Friday Nights At The Met

Having had my fill of abstractions for the evening—I did not enjoy the special exhibit of turquoise dinosaur turds—I decided to take the escalator downstairs and spend my last few minutes among the clichés housed in the recently renovated collection of classical bric-a-Braque, to see what I could see.

In those days, I carried a black Moleskine everywhere I went and recorded everything I saw. I clutched my pen with the white-knuckled determination of a thief gripping the steering wheel of a Porsche: I would not leave the world empty-handed.

In truth, I really had no earthly idea what I was up to besides scribbling: joyriding from place to place, face to face, world to word, wasting time; hoping, in the course of my travels, I would unearth a reason to exist—something, if not exactly noteworthy, or new, at least something more diverting than doing endless donuts around Death in the vegetable aisle at the supermarket.

And so it transpired that I discovered myself on the ground floor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City. In that vast glass-vaulted gallery, I found a garden of broken images that—taken together and carefully weighed—amounted to less than a worm in terms of its collective artistry, but nevertheless remained resolutely human, even beautiful.

For me, this was Heaven. I dipped my fingers in a purling fountain and flicked water at Poseidon. I flipped the bird at Julius Caesar. I peeped around the shattered ass of a faceless Nike. And I whistled at what I saw. For—basking under a beam of light bespangled with billions of starry motes that suggested this section of the Cosmos was still, secretly, under construction—I spied the alabaster corpse of a laughing Cupid impaled on an iron spike.

I saw a legless young man in a wheelchair sketching that sculpture with excruciating care.

That vision of Love changed my life.

The Unknown Chaplin

This canister of film contains a clip

requiring restoration. We can see

the sequence opens in a studio;

a flapping muslin sky diffuses all

the ambient sunlight. Although the heat

looks terrible, we spot a withered palm

sighing and swaying inside a pot with each

gentle breeze blowing through the lot;

a lot still ringing from a bang somewhere

along the Western Front—a Ford back-

firing in the distance. After these

imagined noises fade, we find the world

returns to silence once again: black

and gray and white. A dented derby fans

Edna Purviance and her bouncing leg.

Windows are replaced and hinges greased.

Cops and crooks—wearing identical

false moustaches—whisper, exchanging their

own views about the news: the war, their wives,

sore bums, their pay. A puppy—on a leash

that’s growing shorter as he sniffs around

a fake hydrant—nearly strangles him-

self in search of some comic relief.

A titter passes through the company.

The dog breaks up the day’s monotony:

endless takes and retakes; wasted time;

the camera always turning, turning, like

the door to a hotel you can’t escape.

This is not a movie. This is life.

No longer the director, our hero

races from behind the camera

and acts. His face says everything. But

we only see a blur: a little man,
without a hat, running very quickly

toward a dog. The rest is lost. Perhaps.