One highlight from my trip to Bruges this summer was visiting the Salvador Dali Museum. Dali is celebrated for his surrealistic paintings, his “art of exaggeration” and love of the bizarre. Less well known, but just as fantastic, are his book illustrations and sculpture.
My favorite was his Alice in Wonderland illustrations. An image of Alice skipping rope is hidden in nearly all the illustrations. See if you can find them.
Other drawings and book illustrations follow, among them from Don Quixote, Aladdin and His Lamp, MacBeth, and the Bible.
His sculptures are just as wild and wonderful.
And all this set in a corner below the famous Bell Tower featured in the equally bizarre and fantastic film In Bruges. No wonder my whole visit there felt surreal.
“There are some days I think I’m going to die from an overdosis of satisfaction.” – Salvador Dali
Read more about Dali’s Alice in Wonderland illustrations from Brain Pickings
I could have spent weeks savoring up all this museum has to offer, instead I had five hours. Still I was in heaven. The structure itself is a masterpiece, a renovated train station with a magnificent clock tower set on the Left Bank of the Seine River across from the Louvre.
This was the most visitor-friendly art museum I visited in Europe. An enormous hall was surrounded by various rooms on several floors all flowing into one another. I was forever lost in the Louvre and the Prado, but here I always felt gently guided as I roamed from one room to another in my exploration of all the artwork.
While the Louvre features art created before 1850, d’Orsay picks up from there, featuring an impressive array of Impressionists, both pre and post, including Van Gogh and Gauguin, Monet and Manet, Derain and Degas, Bonnard and Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir and Cezanne, among others, along with a powerful selection of sculpture, and artwork less familiar to me.
Below is a random sampling of some of the work I loved seeing.
What I loved too was being able to get so close I could see the individual brush strokes. See if you can guess whose paintings these came from.
These are just a fraction of the photos I took, which are a small fraction of all the wonderful artwork on display at the d’Orsay.
I leave you with a painting by only American I can remember seeing, although there may have been others. I was bewitched by this Winslow Homer I’d never seen before. It captures something of the enchantment I felt dancing in the arms of the masters on that magical day.
In the brilliant dark comedy “In Bruges,” a mobster sends his two hitmen to Bruges to cool their heels after a job went horribly wrong. What the two men don’t know is that they were sent there so they could have a beautiful “fairy tale” experience before one partner was ordered to kill the other. Things don’t go quite as the boss had planned.
But he was right about one thing. The film’s brooding, atmospheric cinematography did create a fairy-tale, dream-like veil through which the city’s medieval history, fabulous architecture, graceful bridges, and misty canals are revealed.
In person, Bruges does not disappoint. It was one of my favorite stops on our European adventure and I’d love to see more of it someday. Three days was not enough. There are more cobblestone streets to explore, more art museums to visit, more boat rides down misty canals. More Belgian chocolate, beer, and waffles for that matter.
The city’s many canals, bridges, and swans are favorites, of course. Bruges is known as the Venice of the North, and since I wasn’t able to get to Venice this trip, it made this city even more special to me.
Then there was the history and the architecture! From the quaint little corners of the city . . .
. . . to the spacious and grand central plaza with its flags and cafes, shops and towers.
Bruges was full of comic surprises and delights . . .
from the sign above a restaurant “water closet” . . .
. . . to the intimate peek into a doctor’s office on display outside a ceramic shop . . .
. . . the comforting clip-clop of horses hoofs coming up behind you . . .
. . . or a great white whale rising out of the canal.
Then there was the chocolate, the waffles, and the beer . . .
I’m not much of a beer drinker but I did find a fruity blend that suited me quite well.
These were just a few of my favorite memories of this fairy-tale, dream-like city. For more, watch the film, it won’t disappoint.
One of my favorite side-trips when traveling in Europe was the day we spent in Segovia, viewing the Roman Aqueducts and visiting the Alcazar, a 12th century castle where Queen Isabella grew up.
