(Untitled)

Monet's Waterlilies

Robert Hayden

Today as the news from Selma and Saigon
poisons the air like fallout,
I come again to see
the serene, great picture that I love.

Here space and time exist in light
the eye like the eye of faith believes.
The seen, the known
dissolve in iridescence, become
illusive flesh of light
that was not, was, forever is.

O light beheld as through refracting tears.
Here is the aura of that world
each of us has lost.
Here is the shadow of its joy.

In my office, I have this poem printed out and hanging on my pinboard.  It was one of the first personal touches I added when I arrived in the stark little basement room to start my new job.  I wrote about this poem my senior year of college, focusing especially on the line that I am still convinced is one of the more beautiful ever crafted in the English language: “The eye like the eye of faith believes.”

Today, though, as I flipped over to the New York Times website to take a quick break from a project, that was not the line that came to me.  Today, it is the news from Boston that poisons the air like fallout, and I had a sudden need to “come again to see / the serene, great picture that I love.”

My serene great picture is a symbolist painting of an orchard.  I’m a Mannerist fan by preference and a Modernist student by trade (trade being a very, very loose term), but this particular painting is intensely important to me.  After I left my museum job for a graduate program, and realized graduate school sucks, I found myself on a regular basis trudging downstairs to the mental health services department at my university.  I had thought that the Boulder air would be like one of those Victorian spas—it would cure me of all ill-humors and palpitations.  When it didn’t turn out like that, I made my way back to therapy. 

In the lower level of the health services building, they had a small, low quality reproduction of that orchard painting.  I had liked it before I left the museum but hadn’t paid much attention to it.  It was actually kind of ubiquitous: we used it on some of the promotional materials in my department.  In grad school, far from the place I had belatedly realized was home, missing my job and my life in Boston, that painting came to stand for the things I missed.  I’ll admit: I would do some combination of pouting and/or sighing whenever I walked by that reproduction.  It became the shadow of my joy.

Through no small amount of luck, I actually ended up going back to the same museum to a different job after I graduated (though, admittedly, four months and a case of shingles occurred in the interim).  Now, when I’m having a rough day, or I just need a break, I go and visit that painting.  It’s not as huge as Monet’s painting at the MoMA, to which Hayden is referring, but it is serene, and it is great, and I love it.

And I needed it today.

What I found when I flipped over to the NYT website was that the Boston bomber had been given the death penalty.  When the bombs went off two years ago, I was in Boulder, but I felt my heart crack.  That Friday, when the city was on lockdown and the streets were eerily empty, I watched through the news at a distance.  I was so distracted that I came clean with the classes I taught that day: “My hometown is on lock down.  I’m no good to anybody right now.”

In the last several months as the trial has proceeded, I’ve heard about it almost every morning on NPR.  It’s odd to me to think that the trial has been a part of my morning routine since before the city was pounded by blizzard after blizzard—a succession of arctic Mondays—and now through to apple trees blooming and lilacs going gangbusters.  I don’t know why I thought the penalty verdict would take longer in coming, but I was taken aback when I saw the headline.  I didn’t bother finishing the article, but stood up, went upstairs to the galleries, and stood in front of my painting, shoulders hunched forward and trying to keep a straight face.

I’m one of the thousands—probably millions—of people on the outskirts of the Boston bombing.  I’ve written about how extremely lucky I was that all of my people were safe, and that I was able to get a hold of them immediately.  I make no claims to the caliber of loss that so many people have had to endure.  Still, as someone who loves Boston—and goddamn, I love this city—the bombing touched my life, and now, so has this verdict.

I don’t support the death penalty.  That’s such a broad statement to make, but it’s true.  In addition to the irrefutable fact that the justice system is not infallible, and is in fact in many cases deeply broken, I really just don’t believe that there is any justice in taking a life as the punishment for taking a life, or lives.  It’s a gross tautology.  And as the parents of one victim pointed out, the death penalty appeals and ongoing coverage will keep him in the news and those wounds open so much longer than if they had locked him up and thrown away the key. 

So often, it feels like the air is poisoned, that we are surrounded by such senseless, systemic violence.  Or worse, that the “sense” people use to rationalize violence is horribly perverted, that they think the system is somehow adequately self-justifying.  I try to think of what it feels like—“the aura of that world each of us has lost”—and sometimes it’s really hard to come up with.

I don’t have any articulate conclusions.  I haven’t really learned anything among my ruminations on Robert Hayden, paintings of orchards, and death penalty verdicts.  It’s a fucking mess.  

The eye of faith may believe, but sometimes the heart has a really hard time reconciling it all.