August often reminds me of a woman (a man?) of a certain age. As ripe as (s)he will be tending toward decay.
Emily, a young woman, rents a room from Edith, an aging widow.
"While she didn't consider herself an artist, or consider that she might become one, Emily like to draw and to paint. . . . She told Edith that the handsome male drawing teacher - there were no women teachers in the art department - had asked the class to copy two drawing of interiors from their Janson
History of Art book. I copied one of a room, I forget who did it, and the other one I chose was by Leonardo, of a fetus in a womb. When I showed them to my teacher he stared at the womb one for a while, and then he gave me a look. He said: "I said interior." I said, this is an interior. He didn't say anything for a minute and then he said, "When you're an old woman, you're going to be very eccentric." . . . Young people could be such purists, Edith thought - the womb as an interior. It made her smile inwardly. She like being around young Emily but she was happy not to be young, a feeling that she thought she'd never have, having heard about it years before, when she was young. Is this the way the body prepares for death, she thought as she rubbed hand cream on her fingers and economically patted the excess on both elbows."
Lynne Tillman, Haunted Houses, p. 67
I had a dream last night that a mother was showing a good pianist a composition her son had written - it started interestingly enough, with 4-part harmony but then devolved into single pitches indicated by letters scrawled across the page, as if the son'd gotten bored with the assignment and only finished it because forced to - something I can imagine myself having done as a young boy (or even now, I suppose). I heard him say he'd become interested in another project and as I tried to tell him to seek inspiration by going to museums and really looking at things - or by really seeing his surroundings when he was playing outside - the trees, the sky, the clouds - his mother was dragging him away because they were late for an appointment. When I woke up in the middle of the night after this dream I thought how typical this was of our world these days - people rushing to get somewhere other than where they are & having serious conversation imparted on the fly.
I spent today in the Longwood Medical area, with an MD appt. this AM & a vision screening this afternoon. In between time I toddled over to the MFA for some lunch & a wander around the galleries - stopped in the some of the places that I'd never concentrated on before like the Oceania exhibition that was outside the
Bresdin/Redon show I've visited several times already since it's so wonderful. I'd always breezed through that room en route somewhere else in the museum. I was amazed - some of the pieces you would have sworn were by some Art Nouveau artist, the detail work in the wood of other pieces completely wonderful. Also wandered through some of the pre-Columbian art on the ground floor of the new American wing, which floor I'd also never visited before - and loved the contemporary pieces they threw in here & there that related somehow to the much older pieces. There was also a room of mid-18th century embroidery work, off the pre-Columbian galleries, done by American women & young girls that was interesting, too. Then headed up to the
Arts & Crafts room & was waylaid in the gallery immediately before that wonderful part of the new wing that had works by the Boston School. I'm going to look some of those folks up on the MFA site to see how many of the images have been digitized.
I've been thinking about the hysteria overwhelming the news today about the current economic situation the world finds itself in & realizing how much materialistic it all is. As if not having the stock market going gangbusters, or the housing market perpetually rising is the end of the world. I suppose when a culture is shaped and fashioned by a love of lucre . . . I'm so lucky that I have my health, a small but at least steady supply of $$/month from Harvard, and that Andy & I have the wherewithal to be members of the MFA so I can just toddle in anytime I want to and absorb all the aesthetic inspiration I have the energy for.
Photos today from 25.May.2011
