My Unforgettable New York City Unicorn Hunt

I have already shared some beastly New York City experiences: a coyote on a leash (here), a snake in a theatrical costume (here), and a frog challenging a bilingual child (here). I won't bore you with the man who walked a goose around Greenwich Village or the elderly author who fulfilled her lifelong dream of riding an elephant... in New York City!

The Cloisters

You could go to a different museum in New York City every day for a year and not reach all of them. Of the ones that I have visited, my favorite is the Cloisters, a museum of medieval European art, although it is the product of cultural vandalism, what today might be called a mashup.

A branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (website), the Cloisters (website) is in Fort Tryon Park, a beautiful northern corner of Manhattan Island, with splendid views of the Hudson River. It is housed in a building put together from parts of medieval monastic buildings that were disassembled in France, shipped to the United States, and reassembled at the current location from 1934 to 1938.

The Cloisters is an art museum, not a historical re-creation, so there are no Medieval privies or serfs' quarters, but there are some beautiful gardens based on information from Medieval texts and illustrations. Most importantly, the Cloisters houses some five thousand Medieval artworks, on paper, on canvas, of wood, of metal, of precious stone... and of cloth.

The "Unicorn Tapestries"

My favorite pieces at the Cloisters are the "Unicorn Tapestries," seven magnificent panels more than five hundred years old that recount the legend of the hunt for the unicorn. The Cloisters provides a great online presentation of the tapestries here, but the interpretations of the hunt for the unicorn, with its complex mingling of pagan (courtly love) and Christian (divine love) imagery goes on and on. One French page (here) links to speculations on alchemy, the psychology of C.G. Jung, and the Kabbalah in relation to these tapestries.

My hunt for the unicorn

Unicorns are a topic of such personal intensity for me that I have never written about them. In recent years, however, the noble unicorn has been reduced to a fluffy, pastel frivolity, such as the unicorn on which those insanely clever or cleverly insane folks at JimJab (website) mounted then candidate Obama; you can even put yourself onto the presidential unicorn (here).

But, for me, the unicorn is a dark, powerful creature more like that one referred to nine times in the King James Version of the Bible (here): "And the unicorns shall come down with them, and the bullocks with the bulls; and their land shall be soaked with blood, and their dust made fat with fatness." (Isaiah 34: 7)

Like Forrest Gump, that is all I want to say about that.

My unicorn hunting party

One day, I invited a friend to join me for a ramble through the Cloisters, which he had never visited. I planned our route so that we would reach the "Unicorn Tapestries" last. As we entered the room with them, I psyched myself up; walking around the room, I presented each of the tapestries, placing it in the context of the whole series, and pointing out various symbols. In the presence of the unicorn, I must now confess: I was showing off.

After my rant about the final, greatest tapestry of the unicorn series (see the illustration above), I heard someone say, "Excuse me." Turning, I was surprised to see that I had accumulated a group of about a dozen people, hanging on my words. Questions and attempts at answers followed. Several of "my" group complimented me on a good presentation, but no tips were proffered.

I looked up at the poor unicorn, beyond life, beyond death, beyond existence itself, with no parent, mate, or offspring, a likely symbol for the alienation and loneliness that so many people associate with New York City, but once again, I had found myself in an unlikely, impromptu group in that same city, where people gather to attend to the needs of an elderly stranger (here) or to share food in a restaurant (here).

You can find an index to all my unforgettable New York City stories, "My Experience of Unforgettable New York City," here.

You can find an index to all my stories of hunting unicorns, "The Joys of Chasing Unicorns," here.