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While reading Untamed by Glennon Doyle, I ran across the passage below (had no idea about this theory):
When we visited the Louvre, we entered the Mona Lisa room and found a crowd of hundreds pushing, jostling, selfie-ing all around her.
I stared from a distance, trying to appreciate her. I really didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. I wondered if all the jostling people understood or if they were just acting like they did. A woman walked over and stood next to me.
She said, “You know, there’s a theory about her smile. Want to hear it?”
“Yes, please,” I said.
“Mona Lisa and her husband lost a baby. Sometime later, her husband commissioned this painting from da Vinci to celebrate the birth of another baby. Mona Lisa sat for Leonardo to paint her, but she wouldn’t smile during the sitting. Not all the way. The story goes that da Vinci wanted her to smile wider, but she refused. She did not want the joy she felt for her new baby to erase the pain she felt from losing the first. There in her half smile is her half joy. Or maybe it’s her full joy and her full grief all at the same time. She has the look of a woman who has just realized a dream but still carries the lost dream inside her. She wanted her whole life to be present on her face. She wanted everyone to remember, so she wouldn’t pretend.”
Now I understand what the fuss is all about. Mona Lisa is the patron saint of honest, resolute, fully human women—women who feel and who know. She is saying for us:
Don’t tell me to smile.
I will not be pleasant.
Even trapped here, inside two dimensions, you will see the truth.
You will see my life’s brutal and beautiful right here on my face.
The world will not be able to stop staring.
SONG: Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters by Elton John (everybody knows his version, so here's a cool cover by the Indigo Girls... :-)
BOOK: Katie and the Mona Lisa by James Mayhew
POEM: The Aerodynamics by Rick Bursky
The night she walked to the house
she held a string; on the other end,
fifty-three feet in the air, a kite.
Wind provided the aerodynamics.
Does every collaboration
need to be explained?
She tied the string to the mailbox
left the kite to float until morning.
Every night this happens.
She sleeps, I listen, darkness
slides through us both.
The next morning
the string still curved into the sky
but the kite was gone.
This was the morning
newspapers announced
the Mona Lisa was stolen***.
This was the morning
it snowed in Los Angeles,
the morning I wore gloves
to pull from the sky
fifty-three feet of frozen string.
***From The Writer's Almanac: On August 21, 1911 the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre Museum in Paris, France. The theft was pulled off so well that no one even noticed.
The next day, an artist named Louis Béroud went to the Louvre, intending to paint a girl doing her hair in the reflection from the pane of glass in front of the Mona Lisa. He wanted his painting to be a commentary on the debate around putting glass in front of paintings in the Louvre.
But when he got to the wall where the painting usually hung, it wasn't there. He asked the guards, and they said it was probably being photographed. But it wasn't with the photographers. The director of the museum, Théophile Homolle, was out of town — a man who had said the year before, "Steal the Mona Lisa?You might as well pretend that one could steal the towers of the Cathedral of Notre Dame." Finally, museum officials got together and the police were called in, and everyone realized that the Mona Lisa was really gone.
The Louvre was shut down for a week to search every inch of it for the missing painting — since the Louvre takes up 49 acres, it was no easy task. But all they found was the frame and piece of glass.
More than two years later, in Italy, the thief contacted an art dealer and offered to sell him the Mona Lisa for $100,000. The art dealer met him, along with the director of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. The thief, Vincenzo Peruggia, explained that all he wanted was to return the Mona Lisa to Italy where it belonged. He said he would sell it as long as the men promised to hang it at the Uffizi and not let it go back to Paris. Peruggia was, of course, arrested, and the Mona Lisa was sent back to the Louvre … but not until it went on a tour across Italy.
QUOTE: "Is the Mona Lisa an 'accurate' representation of the actual human model for the painting? Who knows? Who cares? It's a great piece of art. It moves us. It makes us wonder, makes us gape - finally makes us look inward at ourselves." ~ Tim O'Brien
My friend RobbyG told me that her firefighter son-in-law and his co-workers do this nightly at their fire station, here in South Florida, and I was delighted to read the following article in yesterday's New York Times to find it was nationwide... actually, worldwide... :-) I cry every time I think about it and, starting this evening, I am going to incorporate the expression of gratitude into my nightly ritual. To quote Mary Oliver: “Thank you, thank you.”
In Praise of Quarantine Clapping
By Amanda Hess
April 9, 2020
Every night at 7, my Brooklyn neighborhood comes to life with the calculated whimsy of a cuckoo clock. It starts with a single neighbor clapping. Soon dozens more join in, throwing open their front doors or hanging from their windows to put their hands together and say “wooooo.” Perhaps 20 seconds into the proceedings, a man emerges from the garden apartment across from me, banging a pot with a spoon, and a woman appears on the stoop of the house next door, her spaniel barking helpfully at her side. Often there is a special guest: On a recent evening, a guy motored by on a delivery bike, a whistle blaring from between his lips. It’s all over within five minutes.
