Thursday I ducked over to The Clark early to hear a talk about Van Gogh, Nature and God. Full room, very attentive, many from the First Congregational Church in Williamstown. Interesting talk, given from a religious perspective of course, by Rev. Mark Longhurst of the First Congregational Church. While I didn’t agree with some of what was said, I understood the perspective.
Coming out of the talk, there was a serious line of people queued up to get into the exhibit. Another lecture attendee headed to the gift shop and I followed. She picked up the Penguin edition of Van Gogh’s letters and we had a short chat about the online letters which she did not know about. Then I took a chance and asked the guard nearest the “exit only” sign how much trouble I might get into if I ducked in that way. He allowed as the best pieces were in the last three rooms and he was sure I’d seen them all before anyway, so in I went. I didn’t wind my way back to the earliest pieces lest the people inching along there wonder where I’d come from but I did get a nice bit of time with the rest.
OK, quick aside which I wish I’d had the guts to hang out and research: How many people thought “Tulip Fields at Sassenheim” was by van Gogh rather than Monet? It’s ok.
Saturday morning, Mom and I got an early start and went back to Williamstown so she could take a tour around. We also took the shuttle up to visit Whistler’s mother and looked at other pieces by Whistler from the Clark collection. I thought it was darn impressive and the size was surprising. Afterwards we had lunch at the Moonlight Diner and called it a day.
Been thinking the past few days and today about Christoffer M. Carstenjen and Steve Adams two young men who were killed on September 11, 2001.
I’ll be spending today quietly, thinking and doing “normal” things. That’s always the contrast isn’t it, what had been normal and this instant where the world becomes something else, something unknown until now. Something perhaps unimaginable but now sitting quite real in the world, alongside us.
Here is an essay about poetry in times like this with with links to some good poems including “Photograph from September 11. (audio version)”
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 compelled me to rethink everything I thought I knew, and made me want to learn more, to read outside whatever borders I had created for myself. Not to be more American, but to be a better citizen, a better denizen of the planet. To go global and be local, to go ancient and be modern, to question all certainties and embrace what I did not know, to read Rumi and Isaiah, Rushdie and Roy and even Al-Qaeda, to listen to Springsteen and Kulthum, to refuse the elixir of fundamentalisms, to translate and be translated again by what I could not yet understand. To tattoo “Oye” on my body. To listen. — Philip Metres, Beyond Grief and Grievance, The poetry of 9/11 and its aftermath.
You can have anything you want if you want it desperately enough. You must want it with an inner exuberance that erupts through the skin and joins the energy that created the world.
