Day 248

Brown-eyed girl.

Henri Matisse lived from 1869 until ten months before I was born, so he witnessed enormous changes in his lifetime, technological, societal, environmental, horrifying and amazing events.  His own daughter was active in the French Resistance during the Second World War, was tortured and on her way to Buchenwald concentration camp when she managed to escape. 

Yet his entire oeuvre depicts colourful peaceful moments: women, nudes, interiors filled with pattern, the bold cutouts of his later years, full of life and movement. 

I have just read a book called McKay's Bees, by Thomas McMahon, also set during an eventful period of American history, when a set of circumstances fomented into what became the American Civil War.  To the characters in the book these happenings are all peripheral.  "They live their lives and pursue their goals inconvenienced but hardly deflected by the cataclysmic events around them - the way most of us live now." (from the book-cover blurb).

Sometimes, to be able to live, you have to block yourself off from certain things.  It is important always to empathise, but there are some things you cannot have any control over, like the terrible abuse of women in the Democratic Republic of Congo, or the fact that although a big drug-lord in Colombia has been arrested, you know (you've watched The Wire) that another will just step up to take his place, so that there will most likely be no glitch in the supply of drugs to the U.S whatsoever.  You cannot change the minds of some people who have no desire to recycle anything, even though you sort and take stuff to the dump as though your life depended on it.  You have to realise and live with the fact that there are people who are educated, who even have post-graduate degrees, but who never really THINK.  That there are terrible men who hate women and do bad things to them, that many people take out their frustrations on creatures smaller than they are, like children and animals. 

All these things mill about inside your head and sometimes make you weep, but there are only small things you can do to help, like give charitable donations.  Like be kind to everyone. 

So a part of you understands Matisse, sympathises with McKay, and leads you to make your own way, to create your own art, decorate your own nest, live your own loving life.
  

Tonight, my own colorful ode to being a woman, to Art, a shout-out against sadness! Thank you Matisse!