Harnett-Hargrove

 

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12th-1/9 entries for annual ROM / muse - hellhounds in the museum / pk

The picnic that is River of Mnemosyne. 

Where anything can happen + will.

Already, my life is a shaky substructure teetering on misunderstandings, hearing half truths, + damn if i can’t think of a third to make this a well rounded sentence. 

Hellhounds in the Museum sounds like a regret. Or a challenge. Or perhaps, a regretful challenge. Why are these damn muses always so damn obtuse? Damn. + again. i can’t help but think they are made for a creator of one. Someone whom picked a muse essential to their own story, an offhand MacGuffin to move someone’s single pointed plot along + simultaneously chosen to throw everyone else off their creative slipstream current by turning every other table upside down along the way. Hellhound on my trail. But, i do go on. Yes?

Hellhound in the museum is a contra flavor of elephant in the room, or perhaps - I can’t find the correct lipstick shade.

The hellhound most defiantly is in the Natural History Museum. (+ likely designed, painted + built by a friend who knows no hell). An extended Hellhound family captured in any number of ways — all illegal, + any number of places — all private property, with any number of intentions — all anti-Peta. Gutted + stuffed into a cyclorama. Minding their own businesses + refusing the fourth wall, the red eyes of the pups peer out from a dark den w/ an imagined tunnel to inner earth + intertwined w/ roots of a faux Balboa tree. Their cockeyed painful look of painful taxidermy is carried over, belying tameness in the state of frozen time. 

One member of the family is noticeably missing - perhaps this hound is employed as a docent in the Rod Sterling wing, aptly named the Other Night Gallery. Peering into hellish paintings w/ hellish themes, darting here + there around suspended frames. This floating feature mesmerized me. Where my 20th century mind said how is that? Today i laugh haha! The hellhound is at home + looking quite natural wearing a this is not a tour tee, grappling w/ a megaphone + queuing the horror foley w/ a condescending drawl.

On the other hand, maybe she's belying a peanut farmer, w/ chicken feathers stuck out the corner of her mouth. Is she the goody-two-shoes cousin from the other side of the tracks? Mules on her feet + diploma clinched in her paw, glasses balancing way down on her nose, as she searches for a brood to teach the dangerous ways of the deadly forefather hellhounds. Or, posing as a derby fox type character? Dapper + charismatic in a bell top hat + knickers holding a riding crop, to ward off the ferrel dogs that would pursue her. Shapeshifting into kitsune or his twin of the Inari Shrine variety. 

i’m imagining the drawing of the dutch classic blurring the ape form into human merging into frog. The morphing of animal farm that shape-shifts into + back from. Where the entire animal kingdom, including humans, don’t land far from the same tree. This could all be an irrational notion. Though empirically, the tracked mud + indelible foul breath proves this character is real. On the other hand, from my lips to gods ear.

The Greeks called Cerberus was a demon, but i say not. He was no Black Shuck of East Anglia, but a three headed sweetheart that was misunderstood, left unattended, + neglected at the gate — how could he not be a little defensive? As the saying goes, (okay, yes - i’ve viewed the film Fiddler on the Roof three times this week) deviation from the norm will be punished unless it is exploitable.

It is the preverbal hellhound of the mind — second cousin to the monkey mind we all know so well. We are the hellhound enclosed in the museum; our virtual mind. The visiting character is masked up + sashaying around dull thoughts + puny sparks. Perhaps she wears the PPS mask begrudgingly, because when the muse was imagined it was not necessary. She had another mask in mind. The mask behind the mask, where no-one is the wiser. A Hell Hound of Baskerville by any other name. Seen in Bulgaria, Turkey, Vietnam, Siberia, Romania, Russia, Chile, Lithuania, Sardinia … you get the picture. Or in other words, the big dark harbinger of death is inside us all. Peering around wildly w/ red eyes that illuminate our fears.

Though they are buried in opposite ends of the earth, one dog will find them both.  -Djuna Barnes

As the good book says; someone wants us to sacrifice something.