The Roman Aqueduct is by far the most dramatic feature of a city full of beautiful landmarks. Built in the 1st century, it rises nearly 100 feet tall and reaches over 2600 feet long, consisting of over 170 arches and 25,000 granite blocks, all built without mortar. It delivered water to the city for over 1800 years, until the mid 19th century.
The city through which it passes is a painter’s palette of raw sienna, burnt umber, and yellow ochre, stitched together with narrow streets of cobblestone and brick pavers.
We stroll through the damp streets with the patter of raindrops on our umbrellas, stopping often to visit the quaint little shops along the way, to watch the street performers play, and to snap photos of each other.
We love the ornate doorways we find, the flower-filled balconies, and richly textured walls we pass.
Eventually the narrow streets lead us into large plazas, as it does here before the Iglesia de San Estaban with its Romanesque bell tower, built in the 14th century.
The largest plaza on our walk opens up to reveal the jewel of the city, Segovia Cathedral, built in the mid 16th century. It is considered a masterpiece of Basque-Castilian Gothic architecture and is known as “The Lady of Cathedrals.”
Surrounding the spacious plaza are an array of sidewalk cafes and tall, elegant buildings.
Another steep climb from the plaza leads to the Alacazar. It sits high above the city on a stony crag with steep cliffs falling to the Castilian valley below. The castle, first referenced in 1120, was a favored residence of the Spanish Royals. This is where Queen Isabella spent her youth. Where she fled with her husband Ferdinand for protection from her enemies when they were newly married. And it’s where she was finally was crowned Queen of Castile and Leon.
It’s tall towers and turrets are said to be the inspiration for Disneyland’s castle, but several other castles claim that distinction as well.
Inside the castle is a dazzling array of richly decorated halls, chapels and armories.
The views from the ramparts are dizzying as well as dazzling, revealing lush forested hillsides, . . .
. . . fairy-tale villages winding along the riverside . . .
. . .and panoramic views of the city of Segovia.
Here you can see the towers of Segovia Cathedral and the Iglesia de San Estaban in the distance. Note too the ancient walls that surround the city, built before Isabella’s father retook the city from the Arabs.
I’m asked all the time which were my favorite places to visit during our 30 days of travel, but I can’t quite pin that down, there were so many. Still, when asked, Segovia always rises quickly to mind.
If you ever get the chance to visit Spain, the city of Segovia is a must-see.
“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” ― Anaïs Nin
I’ve just returned from a whirlwind romance with Europe, visiting five countries and 18 cities in 30 days. I wasn’t with a tour group but with 3 traveling companions, one of whom was on a grant-based mission to tour the castles of Europe.
We traveled by plane, train, bus, ferry, car, taxi and subway, and the wear and tear of the trip happened mostly during those transitions, lugging bags and suitcases up and down hotel stairs and elevators, across cobblestone streets and busy thoroughfares, up narrow escalators and down crowded corridors to throw our luggage through train doors before they closed on us. One terrifying and, in retrospect, hilarious moment I’ll never forget was standing on the platform watching my lone cousin on the train surrounded by all our luggage as the train doors are closing and her husband comes running up behind us shouting that it’s the wrong train.
That “in retrospect” is so important. It’s what filters raw experience into meaningful moments, pushing some moments into the background while highlighting others. It allows us to filter those experiences through our past, to find the similarities and disconnections that help us to place it within a larger context. It allows us to reflect on what was seen and felt in a deeper and more comprehensive way.
Even going through the hundreds of photos I took, deleting the inconsequential and cropping others to highlight and foreground what was seen in a new way, allows me to “resee” what I might have missed in the moment, allows me to re-experience the moment in a new way.
I’m fascinated with how layered, how open to revision, our experiences are. While travelling I had little time to record my thoughts and perceptions, but as soon as I returned home, I began to do that. Here’s what I wrote:
“Currently, as I write this, a day after my return home, I see that month of travel as a huge, largely undigested meal, too rich and powerful to fully absorb, to unravel, to comment upon. I mix metaphors because even how I cannot fully or precisely articulate what I’ve not yet had time to fully grasp.
