Gotham Diary:
Evocation
5 June 2014
At The Bygone Bureau, Nathan Pensky writes a fine piece, gracefully detailed but broken by the shock of loss, about his mother’s death from lung cancer. “The doctors gave her six months,” and Pensky and his wife wanted her to spend that time with them, in their Pennsylvania home. But four days after they fly her out from Arizona, she has to go into hospice care, and within ten days altogether she is dead. It all seems somewhat pointless, especially as mother and son seem not to have had any “quality time” together: mom was simply too sick. (Pensky’s description of her final hours is just harrowing enough to make you pray that you never have to watch someone drown, effectively, in bed.)
Like the best essays at The Bygone Bureau, “My Own Private Arizona” is understated and impressionistic, with just enough information to propel the reader’s imagination. But it was nevertheless something of a surprise to find, near the end of the piece, what might well stand as the site’s raison d’être.
A week after we return, I remember a few things. Things and people and books I love. It doesn’t matter which ones they are. They are more important for what they evoke than what they are. And there seems to be a direct correlation between the meanness of the thing and the depth of its evocation. Describing them would be misleading.
(I suspect that “meanness” is supposed to be “meaningfulness.”)
This clicked with me immediately, for I was still somewhat confused by my inability to come up with anything interesting to say about Monday’s visit to the Cloisters. Anything interesting to say, that is, here. I worked off my frustration in a letter to a friend in which I suggested that what might be the most important thing about the Cloisters for me now is simply that I’ve been visiting it for so long. There is also the fact that the terrain of Fort Tryon Park, in which the Cloisters stands, is the terrain of my childhood, which is not surprising, given that they are about ten miles apart at the most. The earth, after a heavy rain, smells the same — a Proustian discovery, let me tell you! None of this has anything to do with the objects displayed at the museum, nor with the fabric of its building. But it has everything to do with the Cloisters as a repository.
My favorite thing at the Cloisters has always been and will always be the Merode Altarpiece. My second-favorite thing right now is the remnant of the Nine Heroes tapestry. But my third-favorite thing is the built-in lavabo in the Cuxa Cloister. The water spouts from the visage of a jolly monster, but the real monstrosity is the title card, wherein the lavabo is described as “a modern creation.” Which is true enough; but the object is on view at a museum devoted to the arts of the Middle Ages not because it is “a modern creation” but because it is a fake.
The Cloisters itself a modern creation (regular readers will recall just how modern, at least in relation to me), but it is not a fake. It is, rather, an appropriate shelter for a collection of relics of a vanished way of life. It has also become, for me, a pile of evocations. Remote from the rest of town, brooding romantically over the Hudson and the undeveloped Palisades, its grey arcades and stairwells in perfect accord with the old bits and bobs, The Cloisters almost seems designed to serve as a vault for personal memories, especially for someone as fortunate as I have been, in having easy (but not too easy) access to it for most of my life — all but the Houston and school years. To visit it is to make a pilgrimage to traces of myself.
This isn’t what museums are for, I know. But to describe the Cloisters as a museum would be, as Pensky says, misleading.
***
I had hoped that reading John Keegan’s history, The First World War, would give me some insight into the catastrophe, but instead it has taught me that the measure of the catastrophe is, precisely, its opacity, its rebuff of insights. Keegan is very good at pointing out mistakes that, had they not been made, might have made for a smoother, more mercifully dispatched conflict, but as everyone seems to have made mistakes, and as the mistakes all seem to involve failure to coordinate facts on the ground with plans for future action, the overall impression is one of massive incompetence, spiced every now and then with an arrogance that we now recognize as the expression, not so much of upper-class presumption, as of nineteenth-century confidence. It was a Lake Wobegon affair: everyone thought himself to be above average.
As I was finishing reading The Sleepwalkers, Christopher Clark’s thrilling account of the run-up to the war, it occurred to me that the war on the Western Front, at least, was just an old-fashioned siege, and Keegan has confirmed some of that. Whatever the execution of the Schlieffen plan was supposed to produce (the gift of a North-African colony or two to Germany?), its failure created a situation in which Germany defended itself from Allied besiegement. The difference from a conventional, old-time siege was of course that Germany’s defensive perimeter was located in Belgium and France. What I’m waiting to discover is whether I’m right about the end of the war, which was, like the end of most sieges, the capitulation of the besieged. Because of Germany’s massive offensiveness at the beginning of the war, it seems inapt to character the German position as “under siege,” but if we bear in mind that the German military was designed to compensate for a sense of fundamental geographic vulnerability, we might better understand Germany’s toxic postwar resentments, as well as its inability to understand why the French demanded such colossal reparations. Never has the cliché about the best defence’s being a good offense been so spectacularly exemplified.
It is a commonplace to fault “the generals” of 1914 for the pointless slaughter of millions of soldiers, and although Keegan is diligent about evaluating each senior officer on his own, rather than as the member of a class, he does not quite gainsay the conventional wisdom. The generals knew how to create a mess without knowing how to clean it up. Each seems to have believe that the mess would overwhelm the enemy, but, when this didn’t happen, they hadn’t a clue. Sound familiar?
Daily Blague news update: Clarity.