agree on…
It’s not yet established with certainty whether Mr. Bush likes black people or not, but we know for sure that in the past he has declined several invitations to speak at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In 2004, he defined his relationship with the NAACP as “basically nonexistent.”
But in this world everything changes, and today the President appeared at the NAACP for the first time since his election. The atmosphere was reserved and suspicious; several seats in the front rows were empty. The President had a much harder time than usual generating an applause. But then his audience unexpectedly delivered an enthusiastic endorsement of Mr. Bush’s message. When the President said: “And I understand that many African-Americans distrust my political party,” the crowd cheered and clapped in loud assent.
A lion in the house
I didn’t have any intention to watch Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert’s documentary A lion in the house that aired on PBS last Wednesday and Thursday. Who in their right mind would want to watch a documentary on very sick kids going through cancer treatment? Especially with no reassurance that, as it usually happens in TV, they will survive and get better.
And yet last Wednesday, flipping through channels, I could not resist going back time and time again to PBS. Even if it was painful to watch, there was something in that documentary that made it impossible for me to avoid.
For once, it was true life and therefore thoroughly engrossing. No fake reality TV, no boring celebrity stories, no stupid and wasteful challenges to win and competitors to eliminate. It was real people dealing with real life-and-death events and decisions. And differently from other TV shows, these events and decisions are relevant to my life and instructive.
It was also a necessary look at what we constantly try to escape but we want to know everything about: sickness, pain, death. In a seldom visited but always awake region of our mind, lies the awareness that at some point we will have to confront these less glamorous aspects of being alive; and yet we live in absolute denial. We have so many questions about death and they scare us, because death is so unknown and yet never talked about. How is it to get sick and die? How does it feel? How does it smell? And the unthinkable: what happens to our life when our child get very sick?
(Sometimes I think that the reason why people are so attracted to car accidents is not just sick curiosity. Perhaps it’s the fundamental need to get a glimpse of injury and death, because they are so close to us but so mysterious. We may meet them one day, and we won’t be prepared.)
As painful as it was to watch Bognar and Reichert’s documentary (at some point I was sobbing so loudly that I worried people in the next house would hear me and call the police), it was also surprisingly reassuring. To witness the stories of those children and their families was a step closer to admit that death is part of my life and that I might be able to get through it as I got through other difficult events. Stopping to think about death was nurturing, because to be reassured about death is such a profound and denied need. We feel so lonely in the face of death, because death is not part of our social experience. And yet, watching A lion in the house it became clear to me that dying in the presence of people who love you makes it sweet and almost bearable. Finally, it gave me permission to think that if kids can handle sickness and death with such dignity and grace, maybe I will be able to.
There were many surprises and lessons in A lion in the house. For example, the only thing those parents seemed to regret was continuing treatment even when it was clear that it was not helping (which suggests that losing dignity and suffering in vain is worst than just getting sick and dying). How the most heartbreaking stories were the ones of the older kids, not of the younger ones, because the awareness of death and sickness was more painful than just death and sickness. (Buddhism teaches us the difference between pain and suffering, but seeing it in real life is all another matter). How parents broke down not while they were dealing with their kids’ sickness and death but after it. Because when they were struggling for their kid they had hope and they were doing something, but afterwards they were just surviving.
Some of the medical staff at the Cincinnati Children Hospital were amazing. By the end of the documentary, I wanted to have Dr. Robert Arceci as my doctor, friend, father, and president of this country.
In the end, the lesson is that death is an inevitable and painful but natural physical event, even when it happens to children. As hard as it is to look at death in the face, it’s much less scary than pushing our fear of death away, and dealing with the dark unconscious panic that comes from constantly having to hide from her.
Flowers are not boring
In the world of marketing and cool stuff we live in, people and things can become hugely popular in a moment and then be rapidly forgotten. We buy stuff, and then we buy more stuff, and almost everything we buy breaks fast to leave space to the new and improved, version 2.0, turbo model of the same crap. We work too much to earn money that we spend to buy more and more stuff (unless we don’t have enough for the essential things, in which case we work too much just to survive; but where is the boundary between essential and non-essential in a world where appearance and social acceptance are essential part of our success?).
