I could have stayed home in Michigan when I severely injured my knee right before a dream job of teaching in London for six weeks, but the surgeon said that with a brace and pain medication, I could last the trip and have surgery right after I returned. I believed him.
But when I limped into the Tate Britain Museum that summer not so long ago, I’d been suffering for four weeks. I’d chosen the museum for two reasons. I had to escape my boiling hot rented apartment into an air-conditioned space that wasn’t a supermarket or restaurant. And Tate Britain was the closest museum to where I was lodged in Pimlico; I wasn’t remotely up to a long cab ride at all.
That’s because I was in a very bad state: deeply depressed by being away from home for a month already and missing my husband, unused to sleeping alone night after night, and tormented by a top-floor flat with no air conditioning when it was 90 degrees outside most days and hot enough inside that my iPhone stopped working. I had to point a small black desk fan at the phone to cool it down. The fan, of course, was notional and reminded me of a conference at Oxford where the large room filled with easily a hundred attendees had a fan off in a corner so far from where I sat that all I could do was imagine the sultry air it pushed out as it nodded slowly side to side. I did not endear myself by thanking the organizers, when it was my turn to speak, for giving me the Caribbean vacation I’d dreamt of.
The burdensome, ugly, oppressive heat at the conference and this summer I was away from home for a month and half was a bizarre reversal from a different summertime vacation in London many years earlier when it was so cold I had to buy a heavy Scottish woolen sweater because I’d only packed summer clothes. En route to the sweater store I’d located, I had actually burst into tears because I was so cold, shocking a very elegantly dressed man headed my way. I can still see his wide blue eyes and the horror on his clean-shaven tanned face. He must have thought I was a freak, on drugs, or simply having a mental breakdown.
I was a tourist back then. This summer of the Tate, I was in London teaching creative writing students from Michigan. That enterprise was going extremely well because they were uniformly talented and engaged–and cheerful about the lack of AC in our Regents College classroom. After all, they were underage in the U.S., but here in London they could look forward to pubs right after our afternoon class.
But me, I was suffering from insomnia that drinking didn’t help and a knee injury that would be operated on when I got back to Michigan a few weeks off. Meanwhile, I was stuck wearing a brace that made my leg itch and sweat and felt like a medieval Catholic cilice without the spikes.
The museum wasn’t at all crowded at 10 a.m. and reminded me of Beaux-Arts museums back home until I turned a corner and sighted several galleries away, a sculpture gleaming under a skylight. It was Jacob Epstein’s “Jacob and the Angel.”
The enormous, imposing work is actually one giant block of brown and beige alabaster and in the sunlight, parts were translucent while other parts had an unworldly glow.
I knew the mysterious Genesis story in which Jacob wrestles with an angel all night and emerges limping with a new name, a tale that had always struck me as deeply homoerotic, especially in its renderings by various painters.
But this was the word made more than flesh.
I drew closer, drawn by what seemed to be a profoundly sexual energy. The statue is enormous, much larger than life, the figures with the impressive mass of an Assyrian bull and yet they both seemed weightless, caught in a struggle that might have been harsh. But when I moved as close as I could, I saw that Jacob didn’t seem to be fighting at all. His face was an icon of total orgasmic surrender, like Bernini’s St. Theresa.
I walked around the statue many times, hypnotized, until suddenly I felt that I was Jacob in the angel’s arms, no longer struggling for anything, but held, comforted, even adored. I had never felt this kind of connection to any statue before, and it awed me.
Eventually sated, I limped back to the lobby to call a cab, feeling strangely at peace, and that night was the first in London where pain did not disrupt my sleep.
In the morning, I started making notes about this experience because I did not want to forget–or even let the memory dim with time.
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Lev Raphael has taught creative writing at Michigan State University whose library has purchased his literary papers for its Special Archives. He has authored 27 books in genres from memoir to mystery and hundreds of personal essays, short stories, book reviews and blogs. When he’s not writing, reading, reviewing books, or caring for two Westies, he takes voice lessons.
© 2024, Lev Raphael
Halfway Down the Stairs 