But I’m looking forward to the time I have now to reflect back upon those raw experiences and to shape it into meaningful expressions, whether through writing, blogging, sketching, painting, poetry. The best is yet to come, I feel, for bringing the past into the present, into a slow-motion re-examination, pulling it under the microscope of the mind, filtering it through past similar memories, or things I’ve read about it, or read afresh, read anew–experiencing it more thoroughly through the lens of history I had not had the time to read in the raw moment . . .
I see this trip as a treasure trove of experience, largely unmined, to draw upon. My life is deeper now, richer, more varied, than before, because of this experience.”
It goes on, much of it rambling, repetitive–the free writing that allows us to get our feelings and perceptions down on paper uncensored.
So while I’m still mining this treasure-trove of experience, or to mix metaphors again, digesting this rich meal, tasting it twice, I’ll leave you with five fleeting moments forever stilled from the five countries we visited.
“Researchers have previously shown that certain online activities—such as checking your e-mail or Twitter stream—stimulate the brain’s reward system. Like playing a slot machine, engaging in these activities sends the animal brain into a frenzy as it anticipates a possible reward: often nothing, but sometimes a small prize, and occasionally an enormous jackpot.”
Apparently this behavior of constant searching taps into a primal food-hunting drive and the reward we feel when the sought-after food is actually found—it’s matter of survival.
But even more interesting is the discovery that sharing information about ourselves as commonly done on Facebook and on blogs can be even more pleasurable. It can, in fact, give the neurochemical equivalent of an orgasm, according to an article on the Web site for the Today show “Oversharing on Facebook as Satisfying as Sex?”.
So beyond the reward of the hunt, it seems, is the deeper pleasure of sharing what we have (our catch, ourselves) with others.
In that case, blogging may be a new form of “breaking bread.”
We’ve all experienced the pleasure sharing a meal we’ve created with people we care about, and we know how this stimulates conversations in which we share our thoughts and stories.
In a sense, when we blog, we’re inviting others to our “table,” and sharing the best of what we have to offer that day—our thoughts, insights, images, poetry, memories. We’re feeding each other and inviting responses. And, while things we find on other sites may create those deep resonating connections we call “micro-moments of love,” the deepest pleasure comes from our own offerings: sharing ourselves with others. Giving more than receiving.
It all makes sense. Blogging, after all, is about creating community. Creating bonds of interest, of mutual satisfaction, mutual admiration.
It’s all about connecting. Hooking up. Taking risks. Being vulnerable and open.
Blogging may not be “orgasmic,” but if you think about it, it’s pretty darn sexy.
Often when I leave comments on a blog posts that moved me, I write “I love this post” or “I love the way you do [this]” or “I love that quotation.” Lately I’ve been wondering if I’m overusing the word “love”.
Am I really feeling this strong emotional attachment, or am I just being lazy, unwilling to take the time to precisely articulate what strikes me about a particular piece?
After reading an article in The Atlanticon the science behind love, I’m inclined to believe that, more often than not, I use the word “love” because that’s what I’m actually feeling– a “micro-moment of positivity resonance.” That’s how Barbara Fredrickson defines love in her new book Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do.
Fredrickson, a leading researcher of positive emotions at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, presents scientific evidence to argue that love is not what we think it is. It is not a long-lasting, continually present emotion that sustains a marriage; it is not the yearning and passion that characterizes young love; and it is not the blood-tie of kinship.
Rather, it is what she calls a “micro-moment of positivity resonance.” She means that love is a connection, characterized by a flood of positive emotions, which you share with another person—any other person—whom you happen to connect with in the course of your day. You can experience these micro-moments with your romantic partner, child, or close friend. But you can also fall in love, however momentarily, with less likely candidates, like a stranger on the street, a colleague at work, or an attendant at a grocery store. Louis Armstrong put it best in “It’s a Wonderful World” when he sang, “I see friends shaking hands, sayin ‘how do you do?’ / They’re really sayin’, ‘I love you.”
