Waves of Inspiration

Jan. 2, 2025 — I went to see a special exhibit tonight at the Nelson-Atkins Museum that featured the famous woodblock print The Great Wave off Kanagawa along with dozens of other works by the great Japanese painter Hokusai, his students, and many other artists around the world who were inspired by his style.

Sometimes I go to an art exhibit and find something to chew on in every caption and detail, and I expected the same to happen here, and yet I walked through most of the “Waves of Inspiration” exhibit feeling strangely detached.

It’s been a bit of a theme lately. There’s so much around me to enjoy and appreciate, but I find my thoughts drifting to obligations, irritations, and uncertainties, as if largely numb to the beauty, significance, or even terror of the world around me.

The new year is not off to an auspicious start. Our city’s first homicide occurred hours into the new year. The New York Times is filled with stories of violence in the subway. And of course there’s the terror attack in New Orleans, my favorite city in the USA. That kind of thing used to lead me to tears and commiseration with family or colleagues. But now we hardly blink an eye. It’s almost like I’m mourning the ability to mourn.

Last Monday my son and I went to our favorite cabin at a state park in Southeast Kansas. Both my kids have spent hours playing along the bluffs by the lake, setting up “shops” where they smash colored rocks into different piles of dust to collect and trade. But this time we arrived and saw it was all covered with dead trees and branches that washed up during the flooding last spring, wiping out the docks where we used to swim, launch kayaks, or sit beside the water and drink coffee.

My son was upset at first, looking around incredulously and then sitting on a boulder with his head down. We made the most of it, gathering sticks to use as arrows for a bow someone had fashioned and left behind, looking for fossils and skipping rocks, then playing games in the cabin after it got dark. Eventually he set to learning some magic tricks from a kit he got for Christmas while I blasted Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor from the travel speaker into the cabin loft, raising my right hand and seeking the intervals and cadences on an imaginary piano.

Hokkaido’s great wave is more relevant than ever, featured in pixellated form on the ubiquitous Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow book cover and story, which notes that it appeared on every dorm room wall in the 1990s, a fact I can vouch for.

A caption in the final wing of the exhibit talked about the way the painting can be viewed in light of a changing climate, the three fishing boats and crews thrown about helplessly and unexpectedly with a view of Mt. Fuji offering only a distant glimmer of hope. It made me think about the Low song “The Great Destroyer,” about the various waves of destruction sweeping our planet, about how our sense of security is an illusion, about the folly of damming a river in the great plains and thinking you can create a permanent recreational paradise.

And then there was the Great Wave itself. I didn’t notice it at first until an older couple moved over to the side and the artwork came into view. The woodcut was much smaller than I expected. But standing up close you can kind of project yourself into the scene. Soon the wave begins to feel immense, its cultural importance and historical stature belied by the humble, approachable size of the frame. Great works of art always seem to perfectly absorb and resist any interpretations you throw at them, causing reactions that are powerful but often impossible to explain.

Within a few moments the wave of emotion I’d been missing came swelling up inside. I stood there and drank in the muted gray of the background — so similar to the sky at the lake the other day — the perfectly outlined drops of foam and water, the parallel lines on the boats, the richness of the blue, and the overall perfection of the composition. I imagined the hand of a 70-year-old human being creating it and the many thousands of other people who stood in wonder right where I was standing now.

I was grateful to be able to see such great art in my hometown and to be able to take my family to see it with me. I felt relieved that I was able to feel something after all. Like one of the poor souls flung about in the boats, I’m small and scared and not always sure I’ll make it to shore. Waves of destruction loom and inspiration is an unsteady business. But let’s have hope. Let’s keep paddling. The year is still young.

Note: This post was taken from my new newsletter I quietly launched in December and have not shared widely yet. If you’re interested in reading more, let me know!