Exhausting Beauty

Beauty struggles with privacy. It urges us to multiply it—by means of ode, imitation, replica or fraud. If I find something beautiful and refuse to tell anyone about it, I feel that I have left some itch in me unscratched, or that something has been lost on me:

            some marvelous experience

Frank O’Hara said,

            which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it.

Like pain, then, the feeling of beauty begs for expression, whether in words or tears. I have a distinct memory of walking through the Tate Modern and eavesdropping on a conversation between a couple. The man had visited the exhibition once before, and he seemed intent on impressing the woman he was with. They turned a corner into the next room. ‘This room made me cry,’ he said, with what I heard as a proud tone.

The woman didn’t seem impressed. Our words and tears never quite seem to get it right; beauty is a thing of its own unique kind. Wittgenstein says somewhere that flowers or animals that we find ugly always seem to look like something else: ‘that looks like a …’, we say. If an ugly thing is always something else, then, a beautiful thing must never be anything but itself. The desire to render a beautiful landscape in prose is as natural but as insatiable as the desire to capture a beautiful face in song. So beauty teaches us the disjointedness of the senses: that the world we see is not the world we hear, and that neither are the world we can write.

In the Metropolitan Museum of Art you can walk through a skylit hall that holds a collection of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture. You can see: the marble torso of a youth from the Hadrianic period; the remains of a copy of the so-called Apollo Lykeios; a head of Epikouros from the Roman Imperial period; a second-century statue of the Three Graces—and so on. You will not find a single reference to the bizarre and ultimately minor chapter in the museum’s history that began in this very room.

This is what I have been told: in the first weeks of 1991, a museum guard found himself talking to a woman stood by a marble portrait of the young Marcus Aurelius. The woman was holding a notebook and a pen, and the diligent lines of her handwriting had caught the guard’s curiosity. She explained to him, in what I imagine as an unplaceable accent, that she wanted to describe the portrait so that she wouldn’t forget what it had looked like. ‘Perhaps you could take a photograph,’ the guard said. The woman didn’t reply.

In the year that followed, this woman visited the museum regularly, and each time would bring with her a notebook and a pen; each time, while avoiding the guise of routine, so as to avert the chance of pestering her, the staff would talk to the woman about what she was writing. Her notes, you see, were astonishing. In only a few hundred words, so I am told, she would recapture the likeness of a sculpture with uncanny precision. When she presented the museum workers with her notebook, they would find the careful modelling of an ancient face translated into just a few sentences; the subtle inclination of a body, the curvature of its limbs and the pallor of its stony skin found their likeness in an invisible vocabulary.

In time, and with the encouragement of the museum, the woman ventured beyond that skylit hall and took out her notebook before paintings, drawings and artworks from the rest of the galleries. By her hand, the symmetry in Islamic woodwork became rhythm in prose; the expression in a portrait by Picasso was matched by a perfect turn of phrase. As her visits went on, her handwriting gradually shrunk to an almost imperceptible size as her vision deepened and threatened to fill an entire notebook from a single glance at a painting by Courbet, or an Egyptian funerary engraving.

The guards, curators, and workers of the museum arrived at an unexpected consensus: in many cases, the woman’s writing surpassed its objects in aesthetic achievement. She had now taken notes on the sculpture of Marcus Aurelius on at least a dozen occasions, and the sum total of these written sketches was a portrait so vivid, so attentive, that upon reading it one immediately had an intuition of a real spirit glistening beneath a layer of stone. Her words evoked something more inner than inwardness itself, and yet more lifelike and awake than any vision of eyesight. They had an inevitable quality, as if through many centuries they had been waiting to be written.

In her description of a painting of two doors in an unoccupied room, she expressed the faint remainder of the presence of a human soul, and expressed it with such precision that, after reading her description, no viewer of the painting had any doubt in the accuracy of her interpretation. It simply was the case.

Deeply affected by these writings, and wanting to defend them against the incredulous rumours that had been spreading through the New York art world, two curators from the museum met to plan an exhibition of the thousands of notes that the woman had accumulated (in handwriting that was, at this point, almost microscopic). At this exhibition, so the story goes, thousands of artworks in the Met were covered over in black cloth, and beside them was placed a white plaque, the size of a page from a book, on which an extract from the woman’s writing on the concealed artwork had been printed.

Nearly every visitor left in tears.

The writing on the plaques reduced all distance between the artwork and its viewer to nothing. What might have been a curve of blue paint on canvas was now the raw feeling, word-conjured, of cold flowing water. In only a few sentences on an ancient torso, the woman had been able to recapture the grandeur and horror of its sunken past; her readers felt alive in the company of that body, as if they shared the same air. (Or so I assume—I wasn’t there.)

There are scholars of religious mysticism who describe the power of words to bring about real things. The woman’s writings seemed to have approached this power. Each day would bring new visitors to the museum who so often could be heard sobbing quietly, stood before a veiled sculpture, or a vase, or an etching, whispering ‘I get it… I finally get it.’

Now that all those writings have been lost, I can only wonder—how could this woman have managed to find words that were always so exactly right? Were they the only words that would have been right, or could some other writer have achieved the same effects as her? I have found myself in search of the woman’s genius. Looking at pictures in a museum, I meet her in my mind and ask: does this blue have a name? What is the sentence, the story, of this shadow?

I heard this story from an old man in the Met when I visited New York last November. We were stood by the Egyptian temple, which was reflected in a pool by our feet. He told me that the exhibition had closed after only a few weeks, following the criticisms of art professionals who accused the curators of artistic sacrilege. What had happened to the woman? I asked. He told me that she still lived in the city, but was rarely seen in public. After the exhibition closed, she never visited the Met—or any museum—again.

‘I met her once, near her home in Harlem,’ he went on. ‘I told her how much her writing had meant to me—how much it had changed me—and she said that I could talk with her if I wanted, but only in her apartment, where she was comfortable—and only for a short time.’

The woman’s apartment was unlit, and she kept all the curtains closed. The furnishings were incredibly sparse; the place would have looked unoccupied if it hadn’t had the general air of being lived in. In a bookcase beside an empty desk, thousands of notebooks, all identical in colour and size, were arranged neatly. But the woman didn’t write anymore. She explained to the old man that her skill had become a burden to her: to look at an artwork was, for her, to see a hundred overwhelming years of emotion and energy unspooled in an instant; even the most mundane objects would communicate their history to her in all its gravity, and she would tremble with nerves after merely glancing at them.

‘There is too much to see in the world,’ she said. ‘If I open my eyes for so much as five seconds, I find it unbearable.’

She sat by her desk and closed her eyes, and the old man let her rest. He took a notebook from the shelf, and flicked through its pages. Each was filled with meticulous writing, and whenever his eyes paused on a sentence, he would sense its magnificence with shock. Sure enough, as the notebooks went on—they were arranged chronologically on the shelves—the handwriting became smaller and smaller. Sometimes her writing would go vertically down the page, or diagonally across it. When her lettering became small enough, the letters appeared as dots, forming gradual curved lines and shapes across the page.

The old man picked up the last notebook in the bookcase and looked through its pages. Again, the thin lines of writing continued throughout, as consistently as when the woman had started. It was strange to think of all this writing simply having stopped one day. The lines of letters became smaller and fainter; the curved sentences seemed to dance across the pages. The old man turned through the rest of that final book, and though the handwriting had become far too small for him to read, he could discern the contents of its last page. In fine lines, cross-hatched with perfect precision, the tiny letters took a shape which shone out at him with unmistakable reality: a portrait of the young Marcus Aurelius.