Curiosity and wonder, they call it, and put it behind glass and we press our faces against it and hold our breath so as not to cloud the view. Trophies of war, declares one sign, and behind it dangles chunks of the real live hair of people who are no longer really alive. The head of your enemy, with the part that thought it could hurt you carefully removed, just the face now, the dead eyes even deader, filled with sand and looking more like fuzzy dice than anything that could do you harm, which is the point I guess. Body art is a whole floor, and there are objects from rituals once sacred in one place, now trendy in another. Still rituals, though. These cabinets are better curated than a B-lister's Facebook page, they look like chaos but each item has a tiny label in penmanship that makes my fingers cramp in sympathy and longing. Here are shoes worn by a woman who was so rich they had to hobble her to keep her from walking, the wretched smell meaning that all the perfumes of China will not sweeten this little foot.
This room is for crusty old men smelling of wet tweed and pipe tobacco, and for Mrs. Frankweiler, and for me. For people who do not think in the rigid lines of time and space as well as we would like to imagine, but instead group things together in a logic that defies; a pile of thoughts, confirmation bias, and objects used for the same purpose across generations, continents. Here is a cabinet filled with things for Woodcarving, and we suspect that maybe some of them might be sex toys, though later on we find out that's in another museum. Adze is a beautiful word. Here is a world with problems, the cases say, here is rain and hunger, the need for food and shelter, and here is how it has been solved, and solved, and solved, with wood and mud and traps for feathers and meat and bone; here is what we do with what we need, here is what we do with what is leftover. There's a labret made of a soda can. Here is boredom, they say, and breathe across your mind until it fogs, and then they wipe the mist away with a piece of leather soaked in salt and vinegar, and there are so many beautiful ways to solve that.
You gaze into Permanent Arts, the eyes of a woman with a stack of neck rings and wonder if she feels exploited or pretty, her eyes defiant or beckoning, and beside it a corset and an x-ray of the woman who wore it, her deformed skeleton. Or in this cabinet, pig bristles and woven straw, a mixture of things to cause malevolent events, earth from the grave of a man killed by a tiger, bad beasts do not harm me, I'm quoting here. Charms, says the cabinet, and I'm charmed, magicked, transfixed.
http://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/
tuckova 
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