Sun, Moon and Stars // Karlnapity

Selenophile

After his shift, Karl had found himself in a personal dilemma. Within his first shift, he had given away his heart, soul, and breath to this museum. It had not occurred to him, as he now got up from his bed and looked out the window across from him, how quickly one could miss something one had come to know the night before.

It was two full days until his next shift. Days spent at the university, with canvases on which he tried to capture what he had experienced. With countless new attempts, layers of paint crowding the canvas, he tried to divert his thoughts from that place. He tried to calm his agitated nerves, his mind that could not stop screaming for this place, with the paint that circulated around him.

The paint spread its chemical smell in the air. It had a calming effect on Karl that made his skin tingle with pleasure and nostalgia. It was on his fingers, with which he held his brushes, which he swung over his canvases. Even on his clothes or on the floor, little blobs or splatters of paint were drawn. The colorful paintings he created from his mind seemed like hope he gave himself to not suffocate in a world full of colorlessness and desolation.

The museum was on the way to his university. It beamed at him, attracted him like a single escape from his draining and monotonous life. On his way there or back from the university, he caught himself several times in an inner conflict to make a detour in the museum. Just to be able to look at the two statues in their frozen beauty, because even if they were frozen, he could look at them for years and still not get enough of them.

They had revealed to him, in his first shift alone, the unknown and hidden beauty of art. They showed him what they themselves were capable of without the influence of their creators. How lovely their voices sounded, what the colors of the paintings could do as soon as they had their own power, and what stories a work of art could usually tell, if one only gave him an open ear.

Every time he sat in class, he was reminded of how much it robbed him of his creativity. How much they kept him away from the real art. He used to think that this was the only way to get closer to art. Now he only felt further away from it. It seemed as if it had become alien to him, every time a chair squeaked across the floor or a professor analyzed the others' paintings with a weary look.

Immediately, then, he felt much more connected to art, when, with a certain good-humored cheerfulness in his step, he headed for his next shift. The art invited him to participate in its true nature and to witness it with longing and awe. For what was happening here bordered on magic, on a spell that had settled over the entire museum. On the cameras, the nocturnal activities of the artworks were impossible to capture and even Karl, who pranced through the halls or interacted with the artworks, behaved quite differently on the cameras.

It was as if, at the moment he entered the exhibition halls, his soul had detached itself from his body. While his soul walked around the museum free of worries, conversing with the enchanting works of art, his body walked through the aisles unmoved and almost mechanically. This whole place sparkled with magic.

He strode serenely through the cool corridors of the museum, greeting the paintings on the wall or exhibits behind glassy panes that came to life just as his shift began. It was always 10 p.m. on the dot, just an hour into his shift when the stiff statues stretched their limbs and the colorful paintings played with the paint on their canvas.

Eventually, the paint would erupt from the canvases and spread across the walls, and the statues would walk the aisles full of life, talking to each other. Most figures, at least, were able to talk to him, but paintings with many people talked indignantly in a mix of unintelligible words. Many paintings did not respond to what was said, some could not talk and again some could only repeat limited sentences now and then.