Seawall

     My vacation arrived just as I felt like my life was starting to unravel.    

    I had booked a direct flight into Newark, where I spent the night at my sister's in Jersey City. The next day I went into the city to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which feels like my home. I hadn't been there in nearly three years, the longest I've been away since I started going there 35 years ago. Their current main attraction was a big Winslow Homer show, stuffed with billowing clouds and soaked with sea foam. Everything in his pictures looks so solid, and I've never seen anyone capture the countless shades of water so exquisitely. Aside from that, I found myself only wanting to look at familiar work I'd seen many times before. I hadn't been there since the pandemic; I think I needed the comfort of knowing all my old friends were okay. I paid my respects to Rembrandt, to Corot, to Pierre (sorry, Bonnard; I feel like we're on a first-name basis). I sat in front of the Temple of Dendur, as I've done since I was 15. I stared for a long time in front of my favorite painting there, Oedipus and the Sphinx. It's a remarkable, strange picture by Gustav Moreau, in which the Sphinx clings, cat-like, to Oedipus' chest, their gazes locked for all eternity. I spent most of the day at the museum, then walked around Central Park in the sunshine.

    The next day I took the train to Boston. I'd never been there before. I mainly wanted to see the Philip Guston Now show at the Museum of Fine arts. It was lovely to see so many of his paintings in person, but the show itself was not that great. The curators were scared of upsetting people with Guston's paintings of Klansmen, and went out of their way to mollify the public. The galleries were filled with timelines blending Guston's life with the Civil Rights movement, and there were contextual materials about the Klan inside cases which you could slide shut if you found them too disturbing. A brochure in one gallery was titled Emotional Preparedness for "Philip Guston Now" and encouraged visitors to "lean into the discomfort of confronting racism on an experiential level". The show wasn't hung chronologically but arranged in clumps of pictures using common themes or imagery. It all felt very clumsy and condescending to me. 

    The worst part was that a lot of the work just wasn't his strongest. Now, Guston is by far my favorite artist, and even his sub-par pictures bring me joy. But part of the trouble is, I was fortunate enough to see his last major retrospective at the Met in 2003, and that show was superior in every way. Both the quality and the presentation of the work in that show were sensational, and there was no hand-wringing about the public's feared fragility Apparently the Black Lives Matter protests really freaked these people the fuck out.

 

    However, the museum was also hosting a Turner retrospective which completely blew me away. The exhibit was filled with grand sweeping vistas punctuated with moments of hushed mystery, just like the work itself. I was not expecting it; I've always admired Turner's work, but this show made me fall in love with this strange, mad genius. The delicate layers of mist and fog enshrouding the water, the horrifying cloud like a black wave that threatens to sweep Hannibal and his army away as they struggle to cross the Alps...it was glorious.

    Unable to take in any more art, when I left the MFA I walked around the city, hung out by the harbor, felt disturbed by the sight of such beautiful, historic buildings surrounded by gigantic glass skycrapers and hoardes of tourists. I found myself missing Portland as I searched in vain for a decent cup of coffee.

    I also spent a lot of time on the beach. Although I try to get back East once a year, the last time I'd actually seen the Atlantic Ocean was nineteen years ago. I hadn't planned on seeing it at all this trip, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that the place I was staying at happened to be about twenty feet from the seawall, just beyond which was a strip of pebbles and sand appropriately named Short Beach. I was only in Boston two and a half days but I walked along that beach every chance I could get, and instantly felt deeply connected to it. Tiny waves feebly rushed the shore at high tide and sluggishly lapped it at low tide. I listened to the hissing foam, watched the light from the sun and moon dance across the water. I thought of both Winslow Homer and Turner, their brushes floating or flitting across the canvas. I picked up shells and pebbles and found a single mermaid's purse. I plucked hermit crabs from the mud and let them crawl across my palm. It was truly magical. 