We live in a world of marketing impermanence.
Every spring, I look at the flowers and I am amazed. Every year they look the same but they are so beautiful, one can never get tired of them. They show up for a little while, then they disappear, leaving us craving for more, and every year they come back.
Flowers are perfect, short living, fragrant, elegantly dressed up in beautiful outfits (white, yellow, bright red, purple…). Probably everything we humans have learned about beauty we learned from them.
I love bulbs, because they are so loyal and independent; they hide most of the year, and then they catch us by surprise, appearing on their own where there was nothing. And they make us happy like a surprise visit of a dear friend.
Flowers are impermanent too, but in such a different way than a product that is cool one day and useless the next.
So different, yet the same
Today I ate my lunch outside. It was a warm, breezy spring day, one of these perfect days that we experience rarely in a year. The sky was blue, the trees full of white and pink flowers, the air felt and smelled sweet, and the breeze was just cold enough to make me appreciate the warmth of the sun.
It occurred to me that about 30 years ago I was having the same identical experience. I was in high school in Rome and that spring day I decided to eat lunch with a few friends in park. I was so much younger, I lived in a different city in a different country in a different continent. The world around me was different and I had different dreams and concerns. For all intents and purposes, I was a different person.
Yet the feeling of calm—as if time had suddenly slowed down and almost stopped—and awe at the beauty of that particular moment were the same. Perhaps there are feelings that don’t belong to us and cut through time and space, and are just there to be felt. Perhaps enlightenment is when we can quiet everything else inside us and outside of us and just be inside these unchanging experiences that are just there waiting for us to notice.
Evelyn Rodriguez on Art and Ambition
Evelyn Rodriguez quotes Prabda Yoon, a writer from Bangkok who, among many things, led two drawing workshops for the victims of the Tsunami:
It would be difficult to find an ugly artwork by a child. That is probably because when a children make art, they don’t begin with an idea in their heads that what they are doing is making art.
Evelyn writes:
Perhaps ugliness springs from ambition (…) The quality of children’s art is that it defies all the annoying artistic ambitions held by most adults; the sorts of ambitions that turn art into making a career, or a self-serving, egotistical expression far removed from acts of creation inspired entirely by nature.
Tags: Evelyn Rodriguez, art, therapy, children, adults, ambitions
Snowstorm in April
After a few days of full warm and sunny spring, this morning we had a surprise snowstorm. Everybody in my office gathered around the window and watched incredulous the snow falling heavy, twirling in the strong wind. It didn’t last very long. But it reminded me how much power weather still has on us, even with all our air-conditioned glass buildings, excessive energy consumption, and unfounded feeling of control. Thankfully, Nature still has us.
Chronicle of an unplanned trip – Part I: We interrupt our normal programming…
March 15, 6:00 PM – SM calls me at work. He had some problems at work in the last few days, so I assume he is calling to talk about it
"My mother called," he says. SM always talks to his mom or to his sister about things that upset him. His mother probably had some reassuring piece of wisdom to share with him.
"What did your mom say?" I ask.
"My Grandma died. They found her today in her home."
"I am so sorry," is all I can say.
That was the beginning of a week-long interruption of our fairly uneventful life. In the following days we flew to a place I’ve never been before, for the death of a woman I’ve never met in person. It turned out to be a longer and more adventurous trip than I expected. Traveling through space was just a small portion of the experience (although it took two days to get to our destination). We moved across time and cultures. I witnessed the emotional journey of people I love trying to cope with Sarah’s death (the ups and the downs; laughing to tears at the memories; crying at the sudden awareness that she is not here any longer for us and she won’t come back). I learned about the procedures we use to sanitize death, making it at the same time much cleaner and much more disturbing. I had to face the paradox of human death: it’s so certain and yet finds us so thoroughly unprepared.
If it lacked the raw pain and devastation associated with the death of a loved one, Sarah’s death was a powerful reminder that there is more to life than our incessant running around stressed out and out of breath. Questions that are usually left at the bottom of our consciousness, ran rushing to the surface: what is the meaning of our existence, what should we do with our life, what is the experience of dying, what death does to the people who survive, what is left of our existence after death. Death is the most extreme and terrifying experience of irreversibility. The awareness that our own death awaits us at the end of the road shapes our lives even if we deny it and try to forget.
