gustave courbet, waves...

let me go way back for a minute, to my inspiration to start keeping this weblog. the week i got out of the hospital, my dad came to visit. i don't think anything could have been better than having him here. he went through so much of this with my mother and he's always had the wisdom and perspective that i lack to help me keep things from getting bigger than they need to be.

one of the things we did while he was here was to make use of my VIP tickets for the "manet and the sea" (or as dad called it, in one of his groan-worthy but terrific moments of wit, "old manet and the sea") exhibition at the philadelphia museum of art. dad enjoyed it, but i found the exhibition to be colossally boring. part of it could have been that i was feeling miserable and depressed and overwhelmed and exhausted on the day we went to see it, but i've spent a lot of time in that art museum and i can say objectively that this was not one of their better shows. besides, old manet's paintings were only about 30% of the works on display. the others were done by his contemporaries or by folks who some curator decided inspired his seascapes somewhere along the way.

we got the audio tour headsets so we could migrate ever-so-slowly with the masses of people who also got the audio tour. i didn't use mine. it was nice and quiet in there with everyone else listening to their headphones. i'm not one for impressionism and i lose patience quickly with crowds. and this situation was exacerbated by my inability to see to my right (have i even mentioned this yet? the tumor is has limited my sight so i have no peripheral vision to my right. instead of having a normal field of vision, i'd say i'm probably at about 80%. from what i can tell, this is not likely to change any time soon). major exhibitions at major art museums are so clumsy. the works are laid out with a path in mind, generally chronological, but you end up bottlenecking with the same folks listening to the same audio tour spiel and you never really get any peace.

so i wandered around, checked out the paintings with the smallest crowds, took advantage of the spaces where they became available. and i found myself face to face with a painting that brought me to tears...

"waves" by gustave courbet, 1869. i will freely admit that i don't understand visual composition or the balance of color or chiaroscuro or pointillism et cetera, but this painting filled me with a sadness that was so familiar to the sadness i was already feeling. the image is simple--giant waves crashing on a sandy beach, empty except for a small deserted boat. you can see other boats way off in the distance. but what got me was the sky--it was blue at the top of the canvas, but as it fell to meet the sea, the clouds congested and darkened, making this mess of sea and weather and blue and grey right in the middle of the image that made me want to dive right into it.

it was like the beginning of _the voyage of the dawn treader_, the painting in lucy's room. it struck me and i must have stood in front of it for 15 minutes. it was so beautiful and i felt so small and so...
...afraid.

i walked around a bit more in the exhibition, but i kept coming back to the courbet. so many thoughts were in my head and i realized that things are going to happen to me in this whole brain tumor process, i'm going to feel things and see things and do things, and it's probably a good idea to start writing those things down. i said in an e-mail to valerie sayers last night that i want this experience to change my life. i don't really know how one goes about changing one's life, but i would think it is something that happens one step at a time, and probably pretty undramatically for the most part.

so that's that. emily's brilliant how-i-survived-brain-cancer weblog, inspired by a silly painting. though, it seems that it's always the small things that move the most mountains. we'll see how this goes.