"Today as the news from Selma and Saigon poisons the air like fallout , the serene great picture that I love . Here space and time exist in light the eye like the eye of faith believes . dissolve in iridescence , become that was not , was , forever is . O light beheld as through refracting tears . Here is the aura of that world Here is the shadow of its joy ."
"An especially famous example occupies a whole room in the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, but there are hundreds in the series, depicting the painter's garden at Giverny. This poem, by Robert Hayden, was written more than half a century ago, but it couldn't be more timely. The place names it gleans from the news are now historical references to the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War but nothing would be easier than substituting current signifiers of injustice, cruelty and conflict."
"Nowadays we doomscroll. Back then, in the era of Bloody Sunday and the Tet Offensive, the toxins spread through different means: newspapers, radio, network television. The effect of unavoidable, ambient dread seems to have been the same. And so, surely, was the desire for relief, though the first stanza is careful not to say this outright. The visit to the museum isn't proposed as"
Monet's Waterlilies appear as a serene, luminous counterpoint to news of Selma and Saigon, dissolving space and time into iridescence. Images of light described as 'refracting tears' create an aura that contains both joy and its shadow. A famously large canvas at the Museum of Modern Art exemplifies a series of hundreds depicting Monet's garden at Giverny. Mid-20th-century place names anchor a contrast between public horrors and private aesthetic refuge. Media then—newspapers, radio, television—spread ambient dread much as doomscrolling does now. The aesthetic encounter is offered with restraint rather than as an explicit escape.
Read at www.nytimes.com
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