Madonna
The young terrorist, upon learning my father was American, asked in earnest whether the Symbionese Liberation Army had succeeded in conquering California.
When my father hitchhiked across Germany in 1974 he was picked up by a member of the second generation of the Red Army Faction. The young terrorist, upon learning my father was American, asked in earnest whether the Symbionese Liberation Army had succeeded in conquering California. To which my father replied, “Not yet!”
One of the last great mysteries of art and the Movement of Time is how Edvard Munch’s Madonna paintings of the 1890s could so closely resemble Symbionese Liberation Army-era Patty Hearst. Randolph Apperson Hearst’s private collection of Munch paintings and sketches predate his daughter’s kidnapping, and it was only with her appearance in SLA bank robberies that he became aware of the resemblance. He devoted himself to discovering how Munch could have painted his daughter decades before her birth and how her being depicted as the bare breasted Theotokos could have led to her brief career as a kidnap victim turned urban guerrilla. Randolph found no answers and no rest, but the years I spent on his private team of Munch scholars and physicists were the most productive and meaningful of my life.
I’m afraid I cannot summarize our provisional findings on Time. Since Randolph’s death in 2000, the old team still meets once or twice a year, but we’ve all been forced to find new employment. Most of the physicists moved to Qatar to work on fundamental problems.1 We Munch scholars find solace in our still being alive.
As Hobbes said in the introduction to his translations of Homer: “The virtues required in an heroic poem, and indeed in all writings published, are comprehended all in this one word—discretion.”