Day 1: November 9, 2016, #767
A Fling
As rain beat down, visitors quick-stepped their approach from all directions. A couple in bright jackets bobbed to the top of the limestone stairs. I scurried up behind them. We all wanted in. Sibyls, darkened at the museum’s roofline, looked like raptors waiting out a storm. After passing through the glass entrance doors and navigating the “Here I am- am I all here?” logjam, I crossed the Great Hall for an admission ticket. I was ready to begin. With my ticket-sticker affixed, I passed by the two guards manning the entrance in front of the Grand Stairs. They scanned incoming traffic like practiced customs officials. I continued down a hall of ancient gold, through the Medieval Court, turned right and soon arrived in a huge airy courtyard. Statuary had been plotted as strategically as chess pieces. In front of me was the Palladian inspired façade of the American Wing. I entered through its door and proceeded to the rear. After drawing my first room, I had immediately consulted the Map and knew exactly where I was headed. When I turned the final corner, a velvet rope hung across the way. My first thought was maybe they’re vacuuming. Despite the sibyls and the gloomy day, it didn’t dawn on me to parse an omen. Because beginnings have a strange way of invoking endings, I was riding high on the fact that I would finish. I missed the present tense and the message on obstacles. Instead, I was feeling smart for having brought a backup disk. I retrieved it from my pocket. With a quick look and a new number, I climbed a nearby set of stairs and wound my way to a new gallery also in the American Wing. Rightfully so. It was an American day.
Just beyond George Washington Crossing the Delaware, my new gallery commended Winslow Homer. Snap the Whip, 1872, an image I had first encountered in college when professors still thundered “Next slide please” into a darkened lecture hall, hung against the middle of one wall. Homer’s boys– hands joined, barefoot, some with britches rolled up– fling themselves across a field as the tallest one, at the end of the line, desperately leans away from the others in an attempt to anchor the running lot. The thrill and consequences of peripheral acceleration is what this picture describes. Fate gives way to physics.
Americans had just elected a new president. As I watched the red whip across the television map the night before, the anchorwoman’s face said it all. Something had snapped. For a good number of people, it was a rush. Red staggered gleefully county to county all the way to the Oregon coast. For others, it was a disastrous spill. Leveled by something they did not see coming, many had forgotten how momentum ends.
In another painting, two young men stretch their legs into evening, their faces and a lean-to barely lit by a campfire. I assumed this was a Civil War picture– Homer is famous for those– but my mind had short-circuited the scene. This is the Adirondacks. The men are on a fishing trip. To the side of their lean-to, I later caught the creel and net in the ember glow. One man is prone, the other has his back against the A-frame. They face opposite directions. The day is done. I wondered if their conversation included talk of politics and how they might have voted.
Smoke spumes from the campfire and red-orange sparks burst into wispy thin tracers that scatter into the night sky. The ease and confidence of this mark making anticipates its liquid opposite roughly ten years later: the mist and spray of Prout’s Neck, Maine. On the south wall of the gallery three paintings depicted that rocky stretch of coast. In the foreground, soupy, slick lines of white float amongst dark patches of brown to sop tidal pools where crashing surf makes a high-tide show. In one painting, Homer’s spray hovers like the cloud of Yahweh. In another, it resembles a dandelion gone to seed. These seaborne views with their wide horizons were a relief from the press of my morning commute.
And then the surf rose. In came fifth graders with their clipboards and buddies. Alpha kids, often taller, dug in. Others splashed around them. Their teacher, a young man in his twenties, but already resigned with age, reminded them about “being careful.” Kids dropped to the floor. They had worksheets. A few, mainly boys, never settled. They preferred Homer’s painting of the single man in the demasted fishing boat surrounded by sharks. The Gulf Stream, 1899, was where the action was. Pure suspense. Homer’s painting exacted the tantalizing fear that if one were to look away, something big might happen. The sharks, one with its mouth wide open, kept them on their toes.
Purple synchilla and a yellow soccer uniform with the insignia of Sweden colored a private school picture. These were looked-after kids. Another teacher, dressed in a light grey jersey dress, arrived with a new group of students. She was extremely pregnant. The surf churned. Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ bronze Puritan, positioned atop a pedestal in the middle of this commotion, did not flinch. Mid-stride, more cloak than anything else, he grips a walking stick with such force that the knuckles on his right hand had been sympathetically touched over the years burnishing them brighter. His other arm carries a book. I suspected the Good Book, the one that mattered most in his day. Papers shuffled and then the children left as quickly as they came, spilling out like the years that separated them from a Puritan, a man who never knew a museum or the electoral college.
Later, a docent on a mission wheeled in with her small group. She wanted them to see a seascape before heading off to “Old Masters”. She mentioned that Homer had sold one of the Prout’s Neck seascapes only to buy it back again. He proceeded to paint out two figures he had originally positioned at the shore. He grasped a redundancy. The viewer is always already there.
