New Museum Entry

By Zara Fleming

U.B.1
M. Guid Nud.
T. Canala Sambhava.
S. Guru Guido
E. Ancient Protector of Aunties.

The slightly smiling yet slightly wrathful Guru Guido, pink in colour with blue extremities, sits in vajrasana on a computer disc atop a blooming laptop lotus.. He has six flailing arms, two bandy legs and two faces (one facing forward and one backward). In his white front face are three bulging eyes, his central wisdom eye to enable him to see in the bathroom; and in his reverse red face are two startled eyes to alert him to aunties antics, while he is meditating on his computer. His two main hands hold a bowl of licquorice (the elixir of life in UB); his upper hands hold an elephant goad to spur his aunties into action and a noose to restrain their activities; while his middle hands hold a skull drum to awaken them from ignorance and a chopper to symbolically cut off their silly ways.



Guru Guido wears a golden tee shirt and a purple spotted robe. Radiant neon light emanates from his body and above him in a mass of blazing flames sit Shaidara and Zarakala, riding on jewel-spitting hamsters. They are his mentors and attempt to keep him on the straight and narrow and focused on his multi=faceted activities; in turn he bestows a watchful and compassionate eye to save them from their “senior moments”. Beneath the central figure are two scenes from his former lives; on the left his previous magical birth in the Netherlands when he emerges from an incandescent canal and performs his first steps in each direction, and wherever he treads tulips and daffodils bloom. On the right is his former incarnation as a Medicine Man in Mexico, when he feeds the five thousand bandidos with tacos that miraculously appear from his sombrero.



The whole is set in a typical Ulaan Baatar cityscape, with gigantic gers, rush hour traffic and mingling Mongolians. Guru Guido is venerated throughout Mongolia as the main archtype deity of aunties, protecting them from harm and instilling in them more youthful and humourous qualities, in order to prolong their long lives as cataloguers. Meanwhile, Shaidara and Zarakala will continue to catalogue and record the guru’s life performance, which will it is hoped be published as an automatic best seller by the BIM programme of the Tibet Foundation, in the very near future.



N.B.

To view the Guru’s image on the screen, an abundance of discerning wisdom is required. If at first it does not emerge, practice daily visualisation of the above and when ignorance is dispelled and all other negative qualities evaporated, the image of Guru Guido will become a reality.