(Ocean-green rain ringing a bakery on Cherokee Street in St. Louis. Maggie, adrowse, scribbles in a notebook. Zach sits carefully down with a plate of scrambled eggs, and iced coffee in a chipped mug.)
ZACH. My knees hurt and I have scrapes on my back, but my heart is light.
MAGGIE. What happened?
ZACH. Yesterday I visited the City Museum–the four-story funhouse built out of reclaimed city junk in the old shuttered shoe factory downtown, with a ballpit and working rebar crane and circus school and real dug-out caves, and a schoolbus and metal praying mantis and airplane welded to the roof. The City Museum raises the averages of the schoolchildren sliding down its slides.
MAGGIE. What do you mean it raises averages?
ZACH. Well, some splendid things are about raising peaks–you open a new Ivy League school, build a new desert carnival for the grubbiest Burning Men, compose a new twelve-tone opera, unshroud a new Alp to lure the maddest mountaineers. Raise peaks and the one percent adore you for it.
But some splendid things are about raising averages–you mural a library, you drill a community orchestra until they make Prokofiev’s concerto weep, you build the City Museum in a shoe factory and increase people’s expectations for the familiar. Raise averages and the eighty-five percent adore you for it.
MAGGIE. Did you bring me a souvenir?
ZACH. Souvenirs are tame, Maggie. It’s like that James Merrill poem, “The Cruise,” about buying a crystal monster in a tchotchke shop, recalling an iceberg seen from a boat. The crystal is a cunning but tamed reminder of the once-seen icy monstrosity, scale, and chaos; it’s something anyone can buy, but only the one percent can connect to the iceberg.
MAGGIE. Well, how does Merrill’s poem go?
ZACH. Something like“
Poor little Agnes cried when she saw the iceberg.
We smiled and went on with our talk, careless
Of its brilliant fraction and, watchful beneath,
That law of which nine-tenths is a possession
By powers we do not ourselves possess.
Some cold tide nudged us into sunny gales
With our money and our medications. No,
Later in shops I thought again of the iceberg.
Mild faces turned aside to let us fondle
Monsters in crystal, tame and small, fawning
On lengths of ocean-green brocade.
“These once were nightmares,” the Professor said,
“That set aswirl the mind of China. Now
They are belittled, to whom craftsmen fed
The drug of Form, their fingers cold with dread,
Famine and Pestilence, into souvenirs.”
“Well I’m still famished,” said a woman in red
From Philadelphia. I wondered then:
Are we less monstrous when our motive slumbers
Drugged by a perfection of our form?
The bargain struck, a thin child parted curtains.
We took to lunch our monsters wrapped in silk.
They have become our own. Beneath them stretch
Dim shelves adrowse, our hungers and the dread
That, civilizing into cunning shapes,
Briefly appeased what it could not oppose.
The souvenirs at the City Museum, though, felt redundant. In its hugeness, the Museum is its own reminder of monstrosity and chaos. And, in its elegance, the Museum is its own statement of containment and order. Anyone who enters–the whole eighty-five percent–learns its argument.
(Zach stirs the ice cubes chimingly in his coffee.)
MAGGIE. So the City Museum“ appeases the unremarked municipal junk–the scrap planes and rebar and beaten tin–it can’t oppose?
ZACH. Yes–the City Museum is stunning and puzzling. Its excellence of form leaves nothing unremarked. But, against Merrill, it’s not brief, and it’s not about dread.
Merrill’s right to say that form isn’t an elegant response to an elegant world–in fact, form is a tool for processing a monstrous, distorted world. But we can’t all face icebergs to learn this. The iceberg is a substructure, daunting, external, hidden under the water (a power we can’t possess)? And the encounter with the iceberg is a matter of raising peaks, anyway.
But we can all encounter the City Museum, its junk refigured. The City Museum is a superstructure, one we enter. It raises averages.
MAGGIE. Is the form we can inhabit the more moral form?
ZACH. All I want from form is more. (Touches his chest.) In me is all the news–good and bad–of hunger and dread I’ll ever get. I want a place that instructs me on the form I already inhabit.