Sunday Morning/Evening Thoughts

Dear Reader,

Last Sunday morning, I posted the first of what I imagined would be a series of weekly “Sunday Morning Entries” in which I’d briefly make note of the latest happenings in the wretched political and social landscape in which we currently find ourselves, followed by some cleansing thoughts on more pleasant topics.

This Sunday morning, I woke up contemplating today’s post and thought, “What’s the point? Who cares?”

I could easily blame Musk, Trump, Vance and their growing list of enablers for this. I could even blame the Democrats for failing to come up with any sort of suitable response to all of this nonsense but you know what? Sometimes existentialism is just existentialism. Which, now that I think about it, is sort of the definition of existentialism.

For real though: I have no fresh thoughts on the political and social happenings this week. I’m still trying to figure out my role in all of this. I don’t want to be a mere bystander but is there more I can do besides appearing here once a week to post something like “Elon Musk, Donald Trump and company are soulless idiots masquerading as political/business geniuses and the road they’re taking us on is the road to ruin”?

I will leave it at that for now. And I don’t know if I’ll stick to this weekly format or just post whenever inspiration strikes. In any event, I am…

…Existentially yours,

Rich

Tuesday Afternoon at the Cloisters

Donna, Chris, and I drove up to New York City on Tuesday morning, spending the afternoon in the Washington Heights and Harlem neighborhoods of the city. We had three destinations in mind and we hit them all. Here are my thoughts about the first of those stops, at the Cloisters.

The Cloisters is a museum of medieval art that is part the Metropolitan Museum of Art system. Donna and I were there just a few weeks ago, and once more back in 2008, but this was Chris’ first visit.

The Cloisters is a small museum but each time I’ve been there I have found something different to be entranced by. This time, I found myself immersed in a gallery Donna and I missed last month. This room seems to contain some of the oldest paintings and sculptures in the museum, including two paintings that had been frescoes removed from walls and placed on the canvases. I’m still trying to figure out how that worked, but the paintings are haunting, especially when you read that ghostly images of them remain on the walls from which they’d been removed.

Nearly every artwork inside the Cloisters is hundreds of years old but we did encounter one section of an expansive 2004 piece called Everything #4 by Adrian Piper. What we saw is a single mirror with the words “Everything Will Be Taken Away” etched in gold-leaf. It is part of a single exhibit featuring six identical mirrors scattered throughout the Cloisters and the main Met museum on Fifth Avenue.

As the accompanying sign explains:

The installation is an unprecedented fulfillment of the artist’s preferred mode of exhibiting the work, “dispersed among widely separated spaces and rooms, so that the viewer encounters this reminder of mortality and transcendence repeatedly but unexpectedly, and at widely separated intervals.”

Without being explicit about it, this exhibit clearly encourages selfies, such as mine above. Of course, once you’ve done this, you’ve made yourself part of the exhibit, at least for that moment. It was a thought-provoking installation and made me want to walk around all over the Met to find the other pieces that add up to the complete display.

It was also quite a challenge to take the selfie without including the phone in the selfie. I am happy with the result, though of course, putting oneself in such a display does force one to face up to the type of existential crisis I detailed above.

One further note about the Cloisters: ever since my first visit in 2008, I’ve thought that listening to “Pilgrimage”, a mysterious track from R.E.M.’s 1983 album Murmur, while strolling through the museum would be oddly appropriate. I can now confirm that “Pilgrimage” does indeed sound extra haunting at the Cloisters. I’m thinking on some future visit, I may try all of Murmur.