Author: Anonymous
I have been thinking of museums of the mind and of the art in my head.
When I looked this morning at those pristine buildings with marble statues, I was faced back with a sort of blankness. As if every colour on a palette had been mixed and created a white of the purest kind, where one would have expected brown to appear.
The statues were in a row. Two pairs of two, flanking the sides of the front facade. They acted as columns, supporting the weight of the entire roof upon their shoulders. What dignity, what pride, what strength… what made them bear it all so easily? Was it their doubling, the fact that they could see themselves physically in someone else?
Would I be surer of myself, if I had such a presence to affirm my own existence?
But, then what… obsessed with my own image, a Narcissus of some sort? No, becoming a flower was decidedly not the aim, though it would not be the most disagreeable fate of all.
And oh, to be a tree… like statues, immobile. But they spoke if you knew how to listen. I used to talk to a tree in my schoolyard as a child, and she talked back. I cried all the tears in my body when they cut her down.
They would not cut down these statues, I thought. Monuments were built to last. Not like little children’s dreams.
Below those statue columns, I saw a mother and her son on the left and a man holding a sword on the right. As stoic as stone, he was every virtue personified.
And the mother?
She was smiling, seeming happy. “’ Seeming’, Madam? Nay, it is” …
Was she happier than the statues of the Virgin Mary? In her quiet, unknown love, not one of public property – not placed in cathedrals and sung to, nor on little altars in Italian houses. Standing on a tall facade, looked at, but rarely talked to.
Who would talk to statues anyway… they’re all dead.
But shall they overturn, shall they rise? I would like to hear them speak, of faraway lands and of languages long extinguished. Would they even be bound by our time?
Just like Adam and Eve were born of clay, we could become statues when we die. Not in the way the so-called “great men” do. Not in a cold, dead way. We could be of cracked stone, and smile to the wind, and let the birds sit on our shoulders. We could then whisper to the people passing by words of wisdom, and give them a little luck, for their lovelorn lives.
Yes, I have been thinking of where museums begin and where they end, and I now think I know. I shall whisper it in your ear, somewhere, sometime, soon.
Images: © Anonymous author