So when I say I “love” Louis Armstrong’s song, now I know why—because I feel such a strong positive connection to what he’s saying, as well as with how he says it, and the music he says it with, that I experience a triple love-whammy!
What I feel when reading things by fellow bloggers, or see the images they’ve created, is similar—a deeply-felt resonating connection, often on several levels.
In “Tao and Creativity” Chang Chung-yuan describes this connection between poet and reader as a “spiritual rhythm.” It is the means by which the reader participates in the inner experience of the poet. He writes:
In other words, the reader is carried into the rhythmic flux and is brought to the depth of original indeterminacy from which the poetic pattern emerges. The reader is directly confronted with the objective reality which the poet originally faced. The subjectivity of the reader and the objective reality of the poem interfuse . . . .
This is very interesting because Fredrickson discovers a similar phenomenon when she compares the brainwaves of a storyteller and listeners. Smith describes this in her article:
What they found was remarkable. In some cases, the brain patterns of the listener mirrored those of the storyteller after a short time gap. The listener needed time to process the story after all. In other cases, the brain activity was almost perfectly synchronized; there was no time lag at all between the speaker and the listener. But in some rare cases, if the listener was particularly tuned in to the story—if he was hanging on to every word of the story and really got it—his brain activity actually anticipated the story-teller’s in some cortical areas.
“The mutual understanding and shared emotions, especially in that third category of listener, generated a micro-moment of love, which ‘is a single act, performed by two brains,’” as Fredrickson writes in her book.
Fredrickson also discovered that the capacity to experience these daily love connections in our lives can be increased through simple loving-kindness meditations, where, as Smith describes, “you sit in silence for a period of time and cultivate feelings of tenderness, warmth, and compassion for another person by repeating a series of phrases to yourself wishing them love, peace, strength, and general well-being.”
“Fredrickson likes to call love a nutrient,” Smith writes. “If you are getting enough of the nutrient, then the health benefits of love can dramatically alter your biochemistry in ways that perpetuate more micro-moments of love in your life, and which ultimately contribute to your health, well-being, and longevity.”
So remember, fellow readers, as you go meandering from one blog site to another like busy little bees, making those “micro-moment” connections with people whose work you admire, that you are engaged in a kind of virtual love-making. You are distributing a pollen-like “nutrient” that nurtures others, as well as yourself.
As Louis says, “what a wonderful world” we live in!
This essay was first posted in a slightly altered version in 2013.
Some works of art speak to you on a level that is hard to define. You gaze and are drawn inward. Something in you identifies with what you see there. It’s not outside, it’s in here. It was there before you saw it, and the seeing is just a reminder of its presence.
I felt that way when viewing some of the artwork at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. Especially in the faces that follow. The one above is my favorite. I cannot help smiling when I see it. I’ve paired the faces with a few favorite Tao verses and Zen anecdotes that capture a glimpse of what I see in each face.
THE MONK – OH SO DELICIOUS
Once there was a monk fleeing for his life, a tiger at his heels, chasing him over the edge of a cliff where he grabs hold of a branch. He dangles there just out of reach of the tiger’s snapping jaws, while below another tiger is snapping at his feet. No escape. Just then he notices a fat juicy strawberry dangling from a nearby vine. He plucks it loose and pops it into his mouth. “Oh, so delicious!” he sighs.
THE SAGE – WHERE WONDER RISES
“From mystery to further mystery is the entrance to all wonders.” -Tao Te Ching, (Ch. I)
THE SAVANT – RIDING THE WIND
“My eye becomes my ear, my ear becomes my nose, my nose my mouth. My bone and my flesh melt away. I cannot tell by what my body is supported or what my feet walk upon. I am blowing away, east and west, as a dry leaf torn from a tree. I cannot even tell whether the wind is riding on me or I am riding on the wind.” -Lieh Tzu
THE MYSTIC – WHO AM I?
