Several days a week, I walk by a mural of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in the Bronx, painted on the side of a building on Arthur Avenue near the Fordham campus. It is part of a memorial to Anton D. Nikci. (See it here courtesy of Forgotten New York). It seems to me to stand as a kind of symbol in the neighborhood, and I often wonder what people make of it as they walk by. Yesterday, while walking around the East Village in Manhattan, I saw this street art memorial of MCA of the Beastie Boys, near 1st Ave and 7th Street.

I wondered, too, how people related to this depiction. And how urban life gives a lively palette for interrelating adored figures of wisdom or creativity, guides for life.

When I see MCA in that rap pose and think of the Jesus mural, it looks to me like MCA is giving a blessing, with his hands open and a couple fingers bent as a signal of a creative bodily registration of a greater reality. When I see the Jesus mural and think of MCA, it looks to me like Jesus is in the middle of a dynamic motion, instead of standing stone-still as he normally appears, and I wonder how that sacred heart gesture is part of a larger gesture, a livelier performance, of which the mural caught just a moment. What is the blessing MCA gives? What is the song Jesus is performing?

Tommy Beaudoin, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York