Banks and financial giants are failing. Everyone is worried about the price of oil and gasoline. War is translated and morphed from gunfire to body counts over the span of thousands of miles. Oh, and Andy Dick has been arrested again.
Seems like a good day for some music, literature and art.
Pablo Picasso's La Vie can currently be seen at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts’ exhibit, "Monet to Picasso," which is definitely worth checking out if you're in the Hive. That painting tore me down emotionally and then built me back up, completely refurbished, in the span of about fifteen minutes.
There is so much going on in the scene that has to do with grief, as though there is mourning on many different levels. This resounded deeply within me because, in my most melancholic times, what keeps me from being engulfed by the harshness of the moment is this: the knowledge that I am a being, aware of the world, able to experience the full spectrum of existence.
Whether it be joy, sadness, anxiety, or feeling whole, there also comes solace and beauty from all things. I may not understand in the moment, but ultimately I find gratitude that I am able to have a life of multivariate experience. That is what the painting brought to me.
The scene shows a somber couple looking toward a woman holding a baby. Between the four are pictures of people grieving, like the young couple, in the nude. This could represent generations of human suffering. But the baby, so innocently unaware of the sadness around it, is the hope that even in the bleakest of moments, there is opportunity to start anew and experience life all over again.
It brought to mind a quote from Douglas Coupland's Life After God, which I recently reread for the first time since my summer after high school:
"Time ticks by; we grow older. Before we know it, too much time has passed and we've missed the chance to have had other people hurt us. To a younger me this sounded like luck; to an older me this sounds like a quiet tragedy."
Black Kids - I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How to Dance with You
1 comment:
this, my friend, is good shit.
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