Crying in museums

Museums put me in a very different headspace sometimes. In a place designed to zoom out and show you things across space and time, I get hit by the number of lives that have been lived and what they might have been like.

The first time it happened to me, I was looking at a case of dead birds in the Natural History Museum in London.

Seeing the dozens of little century-old feathered bodies made me think about all the birds that have ever lived, uncountable trillions of them. I hope that lots of them had nice lives and enjoyed flying and all that, but lots of them also froze and starved and got eaten. And I cried thinking about all the bad things that have happened to trillions of birds.

Then upstairs I saw a display with a Neanderthal skull with a note about how homo sapiens and Neanderthals seem to have interbred.

Which is one way of putting it. I’m sure some of these human-Neanderthal pairings were mutual, but I cried thinking about all the people who have been raped throughout history.

And then I thought, “I probably need to go back on antidepressants.”

And it was true, I did. 

……

Yesterday it happened again. I arrived in Mexico City for a conference, and got here early enough to go see the anthropology museum. The downstairs is full of impressive big stone sculptures and replicas of temples. But it was the folk art exhibits upstairs that really got me.

So much of it (both the ancient monuments and the recent folk art) includes corn as an emblem. Because corn has meant life in Central America for about ten thousand years. Millions or billions of people have spent their lives mostly farming corn so they and their families can eat. And often they didn’t have enough — all these ceremonies trying to ensure a good corn harvest hint at how bad it is if you don’t have though.

And a lot of people still don’t have enough. Walking around in the city, I’m struck by how a few people are much shorter than others. Usually people doing some kind of manual work, like carrying a heavy bundle on their back. I think it’s not just different ancestry but childhood malnutrition.  On the way to the museum, I passed a billboard proposing a cap on the cost of corn tortillas, the staple food here.

But even in poor villages, people’s lives aren’t just agriculture. The displays of indigenous textiles were really beautiful — hand-knotted lace, garments covered in beadwork, elaborate embroidery.

I’ve done a fair amount of textile work, and it is slow. The farming, carding, spinning, weaving, sewing – it’s hard to grasp how labor-intensive any article of clothing once was. My final achievement in spinning and weaving was a dishtowel too small to be useful. For thousands of years, every garment humans wore was the product of so much work.

And I found it really moving how unnecessarily beautiful these textiles are. People living lives of material hardship put so much effort into designing and making beautiful, extravagant things.

Humans have this in us too, as well as the ability to toil in a field — the ability to make fantastical, aspirational things. We like to impress each other. We’ve created all kinds of religious narratives and rituals about what’s important in life, gods and saints who we hope will protect our crops, save us from disease, and keep us from dying us in childbirth.

The natural world isn’t the only thing we’ve struggled with. The museum is full of traces of humans’ cruelties to each other — human sacrifices buried in the temples, wars between between the different groups in the area even before the Spanish arrived, and the brutal colonization by Spain.

And I’m so damn sad that so many people have lived with scarcity and danger as the underlying facts of their lives. I live in relative safety — I always have food in the kitchen to give my children, and we have antibiotics and clean water to drink. But it stupefies me how many people have gone through their days hungry and sick, have buried their children for lack of things like clean water.

…….

Downstairs are the remains of huge stone pillars and buildings. They’re also a testament to people planning and making big, bold projects.

But the people hauling the stone probably weren’t doing it all that voluntarily, and probably had things they’d rather have been doing than building huge monuments for the emperor. I think of my Uber driver earlier in the day, who remarked that political parties waste a bunch of money that could be spent on better infrastructure so the traffic wouldn’t be so bad.

On the replica of the grandiose Mayan temple outside, the sign notes that at one point in the nineteenth century locals used the temple used as a granary. Of course they did! They needed a place to keep their corn dry, and here was this perfectly good stone building. And better rulers probably would have built more granaries in the first place.

……..

I’m usually much more interested in thinking about incremental change than big utopian transhumanist visions. But today I wish we could have it all. 

I wish for a world where people could spend their time making beautiful, grandiose things. Or farming, or whatever they want.

Where every parent has plenty of food to feed their children.

Where birds don’t freeze.

Where people aren’t afraid.

Where nobody has to bury their loved ones…at all? Not just prematurely?

……..

I have no idea how we’ll ever get to some of these, but museums make me dream big as well as weep into my sleeve.