The Inhabitants of Moon F

by Nikki Vly Cramer

"Fat men painted… this is crazy!"

-Disgruntled 10 year old boy
overheard in the Asian Wing at
the Met

Recently resigned from a nine month stint as a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; I find myself missing my friends already. I'm not talking about my fellow art cops with whom I'd get a cup of coffee and chew the artsy fat with after a twelve hour shift, though I miss them too. I mean my friends the Bodhisattvas; the Buddhist entities that inhabit the Met's Asian Wing.

At nine AM every morning I would lay prostrate in my itchy blue suit at the Altar of the Fates. At dispatch, Mr. Kunkel-the Hand of God for the security staff-would squint and gyrate his pointer finger at the assignment board as if it were a whirling globe and I was ready to be flicked off his thumbnail. Drawing a breath, he would send me in miniature through the cottony atmosphere, hurdling like a fireball, face fisted shut, unaware of my destination. "Okay, Nikki!" his friendly voice would boom when my stomach hit ground, "'F' is good!"

Section F, known to the general public-the deity with more limbs and heads than any other-as the Asian Wing, was not like cranky 20th Century, not like bombastic European Paintings, not like the hokey American Wing, nor the dank Medieval Treasury where Mary Magdelene's horse-like tooth decomposes in its reliquary. No-planets are juicy convoluted messes with garish colors and too much gravity. F is a moon.

I woke up on the moon. It was like a lucid dream where one suddenly finds oneself in a crystal clear alternate landscape, free to penetrate it with complete consciousness. It was the back of F, the Southeast Asian room, at nine-thirty AM. I was before a panel of Beings in shades of stone-slate, limestone, gray moon-in a vaulted room made of tawny stone.

They weren't works of art. "Work of art" implies an artist: some struggling human who creates for the purpose of self-satisfaction, or to externalize his own psychology and find a form that temporarily quells his hunger for meaning or attention. Section F is vacant and peaceful compared to the rest of the Met because no one walks through the gallery chattering about the tempestuous life of the crazy artist who made the stuff. For once, the human hand that formed them is invisible and irrelevant. They were made by somebody to be worshipped; and to physically manifest Godlike qualities so that people could comprehend them as real. For this reason I call them beings.

Most of the Beings had the beginnings of several arms. But, being old to enough to have accumulated presence beyond any earthly charisma, most had broken off and ended as treelike stumps. Some were gendered, some weren't, but they all had faces unburdened by any contortion due to thought or emotion. They were done with that. As Bodhisattvas, they had chosen to remain on earth to help others reach enlightenment. Apparently I had materialized in the middle of their board meeting, during which no one insisted on parliamentary procedure or pounded on the table. They simply existed, gazing through space, humming from their stone skins. While the people on the surface of the earth cry and get drunk, fall in lust and kill each other, this is what the people on the moon do.

Hovering in the center of the tawny stone room were the massive, voluptuous seven heads of the Esoteric Boddhisattva of Infinite Wisdom. The principal head loomed in my vision like a larger-than-life face of someone I was about to kiss; but the sensuousness of his lips and heavy-lidded eyes were not the kind that invite intrusion. He was in complete possession of his own form.

Unsupervised in this silent being-scape, however, I couldn't resist tentatively fingering the stone figures. Being the one in the suit, I had taken advantage before of the inability of art to protest and had fondled quite a few pieces elsewhere in the museum. Although there's a bit of a buzz to be gotten off Jackson Pollack's Autumn Rhythm (whose cosmological intensity is rivaled only by the inhabitants of section F), even when I made a tactile connection it was a stretch to feel the energy that was worked into the objects. So, experimenting as one does in lucid dreams, I approached a red sandstone Khmer temple guardian with bulging eyes and bared teeth and surreptitiously slid my hand into his mouth, where it fit and hovered like an envelope before it's dropped into the mail slot. I could feel the power radiating off it in tight, crimpy waves, not like the wet breath from an animal mouth but something more like electricity. I took my hand back slowly, careful not to bump against the teeth. It would have sent a current through me.

I woke up on the moon another day in a different room in a different crater, a red one with the ceiling of a Hindu temple so ornate it squirmed and breathed with foliage, natural spirits, embracing couples and Vishnus round-cheeked as baby-dolls peering down from heaven.

In the corner, as if to centralize her would create too much titillation among the general public to keep the semblance of a family atmosphere, was the Dancing Celestial, naked except for garlands of jewels. She had no arms and only a vestigial leg but the impossible gyration of her head and torso conveyed more joy and abandon than any dance on our cramped planet could. She was a being dissolved into action. Every degree of revolution around the Dancing Celestial gave rise to a new landscape of curves, each one poignant with intelligence. With her smiling lotus lips almost touching the small of her back, the view from behind was the first page of an epic. The view from the front, her torso bent like a strong snake and arched so her mango-round breasts pointed to the sky, were the fireworks finale on page two thousand and thirteen. I'd been bored for a long time with what passes for sexuality in modern art: vulgarity and fetishism that doesn't relate at all to the ecstasy of the real thing. This dance was the real thing.

My third auspicious lucid dream on the moon placed me in the Guanyin Lounge. Guanyin is a female Boddhisattva but these graceful wooden flaking white figures had bodies that belonged to a third gender, with slightly bulbous torsos, arms like swan's necks and faces swollen with meditation. They were called Water Moon Guanyin because their languid gestures, one arm draped over a bent knee, evokes them relaxing on lily pads drifting in a silvery lake in the moonlight. I felt myself embraced with the familiar comfort of not having to speak.

On a vivid autumn day in my sophomore year of college I was walking with my hyper-literary (he'd call himself romantic) then-boyfriend when we arrived at the Elephant Tree. It was so clearly elephantine that nobody had to question the origin of it's name. It's trunk had many knees and it's massive muscular gray branches twisted and flexed in the air around it. Standing in awe of this ancient organism, I failed to notice until the critical last minute that Mr. Literature had whipped out his Swiss Army Knife and was fixing to slash our initials across its jugular vein. A shriek of protest flew out of my throat. We argued for hours. His argument: "I want to show symbolically that our love is as enduring as that tree!" My argument: "That tree is more alive than you or I will ever be."

There is no place for symbolism in the world of Moon F-a world that is palpably eternal. Leave 20th Century Art for those who want to criticize the effectiveness of forms and colors. The specificity of feeling that modern abstraction strives for was accomplished a thousand years ago by anonymous people who were not working for their own exaltation or for the amusement of their art friends, but out of devotion; a tasted, not thought, understanding of the Godlike.

Pull Quotes:

I'd been bored for a long time with what passes for sexuality in modern art: vulgarity and fetishism that doesn't relate at all to the ecstasy of the real thing.

There is no place for symbolism in the world of Moon F… leave 20th Century Art for those who want to criticize the effectiveness of forms and colors