At the museum

Yesterday I went to the art museum I worked at for a dozen years to say goodbye to it. The museum isn't going anyplace; I am. It's doubtful that I'll be alive in two years and even if I am, the amputation of my right leg will be so high up I'll only be able to use crutches for the rest of whatever life remains. That's no way to wander in an art museum and I think at my age (I'll be sixty in a few months) I'll always be too self conscious to use a wheelchair.
It was a good day for a museum trip. I went early, not long after they opened. Outside, slate gray clouds drizzled rain on cold asphalt. Inside, as the morning hours passed, more and more people came in. Families with kids who didn't know that museums are not good places in which to run and shout. Couples stuffed with brunch strolling through galleries. Lone visitors in search of the companionship art supplies.
I avoided anything modern. Not out of dislike; I wanted to see only art that has endured, bad or good. Anything done in the last or in this century was off my list.
The thing about paintings is that they're hard to do. When you see one and it seems to be of a simple scene, it's easy to shrug at the idea of an artist spending a great deal of time on it and then walk away in search of other works to see. But often, if you look closely, you'll see that you may have missed something.
An example in my case is the French artist François' Bonvin's (1817–1887) The Engraver (1872).
I doubt I would've have thought much about it if I didn't work at the museum and pass by it as often as I did. It looked to me like a simple painting at first:

Francois Bonvin's The Engraver

 A woman is bringing a man a bowl of something—probably a stew of some kind—to a man who is probably her husband (she's wearing a wedding ring), while he works at his profession, engraving; a dull art that paid the bills. 
If you look more closely, however, you see what's really going on. See the easel? The portfolio? The simply framed works on the wall?
Look at her face:

Look at his hunched, defeated posture:

You realize that the story this painting is telling is of an artist with some talent—those are his works he's hung—but it's either not enough to lift him from his modest circumstances or it's gone unrecognized, unappreciated. 
Bonvin was one of nine children. One of them, a younger brother named Léon, was also an artist but failed to be as successful as his older brother, despite François' help and, after being unable to sell his work, hung himself at the age of thirty-two.
Is this painting, done six years after that awful event, Bonvin saying we should learn to accept defeat and settle? Or is it showing the lasting, humiliating misery of doing just that? 
The painting tells a sad story many of us know well, so well that even 146 years after Bonvin told it, we get it.

Thanks for the acid

Young C.:
Thank you for the four tabs of acid you left in my mailbox before you returned to home after Thanksgiving. I was a little concerned that it had been there all day, me at work, this being the kind of mailbox you see more in Normal Rockwell illustrations and the message you wrote on the handmade paper you'd Scotch taped the tabs recommending dosage and state of mind being easily readable to the postal carrier when he filled the box with catalogs and bills.

These tabs are surprisingly tiny.

Really, it was the most positive thing that mailbox has held in the two years I've lived in the house after my parents died.
I took it today, even though it's been weeks and the walk up the driveway is now paved with ice and treacherous for me, despite being technically a few years shy of senior citizenhood.
My manners are remiss. Before boring you with what a middle-aged man's first acid trip was like, I have to tell you how much I enjoyed seeing you when you spent some time at the house, though I know I’ll come off as condescending however much respect I have for you.
We'd barely met before then and most of your life, relative to mine, has been in childhood. Condescending already? No: Your intelligence, insight and capabilities are those of a mature adult, but in terms of raw time they don't erase what to me is the fairly recent past. At 26, you’re young.
I remember instructions on the caring of your parakeet you wrote to my parents before your parents and the three kids vacationed someplace. You roll your eyes now at the memory of your precocious prepubescent writings, but the wit was there, as was the love of words, and the boldness. My parents read it to me, impressed, and I held back on my feelings (as I did with so much else, which will burn me forever, of course, as it should). I do remember thinking that just maybe you’d be different, out of Main Line mold and that perhaps you’d lead others in some way or ignite an interesting trend.

