Yesterday inside the Curtius Museum I was contemplating a dark painting of the Christ child reaching for an apple Mary was holding when I got a text from Ella who was ahead of me in the museum. She said she was in the section of the Curtius covering the Enlightenment. “Just go down the stairs.”
After plodding through a few more apple-grasping Christs, I started making my way through the display case labyrinth following arrows I thought were pointing me towards the staircase. They were. To the staircase going up. So now I was going in circles. Wait—there’s a room I hadn’t been in. Argh! It was the Napoleon room. Not really into dictators these days. I mean how many busts of the man did they make? Was there a factory? The beginning of the Industrial Revolution in some exhausted mining region?
The Napoleon room(s) stopped, fittingly, at a dead end not even meriting an elevator. So I was back retracing my steps past overly large canvases of belching cannons when I noticed a banister out of the corner of my eye. A staircase. Going down! Alors, I was going to drop down into the Enlightenment. Maybe they’d have a bust of Voltaire.
At the bottom of the stairs Ella was standing in a doorway leading to the Japanese Art Nouveau exhibition. What happened to the Enlightenment? Was it like the famous chapter on German humor, totally skipped?
With Ella going in the direction of decorated glassware, I decided to go back to the elevators and take another stab at getting Enlightened. I went to the top floor figuring I wouldn’t miss the exhibition if I stopped at every floor going down.
Up until now it was as if Ella and I had the museum to ourselves. Very quiet, plenty of time to contemplate apples and assassinations. The elevator doors opened. A room full of young men crowded around display cases. That’s the spirit! The Enlightenment speaks to a new generation. I step into the room and take a closer look at the exhibition. Weapons.
I was on floor one of three floors devoted to the history of weapons that warred their way over the flat battlegrounds of Belgium. In a panic I spun around and took the elevator to floor one where the exhibition terminated. Plunging towards an exit I paused briefly to snap a shot of a machine gun that was adjacent to film clips showing WWI soldiers crawling out of trenches before being mowed down by the type of gun I was looking at.
Sort of felt like I was in the presence of pure evil. The culmination of the Industrial Revolution wrought by a weapon manufactured in one of William Blake’s Satanic mills. Why weren’t these melted down and turned into cars? Cars still kill, but not with such utter efficient ruthlessness.
The next time I want to view killing machines, I’ll go to a car museum.
Touche!