Satin Island (11 page)

9.2
Talks were limited to fifteen minutes each. The other speakers’ PowerPoint presentations moved with sub-second precision from one image to the next as they talked with evangelic zeal of neuroscience, genomics, bio-informatics and a dozen other concepts currently enjoying their moment in the sun. When my turn came, I didn’t have any slides or clips. I started by saying that The Contemporary was a suspect term. Better to speak, I proposed, of a
moving ratio
of modernity: as we straddle the dual territories of a present that, despite its directional drive, is slipping backwards into past, and a future that will always remain notional, we’re carried through a constantly mutating space in which modernity itself is no more than a credo in the process of becoming “dated,” or at least historical. The term
epoch
, I informed my listeners, originally meant “point of view,” as in the practice of astronomy; only later, I said, did it start being used to organize the world into fixed periods. This latter use, I argued, was misguided. Instead of making periodic claims which, since they can’t be empirically justified, only produce an infinite regress of detail and futile quibbling over boundaries and definitions, we should return to understanding
epoch
as a place from which one looks at things. From that perspective, I went on—the perspective of shifting perspectives—we can still pose the question of the difference
introduced by one day, one year, one decade, in relation to another. To understand that question fully, though (I concluded), what we require is not contemporary anthropology but rather an anthropology
of
The Contemporary.
Ba-boom:
that was my “out.” My talk was met with silence, then, when my audience realized that I’d finished, a smattering of polite clapping. No one approached me to discuss it afterwards. Later that evening, in the “wet” or Turkish sauna, I recognized one of the other delegates. He recognized me too, but broke off eye-contact immediately before slipping away into the steam.

9.3
While I was in Frankfurt, I dropped in on a friend of mine who ran the city’s anthropology museum. The museum was housed in two nineteenth-century villas: one for the public galleries, the other for administration. I met her in her office in the second; when she picked her coat up and announced that she would show me the collection, I presumed that we were heading for the first. But instead she led me to her car, and we drove for ten or fifteen minutes to an industrial part of town. There it is, she said, as the car double-bumped over an old freight-train track. Following her gaze, I saw a concrete bunker rising up beside the road. We pulled into a docking bay beneath this building, parked beneath huge arches and got out. Around us, large as totem poles, parts of old electric circuits lay about: fuse-boxes, regulators and capacitators, ribbed ceramic insulators and so on. The building used to house a transponder for the city’s transport system, Claudia explained; that, she said,
pointing to the grille that slid by as we took the roomy, doorless lift up to the fourth floor, was a Faraday cage.

9.4
We walked down corridors whose walls, made of the same thick, unpainted concrete as the building’s exterior, made me think of those giant sarcophagi they pour around damaged nuclear plants to stop the radiation leaking out, and came to the collection room itself. Huge metal storage units lined one wall of this, with slide-tracks beneath their bases and spoked handles, like the ones they use in submarines or decompression chambers, mounted on their outer ends. Parallel to these, freestanding filing cabinets stretched the room’s whole length, with index numbers marked on every drawer. In the room’s centre a long, slab-like table lay. A fat male porter, who seemed to have emerged from the walls and cabinets themselves (I hadn’t noticed him when Claudia and I entered the room), laid large sheets of fresh tissue-paper across this, then stood to its side, wordlessly awaiting instructions.

9.5
Where do you want to start? asked Claudia, rattling a set of keys. How do you mean? I asked back. We have over fifty thousand objects here, she said. This way (she gestured to a caged door leading off the main room) is Oceania; that way (she gestured to another caged door on the perpendicular wall) is the Americas; and there (she gestured to a third door on the
wall facing Oceania) is Africa—take your pick. I don’t know, I told her: Oceania. She fished out the appropriate key and led me through to a room as big as the one we’d left, in which rows of older, wooden cabinets stood, one after the other. Through their vitrines I could see clusters of objects: carved whalebones, arrow-heads, head-dresses, plates, knives, masks. All the objects had inventory numbers painted on them—usually near the bottom, although, on the smallest ones, the number covered almost the entire surface area. Claudia opened a random cabinet, and an overwhelmingly sharp odour forced its way right up my nostrils to my nose’s bridge. Naphthalene, she said, seeing me wince.

