Diary Entry: Visiting the Met, and Swastika Info

On the Saturday before Christmas, I accompanied my young aide (from Haiti) to the NY Metropolitan Museum of Art — The Met. I used to go every once-in-a-while, especially while Carl Lesnor was still alive since he lived right nearby, but I hadn’t been to the museum for four or five years.

Manhattan’s streets were jam packed — more crowded perhaps than I’d ever seen them, even before the Pandemic; it took the Xpress bus around 90 minutes to get in the vicinity from my apartment near Coney Island, and then another half-hour on the M3 bus to go further up Madison Avenue to East 79th Street. I was excited to acquaint Bianca, who speaks mostly French with a smattering of English, with some of the great Impressionist paintings I once loved so much, especially as many of them were painted in French.

Walking through the street-level “accessible” entrance instead of up the magnificent stone stairs, me with my walking stick I’ve been using for a few years now to help me keep my balance, visitors were required to walk through airport-style metal detectors —  same kind of “security scanners” they expect hospital patients to pass through when I visit my cardiologist’s office. With my defibrillator implanted in my chest, I remembered to walk around them, But what of those who don’t? The detectors can actually cause your devices to go haywire, maybe even kill you. So many have pacemakers, metal screws, defibrillators — especially coming through the “accessible” entrance! You’d think the Museum (and cardiologist!) would’d at LEAST hang a sign near the scanners saying “If you have a pacemaker or other heart-support, please come around the machine. Do not walk through it!” But I’ve never seen such a reminder.

The guards were fine; in fact, all the workers at the museum were helpful and great. Nevertheless, I had to take it upon myself to squeeze around the outside of the machine. The guard asks routinely, “You have a pacemaker?” And I say, “Defibrillator”. He signals me over to a table to check my backpack, opens it, sees all the books and emergency diapers (just in case!) and clears it. Doesn’t run a “wand” around my body. I crack the usual jokes he must have heard a dozen times already that day, and step to the adjacent “coat check” area which was only accepting bags at the moment and not coats, on this freezing first day of winter. (Winter? Wow, how did THAT happen so quickly? What happened to Autumn?)

The bag-check person suggests I check my coat anyway, along with my bag, great! She hands me a chip with the number “42” on it. “Wow, Jackie Robinson’s number with the Brooklyn Dodgers! This is going to be a good day!,” I exclaim automatically. “Starting off right!” She has no idea what I’m talking about.

First stop: Finding bathrooms. Not too hard, thanks to Bianca — I being already discombobulated in the greatly refurbished and magnificent museum. No complaints about the toilets, although the stall I first ventured into is out of toilet paper. (Aaaargh, Mitchel, you are soooo American!). There’s not even a short bathroom line! What? In New York? I’m already impressed.

Well, we finally find our way to the elevators and up to the 2nd floor, where the French Impressionist paintings are located. When they refurbished the buildings they dimmed the lights much too much, and with my poor vision I could barely see the paintings. And with the low-to-the-ground “fence” — a string fencing off people to keep us from moving too close to the walls and paintings — I couldn’t get close enough to read the info about each painting. The fonts need to be at least 3 points larger. (How did we ever get away with producing the Red Balloon newsletter in 7 point type? OMG. Even in laying out our newspapers we’d considered 11 point type super-large, and too big for the text of the articles!)

Cezanne, however, is always magnifique, and my growing fondness for his work easily elbowed out of the way Gaugin’s nearby island paintings, which drew the largest crowds — their voyeur racist porn imagery (though not by today’s internet standards) along with unusual splashes of red, no doubt serving as the magnet for bored tourists.

But some how I missed the Monet and especially the Van Gogh. At one point in my life while tripping on Mescaline, I’d walk across Central Park and sit cross-legged on the floor in front of the Van Gogh paintings for many hours, being sucked into and out of Van Gogh’s brush-stroke realities. I wanted to tell that story to Bianca; but I realized that even if she understood English a bit more she’d have difficulty comprehending what I was saying. Even my wonderful therapist, from China, has enough difficulty understanding moi! So I keep my thoughts contained, and am unable to find that corner that once featured Van Gogh, alas!

We did pass elegant statues in marble by Rodin — not allowed to touch, when they were crying out to be caressed!

So my experience at the museum was really different than it always had been in the past. I wanted to survey the large crowd there. Why were they there?

As I watched groups gaze at the famous paintings and cranked my ears to overhear the few things they said before moving on to gaze at the next one, I felt more than ever that we were consuming what society deems the great art of the past. My brain not only flashes on John Berger’s insightful book “Ways of Seeing” — one of the first readings I’d assigned in teaching Marxism for Beginners all those years to an underground class at Stony Brook — but even more on Woody Allen in “Annie Hall”. There, Woody, exasperated with what he’s hearing from male line-dwellers at a movie theater, interrupts, saying “that’s not what he means at all!”, and pulls out the flesh-and-bones McLuhan from behind a poster. McLuhan confirms what Woody is explaining about art to the pontificating know-it-all. In an aside Woody turns to the camera and says: “Wouldn’t it be great if life really worked that way?”

