Art & Psyche

“Okay since we don’t have time to see everything, let’s play a game,” I say, pulling off my jacket. “We’re going to look for art that best fits certain categories. My proposals are: most ridiculous… prettiest… and most likely to succeed.”

Connor laughs, and we step into the National Gallery. I’ve had a lot of fun in this museum, and I’m excited to share it with Connor and see how it resonates with him.

“This is ridiculous. This is absolutely ridiculous,” he says, squinting at a painting of a an imaginary ideal gallery of a collection of paintings, sculptures, and tools. I throw it in the ring for prettiest. (What? It's pretty!)

Cognoscenti in a Room hung with Pictures, by Unknown Flemish Artist, about 1620

“I want to add a category. Most contented.” Connor says.

“What does contented mean?”

“A piece of art that is most comfortable and confident.”

“Mmm, gotcha.”

Connor knows this game is helping me re-engage a dormant part of my mind, the part that notices and shares details. When we were in Brixton, I realized I had been filtering out details recently. Then, somewhere between dinner and walking a few days later, I realized it was deeper than that.

"I think this is the most contented painting I've seen so far," I declare, looking at a painting of ruins being overtaken slowly by plants, peppered with people comfortable in their tasks. I'm sure it's depicting a myth I can't identify, but that's okay. What's important is that it's making me feel relaxed by looking at it. Connor moves next to me and nods. He likes it a lot, too.

Landscape with the Rest on the Flight into Egypt, by Pierre Patel, 1652

"I want to add another category," Connor begins, "most self-serious." The painting he's pointing to looks staged. It looks like these people held this pose for a very, very long time to look very, very serious.

A Woman Playing a Lute to Two Men, by Gerard ter Boch, 1668

We laugh.

A few days ago, when Connor and I talked about how I think my detail-filter was deeper than I anticipated, I began to grapple with cognitive dissonance in a way that felt like I was loosening a ball of yarn in my brain, massaging it so I can see what's hiding inside.

Paying attention to details is something I love. It’s something I’m good at. And when I went on  international trips before, I was a college student who leveraged this skill. When I became a teacher, I had to stop. I had to force myself to stop.

I had to stop paying attention to every part of a lesson plan, so I could get enough sleep at night. I had to stop paying attention to every individual thing I learned about every person I interacted with, because it overwhelmed me. I had to start practicing noticing the salient things—what are the things that have the largest impact? Notice that. Dig into that. Everything else needs to be glossed over. My work is not sustainable otherwise.

And, with practice, I became good at honing this filter. I became good at looking at huge piles of student work and noticing the most important trends. I became good at noticing the most important feedback I could share with my colleagues when I was in their classrooms. I became good at looking at lesson plans and revising the most important portions. I became good at reading hundreds of student letters every Friday and remembering what felt most important about each one.

I can tell you something about every student I have ever taught. I can tell you what they’re good at. I can tell you what their goals were when they were my student. I can tell you what many of them are up to now. I can’t tell you every single thing they’ve shared with me, but I can tell you the most important things. This filter was how I could still be the kind of teacher I want to be without being so overwhelmed that it drowns me.

But I didn’t realize that this filter started bleeding into everything else. I don't want to be like that all the time—I don’t want to listen to my close friends tell me about their day and only remember what I think is important. I want to know everything they want to share with me. I don’t want to walk in my neighborhood and only notice what helps me get around. I want to notice what’s in the cracks, I want to notice how time shifts and who occupies which spaces. There’s a joy in taking as long as you want looking at a thing and noticing what resonates with you. What surprises you. What makes you feel weird.

I haven’t felt that kind of joy in a long time. I cried when I shared this with Connor, and then we cried together.

But, now, I feel a kind of hopefulness I haven’t felt in a long time. Now that I know, I can do something about it. I don't have to wait for things to get better on their own. I feel grateful.

Connor calls me over urgently. He's gasping in the National Gallery for the first time. "Grishma... look at this."

The Adoration of the Kings, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1564

"I don't get it. It just looks like a Christian painting."

"No Grishma, look closer."

"Oh, ew."

The Adoration of the Kings, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1564 (Detail)

"Read the description," he urges.

"The tiny, naked Christ Child seems vulnerable among the heavily armed men. He recoils from the gift of myrrh, a spice used to prepare bodies for burial, forseeing his future death?? What??"

Connor continues where I left off: "By contrast, the spectators, one wearing glasses, are blind to what is before them, the son of God made man to redeem fallen humanity."

"Most ridiculous. Most self-serious. This is so bad. It's so good."

The Adoration of the Kings, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1564 (Detail)

We laugh about this one for much longer than the other ridiculous ones.