The Clapping first spread through New York City on a Friday night in late March. Following similar gestures in Italy, India and Spain, the New York iteration was seeded by a strategic marketing firm and circulated over social media to thank workers on the front lines of the coronavirus outbreak. It was originally presented as a one-off event, and after that, residents were asked to repeat it once a week. But now we do it every single night.
The Clapping has surely been heard by doctors and nurses and E.M.T.s, by UPS workers and Instacart delivery people and the many other New Yorkers who are putting themselves at risk to protect their city. I live just a couple of blocks from the choked I.C.U. of the Brooklyn Hospital Center, and on Tuesday, firefighters lined up right outside the center to cheer the staff on.
But the more the ritual is repeated, the more it feels as if it’s for the rest of us, too. We used to go out to concerts or movies or plays and clap for the performances. Now the clapping is the performance. It is our regularly scheduled programming, live and in person when basically nothing else is.
Thanking health care workers may be the point of this act, but its delights lie beside the point. The Clapping is a communal outburst. It is a reminder that though we are isolated, we are not alone. It is made up of a hundred little improvisations that nevertheless add up to a comfortingly predictable cacophony, tailored to the street where you live.
In some neighborhoods, the Clapping manifests as a sparse pattering, and in others it echoes between high-rise apartment complexes, producing walls of sound. On a recent night in Stuyvesant Town, the Clapping was punctuated by clanging bells and hoots from horn instruments; on the Lower East Side, somebody blasted out Sinatra singing “New York, New York.” I’m told that some blocks do not clap at all.
It’s a cliché to describe a performance as “life-affirming,” but here the description feels true. I like it for smaller reasons, though. Like many New Yorkers, I don’t know most of my neighbors, and I’ve found myself using these few minutes every night to gather clues to their domestic lives. I notice who emerges from sprawling multistory brownstones and who from apartment buildings. One night the man with the pot was joined by a companion banging her own kitchenware. Another time, the spaniel failed to appear, and I reveled in my exaggerated disappointment. Did the dog have a previous engagement?
There are those who choose to abstain from the Clapping, and those who actively campaign against it. The British right-wing commentator Katie Hopkins, who is whiling away her quarantine standing in front of a poster of the American flag and ranting into her webcam, has criticized the applause in England as a foolish hobby. She called it “clapping at the sky,” which is an accidentally lovely way of putting it. Others argue that the Clapping is an empty gesture, accomplishing nothing for the workers who are most at risk. And yet even for the critics the Clapping is a kind of gift; it gives them a performance to pan.
It’s true that on the internet, the ritual can appear flattened into a self-satisfied show. On Twitter, I watched the queasy corporate spectacle of the Salesforce Tower in San Francisco light up with a video of clapping hands. The hashtag #ClapBecauseWeCare distorts the experience to fit the contours of a social media awareness campaign; it oversells the purpose of the event and makes it all feel a little smug. As social distancing has migrated all of our human interactions online, the Clapping has revealed the limits of the medium. Experiences let loose on the internet risk being swiftly mined for their utility to the platform, reduced to mere carriers of information capable of accumulating commentary and debate.
I can understand why people feel compelled to share videos of the Clapping, as it is perhaps the most thrilling non-horrifying event that a quarantined New Yorker can document on any given day. But watching the Clapping in other neighborhoods feels pointlessly remote, like eavesdropping on a conversation in a language you don’t understand. You kind of have to be there — and you only get to be there if you’re already there.
Clappers may have learned of the ritual through a Facebook post or a message chalked on the pavement of a neighborhood park. But it persists because we hear it, and we want to keep hearing it. Some days it is the only thing I hear from outside that is not an ambulance siren.
Every night as the Clapping hour approaches, my body is alert with anxious anticipation. Will we clap again tonight? So far, the answer has been yes. With each day, it feels more likely that we will stop only once the virus does. Until then, I’ve got nowhere else to be.
SONG: I Have Just Said by Sara Bareilles, unwittingly in collaboration with The Milk Carton Kids, lyrics are a poem by Mary Oliver (thanks to JudiS for the heads-up on this... :-)
BOOK: Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers by Anne Lamott
POEM: I Have Just Said by Mary Oliver
I have just said
Something
Ridiculous to you
And in response,
Your glorious laughter.
These are the days
The sun
Is swimming back
To the east
And the light on the water
Gleams
As never, it seems, before.
I can’t remember
Every spring,
I can’t remember
Everything-
So many years!
Are the morning kisses
The sweetest
Or the evenings
Or the in-betweens?
All I know
Is that “thank you” should appear
Somewhere.
So, just in case
I can’t find
The perfect place-
“Thank you, thank you.”
QUOTE: " 'Thank you' is the best prayer that anyone could say. I say that one a lot. Thank you expresses extreme gratitude, humility, understanding." ~ Alice Walker
