As we left Gallery 5 and headed into 6 (of 11), I asked Em, “How’s it going?”
“It’s a lot,” she said.
It was a lot.
It was a lot the way meditating two hours straight would be a lot.
In fact, every time I stepped in front of a canvas, I heard Sam Harris of the Waking Up app tell me to deepen my breath and let my gaze be very, very wide.
These paintings are portals. You don’t look at them, you look into them.
And as you continue to stand there and look, they begin to resolve, like a Polaroid, and let you in.
Underneath those big blocks of orange, yellow, and red lurk other passageways, other dimensions. But you can’t see them at first. You have to stand there and wait.
And keep looking. And breathing.
And let your gaze be very wide. Only then, might the painting open to you, revealing new edges, and luminous new neighborhoods of color.
It’s a lot.
This exhibit features one hundred paintings borrowed from museums and personal collections worldwide.
The Blackforms. which generally hang in the Rothko Chapel in Houston, really got me that first day. I found myself standing in front of them with my hand over my heart and a lump in my throat.
That night, I couldn’t fall asleep. I closed my eyes and fell into the paintings: the black ones, the yellow ones.
The darkness behind my closed eyes resolved into Mark Rothko paintings. I was on a beach. I was on the brink of death, toeing that soft, feathery edge between the gray of old age and the void of nothing. Or maybe something?
I wondered.
If I looked deeper into the black of the void, would it start to resolve into something with edges, with shapes, with dimension, with luminosity? Would it become a map? A guide?
Day one ended with Indian food in a restaurant that smelled of incense and was decorated with carved wooden goddesses and thickly brocaded wall coverings as ornate as the Rothkos were austere.
Em and I talked for hours over half a bottle of dry red and ate rice and lentils and vegetable korma.
No one ever rushed us.
Merci beaucoup.
We roamed the neighborhood of Neuilly-Sur-Seine, having found a shortcut to the museum there. Stores and shops and dry cleaners. Some closed. Some open.
Me saying a hundred times, “L’addition, s’il vous plait? Merci beaucoup.”
No one wanted us to leave. One waiter kept pouring wine into our glasses, on the house.
We were in Paris for only three days. Some people have said, “Three days??!! It’s not worth it! You spend most of your trip on a plane!
But others say, “Three days is perfect! Short trips focus you, and they’re not as expensive! Go!”
The decision to book this trip was an act of whimsical compulsion. I read the review and had to see this show.
Emily was free to join me, and did, which made the whole trip so magical and rich and fun. Our conversations went amazingly deep and long, as they tend to do.
At one point, I asked her: How did we get to be this way? How come we can talk and trust each other like this? How did our relationship evolve into one where we are mother and daughter, but those roles aren’t small and confining?
She said we have been doing this conversation thing for as long as she can remember. At bedtime as a little girl, she remembers plopping onto my bed, and there we would talk about anything and everything. Her day, mostly, and I would listen to her, and encourage her, and laugh.
And we have never stopped doing this.
On the first day we ate croissants and walked to the Arc de Triumph and the Champs Elysees and dined on pizza and bread and wine and olives in our neighborhood.
The second day we spent in the museum.
On the third day, we went back and revisited the paintings we loved from the first day, and also spent some time in the Auditorium, eating, writing, and resting.
This space is incredible:
We left the museum and walked to the Eiffel Tower and took the obligatory bad selfie.
And the next morning, we packed up and flew home.
She bought Eiffel Tower toothbrushes for the kids at the airport.
I bought a croissant for G that got squished in my bag, but she ate it the next morning anyway.
Now that I’m home, I want to keep saying bonjour.
I want to keep up with my Duolingo French.
I want to go back to Paris.
Inspiration Location 