MoD vision :: Why
For too long dust, and all its associates and relatives, have been overlooked by the great museological institutions. They are full of it -- but they overlook it or, worse, mindlessly destroy it. The world needs somewhere that all the dust, shards, fragments and shadows can be gathered, displayed and conserved in an appropriate environment. MoD is laying down a heritage for future generations. History will be our judge.
posted by Administration at 11:50 pm
1 Comments:
Of course, that's the official explanation.
But if someone were to ask me, “Why Museum of Dust?” I would have no simple answer. The easiest way to explain it, I suppose, is as a vocation. It crept up on me, unlooked for, unexpected, and certainly unwanted.
At least initially. After a time, however, I came to accept the inevitability of this task. I was meant for this. THIS is why I was born.
Even as a child, I loved the shadows. I liked the back of things, the bits no one else ever saw. I remember rubbing my face on their rough burred surfaces and licking their tattoo of calligraphic texta scrawls. I devoured stories of improbable quests, of unlikely monsters and even more impossible protagonists. I liked to tear the last pages out of new books, before I read, savouring the delicious ambiguity of their new fate.
I came, slowly, to realise that the world itself is full with things that have been overlooked, that have been mislaid and forgotten. Things that briefly effloresced and then just as quickly putresce. That have waned and wasted, metamorphosing into misbegotten new forms. Things that have been worn by time into tattered veils, ghosts long before their deaths.
I came to feel that my own fate was somehow running parallel to theirs. I realised that I could give them respite from a cruel and uncaring world here, among their own kind. It is my fondest and most fervent hope that here in the Museum of Dust, the detritus of history and the victims of various cognitive and mnemonic failures can find a resting place and a safe harbour.
MoD was born from a pure impulse of sheer benevolence and sincere altruism.
It was never, as some have so viciously impugned, an attempt to challenge my respected colleague Musrum’s reputation. Nothing can overshadow his towering achievements, most particularly in the realm of gardening. One has only to have the merest knowledge of his Herculean struggles against the Weed king to realise that the world will not soon see again his like. I have nothing but the highest admiration for his achievements and my sincerest sympathy is with him as he courageously struggles to master his unfortunate terror of sponge cats.
And I am certainly deeply mortified that it was my ignorance of the nature of Musrum’s crippling psychological disability that led me to make the unfortunate mistake of sending Musrum a brace or two of sponge kittens and thus, arguably, hastening his subsequent complete decline and withdrawal from the world.
However, I think that it is very clear, on a feature-by-feature comparison, that Musrum’s collection, or ‘museum’ as he would have it, and MoD have little or nothing in common.
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