Chapter Four: A Course in Art Appreciation

It was the first time it had ever happened, so it was unsettling.  What in the world was going on?

At the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, Monet grabbed me by the lapels and dragged me into one of his paintings.  I stood, transfixed, unable to move on with the rest of the tour group as they traveled on through the rest of the Impressionists.

The protagonist of A Corner of the Apartment was staring at me, and I couldn’t break his gaze.  He was a little boy, in what appeared to be a school uniform, standing in the middle of a room, hauntingly isolated despite the matronly figure in the distant background, head cocked slightly to one side.  I felt like I knew him, and he was wanting to say something to me.  I stood there for maybe 10 minutes, trying to listen, yet unable to hear him.  What did he want to tell me?  Was it important?   How could I coax the words out?  But I couldn’t hear him, no matter how hard I tried.

Eventually, I moved on to the next room, but my mind kept drifting back to the painting.  I was fascinated by the experience.  How could something painted 123 years before speak to me like this?  I had never had such a strong reaction to a painting before.  Was this normal?  Did other people have this happen to them?

And then, it happened again a few rooms later when The Dream by Detaille sucked me in.  As the French soldiers slumbered behind battlements, their dreams of glorious victory played out in the clouds above and I became one of them.  I long stood daydreaming alongside the sleeping soldiers, hearing bugle calls and horse hooves and drumbeats and Les Miserables anthems driving me onward.   Finally, I shook my head and broke the spell Detaille had cast, returning me to a room in a museum from my mental field trip to a French countryside battlefield.

Weird.

I didn’t know what to make of the experience at the time, for art had never moved me or stirred me in such ways.  Maybe it’s because I had primarily experienced it through the pages of textbooks or the art anthologies I’d regularly thumb through at Barnes & Noble.  I’ve come to discover that a photographic copy robs art of much of its true power.  You can’t see the brilliance and depth of the colors or the magnitude of a painting that takes up a giant swath of wall space.  The printed page neuters the art experience in a way, making it safe and sedate and, all too often, lifeless.

Later in the trip, the same experience with art happened again and again as I encountered the masters in person.  I crept through the darkness with Rembrandt’s The Night Watch or covered my ears to stop the piercing sound coming from the mouth in Munch’s The Scream.  Even within the last year, I have been lulled into a tranquil bliss by Monet’s The Path Through the Irises and horrified by the ravages of war as depicted by Sargent’s Gassed.

Perhaps the most significant time an artist spoke to me was when I had a chat with Norman Rockwell at the Frist in Nashville almost five years ago; we talked about writer’s block when I was looking at his Blank Canvas for the Saturday Evening Post cover from 1938.  I’ve been there so many times, scratching my head in the same way with my similarly skinny arm poking out from a rolled-up sleeve, trying to get something to come out when nothing will, frustrated and helpless.  I sat and commiserated with Rockwell for quite some time before going home and writing a blog post about it, ironically inspired.  That summer, accidentally running across a handsome stranger re-enacting that very painting for his profile picture changed my life.

But none of that would’ve happened if it wouldn’t have been for Monet, over a century ago, painting something universal enough for me to connect with as I stood there twenty years ago in Paris.  I still can’t explain why that little boy haunted me so.

In retrospect, after my experience in London, maybe he was me.

Chapter 3: Paralyzed

I had actually forgotten the “official” story of what happened my first night in London.  Here’s what I said at the time in my journal:

“Couldn’t sleep last night, so went on walk alone about 11:30 (dumb!) and accidentally left map in hotel room, but found out after getting lost.  Walked around a while before getting panicked, but ended up in bad places like Chinatown and Soho (red light district), saw many prostitutes (always wore skirts and hoes – how ironic) even though it was chilly and their pimps (men and women) followed.  Got hustled by one pimp lady enough to make me very uncomfortable.  Panicked a few times, ran, should have gotten a cab, but for some reason didn’t, got on wrong bus that took me farther away to West (Hyde Park), finally got home at 1:30 and won’t go alone again!!  Feel better this morning than I thought I would, hopefully won’t get sick as it was raining the whole two hours and I was wearing sandals.  Shouldn’t have brought sandals – waste of space.”

All that was true.  I had forgotten the shock this skinny, shivering, sheltered Oklahoma boy felt when the extremely aggressive pimp was determined that I would choose her girl.  I almost said yes out of sheer southern politeness.  How ironic considering my top secret mission that night.

I had also forgotten the growing concern slowly creeping through my body.  I was lost in a big city, far away from home in an age before cell phones, and slowly that creeping concern matured into fear, and that fear rapidly give birth to panic.  As it took hold, I found myself running, soaked, through the unfamiliar London streets.

