Interbeing – No Interdependent Origins

There are many stories collected here, in the museum. The library is one collection of stories, of course: 

the ceramics gallery another: the dioramas tell other stories: 

the archives are collections of the stories of the story-collectors and hold their own untold stories: 

and behind all of these are corridors and passageways and half-forgotten staircases leading to other floors of the building, the 21st century museum wrapped around the 1930s displays in the Victorian spaces that hide the Georgian house that itself erased the earlier Manor House. 

This is not one building at all, really, but a loose collection of buildings held together only by the stories within them. It has been a home, a collector’s wunderkammer, a First World War hospital – the nurses of the Voluntary Aid Detachment stood here, washed away mud from the Somme – and now this is a museum. 

Although even that shifts: what does a museum from 1930 – ‘Largest known collection shot by one man – many rare curios’ – have in common with a museum of 2021? To paraphrase Orwell, who was talking about English identity – very little except that it is exactly the same place. 

Each story can be told many ways: each character can tell the story, and we can choose which character’s telling we will listen to. We can switch between characters, mid-story. What did you think happened to the character in the chapter that focused on someone else? They don’t cease to exist, but carry on living independently. 

So each character can start the story where they like, or stray into another story altogether. Not all characters who wander are lost. Beckett showed us that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have their own lives, after all, and Moore and Gebbie have explored the lives of Alice, Wendy and Dorothy as they grow older. Our characters have agency. There is no neat beginning, this story does not arc tidily from the first page to the last. 

You, the listener, may choose when to start listening, too. Somebody else’s beginning may not be where you start. You, perhaps, have only just started listening to this narrative. 

To get here, to where you are listening, you walked by the small tea-bowl in the room of ceramics. We may tell the story of the potter’s hands that threw this perfect piece. Or the story of the shopkeeper who sold it or the person who bought it. We can tell many stories of the people who drank tea from it, over so many years. In many stories it is just a prop, and doesn’t even get a passing mention. 

“Mrs Bird pressed the Inspector to join her. He accepted for the pleasure of staying a little longer, managed two cups of tea, then when there no longer seemed any reasonable excuse for delaying his departure another moment he reluctantly said good-bye.” Tell us about the crockery, Mr Wheatley! 

Have you ever taken tea with a bottom-turner? To this day, people from Stoke – with pride in the Potteries of their city – will raise their tea-cup with one hand and flip their saucer with the other to read the maker’s mark. To some people, the story of the person who made the pottery matters. 

But in that cabinet, we choose to tell the story of the rich collector who acquired it later. Even then – we neglect to tell the story of the agent who brokered the deal, of the people who packed it for shipment to Great Britain, of the stevedores and dockworkers, the ship’s crew, or – eventually – the curator who chose this object, this example, this single cup, while a hundred similar pieces stay packed in tissue paper in the store room.