9.6
She pulled a pair of smooth white gloves on and picked up a woven belt, one of at least twenty lying folded in rows inside the cabinet. The next cabinet she opened had a similar number of small tobacco boxes in it. Why so many? I asked. Why not just one or two? Claudia started to explain that the larger part of the collection came from what, to my ears, sounded like the Great
Sepia
or
Septic
Journey of 1960. The
What
Journey? I asked. Sepik, she repeated. The Sepik is a river in New Guinea. The Museum, she said, sent an expedition up it, to acquire material culture. They stopped off at every village on the river’s banks, one after the next, and the natives sold them things. Word spread (she said) from settlement to settlement; as they arrived at each, the tribe would be waiting
there with all their tribal objects laid out, like a jumble sale. The expedition bought so many objects that they filled whole boats and trains with them, stacked up in giant containers. The idea was that you needed to study the morphology of, say, a cooking pot: how the shape and decoration varies from one village or one family to the next. That’s why you needed twenty, fifty, a hundred. And, of course, she added, you could trade surplus objects with other anthropology museums back in Europe later: we’ll swap you ten head-rests for two totems. The prevailing wisdom was that you had to gather
everything:
a hammer or a pair of scissors might tell you as much about a culture as a sacred fetish—suddenly release its inner secrets, like some codex.

9.7
Claudia paused. When she continued speaking, her voice went strangely melancholic. But then, she said, all that changed. How? I asked. Well, she said, from the mid-sixties, there was a turn away from objects: suddenly the prevailing wisdom held that you don’t need to look at pots and arrows anymore—you need to study patterns of behaviour and belief and so forth:
your
school of anthropology, U. She cast an angry glance at me. Trapped with her in this bunker, this cage to which she alone held the keys, I didn’t argue back. She took my silence as an admission of guilt, and sighed. Plus, she carried on in a more conciliatory tone, we Europeans started to suspect that it had been a bit shitty to take all these objects in the first place. So now, she said, sweeping her white glove,
already a little smudged, round the room, we’ve got these store-rooms full of crap we’ll never show, or even understand. What do you think, for example, she asked, opening another cabinet and pulling out a strange wicker contraption, this thing is for? A snow-shoe? I suggested. U., she said, it’s from the tropics. Then a fishing net, I tried again. Maybe, she said. A fishing net; ceremonial head-gear; a bat for playing some kind of game; a cooking implement … Who knows? We don’t. We won’t. We haven’t even catalogued half this stuff. What should we do with it? Why not return it? I asked. That doesn’t work, she answered curtly. The tribe’s descendants don’t know what this wicker thing is for either; they’ve all got mobile phones and drink Coke. And besides, if you repatriate an object it just turns up on the market six months later—may as well just send it straight to the collector’s Texas ranch. That’s even worse than us having it. So they pile up here. She cast her glance first one way, then another, down the rows of cabinets, and we stood in silence for a moment. Sometimes, she said eventually, I feel like I’m in the final scene in
Raiders of the Lost Ark
, where they stash the holy relic in a box exactly like all the other boxes in some warehouse that just stretches to infinity. Or
Citizen Kane:
same thing, but the artifacts are heading for the fire. This, she said, sweeping her now-dirty glove around once more, isn’t fire; but it’s oblivion all the same. And all the time, she added, her voice going really quiet, as though she were afraid of being overheard, in the back of my mind I’ve got the nagging suspicion that one of these objects—just
one
—has
Rosebud
written on its base.

9.8
Before we left the Oceania room, Claudia showed me a large wooden dish across whose surface hundreds of red and white dots had been painted in a semi-regular pattern. These are from Australia, she said. The Aborigines made them. They’re sacred. More than sacred: they’re hermetic. The dots form a kind of cipher, whose key only a handful of the most senior elders are allowed to know. The younger ones can’t even
see
these dishes, let alone be let in on the key. The dishes were brought here in the forties, by an anthropologist: a German one, son of a Lutheran missionary who’d taken his family out there in the twenties. When the son brought these back to Frankfurt, Claudia explained, he set about cracking the cipher. Did he succeed? I asked. He did, Claudia answered. Look. She led me over to a nearby shelf, pulled out a book and flipped through its pages till she came to one on which the very dish she was still holding in her hand was drawn. On the page facing the drawing was a breakdown of the pattern of the dots, and, under that, what I presumed (the book was in German) was an explanation or translation of the text the dots embodied. This, said Claudia, is
their
codex. When the last Aborigine who understood the cipher died without passing the knowledge down, they sent a delegation here, to see this book. It served as a kind of cheat-sheet for them. It was a weird scene: we had all these Aborigines here, wearing their ceremonial garb, walking around Frankfurt. They were grateful to the museum, she continued—although, after they’d looked at the book, they requested that all copies be destroyed. How many copies were there? I asked. Not that many, she said. It was privately printed.
Maybe twenty. They tried to buy them all up, on the Internet, but found that almost all of them were held in obscure libraries, or museums like this one. And what about this copy? I asked. How did you respond to their request? The issue’s unresolved, she told me. As for the dishes themselves, they were quite adamant that these must never be shown publicly. I shouldn’t even be showing this one to you. In fact, being female, I shouldn’t even be holding it. But you are, I said. Yes, she answered, I suppose I am.