“I’m going to add a category. Best dog," I say.

The museum closes soon, and we didn't actually decide on paintings for any of the categories, and that's okay. We found some great dogs in those last minutes.

Greenwich

"Who's Paul Simon?" I ask, balancing my backpack between my shins as we sit under an exhibit called "Yoko Ono's Wish Trees". Connor and I are in on the north end of Greenwich peninsula, well past the cute markets and parks, at a place called The Tide, a concrete-glass-art-path-condo-juice-bar-type of plaza.

"He's a folk rock musician, have you heard of Simon and Garfunkel?" Connor says.

"Yeah."

"He's Simon."

"But his name is Paul… oh wait Paul SIMON. I understand now."

We laugh.

"Anyway, yeah, it's incredibly tone deaf to play him here, when you have all these incredible black artists playing live."

The Tide is... weird. Its extravagance feels especially tied to 2019--it looks plain on purpose, aligned with the idea that the best way to showcase your wealth and secure your status among your peers is to have fewer items and spend more on services. Only one condo is occupied in the building in front of us (I assume it's the model unit) and its decor looks like someone stacked the first 500 images from #LiveAuthentic and melted them into an average. I know model units need to have some amount of sterility in order to try and sell the most units, but this one looks especially plain.

 

In front of us are two boys who look like they're twelve (maybe 16). They brought sixteen bottles of Budweiser, got drunk enough from two bottles, dropped and broke the third, and are getting escorted away by security.

There's a gondola sponsored by Emirates that takes people from The Tide, across the Thames, and disappears behind some skyscrapers.

Two ugly Damien Hirst sculptures are somewhere along the walkway. (Before you "but Grishma!!" me, do you think an artist is capable of creating something good and say this about their work? "In an artwork you're always looking for artistic decisions, so an ashtray is perfect. An ashtray has got life and death.")

I've been thinking about how a city tells its story after visiting the Museum of London yesterday. I wanted to refresh my memory on the city's timeline so I could better contextualize the architecture of the various neighborhoods we are visiting. My feet were aching by then, so I wanted to skim the parts that would have otherwise been lovely but aren't what I'm looking to learn right now. Connor and I moved through the exhibits on Paleolithic to Iron Age to Bronze Age pretty quickly. We spent the  bulk of our time between the Roman colonization of Britain and the Medieval era. Then, we agreed that we know enough about the Victorian era, so we sped up again, but once we got to the post-war era, I had to slow down because I was surprised. The modern exhibits were almost entirely about activism and how communities responded to new forms of poverty created by industrialization. The artifacts were ones that described the lives, hardship, and joys of those who didn't hold much political power. Everything they chose to remember of the last 60 years was about progress made by marginalized people.

There's the story of London where rich people own a lot of land and Emirates has a friggin gondola taking you across the river. There's the story of The Tide, the story of a soulless condo looking down on ugly sculptures. There's the story of people eating restaurant food 200 feet in the air while listening to songs that were on the billboard charts 5 years ago.


But I don't think that's the story they'll choose to remember. 

Brixton

I'm frantically trying to jot down details because it still feels hard to write. I wonder whether just writing badly will help me get back into the rhythm of forming coherent sentences.

My notebook has the following bullet points:

• Brixton Market smells moist & like fresh fish(??)
• The floor is green. 
• Most of the shops sell imported fabrics or freshly made food. Good shops for costumes/drag.
• Mural of Lebanese actors with Arabic words peppered on the wall.

It's a place to start.

It feels hard to write because it's hard to be present. I can't figure out why, but I won't wallow in that thought right now. I'm moving on. Gotta start with details. Okay. Connor and I are sitting in the patio of Caroica Brazilian Cuisine, waiting for our Ipanema brunch specials.

I start wondering what Brighton is like. We're going there tomorrow.

"Con leche?" a tender woman asks when bringing out our coffees, anchoring me back to the restaurant.

Details.

I can see a woman cooking dumplings in the restaurant across the path from us. I make a note of her yellow shirt, her meticulous care in unloading the dishwasher while a man carries in boxes of fresh produce. God I want those dumplings later.

My mind wanders again, so I try to focus on the Portuguese music. 

My difficulties in being present are making it hard to do, I'm experiencing, yes, but not doing. Whenever I encounter a moment of stillness, I am thinking about something else. I've stopped thinking about work (finally) but now I'm thinking about what I'll be doing later.

Why is it so hard for me to be still and engage? Am I that out of practice?

I'm a kinesthetic processor (if you've seen me play with my hair during a conversation, that's why), so I walk and reflect and think I know what's going on. My efforts to cope with the frequent sensory overload I felt this year means that I've started tuning out details (sensory overload is when you've consumed so much stimuli that everything starts to feel overwhelming). Processing a new city, new job, new friends, new routines, and a new roommate in a new home left me mentally drained a lot. So I filtered out the details to get through the day without needing to nap every 2 hours.

