Flights

CABINET OF CURIOSITIES

I’ve never been a big fan of art museums, which I would happily exchange for cabinets of curiosities, where collections are comprised of the rare, the unique, the bizarre, the freakish. The things that exist in the shadows of consciousness, and that, when you do take a look, dart out of your field of vision. Yes, I definitely have this unfortunate syndrome. I’m not drawn to centrally located collections, but rather to the smaller places near hospitals, frequently moved down to basements since they’re deemed unworthy of prized exhibition spots, and since they suggest the questionable tastes of their original collectors. A salamander with two tails, face up in an oblong jar, awaiting its judgement day – for all the specimens in the world will be resurrected in the end. A dolphin’s kidney in formaldehyde. A sheep’s skull, a total anomaly, with double sets of eyes and ears and mouths, pretty as the figure of an ancient god with a dual nature. A human fetus draped in beads and a label in careful calligraphy saying ‘Fetus aethiopis 5 mensium’. Collected over the years, these freaks of nature, two-headed and no-headed, unborn, float lazily in formaldehyde solution. Or take the case of the Cephalothoracopagus monosymetro, exhibited to this day in a museum in Pennsylvania, where the pathological morphology of a fetus with one head and two bodies calls into question the foundations of logic by asserting that 1 = 2. And lastly a moving culinary specimen: apples from 1848, resting in alcohol, each of them odd, abnormally shaped. Evidently there was someone who recognized that these freaks of nature were owed immortality, and that only what is different will survive.

It’s this kind of thing I make my way towards on my travels, slowly but surely, trailing the errors and blunders of creation.

I’ve learned to write on trains and in hotels and waiting rooms. On the tray tables on planes. I take notes at lunch, under the table, or in the bathroom. I write in museum stairwells, in cafés, in the car on the shoulder of the motorway. I jot things down on scraps of paper, in notebooks, on postcards, on my other hand, on napkins, in the margins of books. Usually they’re short sentences, little images, but sometimes I copy out quotes from the papers. Sometimes a figure carves itself out of the crowd, and then I deviate from my itinerary to follow it for a moment, start on its story. It’s a good method; I excel at it. With the years, time has become my ally, as it does for every woman – I’ve become invisible, see-through. I am able to move around like a ghost, look over people’s shoulders, listen in on their arguments and watch them sleep with their heads on their backpacks or talking to themselves, unaware of my presence, moving just their lips, forming words that I will soon pronounce for them.