9.9
While we were back in the main room, looking at a big sculpted figure that the fat, silent porter, on Claudia’s instructions, had lifted from one of the sliding storage-units and laid on the slab for us, Madison called me on my mobile. How on earth does a signal find its way through all this concrete? I asked Claudia. The Faraday cage’s metal acts as an aerial, she said. Who are you talking to? asked Madison. I’m looking at a totem pole, I said. That turns me on, said Madison. I looked down at the figure laid out on the white tissue beneath us. It was some kind of warrior-god, garish, daubed in yellow, black and scarlet, with a phallus stretching from his waist up to his chin; his face was twisted in an obscene leer. It’s like an alien autopsy, isn’t it? Claudia was saying, while Madison elaborated sex scenarios involving poles and savages. Listening to her, I started getting a hard-on, straining at the fabric (denim—selvage) of my trousers. Claudia didn’t notice, but the mute porter did.

9.10
As we drove back to the museum, we traded news about our contemporaries from university. A third of them had gone to the developing world, to work for NGOs; another third were, like me, working in the corporate sector; the remaining third were academics. Claudia was the only one to have involved herself with what she again called
material culture
. As we crossed a bridge in the city’s centre, I could see, on one side of the river, the new headquarters of the European Central Bank being built; on the other, in a row, the town’s museums—all of them: architectural, cinematic, natural-historical and so on—housed, like the anthropological one, in old villas. Further away, spires of cathedrals that had somehow survived wartime blitzing poked out above modern glass and metal. One of the huge cranes building the Bank’s HQ was turning as we drove; the box from which the cables carrying the crane’s load descended was sliding along the jib-arm, which itself was swinging horizontally across the air. The box was sliding fast, and the arm was swinging fast, and we were driving fast as well; and it appeared, just for a moment, that the box, though hurtling along the moving arm, was staying quite still, rooted to a single spot of air. But only from the speeding car, there on the bridge.

9.11
On the flight back to London, as the stewardess gave me a cup, or I removed a teaspoon from its packet, or folded down and up the tray-table in the seat-back just in front of me, the term
material culture
played and replayed itself in my mental
airspace, like a snatch of a stuck record. I couldn’t help but see these things—this table, teaspoon, cup—as tribal objects. Also adjustable air-conditioning nozzles, slide-down blinds, Velcro-fitted head-rest covers, motion-sickness bags, buttons with human icons on them and the like. Aliens, after all trace of us has disappeared bar the small handful of our corpses they’ll preserve for intermittent laying out on their tissue-coated slabs, will have whole bunkers full of these things, stuffed into naphthalene-laced cabinets, twenty of each spilling out of every drawer, and wonder what the fuck they were all for. Before we’d left the building, Claudia and I had ducked into the other two rooms, those housing the artifacts from the Americas and Africa. These rooms had been similarly crammed with objects—drums and bracelets, loincloths,
Día de los Muertos
figurines—but in the second room, the Africa one, a particular item had held my attention more than all the others. It wasn’t, properly speaking, an item: just a lump of some black substance, all unformed, whose rugby ball–sized mass consisted of no more than tubers and protuberances knotted and gnarled together every which way. It’s
caoutchouc
, Claudia had said, seeing me staring at it: rubber, in its raw form. Now, looking through the window at the bulbous clouds that, once again, were slightly smudged, I thought of this
caoutchouc;
then of Petr’s cancer; then, once more, of spilled oil.