Jonah, whom we have forgotten

The raw hidden strength of time seeps into the light penetrating through the huge oberlicht encompassing in its simple squares the entire ceiling. The halls bring a sense of final order in  knowledge and sensitivity. There three ancient cultures are neatly arranged and their once eternal power and grace have shrivelled like mummies in crates.

I am smoking on the balcony overlooking the old park of the hotel. A cold morning. The grey having wrapped the trees is not fog - rather the sea moisture coming over in waves. For several days, while smoking, something slowly brightens in me and roams the Pergamon Museum in Berlin.

I am standing next to a simple stone sarcophagus from Mesopotamia, I would have passed by, but the living sense of the paintings stopped me. The academic work of the artist in the expedition. Document-photography is still black and white, art is still fine, artist is still a profession, not a passion. In the rough brushstrokes on the canvas, desert breathes, the air is permeated by the specific light of these distant for a German lands and his admiration for a simple, eternal and natural world is not an official duty. What a contrast between the feeling of an exhibit in the hall and the direct experience in his own world!

Ishtar Gate had been amazing and frightening with its glazed in sky-blue bricks. Lions painted on them resembled heavenly creatures. The monstrous scale of the city had been standing upright like a weird dream in front of you if you were arriving riding a domesticated donkey after a long journey. Your world, sprouted into an oasis under the canvas of the tent had shrunk somewhere in your soul. Such was the suggestion of Ishtar Gate the time and the purpose it was created for. Beauty and Power.

And this museum is only power. And functions. There our old cultures (and they are not old because they germinate each day, with each outright feeling and reflection) are like Jonah in the belly of the whale.

I will remind you the story of Jonah the prophet so that you can feel him like a man.

After all adventures, thrown ashore and once willy-nilly  betrayed the king‘s warning to repent in sackcloth and ashes - climbed a hill to watch how God will punish the city. He lived in a simple tent, and over time a pumpkin grew over one of the poles. One day Jonah saw it withered. Deeply grieved, he turned to God:

-        You sent me – he said -  to tell the King to repent, something which should not be said to a King, and I hid and ran away ... Drowned me with a boat ... Threw me in the mouth of a fish, threw me ashore and now what!?You should have demolished the city, and what did You do!? I had only one pumpkin and You withered it!

-        If you – God replied – grieve so much for a pumpkin how am I to sacrifice a whole city!

You see – they discuss and communicate as friends. And we do not. Maybe we're like Jonah the Prophet in the belly of his own Museum. Museum of Functions, Knowledge and Perceptions.