Religious Experiences

I suppose it is altogether fitting and proper that one should not be able to photograph religious experiences. The ability to do so, would only cheapen them.  I've had two such experiences since I've been in Paris.  The first was the production of Sweeney Todd, which made me laugh and cry at its genius and beauty.

I had a second such experience yesterday at the Musee d'Orsay.  Claud Monet's Londres, Le Parlement. Trouee de soleil dans le brouillard.  Houses of Parliament, London, Sun Breaking through the Fog (1904).  I found this image on the web this morning.

You cannot begin to imagine how poorly this image of the painting conveys the breathtaking, achingly beautiful quality of this canvas.  I had seen such images of paintings when working with Beverly Long Chapin on her Gallery of Poems on Paintings a few years ago.  In the Musee d'Orsay, hanging within feet of this canvas, were four of Monet's paintings of the Cathedral at Rouen and a painting from the Waterlilies series.  Now I understand so much better the Liesl Mueller poem that Beverly paired with these paintings.

Monet Refuses the Operation

Doctor, you say that there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent.  The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and changes our bones, skin, clothes
to gases.  Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

And that was only the very beginning of the experience.  I cannot explain what it is like to stand mere inches from these paintings as well as Van Gogh's self-portrait when he was staying at the mental hospital at Remy or Cezanne's still life paintings with fruit.  If I ever come to Paris again, and have time for only one museum, it will be Musee d'Orsay.  If I had no experience in Paris other than this one, the visit would have been rich indeed.

Thanks, Beverly.