Museum Metaphor

Yes, this is the same statue as in the haiga of my previous post; I wasn't finished seeing what I could do with this image. In the process, I started thinking about how each of us is a museum, with our images we keep on permanent display and the images we keep down in the climate-controlled storerooms.

And I'm mixing—or complicating—the analogy now when I think of the relationship between art and memory. Each is a creation/recreation/re-vision. Each is a tool to understand the present.

I don't know if I would go as far as Edgar Allan Poe, who said, "Everything we see or seem / Is but a dream within a dream." But there's a truth there that keeps calling me back to explore the nature of art and memory. There's a feeling of trying to know the unknowable, but it's just too enticing to let go of.

I would go to a museum every day, if I could.

Oh, I do.

*

a
masterpiece
up
from
the
gallery
of
good-byes