It is proving to be a difficult Lent. The news is so full of upheaval and suffering. Devastation. Desolation. World events before which we fall silent.
We want to respond, despite our distance, but we don’t know what to do. We don’t even know how to grasp all this suffering. Our imaginations seem poor. But we want to respond.
So we turn to prayer. We donate money. We feel lucky in our own safe lives, and we thank God for our families, hoping that our lucky feelings aren’t callous. We aren’t sure what else to do, but we walk with weight like those who grieve.
Yesterday, Blue and I went to the Museum. We went there to visit the Japanese Gallery on the upper floor. We weren’t the only ones there, but then, one seldom is in the Museum. But, because Japan is so much on all of our minds right now, it didn’t feel as if we were among strangers, either. It was easy to believe that everyone in that gallery was, in one way or another, thinking similar thoughts. The Japanese art couldn’t just be interesting, and none of us could just be interested spectators. The room was quiet.
I was hoping for dragons and Buddhas for Blue. Maybe some lions, too. These are things he likes to look at when we visit the Museum. The Buddhas were there, almost smiling and compassionately beautiful. And we found elephants with mighty tusks and wrinkling eyes. There were blue lidded jars and porcelain bowls from the seventeenth century. Everything took on a precarious, precious air.
At one end of the room, the walls were hung with early nineteenth century woodblock prints, many by Kitagwa Utamaro, who inspired the French Impressionists. Wonderful pieces, women with calm, calm faces, their features subtle, but so present in their own stillness. I was arrested by what may be considered the inevitable image. A triptych of women standing in the sea. Like the many other women in these woodblock prints, they, too, have calm faces, elaborate hair, and tumbling waves of clothing. Each panel holds three women, but the image is continuous. All nine women stand on the same beach. Some of them wear simple sandals on their feet, others have taken them off, and their bare toes can be seen sinking into the wet sand. On the right, one woman plays the flute. The red sun is setting in the background, and the land in the distance is green with low hills. The water is only black and white as are the women themselves. All the colour is in their clothes, the land and the setting sun. The sky is blank.
Here is a reproduction of this print from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. If you enlarge it, you can get a sense of the print, though I find that having the three panels set so closely together detracts from the nature of the triptych. One of the things I like about triptychs is that they are so obviously disjointed. Their form reminds you that you are looking at representation rather than reality. There are frames that direct your gaze, that invite you to consider the figures together. They set three-fold limits which establish us as the imagining audience.
This is what is lacking in the news hour images we have seen of the earthquake, the tsunami, the political unrest, the wars. Frames. With the sheer mass of images of devastation, we don’t know where we are meant to look. If we are meant to look at all. There is so much to see, and none of the chaos has been constructed for our viewing. We might all be focussing on the wrong things.
It is so hard to know.
