Afternoon delouvre

I visited the Louvre today. Holy Godsplosion. Wowabunga. I've never been more invested in or intrigued by an experience in my life. And by experience I mean museum experience. But nonetheless. Egads!

I need to preface by bringing up the foremost thing on my mind. La Jocunde. The Mona Lisa is the most alive peace of art that I have ever seen. I spent 10 minutes staring at her- she not only actively pursued me, but deviated in expression as I thought towards her. I burst into laughter at one point. She squinted. She responded to me. I wonder so many things about the painting. Divinci had to love this woman. How can you see something so well, know it well enough to animate it perpetually on a canvas without loving it? It isn't in the least bit scary, but it is the eriest, most haunting thing I've ever seen. Museum thing. Once I saw a picture of a woman who had been run over by a train. That totally sucked. The Mona Lisa is erect against this defunct, heavy landscape, that she so nimbly smirks in front of, but it's the most internal-ecstaticism that you can imagine. It can't be replicated on a postcard- I looked all around la musée. It changed my life. How a painting can be a time-capsule, but not even of a message-- of an emotion. I looked around and noone else was as transfixed as I was. You have to look for her somewhere in her eyes and then she wraps you. Art is really good.

Lady Liberty is an unbelievable piece as well. In its quiet romanticism, the painting has such an honest, self-aware sense of nationality. Lady liberty is a nippless woman, and she leads a horde of disgruntled men with a child. Youth and gentle liberty confidently but vulnerably and almost blindly lead a nation. Traversing the flesh and ghosts of their countrymen. She is just barely lit, and the factories still are drawn up across the back, reasserting the heavy reality of the French.

Today, French paintings are what took Me. I traipsed through an enormous, 3-hour historical tour of French paintings, remarking the development of depiction. The credit to the human face, particularly the eyes and mouths. The mystery of nature, and our mercy at the barbarous stances of the unknown. Truly, we are not worthy. The French are beautiful, by the way. I will never be able to think I am attractive again- the portraits rattle of their blind confidence, their stately rationality, and their composed beauty. The women with the cheeks of babies and the eyes of deer. The men with the bones of caskets and the glares of forests. In America, we are vulnerable, and unsubstantiated at the center- it's something we have to conquer, a less obvious fear that's seeded in our collective genome. Sitting in front of the radio, praying tell of the men overseas, petrified but hopeful, we are infants searching for the warm barn of our fathers. In France, history is a proud trajectory into the harsh world, with determination and a total dearth of aggression. The oil pastures, the gently cracked portraits of young courtship, the scrupulous obsession with capturing the human soul, in a frame. It's mystifying. I wish I had the bravery and the energy for art. I think I could do something cool.

The fluctuation of a peoples morale throughout the history of their empire is also fascinating. I can't delve into the power of the ancient sculptures of Greece, Rome, Egypt, even France, enough, but I can note the impulsive human obsession with form, the power of muscle, and the angles that dismember our linear impulses is really cool. I hate that the body is so illicit to everyone in America. Look at how Michelangelo worked for weeks on another man's uncircumsized penis. That's pretty wild. The human body is beautiful. Sculptures frustrate me because I often get totally lost in their messages- I look for emphasis, and sometimes I see that statues are just supposed to be accurate depictions, encapsulated beauty, but I get frustrated. I want a story, or context, or knowledge. I think about the animated person. The lack of eyes in early sculpting is really interesting: the fact that people avoided the main indicator of expression on our bodies seems to dehumanize the humanism that's supposed to be perpetuated. I think that it's because it's hard to accurately carve an eye, and that the rest of the face is aesthetically powerful enough. The marble just makes the subject so cold- why winnow out of the body the most emotionally indicative contraption? Eyes are everything for me. One of my friends has the most beautiful eyes in the world, and they used to infuriate me because they were so powerful and piercing. That is what needs to be saved. Painting can do that. However, in the contacts of a lot of statues, statues get cooler individually. To see how the depiction of a person can change as an empire descends to entropy is so cool. The Romans humbly painted their leaders solemnly, and their nobility tranquilly. But as the prosperity of the empire dissipated, the figures stood even more erect, flailing their fingers and torches in the air, as if they were groping for a salvaging slab of driftwood in a suffocating ocean. It's got to be hard to be a failing empire. There's a lot to have fail. The romans went down pretty hard. Good for them, je suppose.

The Egyptians are so interesting because, I realize that with significantly fewer resources 4000 years ago, it was difficult to perfectly paste a portrait onto papyrus, but what's with everyone in Egyptian painting looking like wooden skeletons? It might be the fact that their form of polytheism was designed as a hierarchy of the dead over the undead. Therefore, living mortals must be homogenous and simply designed. But still, the only beauty you can note in Egyptian faces is on statues of Empresses. Otherwise, the crafts and trinkets are the disjointed trinkets that display true artistic realism, and beautiful realism at that. Egypt is cool because it is so far away.

The pyramid is remarkable of course, and the booming sun was muffled by husky clouds, burping patches of soft blue. The sun shone intermittently, but it only balked at the ghostly robot, the pyramids. The Louvre itself, antiquated architecture, puppeted by the sun, shied away from the postmodern gem, a New World embryo ensconced in the frightened old world, trembling architecture situated in a boldly unfrightened Old World. It will be hard to leave the Old World. It's so true.

Tonight, the family and I had des goutes with another American living in France, but a dancer. She was wonderful, and smart, and strong. She reminded me that you grow into places, and that the occupation of space only occurs when you focus on the forward motion in your life: the goals, the dreams, the tasks. I forget what the saying is, but I'm growing up and learning like most others do that clichés are clichés because they're true. But, here it is.

"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."
c'est vrai! bisous a tout le monde. Supér!