But noticing and then sharing details is what I enjoy about traveling. How do I re-engage these parts of my brain? How do I switch gears?

Practice, I guess.

I sit in a park and I try to notice, one sense at a time.

I see children and families on their afternoon walks. I see a young girl, maybe seven years old, with a sparkly backpack with a half-kitten, half-mermaid on it. It says "purr-maid in training." She's smiling. And, now, so am I.

Kensington

"So there’s this vacuum--" I pause so a car doesn’t run me over as we cross Cromwell Road.

“A vacuum??” Connor laughs.

"There's this vacuum and his name is Henry and—”

(Another car.)

“Well it's like a brand of vacuum cleaners that are all named Henry. The vacuum hose connects to his nose, and he's got eyes and a smile."

I don’t know why Henry is the first thing that came to mind as I lead Connor towards the apartment Veronica and I stayed in when we traveled and studied here as 18-year-olds. We loved Henry. And profiteroles. And Jane Austen’s ghost, but we meet her later during our trip.

"The program coordinators showed us a straightforward path to class, but Veronica and I explored a bunch of different routes until we found this one."

I tell Connor about many ways in which we had paved our own path and created our own experiences in the city. Few others seemed to care as much about the Bayeux Tapestry as us so we spent a lot of time at museums and parks with each other.

I’ve shared this walk with everyone I’ve traveled with when I visit London. We weave through Kensington’s roads and mews and admire the beautiful architecture and end up at Montparnasse Café where we have delicious crepes. Today it’s Connor’s turn. Today I share with him some of the many places that hold sentimental value—Montparnasse Cafe, St Mary Abbott's church, the Natural History Museum, and Holland Park.

Our feet are still acclimating to this much walking, so we decide to join everyone else in Holland Park and take a nap under a tree. 

Hours later, we’re in Notting Hill, headed towards two record stores Connor is really excited to browse. 

I'm writing this while sitting on the wooden floor of Honest Jon’s records. The floor has fading orange paint along the wood grains that make it look like tiger stripes. The owner offers me a stool, and asks me if I'd like something to eat or drink.

Another employee answers the phone.

"Uh… rarely. What've you got? Uh huh. No, sorry."

They hang up, then call back.

"Do you want me to take it? It's your first night," the owner says. The employee nods.

"Hello? Yes, he's just stepped away. Yes, I'll let him know it's an excellent collection. Good luck with it. Bye."

London, Again

“If you want to go back for an umbrella I can wait for you, but I don’t want one. I don't want to carry it,” I say, looking out at the rain from the entryway of our apartment building.

“As long as you know you’ll be soaked by the time we get there…” Connor says.

I nod. Connor decides against the umbrella and we start walking towards the light rail, stopping to drop off keys to our apartment so our friends can water our plants while we’re gone.

“What are your goals for the trip?” I ask.

“To be present. To read a lot… to see a lot of good music. What about you?”

“I’m not sure yet.”

I think about this for hours. I know what I want to do but that’s not what I’m thinking about. I’m thinking about how I want to grow.

How do I want to grow?

The lights in the plane mimic the aurora borealis, and as the plane takes off, we’re immediately enveloped into clouds and I can’t see anything. They’re so thick they look like they’re erasing the plane’s wing from existence as we fly. I can’t even see Mt. Rainier.

The last time I traveled on this side of the Atlantic, I was half a decade younger. I wonder how my experiences traveling will feel different now that I’ve been a teacher, now that I’ve moved to several other cities, now that I’m (marginally) older and in a different life stage.

The plane descends over Iceland for our layover, and I see the outlines of a group of whales (not sure what kind) just below the water. And I’m not sure if it’s because I just saw a documentary on the evolutionary journey of whales, or because I just love them, but it brought me to tears.

What are my goals for this trip? In what ways do I want to grow?

I don’t know yet. But my goal is to stay open to the opportunities for growth that are ahead of me. Each time I travel for this long, I come back having changed how I think and how I experience the things around me. Each time, that growth is unplanned, and each time it is inevitable.

Some times I came back with a better, more empathetic lens for consuming and making art.

Some times I came back realizing I'm more resilient and resourceful than I thought possible.

One time I came back wanting to drop out of college and become a math teacher. (I soon realized I didn’t have to drop out to become a math teacher, and did that.)

Each time, I’ve come back having grown closer to those I traveled with. I understand the people I love more deeply and more sincerely because of these shared experiences.

I’m excited to see what that means this time.