Of Museums & Memes
of museums and memes
i reflected back one day
remembering
as a small child
being taken to a museum
and asked
to wander vast halls
asked to traverse grand stairwells
with limbs too short to find the comfort of the balustrade
and a timid stride too meek to ignore the yawning void of height
reaching out from between each spaced step below.
asked to pay no attention to the ceilings
so impossibly high
but rather to an endless gallery
of cases and displays
vestiges of an ancient past
which I had not journeyed,
being myself still a stowaway
of my own uncertain future,
these artefacts and statues
locked in the amber of a dusty silence
that spoke nothing of their truths
but awoke something
to an already frightened mind.
now I reflect back
on how our gathered minds
once revered and celebrated grand works.
on the now ancient wonders,
from the giant guardian at Rhodes
whose titan presence
cast its unachievable reflection
on the moving waters,
and its shadow
not into the past
of the city state at its feet,
but into a future.
so that the eyes of that time,
could lift their gazes
from the feet of clay
and from the pedestal,
and even from the low horizon,
and could look in wonder
and believe
that such an icon
of fortitude and grandeur
would surely last all time.
and to the lands of the first cradle
and the hanging gardens
whose wonders
and perfumed scents would
drift on the winds of time until,
up from musty pages
would they rise,
to delight the imagination of soft men
reading poems in stately parlours;
a nightingale song
opening windows
to a jasmine fragrances evening
of another, half imagined life.
it’s been so long
since the exodus from Egypt
and now the plagues have returned
and the people again speak in pictures,
but unlike that timeless land of kings
whose pictures endured
and carried so much more meaning
than our scratchings
of letters and rules,
and which still endure today,
the surface meanings
only half-understood
and the deep meanings
carved deeper into the psyches
of a people
whose faces turned towards the sun,
than a chisel could cleave to stone
to last a thousand years;
and then of our memes,
which carry depth of meaning
of satire and delight
curiously striking
their quickly fading gongs
in the shallow chambers of our hearts
not a foot beneath
the congested streets
of our hurried minds
and so
they last,
not for more than the passing of a single day
and all their striking chimes are lost,
amidst the clamour
of our unslakable
groping hunger for meaning.
the old, now,
not the young,
are left to face the void of an unsure future
yawing beneath them,
beneath us,
trying to glimpse the reassuring certainty
of the ground below,
between the quick moving steps of meaning,
clutching the comfort
of our dates balustrades
our once sure strides,
now made uncertain
by the redundancy of our relics
and our slow recline
into an amber trap
of a generation
whose time will never come again.
~ from The Ratchet & The Pendulum, by Rocco Jarman