Dead people’s things

Museums creep me out," a Korean producer told me. "They’re full of stuff that belonged to dead people." Not just dead people’s things – sometimes there are the actual dead people themselves, their remains, mummified and placed under glass for tourists and schoolchildren to gawk at. Fine if you were Tutankhamen and visitors seek you out – it’s ghoulish, but at least you’re not forgotten. (Your image will be stored in the memory of a digital camera, even if there are signs all over the museum prohibiting flash photography, until the camera’s owner spots Tom Cruise coming out of a restaurant and your photo is erased to make space for the ambassador of Scientology. Three thousand years of civilization, the rise and fall of empires, the beginnings of monotheism are no match for a two-minute dance in underwear and Ray-Bans.) But what if you were Tutankhamen’s assistant pastry chef or nose-hair trimmer? You probably wouldn’t even have your own exhibit: you’d be stuffed into a cabinet along with the people you couldn’t stand when you were alive – the fishmonger who wouldn’t shut up about his vacation in Gomorrah, and your ex-wife who ran off with the tannery worker who always stank of urine because that’s what they treated the leather with. The museum employees with their advanced degrees, the archaeologists with deep tans from turning over the desert sands with teaspoons and brushes, all these geniuses wouldn’t even get your name right, and you spend a few more lifetimes after your own misidentified as someone else. You’ll be the third mummy from the top, a not particularly rare or interesting artifact that museum-goers, their eyes stinging from the dust of history, scoot past on their way to the gift shop. Museums are crammed with the possessions of the long-dead, and I am a necrophiliac.

Only an idiot would try to see all of the Louvre in one day. It may not even be physically possible unless you’re on rollerskates. I don’t know why I did it. Could be sheer perversity and the fact that I haven’t done enough idiotic things in my life.

It was perfect museum weather: cold and rainy. At 10 a.m. the main tourist horde had not yet arrived, although a small throng clutching copies of The Da Vinci Code was massing in the glass pyramid, looking for the alleged final resting place of Mary Magdalene. My plan was simple: I would dispense with the guidebooks and seek out only the exhibits that interested me. Since I didn’t know where anything was, and have no patience with maps, I would rely on my personal radar. In other words I would wing it. The Louvre is vast, but I like taking long walks. (A friend tells me that in the 1960s, when there were far fewer tourists in Paris, he and his friends would go jogging in the Louvre. They would also break into the catacombs and throw parties.) First the sculptures and the Mesopotamians, the apartments of royalty, the Greek and Roman statuary and Egyptian antiquities. I went back and forth several times across the ancient world before I found the Winged Victory of Samothrace. She’s kind of scary, but I like looking at her. If you stare long enough she seems to be breathing. It’s as if she’s about to step off that boat and beat up the camera-wielding mob ("Read the sign, moron! No flash photography!"). The first time I saw her I was with my friends Leo and Chris. Leo gave a short lecture on classical sculpture, then Chris whipped out a red shawl and reenacted a scene from Funny Face with Audrey Hepburn. ("Take a picture! Take a picture!")

After a late lunch in the crowded cafeteria I looked at the paintings. The Dan Brown fans clubs had congregated in front of La Gioconda to decipher her smirk, or decide if she was indeed Leonardo Da Vinci in drag. La Gioconda seems to know something we don’t ("Yes, the wedding at Cana was their wedding, and he turned the water into merlot."). Worse, she seems to be taunting the viewer with her secret, which may explain the attempts by vandals through the centuries to wipe that smile off her face. Near the end of the Italian gallery are the Caravaggios. Michelangelo Merisis a.k.a. Caravaggio – the name is almost as dramatic as the paintings, and the little we know of the painter suggests that his life was as turbulent and violent as his work.

A great painting holds a universe within its frame, and you can only teleport yourself so many times before your molecules feel like they’ve been stretched thinly across space. At four-thirty I was staggering through the hallways and my brain was refusing to process any more information. It was like being drunk, but without the hilarious side effects. I should’ve left then, to shut myself up in a dark room and recover from this museum overdose, but my feet were no longer taking orders from my brain. The Vermeers, the Vermeers, said the obsessive-compulsive geek in my head, and finding those little paintings took another hour.

Fifteen minutes before closing time I found myself sitting on a couch in the Rubens gallery. My feet felt like they would burst out of my sneakers, so I put them up, and soon I was stretched out full-length on the couch, surrounded by chubby, rosy Baroque nudes. No one seemed to think there was anything strange about a semi-conscious visitor lying on the couch. The museum guard nodded as he walked by. From inside their framed universes, the dead people painted by a dead artist looked down upon the living with pity and compassion.

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