The Met

Finally I come to the Metropolitan Museum in New York. It is beautiful place. In the sense of art, one can actually see the whole world here. But it will take more than one day to see it well. And so I must tell myself I will have to rush through everything if I want to see it all. In like fashion I tell myself, I will have to come back here one day soon to see it better and enjoy it fully at an easy pace. At the end of the day my feet were killing me and I was joyfully exhausted.

I am not surprised. As fate would have it, the person who is guiding me through the many galleries and rooms is Jim Bateson, the very same person who took me for the first time up Mt. Talinis. This is a dormant volcano off Dumaguete, Negros Oriental. It has an elevation of about 7,000 feet. MY feet were also killing back then.

Jimbo is married to Gingging, my older sister. Together with us are my sister Payat and my brother Londong. This is only the second time Jimbo has been here. As he describes it we’re just country boys lost together in the big city. But inside the Met it feels we have lost ourselves not just in the big city but in the big world.

The antiquities collection starts with rooms of ancient Greek sculpture, huge marble pieces  which overwhelm with their classical beauty. You walk further to more sculpture from ancient Egypt, walls of hieroglyphics which take you even earlier in time to relics from Messopotamia and Babylon. And as one passes through this room the well educated recalls in awe all those monuments he had only seen heretofore in books, the bulls head capital, the triumphal gate with the beautiful winged lions guarding each post. They all come to life.

One recalls the feel of the page from a book which showed you these images for the first time. Forgotten paragraphs of text, of analysis and history resurrect slowly in recollection as one confronts the reality, set in stone as it were, for the first time. It is a wonderful exciting feeling. Fortunately, I have a camera and my family with me to bring me back to reality. Otherwise, I would get lost here. Lost, not just in space but also in time.

It is not just historical time, which I speak of, though that is how the museum is set. In the museum one is taken from the Ancient to the Moderns in orderly fashion. I speak here of time also in a more personal sense. Once, I did not appreciate modern art either. In the same way, I did not understand things like the relativity of taste and the philosophical logic of history.

Seeing the Odalisque by Ingres I immediately recalled the time when he was my hero. But the baroque of Fragonard leads to the Impresssionists, Manet, Monet and Degas; And then this room connects to the Post-Impressionsists , Gauguin, Van Gogh and Pissaro. I recall especially “Objects of Desire” by Gauguin and remember this painting was a cover art for an album by Michael Franks. All these can only lead me to realize a bit sadly, how young I was back then. But I can appease myself with the thought I saw it before I died.

And it gets better. “Unique Forms of Continuity in Space” by Umberto Boccioni was wonderfully smaller than I expected; but the Chuck Close portraits were exactly the size I imagined. Then there were the Picassos, the Warhols, the Pollocks, the Klines and the Dalis, all in the grand scale of late modernism. To top it all, the famous stainless steel tubular installation by Roxy Paine, set at the roof deck looking like a dead forest of stainless steel trees, perfect as a photo-op against the New York skyline. I thought: How Iucky I am to be here. ###