    But it was also exhausting, and I was happy to eventually arrive at my mother's house in Allentown, where I could lounge around and read. Though it was a sacrifice, I generously allowed my mother to cook me breakfast every morning. The two of us spent a lot of time together, taking walks and chatting.  We sat on the back patio watching the bunnies and chipmunks and listening to the birds. On the first day of Summer we caught lightning bugs in the backyard, the first I'd seen in years.We spent a day at the Jersey Shore, mostly at Spring Lake, which is her favorite beach. I suspect the way she feels about Spring Lake the way I feel about The Met. I may live for weird paintings of sphinxes and funny little Paul Klee creatures, but her heart with is the blazing sun, the crashing waves.

    While I usually enjoy the nostalgia of seeing Allentown again, the city seemed especially depressing this visit. The city has changed a lot, and yet not at all. Tons of people have moved to the area, causing rents to skyrocket, but there still isn't much to do. It didn't help that three of my favorite places had closed in the past year, places I have deep emotional attachment to and are now gone forever. And every year I lose touch with a few more friends. None of this would be as hard to handle if these disappearing people and places were being replaced by new ones, but they're not. I can feel my life being whittled away, and I don't know how to stop or even slow it down. It's terrifying.

    It's also sad watching people become diminished as they age. I'm fortunate that my mother is still in good health, and stays active. But she's slowing down. My father has started falling down and barely leaves the house, and my stepfather sits staring sullenly most of the day. It feels like both these men are just waiting for death, and it's really depressing to witness.

 

    And then there are the already dead. Their ghosts are always with me, but their presence becomes pronounced when I visit the places where we walked and spoke and laughed together. Just driving past my old apartment makes my heart ache. And yet I still do it.

    Jasmine's is of course the noisiest spirit. I spent a day with her best friend and her brother up at her old house, where her brother still lives, the last one left in the family. While I love seeing them and reminiscing, it always leaves me feeling raw. And I made a mistake: I read some things wrote in a notebook her brother dug out of the attic. They weren't good or kind things, they were hard things, troubling things, and while I knew it was a bad idea to read them, I couldn't help myself. Maybe someday I'll be able to write about them, but for now I need to concentrate on the good parts of that day in the house in the woods. A box full of her final doodles. The melodic trickle of the creek where she used to play. A doe and her fawns grazing beneath the trees.

 

    If I was superstitious, I might speculate that reading that notebook was the act which unleashed the wave of darkness which seemed to rise up the moment I got back to Portland. Or maybe it was something I saw in Boston which seemed like an omen. Every day I'd watch a family of ducks, two adults and a handful of teenagers, swimming out on the water. The last night I was there, as I walked down to the beach, I noticed a dark shape on the seawall. It was one of the young ducks, lying dead on its back, webbed feet in the air. It gave me a chill. But I'm not superstitious, and I don't believe in omens. Everything that is going on now, in the country and the planet as well as my life, has been building for a long time.

 

    As I was flying back West, the Supreme Court was striking down Roe v. Wade. We knew it was coming but it was still shocking. Thankfully, I was in the air when it happened and didn't find out until the next day. The court followed with other decisions to eliminate environmental protections and gun control. We are being dragged into the past by people trying to grab what they can before everything collapses. It's hard to tell if they're really so blind that they can't see the harm they do, or if they just don't care.

     Nothing is solid or stable in my personal life, either. My rent just went up, my job is a Kafkaesque nightmare, and my foot is fucked up from all the walking around I did in Boston. I feel even lonelier and more isolated than I did before; my trip. It doesn't help that I keep losing people. I have three "Celebrations of Life" scheduled for this weekend, though I can only attend one of them due to having to work all the fucking time.

    I know I am very fortunate that I was able to take a vacation, that I had the means to take time off and travel and have such wonderful experiences. I'm lucky to have a mother who loves me and who only drives me mildly crazy. But I feel like any strength and healing I derived from being away, from being both stimulated and nurtured for a couple of weeks, was almost immediately sucked from me the minute I got back. I desperately want to cling to a bit of it. I hold the shells and stones I found on the beach and close my eyes and smell the brine, imagine tiny crab feet on my skin. I think about the taste of that first forkful of cheesy eggs and bacon in the morning. Symphonies of birdsong, constellations of fireflies. How quickly life's sweetness gets trampled by these continual crises. I want to get lost in the misty dreams of Turner's seascapes, but instead I'm staring up at a wave of darkness, the storm thundering overhead, about to crash down.