Maarja Kangro
Nature was ripe, the barberries had already turned red, Gloria was thinking of decay. She was a museum worker after all, so decay was also her subject matter. «Par excellence,» enounced Gloria quietly.
The museum, the dear museum, protected artifacts and collective bits of memory from decay, acting as a brave conservator ensuring all essences to stay the same, yet, everything they protected was always also in the process of decay, transformation, reinterpretation, huh! What lived in the museum was untouchable, undead, zombie. Before working at the Estonian Open Air Museum, Gloria had worked in one writer's house museum, where they had, for example, the writer's blanket. Uncanny in its dead immortality, but it was precisely this uncanniness that excited Gloria.
Even well-conserved works decay, transform, sometimes also re-emerge, but always in another context, always as something else. Like Heraclitus had his river, and Theseus his ship. When has the last piece of an object changed enough for the identity of the object to be completely lost?
Gloria drank the last sip from her water bottle. Is it always autumn in museums? Wow, there’s a question, she thought to herself. She smiled pleasingly, but the question was indeed terribly beautiful. Yes, we have a museum-level consciousness of the perpetual fall, of the inevitable decay of the present, the here and now! The ghostly, unyielding struggle of the undead.
Everything that is alive, transforms. And transformation is not decay, even though it might seem like this in some cases. Our identity. Traditions, if there still are some. Language. Languages are indeed dying, one after another. The ones that survive, change. The environment is also transforming, but humans are afraid to disintegrate, to lose their significance in the process. We shiver like meat bereft of bones when the meaningful structures of our lives are taken away.
Boy, her mind was on fire today! This was nice, as there was a birthday party coming up in the evening where she could talk. Gloria already had a present, a heavy glass vase in her large handbag; however, now, before closing the museum (officially it was already closed), she wanted to go and see the silver painting one more time. She had already been waiting for this: to meditate in front of it also today.
It was an impressive and beautiful work of art. A monumental silver painting on canvas that quietly decayed in nature – the weather conditions had been made the co-author of the work. The fauna was probably intended to start working on it as well: ants, earwigs, spiders. The artist had given up her will, the pretension of permanence so characteristic of creators, and that was beautiful. A large-scale, shimmering work, which did not try to defy the arrow of time.
In Gloria's childhood there had been a lot of talk about entropy. Of energy turning into lower quality energy. How every spontaneous process adds to the disorder in the universe. The organized state needs energy, which deteriorates during use, producing disorder elsewhere in the universe. The museum ensures heating, regulates humidity, makes an effort to pamper the artworks in the right conditions
We are all afraid of the decline and decay, and the irreversible passage towards lower quality is painful, thought Gloria. We, a part of us, comprehends how our density or extent is fading, how we are becoming non-self. Some fibres in the piece of rope are still the same, but some are already new; that is, old, decomposed, crumbly.
Gloria was staring at the wet, unpretentious soil under her feet. There, she thought, the artist had made a magnificent gesture, looking decay in the eye, exhibiting it. No duhkha, no pain of impermanence! Decay that is calmly exhibited, is not really decay, thought Gloria triumphantly. Physically and chemically, of course, irreversible transformation still occurs. But culturally, the decay that is exhibited, is something completely different.
And now she saw it. A person was standing in front of the immense painting and cutting it with a knife. He was scraping it, ripping the pieces of the canvas, tearing them with a beastly energy. He was tugging it, cutting it, pulling it with his nails, almost biting the canvas here and there. A person in a black sweatshirt. Gloria's pulse started to race. Her forehead turned hot. This vandal was not supposed to be here, all the visitors should have left a while ago.
Gloria almost started shouting – screaming at him but at the last moment she realized: a knife! The guy had a knife.
She had to find her phone from her bag. Gloria dug into her bag, while the guy turned his head and grinned at her.
«What are you doing,» Gloria snivelled, but the guy just sneered waving his knife, then turned his back on her and continued to cut the painting.
Gloria later found it difficult to understand how she had turned into such of a machine. How her body and certain parts of her brain had functioned on their own, without the controlling consciousness. Maybe it was the destruction of art that made her boil over, Gloria had been a lifelong museum worker after all. Maybe she was now already afraid for her life, but it was as through a haze that she saw her hand grabbing for the vase meant as a gift from the bag and her body running with it, the collision was so strong that Gloria felt as if she herself had been hit on the neck with the vase, but the guy started tottering, and as he made a menacing stretch with his hand holding the knife towards her, Gloria smacked one more time just in case, and the guy also seemed to punch, but then he stopped moving.
Gloria should have made some phone calls now, though this reeked of big trouble, she still should have reported it – to the police, ambulance, colleagues. But in the foggy haze she saw instead her own body dragging the guy in the black sweatshirt, who turned out to be not that heavy at all, but rather skinny, even though terribly smelly, into a small cottage where visitors were not allowed and where there was a wooden coffin with a heavy lid.
The vase that she still offered, with trembling hands, as a gift that evening, was heavy, not even a shard had come out of it. A beautiful, thick bluish pink glass vase.
Throughout the winter, Gloria lived as if in a fever. The museum was closed during the cold season, but from time to time small groups of people, for example, students, were still brought to see the impressive silver painting, that did not in fact surrender to nature so easily at all.
It seemed that the young art students were fully capable of finding pleasure in the beauty of decay. Embracing the inevitable, the departed broadens one’s emotional capacities. We acknowledge that our destruction ushers in something new.
However, now the other educator accompanying them, or maybe it was some other random character, said:
«This kind of decay is so delicately aesthetic, we do not see the brutal side of it.». The students looked at the speaker, waiting.
«We see presentable matter decomposing here,» she continued, «it is not like an animal carcass that comes together with the awful compounds of decay. This is noble art and not real life. The olfactory part of the decomposition processes is lacking here!»
The students swished, muttered something, and at that very moment a luscious stink reached their noses. Sweet, repulsive.
«Oh my god,» said some of them, covering their faces with scarves.
«There's an animal carcass somewhere here,» said one of the girls.
«This is definitely the stink of a corpse, there was a fox who died under our terrace. Only the smell of rotten meat is so sweet.» But the wind turned in a flash and the smell dissipated like an image.
Gloria, who was guiding the group, smiled, pale like paper from horror. Small ants were running along the silver canvas.
Strange outpourings of smell were also perceived by some others as the spring progressed, they shook their heads, wrinkled their noses. Gloria denied perceiving anything. She had hired a meditation teacher and slept with sleeping pills.
One warm day, one of the more experienced museum workers headed decisively in the direction of the small cottage, sniffed, opened the door, and lifted the lid of the coffin. She was faced with rotten, half-decomposed clothes: a black sweatshirt, black pants, a cap and leather boots.