alonewiththemoon | (no subject)

I went to the Peabody Museum at Harvard today to see an exhibit on Berber culture. It was small but densely informative. An exhibit of photographs of the Marsh Arabs of Iraq was also fascinating. I went to the museum expecting to be intellectually and artistically stimulated.

I didn't expect to walk hard into my past, the past of my childhood in the Agassiz Museum with its perpetually frozen animals and the Peabody with its dioramas of other peoples' lives, and the past of my ill-fated career as an anthropologist as I walked around the Native American exhibits, seeing Tlingit artifacts and remembering my time spent in Sitka, seeing an example of fancy dance garb for a pow wow and remembering that I used to go to those, that these other cultures once had a profound role in my life and now hardly any. I am unsettled, unsure what I am now and how the child who giggled at the way the snow leopard's tail was wrapped around the tiger's ankle, the teenager who would sit on the floor sketching zebras and lions, the college student and graduate student who wrote reams of interpretative analysis and ultimately rejected it all turned into the person I am now.

Nobody else went to the same museum I did today. A museum of dead ends, roads not taken, the dodo created out of turkey feathers and plaster slowly crumbling away.