AT THE MUSEUM

When an English class assignment called for students to visit the MFA on our own and pick a painting that stood out to us for whatever reason, I found myself standing in front of John Singer Sargent's psychologically intriguing masterpiece from 1882, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit. I had never seen, or heard of this painting before that day, but the mysterious artwork, standing majestically on its own wall, in between the two vases depicted in the portrait, gave me an unsettling feeling which confirmed immediately that it would be the painting I would be writing my paper on.

It was also the main reason I wanted to bring Izzat to the MFA, as he was in town visiting, so he could see this unconventional painting in its original grandeur, and tell him its story. How all four girls in the portrait never married. Or that the two eldest sisters, standing in the shadows, the emblematic darkness closing in on them and signifying the loss of innocence and retreat into alienation, grew up to suffer from mental illness.

A chilling sort of foretelling, and truth, in which life imitates art, as Oscar Wilde would suggest, more than art imitates life.

TELL ME WHAT YOU SEE

Living in the depths of Boston, in the heart of the city, below street level where sometimes all I can see are shadows of feet walking past my windows, hear only the voices of strangers as they converse animatedly, and then fade away through the blinds which I never raise. Paranoia of people being able to see inside, see me on the inside, inside of myself, and the estrangement I embrace when I want to be left alone. I love the city, I am a part of its body. I am fast paced and rebellious and spontaneous, but I wont let the city destroy me. I don't want to be blasé, conscienceless, or conform to societal standards of cool and beautiful and normal. 

There is relief in living disconnected from the chaos above me, as it is generally difficult to find solitude in a metropolis. It is a solution for an inalterable city kid who often wishes she was made for the ocean, the mountains, or the trees.

The English art critic, John Berger wrote a bunch of essays which he compiled into the book, Ways of Seeing (based on a 1972 BBC television series) in which he discusses and argues about the different ways of how we look at things, primarily art, in today's dwindling culture that has lost meaning.

One essay discussed a painting by Italian artist Caravaggio, The Calling of Saint Matthew. This painting was largely connected to the underworld, a world Caravaggio was familiar with, and it was symbolized through the use of a single high-placed window in the illustration. His dark style of expression, as described by Berger, "allowed him to banish daylight. Shadows, he felt, offered shelter as can four walls and a roof. He only felt relatively at ease inside. The shelter it offers is only relative, for the dark reveals violence, suffering, longing, mortality, but at least it reveals them intimately."

Though I found Berger's essays really fascinating, especially the piece on Caravaggio, the last paragraph of that essay was what really struck me.

"...In the room at the top of the stairs, there is a window, giving onto the outside world. Traditionally in painting, windows were treated either as sources of light or as frames framing nature or framing an exemplary event outside. Not so this window. No light enters by it. The window is opaque. We see nothing. Mercifully we see nothing because what is outside is bound to be threatening. It is a window through which only the worst news can come."

(Berger, Ways of Seeing 1972)

METROPOLIS

January saw me traveling between cities and meeting with different folks.

After seeing the arrival of a new year with Angelica, I was on an early train to New York City, where I was subsequently swallowed into the pit of concrete and artificiality. Strange, that humans see the obstruction of nature and natural light  as acceptable in order to be city dwellers, where towers of glass and steel and brick trap us like rats in a hell-like enclosure.

The Dutch architectural theorist and urbanist, Rem Koolaas writes in his book Delirious New York - "the metropolis strives to reach a mythical point where the world is completely fabricated by man, so that it absolutely coincides with his desires." This would be truly remarkable only if man's fabrications in pursuit of desire constructed morality at the foundation of such a fantastic dream, but then that would be a contradiction for the most part.

New Jersey, on the opposite side, sits in lowly depression just the same.

And then off to Philadelphia.