It's the first time I saw the black smoke coming from the diesel engine some cars in front of me. The smoke drifted back far enough over my car for me to see it. Something new in a very familiar landscape.
Today is the last day of the month. March, starting tomorrow, hopefully will be the last month that I get to savor the familiarity before a new ones slowly sets in. There won't be many, if any, diesel engines on the trains coming from New York. I have never seen one leaving Grand Central, though the one I take to go home is a diesel one that comes from Grand Central.
The weekend since my last entry entailed a drive as a passenger to New Jersey, being surrounded by the little children of my sister, trying to be connected despite all my mental distractions, and before ending it with my favorite milonga of the week, I spent time in the future home city to which I will be returning in a month.
I didn't want to be alone in the city.
I knew I could. I knew from history I would always enjoy being alone there.
But I didn't want to be alone. I wanted to be with friends. I asked a couple of tango friends, but it was too last-minute for them. I wasn't disappointed, and I was glad I did it because by asking them they knew I was interested in connecting with them. I have already started "living" in New York. Nonetheless, I still ended up being alone.
And that was the fatalistic attitude I carried with me when I went to the Edward Harper exhibit at the Whitney. I never cared to go to that museum, even though it is one of the most famous and popular one in the city. I never cared for American art before the crazy modern stuff. I share the same stereotype that many of Harper's contemporary and past critics had about American art: that it was immature and uninteresting compared to the European art that carried a much deeper and older legacy. But Harper had always been an exception. And my visit allowed me to understand why. His most famous piece is the diner scene, where three or four customers were sitting at a corner diner not really noticing the empty streets cornering them. That had an effect on my since I saw it first on a textbook in high school. I didn't know the artist's name until much later. Now, he had a whole exhibit to himself, posthumously, of course.
I was tired by the time I got to the museum. I was tired from expending the last bit of energy with my crazy nephew and the increasingly crazy niece. Crazy because they are adorable kids. But their nuttiness exhausted my last bit of energy left over from all the mental work over the weekend. So I sat a lot for the less than two hours I was at the Whitney, but I was also able to enjoy the pieces with more attention.
In the end, I understood why Harper's paintings attracted me for so long, and still do. They are all about loneliness. They are everyday life stuff that was beaming with the big L word. I sort of knew that since high school with that one piece I saw. But I never understood how Harper did it. Ironically, it's the colors, the brilliant colors that highlighted the loneliness. It's the subtle distances between people that resonate with our own personal feeling of distances that divide us from others. It's the eyes. It's the very fact that these quotidian subjects reminds us how prevalent they are in our own lives. Most of the snapshots of our everyday events are the same, most carry no sense of hope and excitement. Most of us don't think about it, but especially for those of us who live in big cities as the subjects of his paintings do, we are reminded of this simple reality of the mundane life. Boredom and loneliness are twins, it seems.
The eyes don't show boredom. They are sad. They are uninterested in life. They are merely going on.
And I am not like that. I decided to enjoy my city despite having no one to spend those four hours with. I decided to walk into a falafel place carrying a heavy heart that for the third night this weekend I was having dinner alone. And I did it without self-pity; I did it feeling happy that soon I would be dancing, to be with people who may not be my friends but in their own ways cared because they connected with me, not as dancers on the dance floor, but just people with a few things to chitchat about. I saw one of the people I invited to have a bite before dancing but whose schedule didn't allow it. She was nice enough to call and leave a message telling me she couldn't do it but that I should remember her next time I wanted someone to hang out with before the milonga. That made me feel warm and fuzzy before going to the museum. And when I saw her, we exchanged a big smile. She and others gave me hopes that I could have some real friendships here, in this city of ten million, a city whose loneliness was betrayed in Harper's painting. I went into the museum with the same mood that his paintings carried, and yes, that helped me understand his paintings more, but at the same time, the paintings reminded me that I was an "exception", that despite my frequent feeling of loneliness, the self-pity, and frustration with romance, despite all this, I was able to see the contrast between me and the paintings. I was someone who loves having fun, who loves life, who loves human beings. It is with this attitude, despite a weekend mostly spent alone, I start a new week, a new month.
No comments:
Post a Comment