The Magic of the Ordinary

Think of the artistic genre of the Still Life. Presumably the potentially most boring of all paintings? From 1500-1800! Huh? Not if you had the serendipity of discovering the current The Magic of Things at the Basel Kunst Museum. It feels to me as the most significant art exhibition I have encountered in sixty years of obsessive museum going. I’m reminded of my favorite lines from Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass”:

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars,
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,

And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery

Coincidentally, my afternoons are now spent babysitting our twenty month old boy, Danny, while my wife works at her job as a librarian at the Liszt Conservatory of Music in Weimar, Germany. Walt chose to praise so common a substance as “grass” as an apt metaphor of his belief that in the new experimental American egalitarian democracy, all creatures, human and otherwise, are created equally miraculous. The sheer miracle of existence is their common mandate.

My epiphany was late in coming. The children from my first marriage are now aged 56, 54,and 52. When they were Danny’s age, I was so involved in finishing a PhD in American Lit that Walt’s wisdom went right over my head. Now when I look carefully at his tiny extremities, I feel a wonderment that I can only conclude is what savants have over the ages called a mystical experience!

The show’s first room is filled with paintings of medieval icons—a bishop’s crozier, emblem of his secular power as the human agent who can be influential in whether or not you end up in Heaven with its mystical glories. And a censor, which the priest uses at Mass to celebrate the daily miracle of Trans-substantiation, in which eternal bliss is prefigured as wine and bread are morphed into the Body and Blood of Christ which all we common folk are allowed to eat. Talk about everyday miracles!

Then the show goes on to de-sacralize all religious experience as painters tutor us to appreciate such quotidian miracles of fish, fowl, and flowers—among all the other wonders of fully conscious existence. I call it Ur Romanticism: prefiguring that intellectual revolution which dared common folk to see the “heavenly” realities of everyday life. It’s William Blake’s vision:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

The exhibition goes on to display how our artists have taught us how to relish the ordinary in travel, working lives, indeed in all accessible realities—if we’re strong enough to be “converted” to their post-sacred Humanism.

These were not the only miracles I enjoyed that weekend in the region where France, Germany, and Switzerland converge. In their great Kunst Messe Centre where I had relished the greatest Art Fair in the world a few months before, I relished the annual “fair” of their local Art and Design schools. I have never talked to so many alert and thoughtful student artisans. Next year when “Magic” has moved on, this graduation party would be motive enough for another. I wish I could be equally supportive of the two museums next to the St. Alban Youth Hostel where I put up.

The Museum of Contemporary Art had a show “Above the Fold” (which in U.S. newspaper jargon means the most important stories of that day) which had you looking at the line of light you see under a closed door. Across the street was an even more obscurantist called “Art and New Media”. So far as I can follow their High Tech foolishness, in a darkened basement, multiple screens display gratuitous incidents of military deaths, each of which triggers top floor responses from computers recording this mayhem—for no obvious reason! A growing monstrous pile of recording paper tape attest to the busyness of their electronic MishMash. Yuck.

I needed a break, here on the banks of the stunning Rhine. I was in luck. Around the corner is the Golden Star restaurant which had just received a Michelin star! I had never eaten Michelin before. It cost me $100, but worth every penny—compensating for my cheap digs at the Hostel, 30 euros for a private room! When I returned from the graduating senior’s art fair, there were 90 bicyclists cluttering my projected overnight return by City Night Line train to Weimar.

It was the Biennial Bike Pilgrimage from Berlin to Rome. Each of the 45 cyclists was carrying a handicapped person. Interesting group of professionals doing a charity gig. By the way, the City Night Line is the best rail innovation ever. Instead of a roomette of six farting and snoring ensemble, each ride sits in what is called a peaceful throne-like chair which leans back soothingly. What a way to go home. With dreams of everyday miracles!