So much is free, but you can’t hold it, can’t touch it, you don’t own it. Well, “you can’t take it with you” as they say. Why hold on to something? But when you get a digital something, you have the ghost of it, the music, the book, the film; it’s free but it’s gone. You are holding on to air.
I went to the British Museum recently, and there it’s different; old school. You can walk past things, you can, in theory, touch them (signs saying “please do not touch the exhibits” only encourage it. I have never seen a sign saying “do not touch the MP3s”, because, well, you can’t). Egyptian gods stare down the aisles and ages, Greek bodies are held in split-second frozen marble. And under glass, ancient thoughts written down are too far back in time to find or feel.
This stuff is old. Really old. The feeling is strangely vertiginous, as if looking back is like looking down, and the further you look the higher up is the precipice from which that past is viewed. Looking into the strange, ossified eyes of an Egyptian mask, it seems every smile has behind it a thousand others, and in front of it many more to come. Years ago, and years yet to live. It seems impossible that this has happened. I catch my present day grimace’s reflection and find it lacking.
Recurring dreams of childhood dreams left me with a kind of “fear of infinity”, and a quick google has identified this as apeirophobia. For a long word, this strikes me as being too short, abrupt almost; it should have within it an impossible cycle of repeats that can never end. It should be spelt up a kind of Escher staircase, or possibly down a spiral one. Apeirophobeirophobeirophobeir…o…..ph….
Faces smile back at me, perfect and timeless. We assume that to create something timeless is a good thing – yes, Hotel California, what a timeless classic etc. For me, timelessness is a nightmare of arrested activity, a trapped movement, invisible mucus wrapped around me like a coiled snake. Air into vacuum. Michelangelo’s David will always be youthful and virile, a snapshot (or sculpture, the only thing they had in those days, terribly time consuming) perhaps taken before his later decline into obesity and alcoholism. Like Instagram, these are models of ourselves we cannot match.
But then we arrive in the Japanese Galleries, and this is why I came. They have the lights low here, to try and halt the inevitable decay of the treasures within. It’s never busy. Silk scrolls curl, woodblock prints fade, everything is fragile, is broken, ceramic pots are wonky and endearing. It is not timeless, because the effects of time, the aesthetic benefits of time, are seen here everywhere. It is full of time.
An iPhone 6s, for example, is exterminated well before its natural demise to make way for an upgrade, maybe one of these new ones with a screen that goes past the edge of the handset (to where?). We don’t get to see it decompose, it’s corners fraying and worn, signs of use making it more beautiful, more personal, lived in, like an old book or wrinkled face. The Japanese call this wabi sabi, the acceptance of transience and imperfection, where an object only really reaches its full glory as it begins to lose its shine. Beauty as process. Dropping your phone on the pavement or down a toilet doesn’t count. The internet can document the passing of time (it is mainly about the passing of time) and yet nothing ages…..it’s merely information, a shared thought trapped in purgatory between the mind and the world of real things.
Back in the Japanese galleries, my phone’s message notification disturbs the murky light. Must make some time to get back to them, just need to find my bank details and address and phone number, I don’t like to keep people waiting.
Brother Face 