“Once I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering here and there. Suddenly I awoke and was surprised to be myself again. Now, how can I tell whether I am a man who dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly who dreams she is a man?” Chuang Tzu
THE MOTHER – OBTAINING THE ONE
Knowing the Male, But staying with the Female, One becomes the humble Valley of the World. – Tao Te Ching (Ch.XXVIII)
There was something complete and nebulous Which existed before Heaven and Earth, Silent, invisible, Unchanging, standing as One Unceasing, ever-evolving, Able to be the Mother-of-the-World. – (Ch. XXV)
During my trip to San Francisco last weekend we visited the Asian Art Museum, which was featuring an exhibition of “Divine Bodies,” sacred artwork from Asia. The theme was transformation and transcendence, and the various aspects of divinity as embodied by the Beautiful, the Sensuous, the Fierce, and the Gentle.
I’ll share a few of my favorites below.
A wooden statue of Avlokiteshvara, the compassionate bodhisattva who “gazes down” at the people with eyes full of sympathetic understanding, embodies The Gentle aspect of the Divine.
Below, another “Gentle,” this time of the Buddha, with outstretched hand and lowered gaze. The faces, the gazes, of these two are so similar they could be the same embodiment, although from different times and cultures.
Some of my favorites were the female deities.
Here Parvati, wife of Shiva, represents the female energy of the universe. She embodies The Beautiful, The Sensuous, and The Gentle, with the partial figure of her babe on her knee.
The two below embody The Sensuous, the first representing the link between the female form and fertility, with the woman holding a flowering tree branch. The second is the Buddhist deity Guhyasamaja, meaning “hidden union” of apparent opposites: male and female, mind and body, wisdom and compassion.
The phallic emblem below is a powerful representation of Shiva as the cosmic creator.
The following two represent The Fierce aspect of the Divine, powerful enough to transmute the negative force of attachment into wisdom, although these were found on other floors of the museum.
The Divine Body exhibition also included some intriguing modern art installations. My favorite was Impermanence: The Time of Man by David Hodge, a multichannel video installation with various people off the street speaking about the transience of their own lives, in all its frightening and illuminating aspects.
Another by Dayanita Singh featured the transformations of Mona Ahmed, who says that God gave her a man’s body but a woman’s spirit, and that is why they call her Hijra. In India this is considered a third gender and is closely associated with the divine. Her faces follow.
I can see why the artist found her face so fascinating and timeless.
Compare it to the ancient one below, seemingly the same embodiment, transcending time as well as gender.
Scattered throughout the exhibition were quotations mounted on the walls. Two follow.
“Mind has no body distinct from his soul, for that called body is a portion of the soul discerned by the five senses.” – William Blake, poet and artist.
“And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell, and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being.” – Black elk, Oglala Lakota (Sioux) spiritual leader
I found so much more at this museum that fascinated and inspired me, but I’ll save the rest for a later post.
Last weekend I accompanied my friend Paula on a trip to San Francisco. We stayed in a lovely old building owned by the Native Daughters of the Golden West and designed by Julia Morgan, a five-floor townhouse in the heart of the city.
Third floor parlour . . .
. . . and atrium.
While she attended meetings, I took my camera to explore the nearby neighborhood, full of lovely Victorian homes.
This little fellow caught me by surprise!
The Victorians weren’t the only interesting sights as I made my way to the famous Haight- Ashbury district.
In the afternoon we took the bus across the city to the old Ferry Building and eventually to Fisherman’s Wharf, and two Peach Mules at a seaside pub as we watched the sailboats gliding into the sunset.
I think in another life I could live quite happily in one of San Francisco’s Victorian walk-ups, wandering by foot and bus through it’s many colorful landscapes. It would take a lifetime to explore this vast and vibrant city.
One highlight from my trip to Bruges this summer was visiting the Salvador Dali Museum. Dali is celebrated for his surrealistic paintings, his “art of exaggeration” and love of the bizarre. Less well known, but just as fantastic, are his book illustrations and sculpture.
