~ by which it curates its own madness
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The mind is like a museum. So it seems to me, holding variable collections of images, histories, or provocations within the dome of one singular space. Reveries, like landscapes; dreams, like sculptures; memories, like photographs—hung, dispersed, framed by experience, arranged by the eye of the curator, the eye of the mind, but bound not only to those on display. Much is stored elsewhere: in unopened foyers, forgotten for a time, held for preservation, to be examined later. And in the very back room perhaps—those fragments which are concealed, covered, tucked away. Too terrible or too irrelevant.
The corridors are wandered—aimlessly or with purpose. Information gathered; conclusions reached. We interpret things as we find them, cataloguing, reminiscing, stopping to dream. All or nothing is as it seems, given the reach of our fantasies. These are the pieces of thought; these are the works of art—ever-rotating, brought forward, held back, dwelled upon in great detail, passed over without a glance.
This metaphor, allowing for some small degree of over-glorification on my part, is realized most vividly, as one would expect, in the halls of the art museum itself. Presented with the ripples of this idea, the museum wastes little time in shifting the perspective of its galleries before I am wandering a near inversion of myself. The pieces of art might hold still; they might hang steady, but my race of running thoughts lends to them a quality of consciousness, of movement. The mind exudes itself, filling the space with a collective life, and many works in these particular moments become little looking glasses that house some fraction of the subconscious—the inner, perhaps unobserved self—which now transforms these works into its own private translation.
This phenomenon assumes an air of the uncanny, even the disturbing, when it extends so far as to overlay the museum entirely. In moderation, in sparks of revelation broken here and there, these encounters sway one with an air of the almost-spiritual, of the shared and timeless road of the human experience. But in excess, in a chorus of the mind’s spillages and overflows and unasked-fors, chambers of solemn reflection quickly become carousels of raucous unburials. Traveling down passages of my reflected psyche, each painting is felt to harbor some hidden or explicit truth, something I’ve been running from, something I need reminding of. Each statue an inaudible guide, communicating their message through the slant of the eyes, the ripples of the arms, the folding of the legs.
Creeping reverently through whichever great hall draws the attention, attempting to invoke this transformation no more than is necessary and still remain tuned to the silent whispers emanating from these carvings of the gods and their mortal servants’ twisted shadows—further in, further back, between the echoes of marble archways and the gaps in the pillars’ scrolls, some prominently placed canvas cuts through the quiet gleam of ivory and stone with its crimson and chartreuse and cobalt. A jagged, impulsive creation, it remains just as true, if not truer, than these rulers of the ancients. From chaos they were birthed; they are haunted by chaos still. For this painting of interruption, with its mad jumble of lines and its clattering of triangles, challenges the silence, the mirage of power—an unwieldy form toppling some grand palace of tradition. The blind shadow of a modern-day Samson, come to level our expectations.
In the presence of these century-old pieces, the Current appears almost too violent; for the statues blanch in the wake of new forms. The marble pales. Their façade, this godlike depiction of the past, is broken—shattered by the battlefields of color which clamor in the windows twixt their legs. The gates of Hades are thrown open, and it is not beautiful, milky-eyes angels and demons come spilling out to hang themselves in these halls of preservation and praise—but great cascades of braided thread, molten rubble fashioned into a whirlwind, giant swaths of fabric gathered in points and hung from the ceiling, splotted with the euphoric explosions of every paint color known to man.
I watch the people’s shoes shuffle forward and back in the space between the ground and the fabric of this contemporary leviathan. Everyone wanders in circles, their shadows sparkling in the freshly polished floors. They cross barriers of time as these hypnotically impulsive works bleed out of the future and into the past, chasing the gildings and the glory, the odd holiness of time’s mighty adornments. Held in contrast like so, separated only by history and an open archway—the majesty of the ages and the deconstructive passion of the modern world propose a certain harmony of dissonance, a reminder that for all the precision and the depth of the one—here too the veins and the tissue, the lightnings and the heavy splatters are deemed just as beautiful—if not more so, to some.
The portraits are heard to wail in the wake of such nontraditional orchestrations. Their lips come undone, their eyes pooling in perfect wells of black or brown sludge. They scrape back their own perfections, pleading in their strange language of symbolism. How many platters of fruit—peeled and reexamined—reveal the head of John the Baptist? How many corpses under the lone shadow-man’s cloak? Gods hidden in the guise of mortals; ghosts sewn into the landscape’s rippling brushstrokes. A symphony of sighs; they are but echoes of the future. Time holds not linear. The mind holds not still.
The mind— The mind its own museum. Supported in exemplary pillars, adorned with all the usual forms and graces, seat of muses, temple of musing—the musing of life, such wonder! such style! and yet— And yet— some collection of broken thoughts reaches through invisible cracks in un-crumbling halls. There! Such a shock! Oh the ghastly, the unknown. The unidentifiable surfaces through formulaic chambers. The mad jumble of lines, the chalk patterns ribboning with the whims of a child, of a mind—possessed! possessed of something outside itself. Oh, darling! Dear, what is it? How can you appreciate a thing if you cannot name a thing. If you cannot place a thing?
The pieces all look round now—following, studying, analyzing you. Dionysus harboring this master scheme for the centuries, now unleashed like a mad wag of the maestro’s baton. Mad—yes! For if the mind is a museum, come wander the wing of irregularities, of slapdash rhythm, of the dark and barbaric yawp! Don’t be afraid, now. Don’t be shy. You are already here! You cannot get out. And see how the choir sings invisible! See how the symbols have always been here! Tracing their own metamorphoses, whether consciously or not—to this wondrously unplaceable crescendo of mayhem—this reversal of blind revelation. For if the mind is a museum, then its madness too is an art. Then its madness too is beautiful.
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// Featured Image Courtesy of Kaitlyn Carter //
a literary labyrinth 