ART & WAR

On September 12, 2001, the image of Monet’s water lilies came to me. I could see the painting clearly in my mind’s eye. I could find no comfort in the world of friends or in my city or in the spiritual, nor in therapy or support group. I was drawn to the museum, and I listened to the voice. The Monet was in my body just as the World Trade Center was now in my body, remembered on a much deeper level. I had to see the painting at the Museum of Modern Art.

I’m not particularly fond of the Impressionists. I am not an authority on the period, nor do I linger long when at the museum to enjoy what I consider to be the superficial beauty of the brush marks and color, the swirls and dots. Yet the image came to me like a vision or a voice. I made my way to the museum, and that’s where I sat in front of the Monet. It was larger than a human form spread across the white wall, a still filmic image enveloping the viewer with its size and quiet and beauty. I was breathing a little easier, my body resting in this painting, so few people there. I was simply drawn there to be healed.

There I sat taking in another memory that could not be reproduced by television or books or being held by another. This was the memory of time before. Not before wars—there have always been wars and brutality, cruelty, and torture. Before images so tiny in comparison to the world itself had so much power over us. Were the wars more innocent then? There was a calm. Unlike in a photograph of nature, the hand of the painter was felt in that room as he painted brushstroke after brushstroke carefully with joy.

Beauty took on another meaning, not as superficial pleasantry, but utter necessity, a memory held to preserve us all. Yes, look, there was a time when planes crashing into buildings was not conceived of, when the atom bomb was not invented, and napalm did not melt the flesh of children, before the world of ideas and technology made us move and think faster than is natural, moving us out of the cycle of nature, the ebb and flow. Give me back my thinking and my body before yesterday.

Beauty. I was in search of beauty and silence. There was something magnificent and hopeful in that work. It had served the function that nothing else could. You see, yes, it’s possible, innocence and beauty. It was a photo of the consciousness of the world. It was our history just as surely as a book about politics or world history is ours collectively, or as surely as photographic images in a vacation photo album or the stories a grandmother tells of Eastern Europe or how your old friends remember you in childhood holds history. Yes, this held the history of human tenderness, kindness and beauty. This is a part of our history too. 

I left and proceeded in my days. The smell of smoke every night filtered through my windows for weeks. I coughed from the dust of the dead. My friends and I went to eat in Tribeca to support the businesses there. I felt like I was eating the dead with all the dust of many lives still floating in the air. I cried often, saying I was sorry, not finding the words for this experience. The rest of the world in shock and horror, those who had not experienced this firsthand, it was not in their bodies like an injury, a pebble lodged in your skin, and after healing, your body is different, its form has changed. Their grief would bring them to the place long cleared, a site where something new would be built, and then they, if they wished to, could go shopping at Century 21, one of the largest discount stores in the city. Oh, the outcries for war and blood revenge could be heard outside that small area of land where the modern pyramids collapsed.