When people die, those who knew them keep them alive by telling stories. For a short period, the rushing and background noise of worries and thoughts subside and we allow ourselves to listen. Stories are triggered by a word, an object, a picture, a document, a newspaper clipping, a chain of shared memories in which each story leads to the next. Forgotten events and secrets are discovered in a scrapbook or in a letter. Time warps and leaps back and forth.
This is how I learned about Sarah: by listening to the continuous narration of people who knew her. Sarah was not there in person but she was taking up residence in our mind: our constant conversation about her filled the absence with a surprisingly vivid representation of her. People talked about her and at the same time they talked about themselves: about the pieces of her forever stuck in their soul. The Sarah we were experiencing was not the same person who was here in the flesh a few days earlier, but was not less real.
All the stories about Sarah and her family play as an accelerated course of popular American history and create a complex a network of events, relationships, causes and effects. By looking at the life of another person is easier to realize how our lives are shaped by our time, family history, and external events we don’t control. Perhaps our own choices make a difference in our life. But when we look back at our past, things are just as they are: an organized series of irreversible events leading to us on this day.
Later, the same Wednesday
6:10 PM – SM hangs up. I think how we never got around to visit Sarah. SM had not seen her in more than 20 years and I’ve never met her. Our life had been too narrow to include her: in the last 10 years we had either too little money or too few vacation days to travel to Michigan, or so we told ourselves. Deep inside, we both know that the true reason has little to do with money or time. SM’s family moved progressively away from small town Alpena, first to Ann Arbor, then all the way west to the San Juan Islands, near Seattle. They moved away from their past and their family history; Sarah–fierce, independent, hard, and passionately attached to her place–was left behind. Sarah visited them West a few times, then the contacts became fewer and farther apart. Except for Emma, who traveled to Michigan every year during the summer to stay with her mother.
9:30 PM – Back home, we start planning for the trip. K, from the Bay Area has already reserved a rental car at the Detroit airport. We find tickets on Southwest to fly to Detroit in the morning and SM makes a reservation for an hotel by the airport. In Seattle, Emma has already bought her Seattle-Detroit plane ticket. SM sends an e-mail to Brent: we won’t make it to his New York City wedding on Saturday. SM is sad about it, even more than I am. A lot of people from our University of Oregon days that we have not seen in years would be there. I check my work schedule for next few days, cancel meetings, and send e-mails. SM does the same. In about 1 hour we have made all the necessary arrangements for the trip. In different circumstances, inertia, procrastination, and excruciating planning would get in the way and our day-to-day duties and routines would trap us. But today, everything seems almost too easy.
11:00 PM – SM and I talk more about Sarah. Last time SM went to Alpena he was 23 years old. He is 45 now. SM asks: "What does it mean to visit her only now that she is dead?" What make us lose contact with significant people in our life? Why don’t we pick up the phone any time we think about someone we haven’t seen in some time? I know so well that feeling of paralysis that sometimes gets over us when we think about somebody we miss. I play in my mind all the actions required to call them (go to the computer, open up Address Book, look up their number, pick up the receiver …), then something stops me, I turn back and get to the next thing. It’s almost to preserve the memory of them without tainting it with the reality of a new contact, the fear or laziness to have to recreate a connection that has not be there for a while. Stupid, I know. Worse: mean, because it denies others the recognition that they still exist for us, we miss them, and we enjoy their presence.
(More to come)
Tags: life, death, family, connection, memory
Kitsch, Propaganda, and the Denial of S–t
(Also titled: My all too real existential angst as eruditely expressed by Milan Kundera)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
[My Italian copy got lost when I sold my house in Padova. At that time, I was still a student in Oregon and I didn't have time or the money to go back and clean up my stuff before selling the house. The friends who rented my apartment until few months earlier were kind enough to take care of the house sale as well as to pack what was left in my home and give it away. This is how I lost, among many things, my book collection.]
The copy we own looks like a used book, and has a dedication: "March 1st, 1995. To S., A.," which means that this is the first present I gave my husband for his birthday. Usually the first gift I give to friends and lovers is a book, and it’s not a disinterested present: it’s an attempt to communicate something essential about myself to them.
