getting my goat

I think I first saw it in a social studies class my senior year in high school.

A goat rearing up against a flower tree. A rather prosaic subject, but artistically effective. No. More than effective. Almost mystically alluring. 

A anonymous Sumerian artist constructed it of wood, gold, silver, and lapis lazuli around 4600 years ago, and there it was on the page staring out and daring me not to admire it. I did. Admire it, that is.

The same ram showed up during my freshman year in college in H.W. Janson's History of Art (which resides on the top shelf of my library in the house with no name) and the first volume of my western civilization textbook (which was exiled to Goodwill when I sold the Salem house). I started to feel as if the goat was tracking me.

And then I saw the real thing.

When I was stationed in England in the mid-1970s, I would regularly drive to London to take in the sybaritic pleasures of what had once been an imperial capital, and in the 1970s was quickly sliding into being, in the words of a British politician of the era, "a second-rate city in a third-world country." But there was nothing second-rate about the National Museum -- probably because it was filled with loot from third-world countries that had once been great powers in their own time.

While I was strolling through the pile of Egyptian mummies, just waiting for their chance to star in a B-grade horror film, I wandered into the Mesopotamia Gallery. And there it was, encased in a glass case. My goat. Or one of a two pieces that have survived the ravages of time. The other is at the University of Pennsylvania.

My favorite sculpture is Donatello's Mary Magdalene -- the very essence of beauty in penance. But the goat (officially titled Ram in a Thicket) is a close second. The archeologist who disinterred the piece, Leonard Woolley, named it after the Abraham story where God provided a ram as a substitute saving the life of Isaac.

Of course, the goats have nothing to do with Abraham. They were found in a Sumerian tomb, and the best guess is that they supported some sort of altar between them.

So, yes, it may be true. My second favorite sculpture is in the pagan idol category. I will have to live with that seeming violation of the First Commandment.

The story of how the two goats, found crushed, were reconstructed is a fascinating tale in itself. But this essay is not really about the archeological arc of the goats. It is a thank you.

In this morning's messages, I received a note from fellow-blogger Gary Denness over at The Mexile. He told me he was sending a special gift. It arrived moments later. And I will share it with you. As Kurt Vonnegut would say: "And here it is."



Yup. He was in the British Museum filming my goat. The video was accompanied with a Gary-typical bit of British wit that "the museum seems quite adamant that it's their ram, not yours."

They, of course, are wrong. They may possess it, but the goat and I have a long-term relationship that no curator can break.

I have recently been itching to get on an airplane to visit a number of art pieces around the world. But, for now, I may have to be content with visits more local.

After all, what could be better than visiting the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. A certain skull calls to me.