an unrehearsed universe

Bauhaus

The Bauhaus exhibit was as expected: a bright
overly crowded spectacle for intellectual hipsters
who loved objects and ideas more
than the people they were meant to serve;
who prized an unsustainable notion of simplicity
over voluptuous beauty, over art that delights
the senses.  In the lounge full of unusable furniture
you gawked and admired with the rest of your goateed,
pressed-jeans, plaid-shirt wearing brethren. 
You pointed out a particularly egregious example
of the languishing art of a dying social order
– and good riddance – by Gropius, exclaiming

“This is art, that is beauty,”

earning an righteous rigorous nod from two nearby patrons. 
It was not the first hint that the disconnect between
our worldviews would prove insurmountable. 
A vigorous intellectual debate with you preaching and me nodding
in frustrated incomprehension had me gravitating

even in that sterile suffocating space

to the flashes of color and beauty
some enterprising modernist student
brought to a breakfast service,
beauty which you sneered at for not being pure
or idealist enough.  I freely admitted to being

too baroque for modern art

the color studies and abstractions and
ruthless suppressions or exaggerations
raising very real hives on the sensitive skin
at the nape of my neck, yet you brought me here,
grumbling about the price of a ticket
I offered to pay for, to harangue me about my lack
of taste, of understanding. 

“What about Le Corbusier?”

was your constant refrain at my expressed disdain
for modernism, as if a love of urban architecture
or the sleek enterprising lines of skyscrapers made me
a disciple of that Modernist monster whose ideas
created the blighted public housing projects
of my youth. 

“I want – ”

a city where I can walk not be shuttled to and fro
herded into “machines for living”, human cattle driven
to low-income slaughter.  That is what I would say
if you would ever let me finish.  True, I exude
steel, iron, glass, cement, pillars of stone,

the city

with every breath but a desire for clean lines, open spaces
is mixed with, softened by, a love of whimsy,
an appreciation of playful touches and fantastical
columns composed of circles and crosses,
curvaceous, sensuous straight lines –  rationality married
to extravagant exuberance.

Complexity pervades my aesthetic; the things you scoff at
make me weak with weeping.  But that day,
in the paean to every ugly impulse of annihilation
known as the MoMA, was the moment of realization:

Anyone stupid enough to bring me here, to this exhibit,
with the expectation of my unquestioning approval
had no concept of who I was.  I left you there
amidst your hermetic chairs

your inflexible geometric orthodoxy

to walk uptown between the beautifully hideous
monuments of modernity, the biting wind soothing
to both the rumblings of romantic dissatisfaction
and the unbearable itching of my neck.