Two Meditations

Meditation 14: A museum is a cemetery

Egon Schiele, “Self-Portrait in Brown Coat” (1910)

A museum is a cemetery. We pay our respects in a solemn manner, leaving space between our eyes and the graves as if not to step on the flowers, offerings, incense that we imagine should be there but aren’t. It’s a solemn affair. Everything living is dead, said Schielle. I don’t think he was talking about his own work. I saw his exhibition in Paris. It was a beautiful graveyard. I stepped on the roses and looked closely at his lines. Beautiful. But what happened to the sounds of the studio, the spilled wine, and all those torn canvases?

— Vienna, 2018

Meditation 27: The question the pothole asked

Sometimes while driving, you will be on the lookout for potholes on the road ahead. Little did you know that you forgot about the pothole right behind you, and you must have hit it some time in the near past, because you are still thinking about that pothole, the bump, the spilled Pepsi, so much so that you don’t even notice the pothole right in front of you. There goes the rest of your Pepsi. Now the question is, did this happen to you because you were looking ahead of yourself, or because you were looking behind?

— Mumbai, 2018