The last taboo?

So: Is it okay to put human remains on display in a museum? Based on the number of mummies, skeletons, and burial artifacts we've seen on display, the answer among most curators seems to be a definitive yes. I'm not sure if this is even a debate in the museum community. Museologists – comments?

Surely there are many good and pragmatic reasons for studying remains, even displaying them for the public to see. But does that mean that we should do it? I've only recently started thinking about this, but I have doubts.

There are all kinds of taboos surrounding death, particularly in my own culture, so maybe this is just another and I am desperately clinging to it. But still I can't help thinking that's just the point. Especially among ancient cultures, we can't know what taboos existed, what the wishes of the deceased might have been, what beliefs they may have had. Who are we to trample over these things?

Some suggest that the scientific value of studying and displaying cultural remains is so great that when there is no one left to advocate on behalf of them, to represent their wishes, religious beliefs, etc., that we have the right, maybe even the responsibility, to study and understand them, then communicate findings and make the artifacts accessible to the public. Though I clearly see the point, the utter pragmatism of this argument disturbs me.

Such arguments are easily made about remote ancient peoples – but what about the recently dead cultures and people who have no advocates because they have been oppressed and overpowered? Who gives voice to the conquered? Have we come to a consensus that they deserve nothing? Or that our scientific need trumps any sort of individual wish? I'm not sure we've stopped to consider it.

The Body Worlds exhibit is a perfect case in point. Does it matter if the consent given by the subjects was highly questionable? Do these people stop having rights when their bodies die? If one were someone I loved, I would think these things would matter a great deal to me, as it would likely to most of us. So why is our concern not generalized? Maybe death is just not very real unless it is close to us.

Or maybe I am just simple and sentimental and have been in too many museums lately.

Observer of all, participant of none

Greetings from the Pacific Northwest (of the United States), where, for the first time in many weeks, I find myself with a spare moment and a computer. My travels in the past month have taken me far and wide and at the moment I feel like I don't have any home at all. Oddly, perhaps even ironically, it seems likely this place will actually probably be my home one day. But that day seems very distant indeed.

In my displaced, disoriented state, I've found it interesting to observe people who are at home in these places and to imagine what it must be like to have certain things as your "normal." How must it be to hear mariachi music through your window every night? Or to watch a gigantic Mexican flag taken up and down outside your office every day? To grab a coffee at a pick up window on your way to class? To know the differences between 18 types of oysters? Or to feel like you the parking spot on the street in front your house is yours? I am having difficulty comprehending.

Grappling around a restaurant bathroom lit by just one little candle last night, I wondered to myself (more existentially than literally, but also literally), where am I? And how did I come to be living this adult life here, in this place? What is my own normal? And why do I feel like an anthropologist in my own country? It is hard to tell if I am coming or going.

What have I done?

I am sitting in a house full of sad, wilted plants, feeling depressed by what I've done to them. I didn't feel sadistic when I gave them a long drink, closed all the windows and blinds, and left for two weeks, but now I have to wonder about myself. Am I very, very cruel or just very, very stupid?

The apartment was a dry sauna upon my return last night, our building's over-zealous heating system having cooked every ounce of moisture out of the place. I should have remembered how these wussy Swisstalians super-heat their places in winter. (We have not yet turned on a radiator ourselves!) For a moment before I opened the window I actually thought my skin might split. Poor little planties.

Each one coped with the neglect in its own special bruise-colored way. The kalanchoe (in fact the very same one that died last year but that I left on the porch for a while because Li's dad said it might come back and that eventually did, but kind of ug-ily), now rather street smart, put all effort into preserving its top leaves. The rest turned a soggy yellow and fell off.  The round leaves of my evidently not-impossible-to-kill plant from Germany slowly and evenly shriveled and turned brown. Live together, die together – you have to admire that spirit of camaraderie. But I love the most how my IKEA plant responded, holding onto all of its leaves, dead or alive, staying green, waiting patiently. Nothing going on here, it seemed to say; just a spot of water, please, and I'll be fine. Nary a brown leaf to be seen. Such a hopeful plant. (The lemon tree still taunts me with half-ripe fruit; I have nothing to say about that son of a gun.)

I can't help but think of this struggle for survival metaphorically and feel inspired (though only if I leave myself out of the metaphor). I mean, these plants had no reason to believe they would be rescued anytime soon, but still they did all they could to stay alive. Each struggled for life in its own way, in the dignified manner of a Jack London character or Anne Frank or that kid in "Hatchet." There is something to wonder at here (and it's not that I have the literacy of a 12-year-old). The plants, like the characters in most survival books and movies, it seems to me, are just as likely to live as they are to die. I suppose it will be both moving and my fault in either case.

