mymanian wears a muzzle

"Don't you think it cruel," a passerby said, "to muzzle him as such? What if he is a poet?"

"I hardly think he'd be a very good one," I replied. "I'm saving us all." I don't think I'm trying to be funny when I say these things.

Mymanian has never showed interest in poetry. I read to him, once, a clipped couplet from St. Vincent Millay. He thought it sing-songy and a bit blunt in the area of sex, even for him. I left a William Carlos Williams poem in the icebox and he never touched it.

The muzzle is a property. Mymanian wears the muzzle by choice. Yes, I purchased the muzzle, but only at the spy's direction. It is a vintage piece, from the Hoover years at the Bureau. It became available through an online auction house. I made a last second bid that no one would match.

Mymanian, why do we come to this park? You wear your muzzle and I read the Times and passersby make comments on my cruelty, but say nothing of the cruelty of Will Shortz. The man can twist a pun like a knife in my kidney. And the smug patronage of Saffire, does a passing inquisitor take him to task for his prescriptive tendencies? Oh, I would hope so, but never to me do they remark.

Since the publication of his Duchampian "erotic" flipbook, the one featuring relations between a urinal and various vine fruits, Mymanian has attempted the limitations of the art viewing public. It is his idea that "The Paper of Record" is in some way an appropriate dialectic to the idea of self-imposed repression. I am not convinced.

And Mymanian, is this, can this be art, if it is not declared? We have given no notice. This is our Sunday morning. And no, it is not "Our Sunday Morning," but simply what we do on Sundays before lunch. I assay the Times crossword. You sit muzzled. If we gave notice in some way, handbills or a brief mention in the Announcements section of the Thrifty Nickel, it would add some gravity to the event.

To a lesser extent, this exercise reminds me of Bernhard Kaufmann, III -- artiste of little renown now known, in retrospect, for a performance he executed in the late 1970s. Well-to-do of the trust-fund variety, Kaufmann wanted to bring attention to his art by intentionally bringing no attention to his art. His piece, titled by some of his biographers as "Three Years: Death" sought to examine willfulness. It was a performance in three acts.

Act I: Kaufmann rejects his condition. He divests himself of his fortune (which he did not earn and was always ashamed of), sells all his possessions and burns the proceeds (a literal crime, destroying currency), and assumes the life of a street urchin. He tells no one why he is doing this.

Act II: Kaufmann realizes his mistake. The performance began in late spring of 1978. Kaufmann lives as a street urchin, and to a degree enjoys the certain freedoms associated. Untethered to time and place he moves about the city at will taking especial delight in being barred from the establishments that once took every pain to suit his needs. The onset of weather less temperate brings on the realization that complete commitment to this art will take a serious toll on his constitution. He looks for ways to reject his art, but alas, his planning so complete, he has no safety, no way to reverse the course. It is at this point that his biographers diverge. One camp, the literalists, contend that the entire performance was intentional and even the madness that crept into his external being was a part of the complete set of actions. The other camp, the empathetics, feels that this is the point where the art ends and the human tragedy begins.

Act III: Insane and broken, Kaufmann dies. By far, this is the longest act. Over two years it stretched. Two versions of this Act are recounted by the bickering camps. The literalists view Act III as glorious and cathartic. The empathetics, even at the time, recognized that a price too precious was paid in service to an err of judgment. Kaufmann, after his first winter as an urchin, becomes unbound. He begins ranting in public, in park gazebos, in front of churches, at gallery receptions. The timbre of his plea is constant. He insists to anyone that hears him that he is not a bum, but a wealthy man, a very wealthy man. He insists that his condition is a performance gone wrong, so very wrong. The foundation that received his most generous donation refuses to return even a small portion of the gift. The empathetics see this as a supreme irony, considering the foundation's tireless work to end homelessness. The literalists cite the trust documentation of the donation, which states that under no circumstance was the gift to be returned, as evidence that Kaufmann foresaw his eventual reluctance to remain true to the art, and built in safeguards to ensure his success.

By his third spring, Kaufmann had lost his voice to an untreated ailment. His days were spent silently begging for coin. The exact timeline of his descent is fuzzy, but during this third year on the street, he began using inhalants for some brief respite. Soon he was constantly disoriented and, some have said, possibly brain damaged.

He was identified by a cousin in the city morgue who recognized the inclination of his front teeth, and a discreet birthmark on his chest. Police had retrieved the body from a storm drain. No forensic resources were applied to determine the cause or time of death. A best guess was made that the body may have been in the drain for a week or two weeks, but it was hard to say. The literalists conclude: a phenomenal display of abnegation. The empathetics only shake their heads and in their analysis, the artist is not Kaufmann at all but the rest of us, we were the artists. The work of art is Kaufmann, he is the medium and the token and cipher. We were the actors that worked the medium, and if in the final representation there is an issue of attribution, the artists, the creators of the work were all those who contributed to the final piece, through action or inaction; each name should be placed on a brass plaque and affixed to his sepulchre in the Kaufmann mausoleum.

Mymanian thinks this comparison is flawed. Kaufmann lacked a sense of humor. These Sundays in the park amuse the spy-without-nation to no end, and after I have thrown down the crossword in helpless disgust, we have brunch at the Marriott.