this painting will save your life
Sometimes I gorge on life too hard and then I am stuffed, and my whole system needs a little bit of time to metabolize everything I have just taken in. I am currently a spinning rainbow on the computer, staring at the computer. I am a rainbow filled with east coast adventures, best friends, not enough sleep, art museums, a birthday, mini prints, a little Harry Styles and Bowen Yang, fears, overwhelm, anxieties, the remnants of the flu, and secret quiet longings for things I lost that I wish I hadn’t lost. I am learning to slow down and watch the spinning rainbow at the rate of an old dog, but I am trying.
I grew up looking at paintings. I come from a family that valued art, history, travel. My grandmother traveled to over 70 countries by herself in a time when many married woman were not lucky enough to do that, she went on archeological digs, bought a condo without asking permission in a little town in Portugal where I later took my first steps at the local discoteca. After every adventure my grandparents went on we would gather in front of the slide projector and watch hours of photos from their trip; every click of the slide changing slots another new fresh possibility of what a life could be.
One of my absolute favorite memories of being with my family as a child is sitting around the TV room’s big round marble coffee table eating Moo Shu Pork and playing Exquisite Corps. We would fold a piece of paper into several parts and everyone had a turn drawing until we opened it up to reveal one big family masterpiece. Celeste and I later went through a phase where we wrote poems together in this same way. I love these poems, they are filled with the melodrama of youth, and the symbiosis of a long friendship.
My mother had a voracious ability to soak in information, and when we went to any museum she would stand in front of EVERY piece of work and read the entire information plaque, even at The Louvre, even at The Scythian Gold exhibit, which honestly OMG GET ME OUT OF HERE; I still feel trapped thinking about it. I am not like my mother in this way, but the hours and hours we spent at museums taught me to wander, and daydream, and to allow myself to get unexpectedly caught up, to fall in love with images, brushstrokes, and the space between me and the hands that made them. I found so many parts of myself on those walls.
La Toilette by Toulouse Latrec was the first painting I fell head over heels in love with. I just stood speechless in front of it while other tourists snuck glances. I couldn’t articulate why I loved it, but I bought a poster and it hung on the wall of so many bedrooms after that. My mother and I always left museums with dozens of postcards, and our house was covered in them, like we were very tiny people living in the most decadent art museum in the world. I still always buy postcards when I leave a museum, it’s one of the many conscious ways I choose to have her live on within me.
It is my experience that grief steals language. This is true of many traumas, our access to the part of our brain that makes language gets blocked like a road after a gnarly storm. I didn’t have any language after she died. I walked around the world and I couldn’t stop telling everyone, my mom died, and then as I filled with shame and horror that it had slipped out of my mouth again, I’d add, my dad died right before that. My frustration at myself building as I was then forced to deal with whomever I just loaded this on trying to figure out how to handle it. Usually something like I am so sorry, followed by a very quick, it’s okay, because WTF am I supposed to say. I didn’t want sympathy, sympathy is the worst, I just didn’t have any other words to use. What kind of coffee can I get you? My mom died. Do you like this movie? My mom died. I was in a world I had to re-orient to 24/7. Those words were the door to the life that would come after. My mom died. Now what?
Seven moths after she died I rented a small studio apartment in Paris for two weeks. I hadn’t been to Paris since I was a teenager. I’d asked the universe where to go on my 3 month hiatus from being a therapist, and I heard Paris, and so I went. I was so scared to go to Europe without my mom, because Europe was where we had escaped for private mother/ daughter adventures, and I was afraid the missing would kill me. I was afraid of so much in a world that did not include parents, but I wanted to face my new and sudden fears. My mom died. My dad died. I am afraid. Now what? I was building new sentences.
I walked around Paris for two weeks and looked at thousands of paintings. I had a massive anxiety attack at Musee D’orsay. I took a minute, had a coffee in the cafe, wrote a fear inventory, did a prayer, checked that my legs still worked, and then went and looked at La Toilette again for the first time in decades. I was different, my life no longer looked like it had even last year. The things I’d wished for myself had not come true, but so many other beautiful things had. I cried looking at this painted woman on the wall, as the tourists did their predictable dance around me.
Those weeks in Paris filled with anxiety, walking, prayer, stomach aches, beauty, brushstrokes, helped to clear the road back to myself. I was grenaded, but every piece of art that resonated with me was like a stranger picking a piece of me off the floor and saying, here you go, I think this belongs to you. I learned in those weeks that beauty can save your life. I learned that the world can hand you back to your self.
A couple weeks ago I was at The Clark Museum in Williamstown, MA with my dear friend Alicia. I had never been, and I gasped in excitement when I walked into a large room that was a little replica of Musee D’Orsay in Paris. It was shiny and bright, filed with Renoir’s, Rodin, and Monet’s. I walked around and around soaking in the color and light. I ran out to tell Alicia about it. I had to force myself to move on to the next room. But then in one of the last rooms I saw it, a Toulouse Latrec painting that I had never seen, titled Waiting. It is also of a woman’s back, but her head is turned slightly sideways. There is something more sad and wise about this painting, it is lacking the feel of bravado that I loved in la toilette, but it is still so beautiful. I stood in front of it. I started to cry because there it was, and I didn’t even know it existed before this moment. I would be 49 in a few days. I am not in my teens anymore, people are not here that I wish were here, but this painting is here, and La Toilette is still hanging in Paris, Alicia is right here, and I am right here, alive, and falling in love with something I hadn’t even known existed before I turned the corner.
I think life is always waiting to save us and bring us back to ourselves. Our job is to make time to go to the museum, look around, wander, be curious about what we are drawn to, and let ourselves fall a little bit in love with something as many days a week as possible.
xxJ
La Toilette and Waiting by Toulouse Latrec