[For many years, the book I gave as first present to people I cared about was Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince.
Back to the Unbearable Lightness, I realized that my obsession had to do with the description of totalitarian kitsch in chapter six, The Grand March. In typical Kunderian fashion, Kundera starts by talking about shit.
The fact that until recently the word ’shit’ appeared in print as s— has nothing to do with moral considerations. You can’t claim that shit is immoral, after all! The objection to shit is a metaphysical one. The daily defecation session is daily proof of the unacceptability of Creation. Either/or: either shit is acceptable (in which case don’t lock yourself in the bathroom) or we are created in a unacceptable manner.
It follows, then, that the aesthetic ideal of the categorical agreement with being is a world in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist. This aesthetic ideal is called kitsch.
‘Kitsch’ is a German word born in the middle of the sentimental nineteenth century, and from German it entered all Western languages. Repeated use, however, has obliterated its original metaphysical meaning: kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and figurative sense of the word; kitsch excludes anything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.
Then, Kundera goes on to describe totalitarian kitsch.
Kitsch is the aesthetic ideal of all politician and all political parties and movements.
Those of us who live in a society where various political tendencies exist side by side and competing influences cancel or limit one another can manage more or less to escape the kitsch inquisition: the individual can preserve his individuality; the artist can create unusual works. But whenever a single political movement corners power, we find ourselves in the real of totalitarian kitsch.
When I say "totalitarian," what I mean is that everything that infringes on kitsch must be banished for life: every display of individualism (because a deviation from the collective is a spit in the eye of the smiling brotherhood); every doubt (because anyone who starts doubting details will end by doubting life itself); all irony (because in the realm o kitsch everything must be taken quite seriously); (…).
And here is the quote I was desperately searching, which describe Sabina’s style as a painter (where is the search button in a book when you need it?):
"In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions. It follows, then, that the true opponent of totalitarian kitsch is the person who asks questions. A question is like a knife that slices through the stage backdrop and gives us a look at what lies hidden behind it. In fact, that was exactly how Sabina had explained the meaning of her painting to Tereza: on the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth showing through."
A lot of science fiction has dealt with this type of unsettling feeling: that reality is not what we perceive; that an unbearable truth is hidden from us by an illusory and reassuring lie (think The Matrix; We,
This is also how I feel. I feel as I inhabit a double reality. On the one hand, I see the nice, reassuring, positively spun truth of the political/corporate propaganda, where people who can make decisions are doing a good job, thinking big, taking responsibilities, and acting fairly while we work happily for the common and greater good. At work, we are paid well, our benefits are good, people leaving the job have found "a better opportunity" elsewhere, and we all march together towards the corporate ideal of perfection.
On the other hand, I cannot get rid of the fastidious realization that things below the surface are not always the way they seem. Through the cracks, I can see unintelligible truth of mismanagement, failures and wrong decisions never addressed, personal responsibilities never accepted, favoritism, and unfair treatment. Nobody wants to hear it. Not the people who can do something to fix it and not even the people who suffer from it, because accepting this realization is painful and would force us to make difficult choices. I wish I could avoid it, but I can’t; I don’t have any choice than seeing what is in front of my eyes. I can see too clearly cracks in the orderly and neat picture revealing a messy and chaotic world underneath, and I feel trapped.
Perhaps I’m just making it too melodramatic. "This is life, my dear, and you should just be able to deal with it." Perhaps I’m too much of an idealist. "Stop thinking about fairness and justice and just do your work. This is a contract, pal, not an utopian revolution."
In the end, Kundera says, there is more to kitsch than totalitarian kitsch. Kitsch is a touching, human reactions to the harshness of reality, a salvation from the inconceivable realization of loneliness and death.
Though touched by the song, Sabina did not take her feeling seriously. She knew only too well that the song was a beautiful lie. As soon as kitsch is recognized for the lie it is, it moves into the context of non-kitsch, thus losing its authoritarian power and becoming as touching as any other human weakness. For none among us is superman enough to escape kitsch completely. No matter how we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.
Tags: kundera, unbearable lightness of being, kitsch, awareness