A Touch of Magic
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.
Paul rounded a corner and the sun caught him full in the face, streaming through an unshaded window on the south side of the building. It glared at him as if he had insulted it in thinking the season was dying. The tinted windows did little to block the sun’s effect on his stomach. He needed water. His head spun. Winter. Spring. Summer. Peaceful rest. Dawn. Heat. An eternal threesome turning in upon themselves in a lifecycle dance. Spinning. Spinning. Spinning. The dizziness overcame him and he felt himself start to retch.
A great carved gargoyle startled him as he turned away from the sun. It moved. Then it was not a gargoyle, but a man standing beneath it that moved toward him—gesturing—offering to help him. The hand reached out to touch him and Paris recognized the eyes of the man he had run into at the jade mountain. An unexplainable revulsion rose in Paul at the touch of the man and multiplied itself in his throbbing head and churning stomach. The hand grew in his mind as it reached toward him—grew to the size of a wall reaching to enclose him, trap him. He panicked and ran down an aisle of furniture and domestic crafts. The man, the eyes, the hand, were right behind him. He needed air. He needed water. He needed Serepte.
That thought stopped him at the head of the stairs. If he saw Serepte, she would try to heal him. The healing would cause this pain and panic to transfer to her. She would have to release the pain through her music, raising a magic that opened a gate between worlds. A gate—no a magic—that this creature hungered for. He must not go to Serepte!
He turned to face the evil force approaching. The approach was deliberate and menacing, but a few feet in front of him, another person stepped into the passage. She reached to a display of medieval armor and drew the broadsword from its sheath. She handled it easily and directed the point at the demon-man in front of her. Glancing over her shoulder at Paul, he recognized Lil.
“Go!” she commanded. And then steel met her blade.
The marble stairway seemed to go on forever. His heart raced as he slipped down the stairs and each pulse sent new pounding throbs to his already aching head. His hands left great steamy prints on the cool brass rail as he stumbled step after step down the eternal stairway.
Below him, three bronze sisters danced around a marble fountain, frozen in their never-ending dance. Beyond them was the sculpture of the veiled lady. He could see the position of each sister’s foot in the dance and could see the next step as they wove their pattern. Paul needed help, but the bronze statues could not help. Their dance was a hallucination, a cruel trick of his aching head, blocking his return to reality. The steps rushed up at him faster than his feet could skip from one to the next. The three bronze sisters at the bottom frightened him. His hallucination of them clung to his mind as he watched them dance, drawing him in to join. They held his eyes and he could not retreat from them. They beckoned.
Hallucinating. That’s all. Find an exit. Fresh air. It will all pass.
But the bronze hands were joined to his hands and he spun in the circle dance of the graces who held him tightly. They swung around the marble fountain and as he passed the far side, he looked up to see the demon-man still engaged in his fight with Lil. The dancers plunged him into their marble pool. Again. A third time. He was afraid of the water… afraid to drown again. Its cold marbleness threatened his lungs with stony silence. He would become a statue, drowned in the fountain of the bronze dancers. And still they danced, pulling him into the music that he created in his mind, unaware of the battle on the stairway above them. They danced and sang to the music and at their brazen command, he sang a counterpoint to the music Serepte’s ensemble was creating in another room of the museum.
Winter give me peaceful rest,
Quiet heart within my breast.
Yours the gift of solitude,
Grant a silent interlude.
Spring, like dawn, awake my sleeping
Constant ever in your keeping.
Grant that I might grow in grace
To worship in your holy place.
Summer, baking, heat my soul
And let my mind in pastures roll
Where bitter herbs cannot be found
But passion sweet lies all around.
Paul fell rushing through the bottom of the stone pool, hurtling through an enormous barrier thundering around him like the crashing waves on the rocks of New England. The stone forced its pure breath of fresh air into his lungs and he awoke to the sensations of every part of his body tingling in the cool night air that surrounded him, gasping for every essence of cleanliness around him.
Paul stands, naked and unashamed, upon the smooth round surface of a dome. As his mind catches up with his body, he thinks at first that he has escaped to the roof of the museum and stands at its summit overlooking the city. But there is no city on the flat landscape that surrounds him. The stars are out and their movement in the heavens creates new patterns out of ever constant ones. On the smooth reflective surface of the dome, he sees the stars increase the speed of their dance, and follows them with his steps.
A swirling fog sweeps over the dome and he no longer sees the stars. Instead, he looks through into another dimension—a different loka. Through the fog, a musical ensemble plays in the atrium of the museum. The guitar and mandolin are no more than support for Serepte’s flute. She looks up from her music and her eyes are drawn to the dome above. She stands and dances as she plays, mimicking Paul’s footsteps above her.
His voice rises again to answer her flute in a dawn song that clears the fog. He weeps. The song he sings sweeps over him like the sudden tide of a deep gulf, purging and purifying him from every taint and every lapse in his memory. But the song calls him on to images even more intense. It cries out for its climax. He is prophecy fulfilled. It is the dawn of a day of freedom.
His headache is gone. The nausea has flown and only his song bursts through the tears that stream down his face. Dancing with Serepte beneath him, he is whole again.
She lays down her flute and joins the other two in her ensemble as she bows to the audience’s applause.
Having danced the circle dance until he was exhausted, the pattern beat silently through his now-stilled feet and pulsed behind his tightly closed eyes. He leaned heavily against a cool stone pillar in the blazing sun that warmed him and changed the colors behind his eyelids from cool violet to dazzling orange. It warmed him inside and out. It made him drowsy, but kept him wrapped in the peaceful feeling of wholeness, even amidst the rapidly evaporating memories that he had seen.
“As the gods will, our paths will come together,” the last words of his song escaped from his mouth and were absorbed in the quiet stillness of the day. The light September breeze lifted a lock of his hair, tossing it casually to one side. He opened his eyes to the outside of the museum where he had promised to meet Serepte after her recital was finished. Sunlight played in the trees across the street. He drew a great breath of the new air into his lungs and felt the last of his escaping panic from the ordeal inside. He no longer felt queasy nor had he any headache. A water fountain was near the door of the adjoining children’s theater and he stopped for a long cool drink. I’m glad I got out of there before I was sick. The water sparkled in his throat and quenched a thirst that made him think he had used his voice too much. He looked at the entrance to the museum and thought of the pleasant music and sights that had filled him there. He flipped open his pocket notebook and wrote, “Art Institute. Great collection, especially the Veiled Lady sculpture. Visit here again.”
As he closed the notebook, he looked up to see Serepte bouncing down the steps of the museum to meet him.
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