How many museums will we visit this summer? Will they be thematic, like the Palamós Fisheries or more local, like the Municipal of Llívia (especially dedicated to its pharmacy, one of the oldest in Europe, documented in 1594)? Will they be artistic institutions dedicated to a single art or to a single author or with a little of everything? This poem by Francesc Parcerisas places us in the Egyptian room of a museum that he does not explain, and it is as if through art we could enter directly into that world. And it is that “the past is true”.
Let’s look at a work, that one over there, for example. It speaks to us in multiple temporal layers: when it was created, when what happens in it is situated, when we see it, the future we project. Or it also speaks to us in very different ways: slaves and pharaohs refer us to the upheavals of history, and everything seems close and distant at the same time, we think of the slaves and pharaohs around us, since of course we have not changed so much. And although the way of reading art, or even of understanding what it is, is different, we can find an emotional continuity and we can find refuge in it. Are you sure that “passions can never be painted”?
And while we are inside the painting, as if we were in front of a mirror itself, we return to the only certainty, that “death will come.” But instead of having “your eyes” from Cesare Pavese’s poem, here it is “like the dark dog on the wall”. Are we also, that dog? Where does he come from? Does he bark a lot or is he just lying down, half asleep in the heat of this August?
We will almost always believe that we are “too young or immature” for the long journey, we have never lived long enough. The Egyptian world, always tossed about with the eternal night, and ultimately almost all cultures, what remedy if we all have to go through it one day or another. And precisely for this reason, too, life goes on and we will have to deal with it, and carpe diem and all the fishing, because if we don’t fish we will be fished, and the ship goes, as the other said or, as Parcerisas ends: “But the eternal boat glides under the burning sun”.
Let’s take advantage of visits to museums, of course, and extract as much juice as possible from them. And if we don’t go, for whatever reason, then let’s find art, poetry, which is always everywhere.
Catalan version, here
