I Wish I Had a Heart Like Yours, Walt Whitman

IN THE WORLD MUSEUM

IN THE WORLD MUSEUM WORLD WAR I DISPLAY . . . and over here, drones the docent, a collection of smaller, more personal battlefield items. His tour group are boys so it’s trench dioramas they want, and tanks and shell casings tall as they are; and so as they pose and measure up against the tracks of a rusty Whippet, I make my way to the glass display case in which someone with a taste for irony has arrayed, as if setting a place for some formal dinner, a complete set of silver, non-regulation cutlery dug from the mud of Gully Ravine. Instead of a plate there is the shallow, upturned bowl of a British helmet, positioned, I suppose, so we can look inside to see how metal peels, petal-like, back from a bullet hole and is as thin as paper which is something an Austrian soldier marooned at the front did not have because placed like a serviette on the right is a postcard of tree bark addressed to the brothers Stickling in Vienna. Birch, I think—you can see the dark flecking like runs of stitching in the bark, and still, after all this time, that distant, non-committal sheen like the demeanour of moonlight on water; and suspended at eye level on a strand of monofilament is a single boot. French. Size 8. Small, really, for a soldier. Still tightly and evenly laced and because of this one detail alone, almost beautiful. The real promise of art is that it might rescue us from the literal. A helmet. Place settings 4 of silver. A postcard of birch bark. A single boot. To each, a different story. But to each story, the same ending. ANGLO-SAXON DISPLAY In the case before me the blades of a seax and a sword; the flared, black knuckle of an axe head. Men, it seems, slept, and were buried, with their weapons. And anyone who’s ever loved a soldier knows that when he is sleeping the hands of such a man are like the shuttered paws of the lion—more terrible because he is sleeping. Even the crafty, clever lighting, even suspending each weapon inside its own soft hammock of brightness, can’t separate its form from its function. How easily we grow tired of the obvious. But the meanings of the objects found with the bones of women remain ambiguous: boxes holding scraps of fabric, spheres of crystal and amulets carved from the joints of sheep; false keys thought to symbolize availability and high status. Ambiguity itself is a form of seduction: look, these are keys to the gates of possibility and myth. And look: without the glaze of the imagination, the world is what it is. Notice how the heads of the spears were long and slender and so took advantage of the joins and the gaps in a man’s armour. 5 THE LEDGER Imagine if everything the Buddha claimed is true and all things external are illusions. But who wants a world, illusion or not, in which a witness can sit all day on the banks of the Kagera watching bodies from the war in Rwanda coming over the falls and then later describe how they never once appeared to be really dead: they looked, he said, like swimmers because strong currents invested them with the power of movement. The past might be over but it’s never done with. Leave them in peace, said Stalin of his favourite scientists who were lost in projects important to the state; we can kill them later. History: a ledger of atrocities. Remember those who never ceased trying to undermine the rhetoric of governments: Goya at the end of his life—deaf and lonely but still bearing witness, painting directly onto the walls of his country house outside Madrid. It is said that after Goya there were no more innocent rifles in art, no more sticks uttering puffs of smoke and fire. Remember Ed Murrow, live from Buchenwald after liberation. For most of it, he said, I have no words. For most of it. Not all of it. Murder, he said, rags and remnants. I looked out, he said, over the mass of men to the green fields beyond. A ledger of atrocities. Another hostage, another smart bomb gone astray in the market; collateral 6 damage and acceptable losses and somewhere one more child dead...