At the Met

What is at the bottom is a poem. What comes before it is a little insight in to how and why it came about.

A peak inside the untidy world of creation.

I recall---and so far have failed to forget as I tell it to you now---something I’d read about our favourite dipsomaniacal wordsmith, Charles Bukowski. When recollecting his early years as a young, penniless, peripatetic writer travelling the country during World War II, he often revisited in memory the sheer squalor of his lonely years moving from cheap hotel room to sordid boarding house to cheap hotel. He wrote of those travelling years walking on a knife’s edge that caused him to believe he would surely slip on that edge and impale himself through the heart. He more than once contemplated suicide.  

Never more was suicide at his elbow than when he found himself paperless.  Not money, of course, though that surely was a factor in being destitute.  No. His impoverishment was in the form of white paper needed to write. When out of sheets to place words is when he was most near despair. One night, with nary a piece to write on and just a nub of a pencil as his technological implement, he readied the noose. Before he could finalize the ‘easy cure,’ however, something seemingly insignificant stopped him in his tracks. He spied the margins of a newspaper. Blank white area, he realized!  He explained that what kept him alive on at least one occasion was the free, unmarked area of the margins of the newspaper where he could continue writing words. Like a man underwater finding an alcove with small pockets of air to breath, he found a way to go on  thanks to roughly a half inch margin of white area around somebody’s Gazette or other, to stain with a pencil marks. He would continue to create.

I cannot by any stretch match anything in my own life that might compare to the circumstantial despair that Bukowski lived through during those his lean years. However, in my own pathetic way, I can relate to the margins.

The germination of the poem below sprung from a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City one blistering summer afternoon. Though things in the poem are not conveyed as they happened exactly, (I naturally take some artistic license) there were enough fragments of experiences I believed could be shaped in to a poem.  This is not a poem so I shall try to be accurate whilst being slightly vague. The problem was that I hadn't the means to write the ideas down as they came and I was deathly afraid I would lose them. Who, after all, when one gets right down to it, even in the most intimate recesses of the mind, truly trusts their own recollective abilities when it comes to ideas not yet shared? Sure, we may believe we have been the eyewitness to something, or recall an argument we are sure went our way.  But to believe we can manufacture again that eureka moment is something we do not trust within ourselves. I am be being too objective here. May be I should say I cannot. On this particular day I was dictating words in the mind whilst at the same time feeling the excitement that possibly they were good ideas.  I know that even if I might have recalled them accurately the same excitement would be lost. If this were lost I would think the ideas were lacking.  If not a lack of true recollection at least a loss of spontaneity in the moment. A paradox of sorts to be sure.  

No matter what I recalled later they were in danger of losing the sheen. We know how this works. Like the initial images that present themselves with a quick flick of paint on a canvas, we are fixated and excited about our original and intuitive idea.  They come from the ether. There was nothing, now something. They seem the best and freshest early. However, when they are ideas for a written project, we become deathly afraid of losing them if they are not brought forth from the brain to something substantial like paper. They must be set down! This was my own squalor: Fear that imagination dried up beyond the first intuitive idea, if not grasped in time. My fear was that the excitement of primary imagination was only a mirage of ornateness that, if allowed to change with passing time, turned out to be nothing but a lumpy fold out bed, a Gideon’s bible in the drawer, and a neon sign shining a devious red through the curtains.

I walked out of the Met with a jumble of ideas and an unorganized collage of images. Worse than this, I was afraid of losing them. I walked the long path down 5^th Avenue from the Museum at 80^th to a friend’s place on 57^th street. Walking south down 5^th meant Central Park always at my right hand. I ignored it the whole way.  I was only thankful for the benches at every entrance. It was a blazing hot day and my brain melted seemingly taking my ideas with them in a kind of puddle of primordial soup. I tried desperately through the sweat to contain them. It felt as if the perspiration was from the exertion of holding on to them. I found myself sitting on every bench at every block to rest and collect my ideas. More to the point, I checked to see I still had them. It was at one of these rests, I realized I had white space around the margins of a few magazines I carried in plastic bag. I found a pen and feverishly wrote down these ideas at every sit-down at every block, filling in the white spaces on every page with ideas and lines. I walked and thought (and perspired) then stopped and thought then wrote. Soon enough as the blocks and hence, park benches added up and receded, I was able to piece together very loosely the poem below, haphazardly and cramped, in an array of untamed ink within the white margins of my magazines. It was hot as blazes. I was as soaked as white water rocks.

Anyway, none of this is quite parallel with the early, destitute life of Bukowski. I suppose, may be, I can say we both worked within the margins. We both might also agree it’s a cramped life. So is the Metropolitan Museum most days. The poem below is set there. The poem is simply about a little calm, real, unfabricated sophistication surrounded by a good deal of the opposite kind. Sometimes the surroundings are fabricated (like temples in a museum wing) and sometimes the inhabitants are unsophisticated (like tourists in that wing). The unforced and original sophistication can be in the form of a person. It may often be in the form of a child. It may often be in the form of a sophisticated child. It is rarely the artist. He is merely a detached watcher of things. When he is in his workshop he is clumsier. There is often no sophistication there. He often must stop at every block. He may often work in cramped places. He might often wipe copious amount of sweat from his brow. The poem:

At the Met

Roofed by Japanese temples and

Artificial light we stood. No rising

Sun from the east here. Rather from the east

wing. Our roof, as ornate as a geishas

Conversation is deceivingly simple,

Curled up at the four corners like a sultan's

Slippers towards a God though whose, I

Could not tell. I stood with a small worshipping

Mass whose saviour must be a giant eye

As the talisman's around their necks

Implied. Only I and my Buddha boy

Stood naked necked. His naked nape, bowed like

A lover's top lip and his shorn head, in

Danger of colliding with my hip, aimed

At our interest. A lady of the mass

With a voice like a bugled blare to send

The weary off to war, spoke. The small pool

Of water at the foot of the temple

We all penetrated with a glare (the

East know the importance of water, so

It's said). At the pools edge she read aloud

The sign: "Do not throw pennies as they might

Endanger the fish." What fish we all wondered?

Then: "Did I just see one scurry by?"

The question sent us all on a journey

And the ladies, camera eyes bouncing

Like bewildered demi-gods against

Ancient mountains, were off on the hunt.

"Do fish 'scurry'?"

"Is 'scurry' the word?"

"Who still says 'scurry'?"

"Well, what do fish do?"

The leaves of the Bodhi tree tickled the boy’s

Head, I could see. For silently, with fixed glare,

And all the aplomb of a cherry trees leaf

As it alights from its place, he whispered: "swim".

In an instant the light danced off the water

And rose and congealed a tight ball like a dying

Star. It ascended my face where the white

Heat thrust through my nostrils and the light

Flashed out my eyes. I staggered for a moment.

Blind and frightened, I leaned upon a pillar

And speculated: The superlative artist paints

Mount Fuji with a mere stroke of the wrist.