New York anagogy
Like most of the relics in these galleries, the pieces of the statue have been lost to the plunder and accident of Time. But this Bust of the Virgin is somewhat different. It wasn’t made to be a bust, the nearby plaque explains. Large clay sculptures would have been cut into sections with wire before they were fired. The pieces would have been reassembled with mortar and the seams concealed with paint. The nameless Bohemian craftsman would have known to cut his sculpture in order to dry the clay more evenly. He would not have known that, 600 years on, one piece of it would sit in a glass box in a land he didn’t know existed, the bust broken cleanly from the torso, the paint faded but still there.
Dust to dust, sure, that old saw. But things can take a long time to grind back down to powder; and long before they turn to dust, they break, undone along the seams of their creation. That’s the real draw of the Met Cloisters, the brokenness. It is a fragmentary and improbable place, far more so than other museums, which play up the pristine condition of marquee pieces, turning objects into totems of whole eras and peoples. That placarded, auction-house history, paced about by docents saying adjectives, drawing attention to genius, flourish, mastery.
At the Cloisters, the objects are so anonymous and fragmented, and from such a vast time period and geographic range—some 500 years, from all corners of Europe—that periodization and auteurist appreciation are not really possible. There can be no retrospective without a proper noun to pin it on, and these works are mostly nameless. Standing in the room with the famous unicorn tapestries, a tour guide points to the letters AƎ woven into each tapestry. We don’t really know what they mean, she says. We just assume it means that they all go together. In the next room, a drop-in drawing class does stretches in front of a tapestry of the Nine Heroes. This tapestry, too, has its uncertainties: a figure is (mis)identified as Hector of Troy (?). An alarm sounds intermittently, tripped by tourists walking too wide around the drawing class and too close to the art. None of us can quite figure out where the sound is coming from. We all just look around, waiting for it to stop.
I wrote about visiting the Cloisters a year and a half ago, alone on a blue spring day. This time I went with M, who lives with me in the City now. I brought up the Bust of the Virgin as we walked back down the hills of Fort Tryon Park. What had the other pieces been? What had the Virgin been looking at? Had she been kneeling or standing or sitting on a mule? The obvious response was that it didn’t make a difference. But what if the craftsman had been inspired? What if one of the lost pieces was actually the most inventive, the most important?
On my last visit to the Museum, I left the galleries with similar obsessions. I couldn’t stop thinking about the tiny tunnels made by beetles in the robes of wooden saints. Or about the 12th-century Torso of Christ, a pale wood block with two tunicked thighs, mounted on the wall. The torso was being used as a scarecrow in a field in France when it was found by an American collector, a hundred years ago.
I asked M what she thought of the museum. Medieval art wasn’t her favorite but the afternoon was, the outing. A bright November in Manhattan, leaf-crisp, perfect. The afternoons that seem brighter as they grow shorter. A burnished imminence, always almost over.
—
November. What have I done. I’ve worked, I’ve walked the dog, I’ve sat at bars with friends. Friends who live here now, friends who don’t. Two of my friends left the City and now talk of moving back. They’ve been gone the same amount of time, more or less, but one feels far longer than the other. I don’t know why. Maybe time is harder to measure in the short, dark days, but easier to feel. It’s like the darkness has no chronology once it sets in, just a heavy feeling of having already happened. We marvel at how long it’s been, how short it’s been—somehow it’s all the same. We talk of distance and departure, not of Time, which glides like a whale beneath the surface of the world.
One of these friends, a documentary producer, told me over drinks that an old coworker of hers had just been reported missing, that the police had found his bicycle chained up at the beach. He’d sent an email the night before he disappeared. And then—gone in the middle of the night. We didn’t really know what to say. Manhattan is such a stupid place to feel foreboding. Sitting under globed and orange lights, drinking green mango martinis, having premonitions of death.
A few nights before, I sat outside with another friend, whose cat had kept him up all night. His eyes were tired and we drank beers, waiting to walk across the street to see a concert. My friend is a bookseller and we talked about books. I had some questions about his favorites. Jon Fosse, Joy Williams, this one Philip Roth. There was something in the novels he liked that reminded him of a term from our days of undergrad English classes: anagogical. It had something to do with prophecy, with reading texts with an eye toward the future or the soul. We both knew the term was from a letter that Dante had written his patron, but neither of us could articulate it very well. We couldn’t really remember anyone articulating it well. Anagogical. Maybe we just liked the sound of it.
