Letter to Penelope : the psychology of reality

Dearest Penelope,

Had a really great conversation with a new friend today who I met at a cafe while going to read my paper. His name was Claus Jessup. I asked him how he knew of Ernst Fuchs since I saw he was carrying a book on his art with him while in line. Then I asked him if he had ever heard of Zdzislaw Beksinski thinking if he hadn't he might be interested considering the fantastical similarities, he said he had and then mentioned that he knew of a big retrospective of his work that was supposed to be opening up soon in the States. I told him I knew about it, I told him Sofia Lucia and myself were responsible for putting it together, that we'd been working toward it for the past six months or more. We ended up sitting down at a table together since there were other people in line and we were blockading cranky customers in apparent dire need of their caffeine crush. He is a photographer who does commisioned work for publications like National Geographic and Conde Nast, really cool fellow with stories to tell about his travels. Somehow we got on psychology and how it has replaced religion as the new spirituality. Except instead of it being a spirituality in the sense of faith it is more about turning the exterior diety into yourself and making yourself like God. Which is really what Jesus was saying all along but preachers don't preach that side of it since it leads to self-empowerment over mass control. The science of psychology is simply a modern attempt at bringing the message that the individual is the one who experience's God (that was another discussion, 'what God was?') back to the person. He proposed Sigmund Freud was the new Jesus where in Christian doctrine there is the father, son,and the holy spirit. Freud turned them into the id, ego, and superego. In Christianity one purifies their soul, to Freud it was the psyche. He made a pretty good case for it using relative terms. We talked for a couple hours until I had to leave to be at the library to examine and hopefully date some illuminated manuscripts before they were to be restored. I didn't leave without exchaning our contact information.

When the museum positioned me for this trip I knew that I would be all over the place getting the chance to see great variances of historical artifacts but actually being in the presence of some of these things which prior I had only seen in books and talked about with historians and curators has been quite the memorable treat. This is after all one of the reason's why I stepped into this offer of course. Rubin said he regrets not taking the position himself after being stuck back with maintenance and upkeep hassels at the museum. I told him he wouldn't have been given the job anyway, the head chair has her eyes on him and she doesn't want him leaving her access. He still acted like he had no notion of what I was talking about. As if he couldn't recall the Wine Tasting event last month where I pointed out how she not so subtly invited him over to her loft for a after party of two, missing the hint that he was going to be the only other person there. He mumble something and then started talking about how the Hopper etchings that were just installed are more mysterious than reality. I told him reality leaves a lot to the imagination.


All yours,
Odysseus