Chapter 13: Dancing with the Graces

18 September 1974, Minneapolis Institute of Art

PAUL TALKED TO SEREPTE Tuesday evening. At least he’d managed a phone number before he left Monday. After the intensity of the family get together on Monday, the Tuesday evening call might have seemed mundane, but for two young people in love, it was filled with sighs and affirmations of how they missed each other and wished they were together. The call finally ended with Paul’s pledge that he would listen to her play at the Art Institute on Wednesday afternoon.

Of course, he arrived at the museum hours before Serepte was scheduled to play. He had searched his notebooks for more information about the city and the museum, but the last time he was here, he had spent most of his time in St. Paul where he performed on the University Campus.

At the museum, Paul strolled casually through the primitive arts exhibit on the first floor, noting the repeated motifs on baskets, pottery, and handiwork from primitive, though not necessarily ancient civilizations. He paused to study a basket bordered with a crisscross design. The herringbone pattern of the hardwood floor in the museum seemed to echo the theme. The border created a circle that turned in on itself. He made a quick sketch of it in his notebook. As he walked across the hardwood floor, he imagined his feet tracing the pattern of the mandala in a sort of dance.

He left the primitive arts selection behind and in a more open and brightly lit area of the museum, he stood in a sculpture garden. He wandered aimlessly until he was stopped short by a marble sculpture of a woman’s head, draped in a veil. The sculptor was Raffaelo Monti and the sculpture was dated in the mid-1800s. Paul could not draw himself away from the marble face. She looked sad or resigned, her face tilted downward. A wreath of flowers circled her head from which a veil fell across the features of her face. It looked as if the veil were truly transparent and might be lifted or shifted to reveal the exquisite beauty of the face beneath. The image juxtaposed life and death, the fragile beauty covered by an ivory veil.

Paul wasn’t sure how long he stood there, but he was interrupted by his stomach complaining of lack of food. He caught his hand back before he had touched the beautiful sculpture.

“I beg your pardon, my lady,” he said softly as he bowed. “I should very much like to spend more time in your presence, but the needs of the body summon me. I will return.” With that, he walked up the stairs to the restaurant on a bridge between the museum and the children’s theater. Paul was seated in an area where the sunlight through the atrium windows gradually moved to cover him. With the light came heat. By the time Paul finished the meal, he was sweating and feeling light-headed. He wondered if he had eaten something that disagreed with his stomach. He still had a half an hour before Serepte’s performance, so he went up to the third floor exhibit of Chinese jade and Asian antiquities.

He was absorbed in reading the placard describing the jade mountain an emperor had commissioned in the 1700s to preserve a poem from 2,000 years previous. The carving showed the scene described in the poem engraved on the front. On the back, a poem written by the emperor himself was engraved.

We sit by a redirected stream with floating wine goblets,
Although short of the company of music,
The wine and poems are sufficient for us to exchange our feelings.

Not quite the type of poetry Paul was drawn to, but the gathering at the stream, the path up the mountain, the constant yearning to be remembered, all tugged at his heart.

A man turning the corner around the other side of the glass case slammed into Paul, nearly causing him to fall. They both excused themselves as having been at fault, but for a moment Paul was caught by the intent look in the man’s eyes, the green jade reflected in an otherworldly glow. Paul continued through the exhibit with a feeling of the intent look of those deep eyes on his back. His stomach was in turmoil and the collision had not helped. Paul looked to see if there were any seats or benches nearby where he could rest. Winter give me peaceful rest. He turned to look behind him, but the eyes that bored into his back were not visible to him.

He heard a flute echoing through the chamber from far away and knew that he needed to move and listen to the music. He would just rest one more minute while the group tuned up. He hummed along with the music as colors swirled behind his eyelids. Occasionally, he would misjudge the pattern of notes and it would take an abrupt turn away from the melody he had in his mind. Each of the turnings forced him back into the reality of the museum, his upset stomach, and his spinning head.

The music liked him. It twisted its way around inside, showing flashes of the colors in his daydreams. He turned from the open gallery and found himself walking through the classical civilizations exhibit. To his left were beautifully preserved specimens of Greek pottery from the third and fourth centuries BC. Smaller trinkets were displayed in glass cases. He walked among them trying to imagine the beauty of the priestess or queen who had worn the jewelry on display. It almost made one believe in magic. What a gifted people must have lived during that age two and a half millennia past.

He stared at the display, unfocused by the heat that seemed to overwhelm him, causing a flash of pain behind his eyes. It was not the pieces of bronze and gold holding his attention, but rather a pattern they made when exhibited together. He closed his eyes and tried to see the pattern, but it was interrupted by images of the specific objects. One was a tiny goddess, wrapped in a floor-length robe of silver that left her bosom exposed. Another was hollowed and worn through in spots, having been dug from the depths of a tomb of ancient days.

He tried to capture it in his notes, but the pattern refused his imagination. The music, which had now begun in earnest somewhere in the museum, held him as he opened his eyes. He was transfixed by the objects in the case. Yet, the circular pattern that began to take shape before his eyes was not in the objects, nor in the case itself. Instead, he found himself staring at the shadow created by the direct overhead lighting on the herringbone patterned floor. His eye followed the pattern round and round, in and out of the center and connecting star-like points around its edge.

“The future turning in upon itself,” Paul whispered. “Life returning to its source. Like the seasons, always circling, always in a cycle repeating one another, yet ever new. Winter to Spring to Summer. Winter to Spring to Summer.”

The distant music left room for only three seasons as he heard it in his mind. It showed the seasons turning in upon each other, dancing around the mandala that the shadows on the floor created with the herringbone pattern of the hardwood.

Winter give me peaceful rest.

He turned away from the pattern, but it did not leave his mind. He thought he should sketch it, but it seemed firmly embedded in his memory so he would be able to remember when the time came. When the time came? What time? He wandered down a corridor of twentieth century artists, looking for the correct passage in the complex arrangement of rooms so he could get to the hall where Serepte was playing, accompanied by a guitar and mandolin. Even in this hall of contemporary art, Paul saw the repetition of themes from ancient times into the present day. Time ever turning in upon itself. All things created new were merely things remembered again.

Winter. Spring was next. The motif of spring was dawn. Spring, like dawn, replace my sleeping. Awake.

Paul was sweating profusely. His head ached with that constant throb that had haunted him for years and always seemed to strike when he was just at the point of remembering ... remembering that time before he was fished from the sea. It made him want to fight for the memory, but the more he fought, the more intense the pain became. If he relaxed away from it, it would gain momentary glimpses.

Winter, spring, and summer. Why only three seasons? Summer, baking, heat my soul. He sweated like this in summer heat, but why now when the year was beginning its slide toward winter? There was a crispness in the air outside that told him the transition from summer to winter had begun in Minneapolis. Most of the trees had already lost their leaves and the world had grayed.