METROPOLITAN THOUGHTS - TOR ROSE
February 14, 2025
Metropolitan Thoughts
1.
I show up to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in a MoMa hat. “Oh fuck,” I text my friend. “And?” she replies. This is only embarrassing in a self-imposed, insular way. No one actually cares. No one will even notice. And yet here I am, feeling like I’ve just shown up to a wedding wearing white. Narcissist, I utter under my breath.
2.
I definitely died of grief in a past life because, unfortunately, I am that dramatic. Cue the violins. I'm convinced of this every time I’m in a museum. Certain paintings remember me in ways I cannot. I feel this while standing before Graziella by Jules-Joseph Lefebvre. As the story goes, Graziella is the title character of a novel by Alphonse de Lamartine that recounts the tragic affair between a young Frenchman and the beautiful granddaughter of a Neapolitan fisherman. I actually dated a Frenchman once. He sucked. At the end of the story, the heroine dies of grief when her lover is forced to abandon her. This means I probably saw love as a vocation in a past life, too. Maybe I still do? My dramatics are fairly consistent.
3.
This spurs my next thought: how could men render women in such exquisite detail while treating them so horribly? The softness of a hand, the longing in the eyes—it’s like if a serial killer went to church every Sunday. What’s even more (or less) baffling is that nothing has really changed. Women are still muses more than equals, trapped in gilded cages that sparkle but remain impenetrable. You need us, you want us, but we exist forever at arm’s length. What if I don’t want to be kept at arm’s length? What if I can feel you on the other side of the door with your hand hovering the knob?
4.
The world is burning. It is an unseasonably warm autumn for another year in a row, but don’t worry, we’re amending damage with electric cars and soggy paper straws so that oil on canvas can persevere. Am I a bad person if I say I’m not entirely mad about it—oil on canvas? Stop and marvel at what it’s given us. I don’t bless the greed, but I do find beauty in the gospel—that transcendence is born from ruin, and every stroke is a eulogy for what’s gone. The irony, of course, is that museums are mausoleums dressed as sanctuaries. Art is to destruction, as sacrifice is to salvation. Culture is preserved, and it’s not alive, but it is not dead either. Do you find religion beautiful when divorced from dogma, too?
5.
I can’t help but feel like something is missing, like my thoughts would seem more punctuated if I were able to wander with a cappuccino in hand. I understand the rationale, of course. One rogue coffee cup, and we’re rewriting art history. Would really raise the whole “you break it, you buy it” to a perverse level. But there’s still a lack of alchemy. Coffee gives the hands purpose while the mind trails off. Same with cigarettes. I wonder if they would welcome cigarettes over coffee? This thought arrives punctually around 12:30 PM—birth control time. Nothing pulls you out of a historical reverie like tending to your reproductive autonomy. I sit on the bench that sits before Jules Bastien-Lepage’s Joan of Arc. Just as I’m sensing a correlation, I overhear a stranger say she has that “blue eye stare.” I think of Ray Liotta, and every documentary I watched on the Liberation Movement. Down goes my pill with the same quiet assertion of authority in a patriarchal context. Be damned my constitution for needing to define every trivial scenario.
6.
Nobody understood divinity in distortion better than Dalí. I say this while marveling at one of my favorite paintings of all time, Madonna. There’s something about this image, and I want to say it’s the tension. There’s an ear, and then there’s a face, a face that doesn’t want to be seen. Not entirely. It hides within the curve, in the soft place where sound is swallowed whole. I step closer and there she is—a woman caught between what is and what was—a Madonna not yet born, not yet lost. She does not offer anything easy but stays with you like a memory. I wonder if the ear knows what to listen for? I wonder how much of a museum’s magic is in the art itself and how much is in the people it draws. I wonder this as the only spectator in the room.
7.
And while we’re on the subject: What makes art Art? Maybe the answer is irrelevant. Maybe the act of asking is the point. Everything here is a confession of which sins are admitted and forgiven. It asks: Did you leave people better or worse than when you found them? And like any good sinner, you avoid answering directly, choosing instead to linger a little longer in front of a painting by the original mad genius: Van Gogh. The mad genius who stands as a metaphor. Who made immortalization our greatest spite. I see Van Gogh as both wound and salve; proof that brilliance often lurks in the margins. This was a man who certainly saw love as a vocation. Maybe I’m Van Gogh?
8.
Now that I’ve made my way to the Ancient Egyptian wing, I’m curious if the secret to eternal youth is dry climates and dying young. Maybe it’s not even about immortality but the illusion of it—mummified in lavish tombs and embalmed flesh. No one does death better. Also, Night at the Museum could totally happen. I’m telling you, the statues know something we don’t.
9.
I have always felt a certain kinship to Georgia O’Keeffe and Rothko. As someone who is removed entirely from their medium, I’m drawn to how they enrich emptiness. O’Keeffe seems to suggest that softness, when done right, can be just as authoritarian. Rothko says the opposite yet somehow achieves the same effect. They leave us only the essentials, which in turn feels vast and all-encompassing. A balancing act of restraint and intensity. It’s the idea that less isn’t just more; it’s everything. It actually reminds me of my ballet years. I was taught at a young age that a dancer’s vitality is to move with purpose without visible effort. Every movement has to extend beyond the body as if each limb comes with its own extension chord. It’s a balancing act of weightlessness and power. Softness, when done right, can be just as authoritarian.
10.
Gift shops are proof that humans can turn even the most existential experiences into transactions. After a spiritual stroll through centuries of human suffering and triumph, what better way to commemorate the journey than a tote bag emblazoned with The Death of Socrates? It’s capitalism’s greatest magic trick, and I eat it up every time. Wait, why didn’t I stop in here first to change my hat?
11.
And on their way out, the dead whisper to the living: Come again soon.
Tor Rose is an award-winning poet emerging from the streets of New York. Through her artistry, she creates poignant portraits of the human experience, allowing readers to walk the fine line between imagination and reality