The Nightbird and Egyptian Cats
Chapter 6. of a memoir in progress
On my second visit to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, my aim was to take in as much art as humanly possible.
First stop – the Egyptian Wing, first floor and to the right, where one could walk through time back to ancient Egypt. Around me were cats made of black onyx, turquoise and gold beads strung together in intricate necklaces, half human and half lynx creatures ready to pounce – and this wasn’t even halfway into a long hallway stretching all the way back to the age of Cleopatra’s reign. I’d read somewhere that Egyptians worshipped cats, and they invented beer. I wondered if these two things were connected.
I came to a Plexiglas case, and inside were seven or eight portraits on pieces of wood with guys with wide open eyes and close-cropped haircuts, seeming to stare out of their dark eyes across the centuries, from a land of sand and pyramids being built, wondering what had happened to the world they knew.
Some of the sculptures were in the center of the hallway – a man’s head on the body of a crouching lion, and a winged woman’s body with a cat’s head. Did these hybrid humans only exist in the imaginations of long ago, or were some of them as real as a yellow taxi, or a color TV set? How many people of that time had time to wonder, even for a second, about being alive during an age of myths and wonder? In our world, we’d witnessed mythical adventures of men flying through outer space to the moon and back.
There was a wide-looking monkey made of turquoise stone, whose eyes looked like they could’ve been drawn by Picasso. Nearby, was a vase with a woman’s head on top. In the wearable art side of things – kept in a Plexiglas display case, was a turquoise and gold necklace, looking like it wouldn’t be out of place in a shop in Greenwich Village. Close to this, I saw a colorful sideways bird with intricate patterned feathers and precisely carved wings. That’s when her voice popped into my head.
She was Allison Steele, The Nightbird. I’d discovered her on my first night at the West Side Y while listening to my clock radio, scanning the dial for what I could find coming over the New York City airwaves at 10:01 p.m. She had a deep yet soft, welcoming voice, and as her show opened and in between songs she read poetry and free associated over the sound of a flute and Andean pan pipes, an otherworldly sound one might only hear on a mountaintop at night. She seemed to be voicing characters, scenes, dreamscapes, wandering through her mind or was near at hand in carefully marked pages of books. She referenced the night, history, poetic observations, time’s passing, flying above cities, mythology, music, and the mystery of love. Her radio program was called a “flight.”
Allison Steele read poetry she’d picked to share with her listeners, and a few times said she’d be rereading a poem she’s read many times before. I’d discovered a new country, no, a new world – it was a world where imagination and being open to freeing experiences were encouraged, and it was the essential factor of how its inhabitants lived. They lived on dreams you could taste and mountains that touched the clouds.
There was absolutely nothing this cool, weird, incredible on the radio in St. Petersburg in the mid-70s. I had to remember back to 1971, WUSF radio, coming across the airwaves from a college radio station, called The Underground Railroad – Radio Free Tampa. Back in the days when a DJ would play a double live album, from side 1. To side 4. Maybe stopping at some point to give the call letters at the top of the hour, usually not. Probably too stoned to remember. In 1976, the early 70s seemed like a million years before.
The Nightbird had a unique voice, with a mellowness and sense of humor lurking inside her vocal cords, which came through a voice perfect for radio. She played mid-1970s music usually but not always of the Rock variety on WNEW, and yes, there I was, thinking, I’ll be back here, and I know a radio station to tune into where a woman DJ reads poetry in between the songs. Or did she play songs in between reading poetry? It was becoming clearer every day, New York had more and more mysteries to unravel. But right then, I was going to walk deeper into the mysteries of The Met Museum, and see more of what I hadn’t yet seen.
From Egypt, I went directly back into the first-floor heart of the museum – past the short hallway next to the main stone stairway, and all the way back to medieval times (which weirdly felt further back in history than the Egyptian art). Maybe the Egyptians just had a more modern vibe about them, and the dark ages were not so much fun for all concerned, except maybe the monks cloistered away in towers overlooking the stormy seas of the Atlantic Ocean, busy illuminating manuscripts and saving pieces of history to be recovered and rediscovered later, when the world lightened up again.
I wandered through the enormous medieval hall – forbidding, and like something out of a fairy tale at the same time – in a Lord of the Rings meets Snow White kind of way. Except it was all real, and people way back in the Middle Ages had painted those paintings, illuminated those manuscripts, and chipped away at stone and formed those sculptures. Deeper into the museum, toward the Central Park side of things, I entered a room with an octagonal shape, and on the first wall to my right was an El Greco portrait full of dark colors, and intricate layers in the crimson cloak the man with a long white beard and a crazed expression wore. It was the quietest spot I’d yet found. A guard stood nearby, the next room over, and I went in the opposite direction – deciding there would be more rooms full of art, and even rooms full of art upstairs, after I made it that far.
My second walk up the big stone main stairway of The Metropolitan Museum felt lighter, quicker, and I felt I knew more about the pathways and ingredients of the third largest museum in the world. If someone later asked me directions to The Met Museum, if I happened to be standing on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Central Park South, I could, with a newly-found urban assurance point them up the avenue known as Fifth, and say, “It’s on Fifth and Eight-Fourth. If you’re a walker, I suggest walking”
Back to European Paintings I went, for the second time. Consuming all of the Rembrandt paintings The Met had on view, I zeroed in on Rembrandt’s Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer, which I’d seen on my first visit, but hadn’t stopped to read the title, or get close enough to view the thick build-up of paint on the underside of Aristotle’s grand-looking hat. Mesmerized by the thickness of the paint and the sense of melancholy Rembrandt had placed within Aristotle’s expression. A golden light surrounded Aristotle, and the light was as much what the painting was about, along with humanity and philosophy.