the mhyana family: art

There are pigeons and love-birds all around Paris' famous Notre Dame Cathedral. Oh, look, here's a couple of love-birds snuggling in front of the wood and calligraphic metal door of the cathedral. Can you hear them cooing? Can you hear the mighty organ reverberating ecstatically through the stone walls of the gothic cathedral?

Inside, the cathedral is glowing with candles and faces turned to god, burning passionately. Everything rises. Far above us, in the pocket of heaven tucked into the angles of the cathedral ceiling, our prayers took wing in the dark warm spaces. A little bit of this hallowed atmosphere entered our lungs, then released itself back into the respiratory system of the cathedral, each of our bodies a minute bronchi in the breathing in and out of this great stone spirit.

This was a brilliant day and night! Oh man, it's the stuff of dreams! We spent time at the legendary Shakespeare and Company English-language bookstore, where we saw a poetry reading and where the kiddos curled up on an old couch with the resident puppy. Then, just literally a hop, skip, and a jump across the river and voila! We were at the Notre Dame cathedral!

We visited the cathedral in 2005 too, but it was closed...so we hung out with backpackers, tourists, and all sorts of colorful characters late into the night watching street artists and fire jugglers. This time, though, oh man...not only was the cathedral open, but there was a midnight mass in progress (serendipity - my true religion!!!) when we entered, replete with organs and the sound of many voices raised like wine to god. After this heady experience, we had a scrumptious picnic while watching a street performer juggle and blow fire. Every time I look at this picture (above), it evokes these memories.

On a sophomoric note: in this picture (above) Phil's backpack looks like a futuristic jet pack, the twin "jets" of the French bread about to propel them across the Seine. It cracks me up!

With full hearts and souls and bellies we strolled around the Left Bank as long as we could before collapsing. It's a sacrilege to waste time sleeping in the city of lights...so we traded a bit of sleep for a bit of Paris that we'll have in our memories forever. A dream for a dream.

Inside the Louvre: See the man taking a picture in the foreground? It's impossible to take a picture without photographing someone else also taking a picture. This self-referential mirroring or echoing of each other's bodies, actions, and human hunting instinct is very fascinating to me.

One of the most interesting aspects of this behavior is taking pictures of ourselves and loved ones in front of landscapes, art, or other awe-inspiring objects and places. What are we proving, edifying, immortalizing? What am I saying by posting a picture of my children with Aphrodite? What does it mean? What need does this spring from?

How many times do we need to re-create the world we live in? For instance, I wonder how many alternate worlds we could create by amassing tourists' photographs and laying them side by side? What few insignificant corners of the earth would be left uncharted and virginal? What a pilgrimage that would be; traveling to all of the places in our great cities that haven't been photographed (there must be very few). As soon as you'd get there, you would pay homage by not taking a picture.

Sometimes I wonder if I see the real world at all, or if I am there simply to transform it into images and words. My mind is always in the future, re-creating the experience that I'm not participating in because I am obsessing over how I can best describe my un-experience of it.

I recently read a woman's travelogue about a trip to the monasteries of Thailand. Her story goes like this: when she arrived at a very remote, breath-taking monastery, she realized that her camera was broken. She couldn't record her surroundings and take them home with her. When a monk asked her what was wrong, she told him that her camera was broken. He replied, "but your eyes aren't broken."

Many times I've shared this woman's frustration. I'm ashamed to admit it, but it's true. I've felt that a visit to an incredible place was wasted because I couldn't capture it in a box. I've chastised myself from time to time for allowing myself to get caught up in the moment and forgetting to take pictures (angry that I didn't stop living in order to record my living). Humans exhibit a strong hoarding instinct, a greediness, an illusion of controlling our world and recreating it on our own terms. God-like. I am so guilty of this.

Photography also involves the safety of being an observer, playing the anthropologist, never actually touching the skin of the world. Convincing ourselves that we are separate from our subjects. Photography is a variation of hunting; we kill by slicing a second of a person's existence from their whole self. We pin them to our walls like butterfly specimens. Conversely, we photograph to keep the people we love alive; though it's illusionary, it makes us feel good. They will remain real to us forever because we have their likeness. We turn them to stone. Invincible.

I think of Medusa, turning flesh to stone in one blink. I also think of Galatea, Pygmalion's sculpture turned to flesh with the aid of Aphrodite (see above). Goddesses who turn flesh to stone and stone to flesh. Humans who turn eyes to screens and screens to eyes. Our flesh will remain supple as long as we avert our eyes, seeing and experiencing everything through a filter - eclipses in photographs, Medusa in a mirror, touch through a plastic sleeve.

What I wonder is, how is this different from watching a documentary on TV or scrolling through the museum’s holdings on their website? In each case, we are divided from our experiences by an electronic screen. Ironically, the Louvre's website offers photos of every collection so that visitors don't have to climb over one another to take a picture to prove that they were there. All of the pushing and flashes made good picture-taking an impossibility anyway. The irony and futility fascinated me.

That's when I decided to watch the people instead of the art. I stood at the very back and watched semi-circular waves of spectators engulf sculptures like phagocytes, then raise their arms high in the air, their hands burning brightly above their heads. Flash, flash, flash. For a brief second every raised hand became illuminated. It was as if this were a divine pilgrimage....holding our burning souls in our hands, little offerings at the feet of Winged Victory, Aphrodite, Mona Lisa.

I became obsessed with taking pictures of the backs of crowds in the museum - the tense, struggling bodies, the right hands all raised in unison, flashing.
The desperation for acquisition is tangible, visceral. Everyone in the museum had traveled so far and made so many sacrifices to be in proximity to these works of genius. I found this so much more interesting than the artwork itself.

In a life-sized painting of saints, there was a veritable hail-storm of fiery comets blazing down from the sky, toward the saints' heads signifying enlightenment or sainthood. The painted saints are being bombarded with light from within their own landscapes, presumably driven by god's hand, and also from without. We magnify their enlightenment every time we flash, our hands mimicking gods'.

By late afternoon I was “museumed-out” already. I was eager to be at our hotel pondering my newfound understanding of the world of art (which is still, regrettably, laughable), but I was entranced by the throngs of tourists acting out my own deep-seated need to possess beautiful things. So I decided to stay a little longer, watching people through my camera's view-screen. In each of my photos I zoomed in on someone else's camera or cellphone screen, to capture a picture of them taking a picture.

It was a hall of mirrors, truly, every sculpture and canvas reproduced exponentially on thousands of screens jostling for the best light and angle, little knowing that their pictures became mine. By taking pictures of them taking pictures, I worked less and profited more. For every one of their pictures, I had two. I was the über-consumer of the food chain; its hungriest proprietary organism.