bækur á flugi

I descend into the library, stepping past the glum young guard, stack card in hand, list of Dewey decimals in pocket, heading for the broad staircase the winds downward about the atrium towards the subterranean shelves. There, at the first landing, I am confronted with Art in the form of maybe sixty books pierced by steel wires and suspended in various attitudes. So pinioned, they resemble birds in flight, tumbling on air currents, only caught mid-tumble and frozen. I walk to the edge and peer downward. The books (open, shut, hanging, held) fill the several-storey shaft, the wires criss-cross in a metal web.

How arresting. I have the same disconcerting feeling I have had upon happening across taxidermy at a zoological park or a natural history museum and thinking what beautiful animals and then oh, they are real, they are dead. I recall hearing a docent at one such museum address just this reaction in her tour group by saying with audible regret that, yes, animals used to be "collected" from the wild for display purposes, but that the museum no longer sponsors such expeditions, and today only animals from zoos and sanctuaries, dead of natural causes, are used.

And I suppose the books have similiarly been culled from captive populations in bibliographic parks, and only after long and productive lives. I suppose none of them represents anything like an endangered species of printed matter. Nonetheless, the installation seems faintly inappropriate, and I leave feeling unsettled.