I’ve been reflecting that the fruit/logical end to a culture based on power, property and prestige is an overweening cheapness, ugliness, homogeneity and banality; an oppressive force, monstrous in its seeming blandness but actually evil…militatating against vigor, humor, creativity, curiosity, interest, enthusiasm, spirit, life. Come, it says, fall asleep….
Understandably we want to anesthetize ourselves against the pain…blend in…belong to a tribe…It is probably one of the greatest gifts of my life that my own efforts in that direction led to an addiction so deep that I was faced with the choice either to quit or to die…
Of course I still have my own myriad ways to “fall asleep,” distract myself, avoid being awake. (And of course I also avail myself of the bits of culture that appeal to me: Is anyone else watching Wimbledon for the next two weeks?)
In the midst of it I march and careen and lurch about, eating my rancid snacks, inwardly laughing at my own jokes, and walking, always walking. Walking is the last redoubt or one of them against the “noxious paste,” the ooze in which so many sinners are mired in Dante’s “Inferno,” that wants to suck us into the depths of what can seem like a contemporary hell…
The treasury of art and museums in Washington DC were almost overwhelming. At the end of the day, what I remember best was chancing upon a little gallery tucked away to the right of the entrance (if you’re looking out to the street) of the East Building of the National Gallery. It’s called “The Nabis: Bonnard, Vuillard and Their Circle” or something like that and two small Vuillard paintings absoltuely captured my heart.
One is the title image above; the other is called “The Yellow Curtain,” c. 1893.
I am a thousand percent opposed to “minimalism” in interior decor. My whole life, whatever space I’ve inhabited, and even while drinking, I have spent a ton of time, thought, and effort into building and feathering a little nest (a friend once described my apartment as a grotto). Shelves full of tchotchkes, icons, postcards, holy cards, votive candles, Christmas ornaments in July etc are what “sparks MY joy” (vomit) and, chacun à son goût of course, but everyone I’ve known with an anodyne monochrome “aesthetic” (admittedy, a grand total of two) has a soul to match.
Anyway, so these homey domestic scenes of Vuillard with their rich but muted colors, their curtains concealing hidden treasures, their mirrors back-reflecting the rest of the room, their evocation of extravagant and carefully-tended inner lives, spoke to me.
Meanwhile, back in Tucson, I have just checked a book out of the library called The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig that is filled with inventive names for various emotional states we generally DON’T have a name for.
Right away I came upon “chrysalism”: “the amniotic tranquility of being indoors during a thunderstorm.”
Yes!
Even better, and maybe this is a separate word, is being indoors during a thunderstorm with the French door to your bedroom open and looking out through the screen to a yard full of twittering birds, waving agave fronds, snapping tree branches, the sound of rain on mesquite, sidewalks, and asphalt, the gentle humidity and the sublime smell of creosote, wet warm earth, juniper, and desert flowers.
A super special treat: this last rain the hedgehog (and other) cacti threw a pageant. In the ensuing couple of days seemingly overnight heavy with buds, and the day after that, when I crept out at dawn, all up and down the neighboring streets was a riot of bloom.
The next day, two at the most, the blooms look like wet tissue paper, fading away almost instantly to “nothing.”
A metaphor for life…but to my mind that brief burst of bloom speaks of God’s preference for maximilism, too.
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