Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

78. MICHAELANGELO LAUGHING:

I remember some blues lyric by somebody which went - 'nobody loves me but my mother/and she could be jivin' me too' - and it sometimes made me laugh as I said it even though I could never remember the tune for it or what it went to and one day while I was at the museum I'd gone to looking at pictures and there were in this section many sorts of old religious paintings and Jesus-and-Mary's and loving mother/son paintings and a lot of that very old pious stuff that used to be painted to illustrate chapels and the like for illiterate people who otherwise needed illustrations to get their faith going and I thought of that lyric in such a context and started wondering if those people any of them could get the humor out of such a juxtaposition - like would they laugh or smile at this or would none of the humor or lightness of it come through and instead of that dour burdensome old heavy weight of faith and doom I wanted to understand where lightness and whimsey came in and how it connected to faith or if it could be or ever was but of course just the same museums are no places to do that either : fat art-guards standing around in silly little museum ID jackets with that blank hour-after-hour stare they put on so as not to really 'connect' with people or make eye contact or anything but instead just stand around vacuous and present as they have to and it was something of a wonder to see such a guy standing there and not taking anything in - of course I didn't know their thoughts and perhaps just perhaps they loved each minute of it all and had favorite paintings and places and stories of their own about the art but I wanted to just go up to the guy and say 'hey pal ! that's a Giotto right next to you get it?' but I never did and just walked around wondering and anyway they weren't 'all' fat just some and they reflected the same mix as the people in the crowd - those somber art students on the benches referring back to textbooks or drawing lines and writing notes and comments about what they see and the old ladies peering as if it all were some kinetescope of old into which if they put a nickel and waited for the movement and action to begin (alas it never did) or the lone art lovers and the romancers in couples on art-dates swooning together their generous likes or dislikes about what they see - out of towners and Oklahomians in gayly patterned colors and clothing from somewhere else both freshly laundered and pert as can be touring distant lands and cultures for a fortnight of hollow joy and spendthrift daring - as such it was always fun but not as much as the fun of the old irony which had always it seemed been missing for centuries - with both Rabelais and Pascal notwithstanding I guess - but I never did see Michaelangelo laugh then did I?