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February 27, 2006

“Unprepossessing Individual in an Indeterminate Setting�

It’s Friday or Saturday night. I sip wine on the balcony of the Museum. An echoey string quintet, Schubert, I think, is accompanied by the continuo of vague palaver and dimly percussive applause, like matterings of rain or rustlings of cellophane. In the overarching vaults, the mix of sounds bounces and ricochets, dueling and dueting inside a skull bent on soliloquy.

Outside -- beyond the gothic arches, alcoves of stone Romans, masonry balustrades and urns bursting with forsythia -- a long Mylar banner shifts in the breeze like a silky negligee. The fluid marquee announces Cezanne; perhaps Fra Angelico or Medieval Reliquaries. Odd to see it from here, inside, rather than from the Avenue, as if I were backstage, behind an opera curtain.

This banner, one of three or four, is an ineffable Giotto-pink. It is punched with unobtrusive holes that keep it from billowing too much. Through the punches gleam bright azure crescents hatched with charcoal trusses. Takes a moment to “get� what’s shining through like blue glazed shards: the sky — not up, where heaven ought to be, but straight ahead, as if the sky were hanging on a wall. Quartet of blue, pink, yellow, gray; a Diebenkorn tangram.

A drop of wine is left at the bottom of my glass, like a cabochon garnet or a glittering eye. Rather than jumping up to leave (as is my wont), I decide to wait and see. In both senses.

The spread of cocktail tables is rife with high spirits, dressy businesspeople celebrating this and that, tourists with gift-shop bags and street guides. Tawny Japanese toast with flaxen champagne. Their flutes, lifted horizontally to lips, are translucent with viscous gold - they seem like ships-in-bottles - and turn the champagne into Turners before my eyes: sun-drowned seas, mercurial skies.

Time slows.

Beyond the revelry, cryptic Asian antiquities abide in airless vitrines. Bronze bird vessel, incense box, enamel jar, snuff bottle, cylindrical cup, porcelain pot, red lacquer cabinet — so many small enclosures. A pocket-size Chinese monk grins from inside his lapis lazuli grotto — detached and snug: “an unprepossessing individual in an indeterminate setting,� says the catalog. Of course a thread or two of Yeats wafts in: “Every discoloration of the stone, / Every accidental crack or dent / Seems a water-course or an avalanche, / Or lofty slope where it still snows…�

Observation slows time to meaninglessness. What one’s eyes alight on does tantalize! I squint down, paring my vision to the thinnest possible lash-crossed crescent of light. Plate, goblet, knife, spoon, an assemblage framed in a tabletop. My concave portrait shifts like sauce in the spoon. The gesso-white plate has become a palette of condiments mixed into an accidental landscape: an indeterminate setting spelling everywhere.

At this stoppage of time, when microscope turns telescope and back again, when inner and outer converge, the oil-vinegar-mustard fusion of fugitive perfection is exquisite, as everything truly is. I wish I could show you.

Posted by Jane on February 27, 2006 9:18 AM

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