More on all the other less heartless things I have done lately later in the week.

A Story

I somehow feel that I should round out the week with one final post about my trip to Bavaria. A picture might be nice, but since I did not take my camera out during the entire visit, I can't say that I could come up with an original one. Unfortunately the one I tried to take with my phone, a candid of the Swiss band waiting at the train station in Zurich, was just a blur of green hats (could have just as easily been Mexi standing in Lincoln Square). Sad, that would have been a money shot. (Somehow, the longer I am in isolation over here, the easier it is to say anachronistic things like "money shot." I used "bling bling" in an email yesterday, just because it entertained me for a second. I am like the guy down the river in "Heart of Darkness" – nothing to hold me back.)

Actually, I think I have a good story to which everyone will relate. But I must begin it with a confession: In the Munich Hbf, contemplating the many hours I would be spending on the train, I folded and went to Starbucks to get a coffee. This is very embarrassing for me to admit, so I hope you appreciate that the intimate nature of this disclosure and will be gentle, even in your thoughts. (Though I have to say I was not alone; I do not think I would have had the fortitude to go in and stay in on my own, especially after seeing those American girls descend on the cream and sugar counter as if they were the only people in universe and on top of that the first people to have a hangover after too much beer in Munich.) 

The tall but not small Starbucks coffee is essential to the rest of my story. Otherwise, you would be confused about why I would be actually paying to use the bathroom in Zurich. Even in spite of the coffee, I myself was perplexed by my willingness to spend my only remaining franc on a train station bathroom. But sometimes these things happen, even to the strongest among us. So anyway, it was not without some amount of ambivalence that I withdrew the coin from my wallet. 

Perhaps my fingers, channelling this indecision, gave a miniscule jerk as I reached out to put the coin into the slot. Perhaps my inexperience with public bathrooms kept me from knowing some essential secrets to pay-as-you-go WCs. Perhaps the slot was actually jammed and it was not my fault. Whatever the case, when I tried to put it in, the coin reissued through the air back toward me. My relief was momentary, interrupted by the sight of it hitting my shoe and then rolling, slowly, tauntingly, tragically, under the stall and out of sight. 

I suppose I have felt greater and more important despair at other times in my life, but that did not come to mind then. Instead, it seemed all the unfairness of life had been encapsulated into a freak moment. I might have kicked something had I full range of movement. It really felt like someone was laughing at me, but I think it was just myself.

New Year's Resolutions

I'm trying to remember if I'm the kind of person who makes New Year's resolutions.  I can't really recall any that I have made or kept in the past, so I don't think I am.  And I generally try to avoid being the source of my own disappointment, when I can.  How boringly pragmatic.  

Yesterday on the short 8:00 a.m. flight from Nürnberg they gave out fortune cookies for breakfast dessert.  This seemed odd for a number of reasons.  But anyway, my aptly-timed "fortune" reads: 

The past belongs to the past; 

now the time is right for

a new beginning.

So now I am thinking.  For some reason, "What's past is prologue" immediately came to mind on the plane.  Shakespeare wrote that in The Tempest, but I didn't know this until a few years ago when I looked it up, remembering the vintage wartime poster in our basement which quoted this phrase.  The design of the other posters -- Uncle Sam, Joan of Arc, "Buy War Bonds" -- are clear in my memory, but I can't remember what the background of this poster looked like.  Was it a flag? A peaceful field? Marines at Iwo Jima? A woman working in a factory?  I am forced to guess which part of the past Americans were supposed to consider prologue. 

In any case, because of its context (on a propaganda poster) and because I probably only thought about its meaning lazily, during breaks between movies at sleepovers, "What's past is prologue" always seemed to have negative connotations.  What happened before is just a shadow of what's to come -- watch out!  This is just the beginning.  If you think this is bad, just wait until Act II.  You!  Do something!

It didn't occur to me until now to think of this positively -- as something other than a manipulative threat or a wistful recollection.  Could it be instead that what happened before, whatever it was, simply sets the scene for future greatness?  A new beginning doesn't necessarily take leave of the past.  But then again, as the fortune cookie points out, the past doesn't preclude a new beginning, either.  So, whether you make resolutions or not, it seems a good time to consider both the past and the future, to mark the passage of time, and to hope for a great future. (Join me in thinking too much!)

I hope Shakespeare wouldn't be offended to be in the company of a fortune cookie.