Even the Siena exhibit, which some raved about, I found boring and in a sense tragic. I guess I’m just a Philistine when it comes to appreciating great art, but I’ve grown not to like the idea of being an art voyeur, with all those great artworks packed onto the walls of one room after the next. Bianca pointed to the time, and so I picked up my bag and coat, relieved to head back out into the freezing but bright sunny chill Saturday.

Bianca headed to a bus to the subway, and I headed down to Times Square. And yet we found ourselves on the same extremely crowded bus, with me — old man that I am with my 5 foot tall walking stick — being offered a seat in front sandwiched between two quite large individuals. Lost track of Bianca.

Across the aisle, a young woman and two young men were talking avidly while she breastfed her 5-week-old baby. YES, back to real life! I appreciated her guts to feed her child in public, as the bus was crawled through city traffic, 40 minutes to go just a few blocks. I speculated to myself what a fucked-up culture we live in where it takes guts to breast-feed while out and about! It’s generally seen as pornographic in a sense (fuck Gauguin!), treated as some private sexual activity, and so glad that times seem to be a-changing! I also thought of the high school boys in Park Slope who’d go to the Two Boots restaurant during lunch to ogle at the young mothers who’d invariably gravitate there to breast feed their babies. (On behalf of those with day jobs, the nannies would whisk the babies off to Prospect Park, which was free and they wouldn’t have to spend money from their salaries. Even there, a class division!) The boys nicknamed the bistro “Two Boobs”, and it had been a real thing ten years ago in Brooklyn.

On the bus, two 30 year-olds from Latin America were standing right in front of me, and the male had pinned on his hat an image of a hammer-and-sickle. Wow. Hooray! His partner, standing above me, looked down and noted my “Resist Fascism” pin affixed to my black peacoat. Smiled at me, tried to point it out discretely to her oblivious partner. Hope I made them feel welcome here in Nueva York!

Finally made it down to the Palestine demo — man, that bus took forever! — and I found a good spot to meet the “manifestacion” (too much French painters, and Haitian aides!), just as it began marching past, swallowing me up, glad to have made it and be able to participate, even for those few minutes! It’s my obligation, I feel, to attend as many protests in support of Palestine and opposing genocide as I could, being an anti-zionist Jew from Bensonhurst.

At the very end, who should come by? Old friends Rob Jereski, and then Jennifer Jager. Got to talk with Rob standing out there on the street in the midst of the protest. Remembered how he and Harry Bubbins engaged in a 3-day hunger strike in front of Hillary Clinton’s office, against some war she was dragging us into. Talked about his daughter whom I’d last met as a newborn, and Rob said she’s now 16 — holy shit! — and he had also in the interim between Green Party campaigns gone to law school and become a legal aid attorney, for a number of years already! Doing good stuff, of course!

Jennifer and I ducked into “Le Pain Quotidien” around 39th St. and Broadway, and as usual sat talking for a couple of hours — one of my favorite things to do when not busy protesting somewhere or writing. Jenn complained about how weak the coffee was at a different Le Pain, so the waitress made her something especially strong! While I ate baked eggs, avocado, and goat cheese, and washed it down with a not-weak-at-all cappuccino (I had fired those doctors who’d told me “No caffeine!” and stuck with those who said that caffeine is fine), I noted a page I photographed at the museum from an exhibit of W.E.B. Dubois’ magazine “The Crisis”, this from an issue in 1918, which unexpectedly printed swastikas with no relation at all to the article I was looking at.

So Jennifer began looking up on the internet the history of the Swastika. We knew it was at one point an American Indian symbol, but where did it come from? (This is what we do in our spare time!)

Lo and behold, the Swastika has for centuries been a symbol for Buddha’s heart!!!! Wow! Which took both of us by extreme surprise. The U.S. Holocaust Museum has this on the History of the Swastika (click on the link). “The swastika is an ancient symbol that was in use in many different cultures for at least 5,000 years before Adolf Hitler made it the centerpiece of the Nazi flag. Its present-day use by certain extremist groups promotes hate.”

So how did American Indians use that symbol long ago if it came from Asia? Could it be that early people here in the Americas crossed the straits from Asia via Alaska and carried the image with them? I don’t know. But wouldn’t it be amazing if the true history (and genocide) of Turtle Island’s original inhabitants can be tracked by examining the swastika? The ironies are astounding.

And so went my day Saturday. I had to argue with the watress and her supervisor about removing a $5 mistaken addition to the cost of my lunch — which they quickly tried to do, until one thing or another went wrong with their machine. Jenn left, and I hopped on the nearby subway and enjoyed my ride for the next hour, sitting next to a lovely immigrant family who were playing a game asking their cell phone questions and receiving back accurate answers, and laughing uproariously.

Dozing off. Came into Coney Island — the same station where a woman would be set on fire and killed 12 hours later! — and hopped on the bus back to my place. And so it goes. Just in case you were wondering!