One of the most powerful things that art can do is to blur the boundary between reality and perceived truth. This is one reason that I struggle to enjoy flat representation; too often, a painting strikes me as a simple representation of virtuosity instead of something that applies to - something that changes - the human experience.
Four days ago, I noticed this article on the Boston Globe site. I didn't read it because I was at work and thus engaged with multiple conflicting other demands, all roughly related to the myriad and inscrutable demands of the parents of four-year-olds. But I made a mental note to see the exhibition.
Because we are engaged in a hectic race to find a new home, my girlfriend and I rarely get a chance to breathe, much less sit in a two-hour line for a ten minute experience. But as luck would have it, we got our chance on Sunday.
Our real estate broker, who had been so kind as to show us apartments preferable by shades to certain cardboard boxes, finally asked us to stop wasting their time and look elsewhere. It was a low moment that came when we realized that the initial fees alone (equivalent of 1600 loaves of bread, 760 large mochas, or 4.8 years of comic book Wednesdays,) equalled too much. The look on the broker's face was a mix of disgust, anger, and confusion. Where do people like this get off? it seemed to say. How do they think they deserve all of this? Or any of this? Ugh, I hope they leave soon, the urchins.
So we left, emotionally drained, defeated, and desaturated. The car, which has made strange noises since I drove it to Philadelphia in December, complained and groaned at the extra weight of our slumped shoulders, our heavy heads, our hearts.
There is one thing that any Salemite can do to feel wealthy: go to the Peabody Essex Museum. Admission to this world-class institution is completely free to residents of the city. You could go every day, and as long as you had an ID listing your residence as Salem, you would be greeted as an honored guest. Otherwise, tickets cost 9 loaves of bread per person.
It makes you feel special.
We were given pink collar clips and politely informed that the line was long. We settled in to wait - it seemed appropriate. Around us flocked people who would probably have passed the real estate broker's exacting standards, all wrapped in giant charcoal pea coats and adorned with hairstyles indicative of lifestyles. They chatted with us easily, and we with them. The broker's distorted ideas about the relative value of humanity meant nothing here. We were all lucky. We were all about to see something amazing.
Suddenly, we were close. The giant glass doors ahead offered a limited view of the interior of the exhibit. Things flitted. Something moved. Humans stood gaping at things invisible from our point of view. They looked nothing like people in a train. A docent was looking us all over when the head of the family before us suddenly spoke up: "There's only two of them." They pushed us forward. We entered.
Beyond the glass doors, beyond a chubby, well-dressed security guard in a vestibule, beyond a heavy silver curtain of hanging chain links, was a space.
It is hard to think of the exhibit as a room. The walls seem completely irrelevant. Feet stay to the neutral linoleum path by nature. Around it, a sea of very coarse, gravelly sand allows no dust to rise in the hot, still air. Rushes spring from this sand, but whether they are alive or dead, sleeping plant people or dry plant bones, is impossible for me to determine. The birds take them to use in nests that they have built despite the upscale wicker habitats hanging from the ceiling...and the guitars eager for the rake of the birds' tiny, undeniable talons.
The birds land on the guitars in fifths. Tones reverberate through amplifiers in asynchronous harmony, counterpointed by the sweet vocalizations and the beat of the wings of the flocks of their creators. Some of the humans are so shy around the birds that they jump when the tiny creatures come too close. But the music is not to be denied.
I need to spend a week here. I need to know the circadian rhythms and the cycle of feeding and the new chicks learning to fly and land and the teaching of their chicks in time. I'll sleep on the neutral linoleum and smell the sand and head single chords sound randomly in the night, excited cacophony resounding at daybreak, birds courting on the necks of Fenders.
Then, we had to go.
It's impossible to share an experience like that. Years would go into its full understanding. In another age, monasteries would have been built around that exhibit and generations of quiet people would think of nothing else. The sound was the one the human species lost when we started wearing shoes.
We're already talking about going back. It runs into April, though by then, we'll be long gone. Our own rhythms are taking us elsewhere. But maybe we don't need it. My girlfriend turns the pages in her book over the excited tapping of my fingers on the laptop, which emits a very high electric tone. The cats bump and sigh when we move. We talk about the future. The sounds we make for each other reverberate gently through the slow morning.
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