In Dante’s letter, written just decades before the Bust of the Virgin was fired and assembled, he explains to his patron that his work can be interpreted several ways, that it “is not simple, but on the contrary it may be called polysemous, that is to say, ‘of more senses than one’; for it is one sense which we get through the letter, and another which we get through the thing the letter signifies.” He uses a Bible verse to delineate these different senses:
When Israel came out of Egypt, and the house of Jacob from a people of strange speech, Judaea became his sanctification, Israel his power.
For if we inspect the letter alone the departure of the children of Israel from Egypt in the time of Moses is presented to us; if the allegory, our redemption wrought by Christ; if the moral sense, the conversion of the soul from the grief and misery of sin to the state of grace is presented to us; if the anagogical, the departure of the holy soul from the slavery of this corruption to the liberty of eternal glory is presented to us.
For Dante, whose works were not just fanciful tales but theological and political polemics, the anagogical was a way of reading that looked for spiritual meanings. Anagogy was a mystic subcategory of symbolism, focused on clues about the afterlife. But after looking all this up, I’m still not so sure what it means, or what to do with it.
My friend came closest to articulating it. He brought up an interview with Joy Williams, where she talks about a writer suggesting that she cut the final line from one of her short stories, “Taking Care.” In the story, a minister has to care for his cancer-stricken wife and a granddaughter that his daughter has abandoned. Williams said of the writer, “She suggests I cut the final line, ‘Together they enter the shining rooms.’ I am dismayed. I become suspicious of readers. Of course I will not cut the line. It carries the story into the celestial, where it longs to go.” That was the closest we could get to the anagogical. It carries the story into the celestial, where it longs to go.
When my friend said anagogical, he didn’t mean books that offer clues about the afterlife. I think he meant something more like Williams’s notion: that art is anagogical when it gestures away from itself, toward another place that only art can summon but cannot account for. Like the conceptual place beneath the museum gallery floor where all the broken Virgins seemed to stare, looking beyond the world, into some past where they were whole, a real past so remote as to be fiction. In a secular time, the anagogical is no longer about where the soul goes when we die but where we tend without one. It’s no longer about the celestial or the “eternal glory,” as it would have been in Dante’s day. It is about the longing.
We drank another beer and walked across the street, to see Laurel Halo and Leila Bourdreuil play Halo’s latest record, Atlas. Halo sat at a grand piano and Bourdreuil at her cello. All the noirish, creaking ambience from the record was piped in through the PA, something the couple in front of us, passing messages back and forth on their Notes app, didn’t seem to like. I thought it made sense. Atlas sounds cinematic and sourceless, hissing like steam from somewhere beneath the city streets. It is a spectral and subterranean record. We sank into it. Time turned to music. My friend hunched forward slightly, his eyes closed. Listening. Longing to go.
—
Recently M broke a large ceramic plate, bringing down a pitcher full of apples too hard on it. Trying to find the right glue to fix it, I read through dozens of reviews online. Commenters warned against cheap options, some with awful odors. In a review for the glue that I ultimately bought, a commenter said that they had used it to mend a beloved mug they had broken. When they broke the mug again, it wasn’t the fault of the glue. The glue held. The mug just broke again, in new places.
It’s alluring to think of brokenness as the byproduct of Time, and of the broken thing as something that survives. The Cloisters gets you feeling anagogical, as if there is something in its broken idols that might hold clues to what will happen to you or to your art. The whole that each fragment presupposes outweighs its aspect of debris. And yet things so often do not break at the seams, but rather where they’re weakest, when they’re hardest hit.
A couple weeks ago, a body appeared on a beach in Queens. I read it in the news, knew immediately who it was, who it had been. The bicycle chained nearby. What struck me first was the language, how literal it was, how hard. NBC-4 New York described what the police found as “a body without a head or arms” and “a human torso with legs attached.” It was as if a shattered statue had washed ashore. As if his life were a cathedral ransacked by the sea.
When I glued the ceramic plate back together, I couldn’t set it down to dry at quite the right angle, so one of the cracks is now just slightly out of place. All the other cracks are invisible except for this one, a crooked fissure across the plate’s bluegray well. My fingers catch on it every time I wash it. It will be there forever now, until it breaks again.
ben tapeworm