Museum - Photography of David Allan Barker

To the Museum or Bust!

Further to yesterday’s museum post, I note that museum exhibits serve as an obvious reminder about the fleeting nature of life. We who are gaze at those who were but are no more. Dinosaur fossils. Mummified remains. Roman busts.

Whenever I visit the local museum, the Royal Ontario Museum, I pay a visit to the gallery of classical busts. I like to pretend I’m schmoozing with people from the past. Afternoon drinks with old (really old) friends. Selfies to post on the ancient Roman social media site, VoltusLiber. Unfortunately, after a few drinks, their eyes start to glaze over.

Sculptors have always had difficulty with the eyes. They look blank and eerie. In fact, Roman sculptors working in marble had no trouble at all with eyes because they painted them in. They had no scruples about painting their work to make it as lifelike as possible. But in the intervening years, the elements have worn away the paint. It was the sculptors who came later—Renaissance and Neo-Classical artists—who complained about the eyes because it never occurred to them that classical artists had painted their marble. Even where they did suspect that their predecessors were more relaxed, conventions had become so entrenched that later artists couldn’t persuade their patrons to try new things. And so blank and eerie eyes gaze back at us across the centuries.

To my way of thinking, blank and eerie eyes may be more realistic than carefully painted irises and pupils. They say eyes are the window of the soul. It’s impossible to say who the first “they” is, but people have been saying this since at least the days of Cicero who, ironically, is the subject of many blank-eyed sculptures. The problem is that no matter how precisely we represent a person’s eyes, the sense of an essential personality conveyed by that representation is illusory. Maybe our belief about eyes has something to do with empathy. Humans are keyed to feel something when they look into another’s eyes.

However, personal experience (and rational thought) contradict this belief. People with visual impairments give the lie to the “window to the soul” conceit. When I gaze into a person’s injured or unseeing eyes, their eyes tell me nothing about them as a whole person. Conversely, the fact that they cannot gaze into my eyes in no way hinders them from perceiving me as a whole person. Whatever mysterious alchemy constitutes the self does not depend on eyes. Similarly, the belief that we can learn something about ancient cultures by gazing into representations of ancient eyes is silly. In fact, ancient sculptors may have done us a service by leaving us with blank and eerie eyes; they force us to seek out more credible sources for our convictions about what our predecessors were like.

Old Bones

There’s nothing quite like bones from the Late Cretaceous period to remind you that you’re going to be dead for a lot longer that you’re going to be alive. Compared to the millions of years you have ahead of you as a corpse, the handful of years you have as a living breathing creature pass in the blink of an eye. My wife and I didn’t set out with that in mind when we booked our tickets to a special dinosaur exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum, but it didn’t escape our thoughts as we observed how shadows of the ancient bones played across the floor and danced with our own footsteps.

I am a rational soul and tend not to tie myself up in anxious knots over the prospect of my own death. Age may have something to do with my willingness to entertain thoughts of death. Experience, too. A brush with death does tend to clarify one’s thinking. Then there are my vaguely Buddhist habits: for a time, I was a regular in a community that engaged in traditional Tibetan meditative practice (until surprise, surprise the leader died). Holding one’s own death in mind turns out to be a paradoxically liberating thing to do.

The deliberate contemplation of death is not unique to Tibetan Buddhist practice. I’m reminded of the Capuchin Crypt beneath the Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini where tiny chapels have been formed from the bones of 3,700 monks. The purpose of the chapels is to remind worshipers that their time on earth is fleeting. A plaque declares: “What you are now we used to be; what we are now you will be…” As an aside, I can’t help but hear these words in the voice of Yoda.

Playing on the walls of the museum exhibit were animated videos featuring 3D dinosaurs. It seems that digital animation is paleontology’s answer to breathing life into Ezekial’s dry bones. The dinosaurs may be long dead but, like gods, we can bring them back to life. We watched to the end of a video then read the credits scrolling down the wall. Noting the name of the production company, we wondered why it sounded familiar, then realized that our son had just that week gotten a job working for the production company. It creates a lot of children’s programming, including a show about dinosaurs. It hired our son to do a job that didn’t exist even 10 years ago.

Children hold an ambivalent place in conversations about mortality. On the one hand, they are a source of hope insofar as they offer us an extension, both imaginatively and genetically, into the future. On the other hand, their youth reminds us of the very thing that is slipping away from us. Sometimes, they go out of their way to remind us that we are becoming superfluous. Never is our obsolescence so apparent as when they roll their eyes while explaining to us for the umpteenth time how the smart TV works. Now I understand how my parents felt and I hope they forgive me the impatience I showed while trying to set up their VCR.