Vox Meditantis

Monday, 23rd November 2020

I’ve been spending my afternoons here, in Marcus’s studio, ever since the second lockdown began. He doesn’t mind – he’s barely here himself anymore, just comes in to check on the pieces, the installations. It’s quieter than my flat, which is saying something, because this place is full of bones. Taxidermy fox skulls lined up on the shelf like students in a lecture hall. Vanitas paintings he’s been working on, all that lush rotting fruit and tipped-over goblets, memento mori for people who’ve forgotten how to remember they’re going to die. Except we haven’t forgotten this year, have we? We’ve thought about little else.

The silence in here is different from the silence outside. Out there, it’s the absence of traffic, of voices in the museum corridors, of the undergraduate chatter I used to find so irritating and now miss with an intensity that surprises me. In here, it’s deliberate. It’s the silence of things that have already ended. The fox on the table, its glass eyes catching the grey afternoon light, doesn’t make a sound because it finished making sounds months ago, years maybe. There’s something almost restful about that. Final.

I keep thinking about beauty. About whether it matters. My thesis advisor used to say that aesthetics were secondary to understanding function, that we mustn’t let ourselves be seduced by the surfaces of things when what we’re after is how people lived, how they organised their worlds. But I don’t know anymore. I look at the Neolithic pottery fragments I photographed before everything shut down – those careful incised lines, the patterns that served no functional purpose whatsoever – and I think: this mattered to someone. The beauty mattered. They were going to die, they knew it in whatever way people knew things then, and still they took the extra time to make the clay beautiful.

What are my favourite animals? God, what a question. I suppose I’ve always been drawn to corvids. Crows, ravens, magpies. There’s that intelligence in their eyes, that uncanny knowingness. They show up in the archaeological record often enough – associated with battlefields, with the dead. They remember faces, hold grudges, play games. They collect shiny objects for no reason anyone can quite explain, which feels terribly human, doesn’t it? That magpie impulse to gather beauty, to hoard it. And they mate for life, mostly, though I don’t know why that should matter to me. Maybe it’s just that they stay. They commit to something beyond their own survival.

Marcus has a crow skull somewhere on the upper shelf. I’ve caught myself looking at it, wanting to hold it, to feel the lightness of it. The hollow bones that let them fly.

I feel exposed lately, like I’ve misplaced some essential layer of protection. The pandemic’s done that, I think – worn us down to something rawer. I can’t hide in the archive rooms anymore, can’t lose myself in the cool stone quiet of the museum. Everything’s online now, these terrible video calls where I can see my own face looking back at me, and I don’t recognise the expression. Is that what I look like when I’m listening? When I’m thinking? It’s too much visibility. Too much of myself reflected back.

But here, in this studio full of beautiful dead things, I can sit very still and no one expects anything from me. The fox doesn’t judge. The crow skull holds its own counsel. Marcus’s half-finished painting of wilting peonies and a pocket watch asks nothing except that I acknowledge what it already knows: that everything gorgeous is also temporary, and maybe that’s not a tragedy, maybe that’s just the terms of the contract.

I’ll leave before it gets dark. Lock the door behind me. Walk home through streets that still feel half-empty, half-held. But for now, I’ll stay a bit longer in this deliberate silence, among these remnants, these carefully preserved bodies that someone thought worth saving. Worth making beautiful. Worth remembering.

Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.