What do I think now? I can only be honest: Too early to tell. But that’s in your favor. Yes, it’s at my age that some get crotchety about things moving too fast, and that what really endures is what’s built over time and other cliches, but after a few dozen spins around the sun you do start to take a long view. There are short cuts. Music, for example. In interviews with mature musicians most speak candidly of how much of the profundity of their lyrics was happenstance. A word that fit, another that rhymed. Too much visual art passes for something when it’s not, but you’re a better judge of that than I. The next time you’re at the museum I’d like to show you two paintings I love. Both are unromantic images of a man and a woman. Being visual images, words fail me, so I’ll leave it at that and it’s on you to remind me on your next trip east. Writing’s harder to fake and get away with, but some do, for awhile.
I don’t mean to discount music and art made by the young. The young John Lennon, Paul Simon and Laura Nyro said as much as the seasoned Randy Newman or Loudin Wainwright, and Alice Munro and John Cheever in their sixties are good to read at any age.
I like what you said about what you’re up to these days. It seems you learned volumes from the bad relationship in Texas and moved on undamaged. Keep throwing yourself into others, with as much heart as you have and without fear. Once, a few years before you were born (my condensation again!), someone I knew would be “it” gave me hope, and for an unforgettable walk down a hallway at a corporate center in mid-1980s Japan to a telephone, there was only air between my rubber soles and the charcoal industrial carpet below, I swear. Nothing has come close since. An obituary in last week’s Inquirer quoted a local husband in his late 80s saying of his late wife that his heart fluttered whenever she entered the room throughout their marriage of over half a century. May you be one of those who remains fresh.
Back, now, to the acid. It’s good. I’d feared it. You know -- jumping out of windows, going tete-a-tete with locomotives. But no. It’s fine. Not the different animal I’d thought it might be, closer to the bhang lasi I’d had in India and with even less time distortion. A gentle high. You were right, what you had is good. I listened to comedy and music and laughed and swooned.
It’s horrible, but the greatest fear of such drugs at my age is that they remind you of lost promise, of roads not taken, people not told to fuck off, interests not pursued. True, you and others will say it’s never too late, that so-and-so started doing this or that at an advanced age and became happy with the output, if not renown for it. I’m not one of those special people with that energy however. For me, nine-thirty at night means a book and a warm bed, alarm set, tomorrow’s responsibilities in mind. Hell, the reason it’s taken until now to take half a tab was scheduling.

All right, Young C., nearing a thousand words, which is about six hundred more than needed or that you may have interest in. Oh, the acid brought out the latent stand up comedian in me and I wrote them down on paper so, before it completely wears off:

• I was walking to the mailbox today and I thought, “Brrr!” Then I thought, How can “Brrr!” be a thought?
• How do you feel right now on a scale of one to ten with “one” being a one and “ten” being a ten?

And what good’s an acid trip without a profundity of love, like this one I wrote of my most recent instance of rejection:
The photons of this winter’s sun would seem less cruel if reflected from your face, blah, blah, blah.
I actually wrote the “blah, blah, blah.” Go figure. 
Love,
B.

The Loser Knows He's Getting Old Because ... 2

Many saying, writing and otherwise expressing wise, insightful ideas he never thought of are half his age.
 

"Companion (Passing Through)," a sculpture by the artist KAWS, garners attention at Philadelphia's 30th St. Station, where it will be exhibited until May 14. KAWS is not half the Loser's age, but he is much younger than he is.

An Early Ambition

In his youth, the Complete and Total Loser toyed with the idea of being an artist.

It didn't matter to him that he had no talent for composition, no sense of color, no concept of how to translate an idea into an image, and drew poorly; he liked the idea of little work that would pay well and give him an air of being above those who settle into the ranks of workers.

Then there were the women. The Loser had (and has) no ability to get them. "Artists," he thought, "don't need to be good looking or well dressed. Their passion appeals to women."

And the type of women drawn to artist were, he thought, his type. Exotics with tawny limbs, free spirits who would disrobe in the woods and have sex at odd times of day and in unconventional positions. Supportive women with hair in their eyes, casual about a threesome. 

The Loser even picked art for his college major. His topics were unfocused and, despite their frequent graphic sexual images, timid.

Not long after college, he threw away everything he'd done.