A chilly rain fell as I began my yoga practice on an autumn morning a few weeks ago. Hands up toward the sky, a forward bend, down dog, and up again into Warrior One. I held the pose and looked out of the window in front of me at the landscape: one tall maple still a gorgeous red, a few lower trees nearly bare, and two yellow maples dropping their leaves rhythmically. In my stillness, I felt as if were watching time itself fly by.
That notion of time flying occurs to me often these days. Yes, it has to do with being older; my mother told me that she experienced it too. But right now it has more to do with the magnitude of the changes in our lives because of the pandemic, and the time we seem to have lost over these last couple of years. Even if we escaped the worst, we missed so much as we hunkered down at home, in our own small lives. We were cut off from family and friends. As well, we lost the reality of our connections to the larger world of art, music, and other cultural institutions when their doors were locked to stem the spread of COVID.
The depth of my sense of loss and disconnection from this larger world had clicked into place for me one day as I perused the photos and essays of “Live Arts at the Met,” an issue of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin. I was a New Yorker before I became a Vermonter, and my ties to Manhattan and its museums remain strong. One photo focused on a highly creative, pre-COVID performance at the Met called “Battle! Hip-Hop in Armor.” The idea for it had originated in an observation by the curator of the Arms and Armor Department. He said, “our collection is frozen … and in order to understand it, it has to move.” It became a reality when the department began a liaison with an amateur dance company from the Bronx. Ultimately, their members wore specially designed replica armor as they did hip-hop and break dancing in the Arms and Armor Court of the Met.
I had missed it, but I was inspired by what I saw in the magazine. My curiosity and my enthusiasm showed me how ready I was for newness and for stimulation of my senses, my intellect, my whole self. But I was eager too — maybe even more so — for some of my more traditional connections in Manhattan. I needed to make up for lost time.
Not long after that chilly fall morning of my yoga practice, I made a plan to spend a couple of days in New York. Yes, it was a bigger deal to go there now that we were Vermonters. But the return to our old haunts in Westchester County that had been common before the pandemic was now again possible. And from there, the train trip to the city was wonderfully familiar.
I started by scheduling a lunch date with a teaching colleague who lives in Manhattan. Our restaurant agenda was always long, with talk of books, travel, art exhibits, and old friends. I then confirmed with one of my daughters, an art historian, that her plans to be in New York at that time would allow the two of us to spend a day together there. Knowing what was on view at a variety of museums, I was sure I’d have a good time. Of course I did, and two museums were among the highlights.
First was a visit to the J.P. Morgan Library. After a leisurely lunch with my former colleague, I boarded the Madison Avenue bus and used my MetroCard to pay. My plan was to see the new exhibit there, “Sail Away.” Entering the glass doors of the museum, I paused in the atrium to marvel again at the height and the light. I showed my membership card and walked to the elevator.
Described as a celebration of Black life and Black creativity, “Sail Away” focuses on the collages and poems of a 2015 book. The collage artist is Ashley Bryan. In the book he illustrates a number of the water poems of Langston Hughes. Bryan’s paper cutouts are vibrant: fun, whimsical, and light-hearted in their use of brilliant colors to illustrate the stories, seascapes, and characters of Hughes’s poems.
Reading the poem Catch, about a boy who carries a mermaid on his shoulders, I was hooked. Amazed at the artistry of the layers and arrangements of the cut paper, I was energized by the smiling mermaid in her red, orange, and yellow dress. I gazed in awe at her long black, brown, and gray dread-locks streaming in the breeze — and at the Black boy, knee-deep in roiling water of four complexly textured shades of blue. I moved on to sailboats, a rowboat, and bouncing waves illustrating “Long Trip,” and too soon, I reached the final poem and collage.
It turned out to be The Negro Speaks of Rivers, an old favorite from my days of teaching African American literature. The lines are familiar:
I’ve known rivers:
…ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood
in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers….
One color on top of another rose from the bottom of the picture to the top, deep blue to olive green to orange, rust, gray, cream and finally, orange again. At the center was a person, hands folded, dressed in colorful stripes. He held a small tree at his breast. Looking, I had a brief moment of knowing rivers, too — the Euphrates, the Nile and the Mississippi, all “ancient, dusky rivers.” For a second, my soul had also grown deep like the rivers.
My date with my daughter Libby occurred the next day. We went to the Metropolitan Museum for the show that had just opened there, “The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England.” Libby specializes in modern art history, but she is a great companion and knowledgeable guide for older works too. She was delighted to come with me to see the portraits, tapestries, manuscripts, sculpture and armor from the Renaissance. While I was happy to use my phone to listen to the audio commentary by the experts, I was even more pleased to notice what Libby saw, things that I so easily overlooked. This exhibit was longer, and as we walked, I loved remembering my academic ties to that period of history, as a student and as a teacher.
Now back home in Vermont, I’ve returned to my quieter life and to my reading and writing. One morning I raised the question in my notebook, besides being fun, what was the importance of those couple of days in Manhattan? My answer became obvious: I had reestablished my relationship with the larger world of art and culture that had been closed off during the pandemic. I felt more human again. A character in a recent favorite book, Sarah Winman’s Still Life, said it well: “Beautiful art opens our eyes to the beauty of the world. It repositions our sight and judgment.”
For all of us, restoring our connections to these longer, broader views of history is essential. They give meaning, energy, and joy. They are reminders of our belonging. They help make life more bearable in a challenging world.