I had been working all morning, translating difficult passages and writing commentaries. My eyes were red and stung when I rubbed them. I was hungry and thirsty. I’d nothing to eat since last night. I thought to clear my head and so I went outside and began walking. There was a small park nearby and a vendor was selling large pretzels and cold soft drinks. I bought a pretzel – the flakes of salt on the pretzel looked delicious – and an ice-cold orange soda. I found a bench. After I finished eating, I realized how weak I must have been as I felt myself to be greatly revived in both body and mind. Suddenly I found myself inside the museum, holding a ticket, and just beyond saw the large gallery where the Jackson Pollock exhibition could be sensed as a powerful visual energy field. I walked into the first room, where I was vertiginously encroached by shifting shapes and wobbly lines, my eyes assaulted by densely cadent clusters chaotically arranged yet strangely balanced. The walls were white and had large spaces separating the paintings, allowing each its proper space to breathe and pulsate without fear of impinging on its neighbor. The paintings seemed vast. I do not know and can’t say for sure how large they were. They gave the impression of enormous size. I would stand before a painting as if before a canyon, above a cliff, looking down into an abyss. Where I looked there seemed to be life, the paintings seemed to breathe, to pulsate to throb, like living beings. The colors seemed to vibrate sounds. What I heard was like a vast choral improvisation, free of conventional melodies or traditional chord structures, being a sonic flow without beginning or end, an absolute clarity of creation suggesting rain or waves or an infinite sea. At first, I could not stand to be in front of any painting for more than a few minutes. I seemed hypersensitive to voices heard around me. Comments enraged me. “My five-year old could do better!” I would rush to another painting, shaking. I found myself praying under my breath, pleading for the powers of restraint, empathy, and understanding. My head felt as if it were under attack from angry wasps. I could feel sweat on my forehead, my palms, under my arms, trickling down my stomach. I looked with total concentration at what was directly in front of me. And thereby distractions were prevented from entering the cell of my consciousness as if I had shut a massive iron door. I saw a forest become a thick bank of cloud transform into the surface of a sea. I saw a strange bird with long beak and legs, wings outstretched, as if dancing. I saw snakes extended through thick clouds, and black creatures with bodies smudged and weird tongues where faces would be. I saw a large flatfish with the face of a woman, and a series of ghostly apparitions floating upon bandages stained red and green and yellow. Tall grasses marched toward me going this way and that. Eight tall black trunks seemed to lead a furious parade. The colors were feverish, dirty, dull. Gray and black, orange and yellow, and beige. I did not know how to calibrate the noise the sounds made as I looked at them with my eyes. In one corner, a man’s head with heavy horn-rimmed glasses, his nose missing, a thick old-fashioned moustache. He resembled a banker from a silent movie. Another pair of large eyes, disembodied, hovered near the center, like a phantom of surveillance. Elsewhere a portion of a face, a child’s wide-open mouth, frightening teeth, caught in a moment of derisive laughter. And everywhere the frantic wires of paint, the lines, splashes, sprays, clusters, entangled in an inferno, a kaleidoscope, a shifting fun-house between nightmare and giddy delight. In the bottom left, the artist’s magnificent signature. I wiped my brow. An elderly couple holding hands shuffled by. He had a look of disgust on his face, whereas she seemed to wear a mask set in wonder. There was a forest, deep and thick. There was an overgrowth, wild, dense, uncontrolled. Exposed roots were like chains, yet they writhed like snakes or worms on a sidewalk after a hard rain. There was a narrow pathway that led to a gate on the outskirts of a village where there was an open plaza and a fountain. I heard music and the tumult of dancing. The dancers twined and spun. They rolled about and the action of their flesh created sparks as they whirled. The sparks turned to flames that reached up into a night sky filled with ice-like stars and a glittering firmament beneath a dome. In one painting a beetle scurried across, in another a camel labored up a long hill strewn with rocks. From a strange spike, a turtle could be seen balancing on its shell a small row boat. I tasted rust in my mouth and knew I would soon need to drink a cup of water. I took a few steps into the next room. I felt myself climbing a rough-hewn ladder held together by rope. I could feel bricks tied to my feet as I labored up the ladder. Before me was a door which I opened. I found myself at a mid-point within a dark wood. There were wires, ropes, roots. Faces hovered like ghosts. A dull heavy iron sound, like chains falling or infernal machines working, was heard. The wires became snakes became worms became ferns became tall grasses. They seemed to refract as if underwater. The grasses seemed to curl like fingers. They beckoned. The forest disappeared. In the distance I could see lights, like an unreal city, on the horizon. I found myself at a silent crossroad on an empty plain. In the sky above me there were wheels. They moved slowly above me. They were brightly colored. They spun and turned separately. Then they fused into one. They began to turn within each other, wheels within wheels within wheels. They looked on fire. Suddenly I found myself in darkness and felt on all sides enormous pressure. I seemed entombed deep inside a living pitch. I might have shouted for aid. Then there was a volcanic eruption. It seemed as if I had been shot violently into space, expelled, ejected. I was standing outside, on the sidewalk, dripping, bathed in late-afternoon light. I squinted at my wristwatch. Hours had passed but it seemed as if I had left my hotel only an hour ago. I shook my head. It was 1967. I recalled I was in New York. Next week I would travel to Canada to attend Expo 67, the international celebration of national culture held to coincide with Canada’s confederation centennial. I would meet many theologians there. I looked forward to my visit. But right then, on the sidewalk, in late-afternoon light, I continued to tremble slightly. After a few moments, I seemed to regain my composure and so I headed back to my hotel where my books and pens waited on the desk, my clothes and various sundries in the bureau and closet where I left them.

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Jon Cone lives in Iowa.  His recent works include New Year Begun: Selected Poems (Subpress Editions: Brooklyn, NY, 2022); Liminal: Shadow Agent, pts 1 and 2 (Greying Ghost, Salem, MA, 2022); and Cold House (espresso, Toronto, Ont., 2017).  He can be followed on X (Twitter): @JonCone