But I was lost in a more important way that night, and the concern and fear and panic was about more than not knowing my way back to the hotel; it was about not knowing who I was and running away from who I feared I might be.

You see, I had this night excursion planned out well in advance.  Months in advance.  When I started out, I knew exactly where I was going even without the map I had forgotten.  The “jet lag” that drove me outside for a walk was an alibi I told my roommate to allay any suspicion of why I’d venture out alone, something I concocted when I hatched this plan in the bedroom of my parent’s house the previous summer.

What was I actually doing out that night?

I had decided that I needed to see if I was gay, and I was going to visit my first gay bar to see if I fit in there.

I couldn’t do this at home, because I might be found out and the stakes were too high.  I was from a well-known family, all of my friends went to a church that condemned that “lifestyle” of sin, I was a ministry major at a Christian university.  I might see someone who knew me and would subsequently out me.  No, my only safe chance at testing the waters would be when I was 4,623 miles away from anyone familiar, other than the handful of exhausted travelers tucked neatly in their beds.  Literally within weeks of finding out I was accepted for the Vienna Studies program, my brain started crafting a plan as my conscience nervously wrung his hands in disbelief.

In preparing for the trip the previous summer, I had bought many guidebooks to study up on all the major cities we’d visit.  In the back of many of them, there were small sections dedicated to hot spots in each place for LGBT travelers.  When I stumbled upon this section the first time, my body rushed with adrenaline.  Here was my chance.  I looked up the location of our hotel right outside of Piccadilly Circus (on Mapquest), and found that there was a gay club within walking distance.  If I could just sneak out, then it was easy from there.  I memorized the street names, distance in blocks, landmarks to check for along the way.  I must’ve looked at that section of the London map a hundred times before that night.

The alibi was the easiest part, but thinking through just the right way to perform jet lag insomnia took planning.  It would have to be casual, not forced.  Done at just the right moment when my roommate was clearly exhausted and wouldn’t care what I was doing.  I practiced it all in my head and then executed it better than a Shannon Miller beam routine.

As I snuck out into the cold night air, my internal fear started pleading as my body went into auto-pilot navigating the path to my destination.  Could I really go do this?  What if something went wrong?  I could be stabbed or robbed or roofied!  How could I be so careless?  I could be sent home on the first night of the trip!  And then kicked out of school!  But something inside drove each step forward.  Something inside wanted to know, or perhaps needed to, as fear tried to dig in his heels.

The battle raged inside my head the entire walk there.  As the streets got seedier and darker, away from the bright lights of Piccadilly, the gravity of the situation started sinking in.  This was an unfamiliar and scary place.  What was I thinking?  Fear started gaining a foothold.

As I rounded the corner of the last street, I looked up and saw the doorway of my destination.  It wasn’t gaudy or flashy like I expected, but rather understated.  A simple door with a simple sign.  Patrons would occasionally file in or out in groups or singles.  My legs began to fill with lead as my internal fear ratcheted the pleading up to shouting.  I found myself standing across the street from the entrance.

I was paralyzed.

Each time someone walked in, I’d catch a glimpse inside of what my life might look like in the warm light and company of the bar.  The truth inside me longed to take the few final steps across the street, but I was much more accustomed to listening to fear’s voice back then.  There was simply too much to lose, and I had “everything” going for me.  My family was counting on me to continue being the golden child they wanted, and I couldn’t let them down.  It was my grandmother’s dream to have a minister in the family, and I was her great hope.  It was my grandfather’s pride to have his first grandson at the institution he’d spent his entire life nurturing and building.  You can’t be anything else than what they want.  You just can’t, because that’s who you really are.  Not this.

And so, after pondering there an uncomfortably long time motionless as the steady rain ran down my face, fear won.  After months of planning and anticipation, I snuck out to stand, tethered by my fear, across the street from what I wished my life could be.  I wasn’t ready.

I remember the overriding emotions as I walked away, adrift in my own thoughts to the point that I ended up getting lost on my way back to the hotel.  I was disheartened, thinking I had just come to my proverbial crossroads, and I didn’t have the courage to make the right choice, so I made the easy one.  I was sad and resigned.  I felt doomed to a predestined life that others wrote the script for instead of me.  I was ashamed.  I was lonely.

And then, I spent the rest of the night berating myself for feeling all of those things because they were “wrong” and I had really just saved myself from a horrible decision that would lead to a wretched life.

This was not the last battle between fear and truth in my life, but it was the most poignant one.  When I think about that scared 19-year-old kid standing on that rainy street, it makes me incredibly sad. That night haunted me for the rest of the trip, and for years afterwards.  I was so lost, without a map, and would have to wander for a long time, often running panic-stricken through the streets of life, before I found my way back.