I’ve been travelling a lot, which means I’m lucky. It also means I’ve been procrastinating more, as I’ve self-imposed homework on myself with each trip I take. My third trip to Berlin had a school project vibe to it in general since I went there with the sole intention of going to museums.
Berlin is in the habit of blindsiding its tourists with the sheer number of things to do. While, on my prior two trips, I kept Museum Island on the To-Do list, I never got around to visiting any museum there. My first trip to Berlin was with my mother and sister, who grudgingly allowed me one museum to take them to, and I chose the DDR museum for its interactivity (I come from a family of go-getters and athletes. Their need to be constantly climbing, running, or moving is antithetical to an art museum, which features a lot of old people plodding along slowly). The second time I went, it was for pride and there was no way I wanted to do anymore walking after eight hours on foot.
I made this trip in January, knowing the cold would force me to seek heated museums, since there isn’t a lot of activities in Berlin when it gets dark by five and it is freezing outside. Thus, I went to the Pergamon, the New Museum, and the Bode-Museum. I didn’t go to any of the other museums on Museum Island, let alone throughout Berlin, though that’d been my initial plan.
After seven hours of museums, it takes a special person to not feel mind-numbed from the sheer volume of a collection. I’m not even an art historian, so most of the finer details that somebody would admire in portraiture are mercifully skipped over in my interaction. Still… Seven hours. I get dreams after a day at the museum like I get dreams after a day at the beach, with the feeling of wave after wave crashing into me, but instead I picture endless corridors, stifled coughs, echoing steps, faint coffee tucked into some faraway café, and the many painted faces of the long-since dead.
I’ve burned myself out on museums for the foreseeable future.
The book I listened to during my museum day, Gathering Moss by Robin Wall Kimmerer, was likewise an exercise in the educational. I devoured a love story to moss while spending hours inside, completely separated from forest, lichen, and leaves. I paid to see other people’s representations of the natural world instead, watching as its complexity was reduced to the picturesque, with great swaths of snowy fields, ruined forests, pastureland, and harbor docks decorated by felled tree-frames. All the while I listened to the pretty Latin phrases of moss in my ear; all the while I read placards for artists and art movements I know very little of.
Thinking that, I’m only understanding a fraction of each of these things.
At one point, Kimmerer told a story of her time as a consultant to an anonymous elite who wanted to relocate wild moss throughout his property, claiming it was a conservation effort, when in reality he defaced a cliff to create a showpiece for visitors. At the Pergamon, I listened to Kimmerer’s frustration and sorrow at seeing the pillaged rockface while I stood staring up at the Ishtar Gate.
The Ishtar Gate is an ancient structure pulled from Iraq and reconstructed in a museum with fire exits, freshly painted walls, and spotlessly clean floors. It removes what made it great from its natural habitat and sanitizes it; ridding it of the nesting pigeons, the dust from the road, the hot climate, and, perhaps, whatever type of moss can grow in a desert.
Strange, the things men claim for their own. From moss to gates. All of it under the guise of protection and conservation, instead of ego and ownership.
Strange, for me to be both awed by standing at the gates and guilty knowing that it doesn’t belong in front of me.
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