The cartoonist Tom Gauld recently posted a cartoon he drew for New Scientist magazine. In it, a little stick figure is wandering off the edge of a circle divided into six categories of knowing. The middle circle, the bull’s eye, is labelled ‘Area of Expertise’. The next one is ‘Realm of General Understanding’ and so it goes on until the final ring, which is called ‘Zone of Utter Ignorance’.
That’s the zone I found myself in during a museum visit this weekend. That level of Utter Ignorance, combined with Very Little Interest, made it a Failed Museum Visit.
I tried to work through my disinterest with Sam. There are so few things that don’t spark anything in me – competitive sports and ballet are all I can think of off the top of my head – that I was surprised to find that ‘antiquity’ presented in a general sort of way in a museum doesn’t really ruffle my truffles.
Sam said he thought it was because the idea of presenting history in a museum like this was outdated.
‘Here is a thing. It is old. Here is another thing. It’s also old,’ is how Sam summarised this style of museum presentation.
In the brief period I jostled with hundreds of other patrons on free-museum-Sunday, I was more interested in how the things before me came to be so many thousands of kilometres away from where they’d been made than I was in the history they were supposed to be presenting. The only history that felt real for me in the moment – because ‘antiquity’ feels a little bit more like fiction than the last two centuries do – was the history of ‘taking things’.
The crate pictured above helped me focus my ignorance down to a managable little spot of blankness.
Apart from the Boney M song and the Bible story of the Tower of Babel, I realised that I actually know nothing about Babylon and why it has such a hold on people’s imaginations.
My scruffy religious education left not much in the way of spiritual enlightenment, but The Tower of Babylon really imprinted itself on my young brain.
The story goes that the people of the world spoke one language. They were sophisticated and civilised and they built Babylon, the city and the tower, where culture and science and trade were valued.
God wasn’t having it. He tore the whole thing down and damned the people of the earth to speaking different languages.
Was this so that they wouldn’t shore up their might and overthrow God? Was he jealous? Or was he just randomly flexing using his godly magic-wand?
The story has a lot of power.
Misunderstandings and failed communications worry me intensely. How could I have expressed myself more clearly? Why did I not understand what you were saying when a fairly straightforward sentence issued from your mouth?
And how is it that there are so many memorials commemorating the dead lost in wars, purportedly built to remind us that we should never allow violence to obliterate lives again, and then violence just rides roughshod over these high intentions, time and time again? How do we collectively misunderstand the imprecations to not rape, steal, maim and kill?
The city of Babylon, I now know, was an ancient city that really did exist (unlike Atlantis, which did not). It lies around 85km south of where Baghdad is now. It was the main cultural centre of the region. Akkadian and Summerian speakers were united there under one rule.
The language aspect of the history feels like it chimes, but not quite, with the Bible story. I’m absolutely not even a single hair in an historian’s eyebrow so please don’t consider this a worthy theory. I’m just saying this because of my next point, which has to do with the name ‘Babylon’.
It’s seems that there’s no agreement on where the name comes from but, in the Hebrew Bible it was called ‘Babel’ and was interpreted in the Book of Genesis to mean ‘confusion’.
The modern English word ‘babble’ – which sounds a lot like ‘Babel’ – means speak in an excited or confusing or foolish way.
Because of the place’s historic and biblical significance, ‘Babylon’ – I read in my attempt to get out of the Zone of Utter Ignorance – has acquired a generic meaning in various languages of ‘a large, bustling, diverse city’.
We are currently watching a German crime series called Babylon Berlin (watch this music video to get a feel of how rich and entertaining it is). It is set in this large, bustling and diverse city we’re currently staying in, but a hundred years ago.
The series is so visually exciting that I think about it all the time while I walk around Berlin, trying to work out where scenes might have been shot. So it seems obvious that my eye fell on what could be called a boring crate of bricks with ‘Babylon’ written on the side while surrounded by all kinds of marvels hauled North by ambitious archeologists.
Babylon If you could bring her glories back! You gentle sirs who sift the dust And burrow in the mould and must Of Babylon for bric-a-brac; Who catalogue and pigeon-hole The faded splendours of her soul And put her greatness under glass -
This is the first part of a poem by Ralph Hodgson. He really brings those archeologists down to size with ‘dust’ and ‘burrow’ and ‘mould’ and ‘must’.
I don’t want to diminish their work, or the work of preservation in general.
I do though, want to see old histories in the context of newer histories. How was the wholesale importation of the Ishtar Gate negotiated with the people from the area where Babylon once was? How does ownership work now? And compensation? Reciprocity? These things might all have been at the museum for me to read easily, but perhaps it was just too busy and I didn’t spot them.
In the Rastafarian belief system, ‘Babylon’ is shorthand for the materialistic, capitalist world and any form of imperialist dodginess. ‘Babylon’ exploits and oppresses people.
In the sci-fi series Babylon 5, ‘Babylon’ represents a society in which there is respect for difference and a desire to learn from the other. It’s all about the peace.
Perspective is a tricky trickster.
A special kind of tired
The Spree runs through Berlin. At a certain point in the middle of the city, a piece of land juts into the river like a hang nail. On this was built, back in the 1500s, a royal palace that housed the members of a dynasty. The royalty lived, laughed and loved in this palace until the monarchy was abandoned in 1908.
Four hundred years is a long time to be adding tchotchkes to the family pile and even palaces can get pokey, one supposes. When there were no more walls for hanging paintings and no one could fit another wunderkammer cabinet in under the back stairs, the architects were summoned. The bosses wanted wunderbuildings for their collections of bits and bobs.
Which is how that little spit of land became Berlin’s famous museum island, housing five museum buildings, a pleasure garden, a palace and a cathedral.
Most of the buildings bear the pockmarks of bullets. The area saw heavy fighting in the Second World War. So heavy, that when Berlin was chopped up in its wake, the palace was in ruins.
The Russians got that part of the city. Communist East Germany tore the palace ruins down and carted away the rubble. In its place, a new palace was built, a glass box called the Palace of the Republic, where the East German parliament was housed until reunification.
Then – history just never stops happening – the glass box came down and, quite recently, the original palace was rebuilt, but with modern additions. It is now called the Humboldt Forum.
This past Sunday, Sam and I wondered around the newly built palace between our two museum appointments.
It was almost 3pm when we were done with the exhibition we’d most wanted to see. Sam said, ‘Okay, let’s go buy your book now.’ I have wanted this book for months and months and the bookshop was on our way home.
I said, ‘Let’s not.’ It was such a monumental refusal that it seemed to take Sam a while to process. I never say no to any excursion involves books. But I was so tired that if I was a toddler I would have found a reason to cry.
Now I completely understand the concept of museum fatigue.
Lots of love,
from bright, warm, beautiful Babylon Berlin,
K.
oh goodness, now I feel tired in sympathy. Museum and gallery fatigue is a real thing, there is a point at which you ought to stop and walk away, but you feel compelled to see more/all. That said, I know people who can do this sort of thing all day... vive la difference!