Dogs of God

Not all of them are dogs. But all are looking with the same openness and confidence as the dog looks at its master. In the safety of the created being and in the presence of the Master taking care of the creation. In the Mesoamerican exhibition of the Dahlem Museum of Berlin.

With all its eyes the animal world beholds the Open. … Free from death. Only we see death; the free animal has its demise perpetually behind it and before it always God, and when it moves, it moves into eternity, the way brooks and running springs move.		Mit allen Augen sieht die Kreatur das Offene. … Frei von Tod. Ihn sehen wir allein; das freie Tier hat seinen Untergang stets hinter sich und vor sich Gott, und wenn es geht, so gehts in Ewigkeit, so wie die Brunnen gehen.
(Rilke, Eighth Elegy)

Ethologists write that during the several thousand years passed on the side of the man, the dog became a being that is genetically dependent on man and is only able to accomplish itself in a symbiosis with him. It is not a being closed in itself as the majority of animals are, but is open to man: he is the center of its existence. It can become wild, but by this it also becomes deformed, unlike other animals, while if it lives in a real closeness to man, it is somehow able to rise above the limits of its own animal existence.

As a man living in a real closeness to dogs, I have been watching for several years this strange metamorphosis of them, and I can imagine on this model the relationship between man and God. As it was quoted from Saint John of the Cross by his companion Brother Eliseo (at that time living, by chance, in a Mexican Carmelitan monastery):

When a very simple sister once asked him why the frogs were jumping into the water when she was nearing to the pond in the garden of the monastery, he replied that for the frogs the depth of the pond is that place, that center where they feel safe and where nobody can hurt them. Let her act the same, that is, let her avoid the creatures and submerge to the depth and in her own center who is God and let her hide in Him.

Man – again unlike the majority of animals – is not a being closed in himself, but by constitution is open to God. His “center” is not in himself, but in Him. And like the dog, he also has only two choices of either turning away from this center and thus getting deformed, or trying to get increasingly nearer to Him, and thus rising above the limits of his human existence.

It is precisely John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila who describe this anthropology in the most detailed way.

And yet, upon that warm, alert animal is the weight and care of enormous sadness. For what sometimes overwhelms us always clings to it, too—a kind of memory that tells us that what we're now striving for was once nearer and truer and attached to us with infinite tenderness. Here all is distance, there it was breath.

..

Und doch ist in dem wachsam warmen Tier Gewicht und Sorge einer großen Schwermut. Denn ihm auch haftet immer an, was uns oft überwältigt – die Erinnerung, als sei schon einmal das, wonach man drängt, näher gewesen, treuer und sein Anschluss unendlich zärtlich. Hier ist alles Abstand, und dort wars Atem.

Tibet: Klöster öffnen ihre Schatzkammern

Exhibition, Dahlem, February 21 - May 28, 2007

As in Studiolum (this is the place of advertisement) we have just recently published the web presentation of the Tibetan collection of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the legacy of Sándor Kőrösi Csoma, the founder of Tibetan Studies, I decided to visit the Tibetan exhibition first. And there I stayed on until closing time. Dahlem only can be digested in small pieces.

This exhibition was organized at the end of the last year by the Kulturstiftung Ruhr Essen in Essen’s Villa Hügel, from where it has been transferred to Dahlem. The exhibition is of historical importance, as this is the first time that cult objects of active Tibetan monasteries are exposed outside of Tibet. Jeong-Hee Lee-Kalisch, head of the organizing committee relates in the introduction of the catalog that they have been engaged in field research in Tibet since 2003, in the course of which they managed to convince the largest Tibetan monasteries to allow their sculptures, paintings and liturgical objects being exposed, all in all 150 objects from the 5th to the 20th century. It is interesting to read that although the Tibetan monks – in spite of their best efforts – could not grasp the Western concept of “exhibition object”, nevertheless they understood that it was important to the Western scholars, and thus they readily collaborated in the interest of this unconceivable purpose.

The difference of the two visions is well attested among other things by the fact that the cult statues that are dressed in precious clothes in the Tibetan monasteries are exposed without these vestments in Dahlem, as if an allowance to the European concept of statue that considers them a superfluous addition. Just like the Gothic statues of Pietà wear rich Baroque robes on the altars of Marian pilgrimage shrines, but if they happen to get into museums, they are exposed without their vestments. Fortunately, the catalog of the exhibition also includes the “vested” images of these statues, as the Tibetan believers encounter them.

The objects are grouped by some basic themes of Tibetan monastery culture, and this is how they are explained on the summary boards in each room: portrait statues of monastery founders, the stupa, the mandala, musical instruments, healing and so on. By this they intend to offer some handle to the European visitor in his probably very first encounter with this unknown and complex culture. However, the result is that one is urged to behold the object as illustrations of this conception, and not as autonomous objects of art.

A flash presentation of the exhibition – still from its Essen months – that is worth an abbreviated catalog can be seen here. It puts less emphasis on the thematic conception, and presents the objects on independent pages and with separate explanations. And this is already enough to achieve what the exhibition was unable to do: the presentation of these objects as objects of art.

Dahlem

If you get in three or four hours from Mallorca to Csömör, you will not really grasp how far you were. Therefore – in the periods when there is no direct flight – it is not bad to have that day of sluicing in Berlin, so that you have enough time to feel the taste of being on the way.

I have been planning for a while to spend this sluicing day in Dahlem. It’s a long time since I have not been to Dahlem. It was Ernő Kunt who, in the year of my anthropological detour in Miskolc, drummed into me that visiting the museum of ethnography in Dahlem is a must, as they have distinguished objects exhibited in an intelligent way. And so it was indeed. At that time, some fifteen years ago, no other exhibition employed that point light which in the dark room of the gallery drew an individual space around each object, isolating it from the context of the room and of the other objects, endowing it with a life of its own and offering it in this way for reception, thus rendering visually perceivable the concept of “autonomous work of art”. I remember the first time I was there, I stopped in the room of the Buddhas of Gandhara, and spent there all the afternoon.

Another attraction of Dahlem is that it is a Gesamtkunstwerk organizing the whole space of the museum, and even its environment as far as to the metro station. Right now it houses a number of Eastern Asian special exhibitions. Therefore the museum coffee – the large central hall of the building, from where each exhibition opens and to where they all return – decorates its tables with Japanese ikebana, and in the vitrines set up in the space of the coffee a small exhibition of Eastern spices is installed. And in this period the museum bookshop is also dominated by Eastern Asian books, not only from their own stock, but also purchased from a large number of other museums of the world as well as from local antiquaries, so their offer is arguably better than that of a department library.

And at six o’clock when the exhibitions close, lectures begin for the visitors until eight, and during this period the bookshop and the coffee bar work as well. The lecture of the day was held by a lovely and well-prepared tiny Tibetan woman who reads ethnology in Berlin, dressed in a beautiful Tibetan garment. She gave a summary in a nice German about the Tibetan special exhibition, and when from time to time the adequate term did not occur to her, it also offered a good occasion for a little show of the repertoire of Eastern Asian apologizing smiles. At the end she was applauded, and I’m sure that the service she did to the cause of Tibetan culture through those hundred persons – and their friends as well as the readers of this diary – was not less than that of the exhibition itself.