At the anthropology museum, we're briefly holy
on objects worth keeping
This week, I moved into my fourth short term rental in as many months. In each new room or apartment I inhabit, I set up my writing space with a red stapler (I don’t have a printer so the stapler rarely serves its function of actually stapling) and a small cup with a red penguin on it that I stole from my college’s on campus hipster cafe six years ago. Even if I’m only going to be in a space for a month, I put up a poster I bought at a yard sale that was designed to belong in an elementary school classroom (I’m very affected by inspirational quotes) and a painting of the Utah desert I found at a thrift store and got framed. Other than that, the walls of the sublet are mostly bare.
When I lived in Salt Lake, it felt so important to set up a home that I loved. I invested in a bed frame and a rug and other things that can’t fit into the back of a car. Obsessing over decor felt like a logical answer to the extreme unknowns of life in my 20's and a pandemic that kept us mostly inside.
I'm finally separating the things that made it to New York from Salt Lake into two piles, things that I want to take with me as I move around (accepting this is a nomadic period of my life) and things I'll move into boxes in my parents basement until I sign my next lease.
I wrote a piece about objects after a visit to the anthropology museum in Mexico City. I initially sent it to a lit magazine that publishes stories about people's relationship to objects but got an auto reply that they no longer exist. I’ll include it here instead <3
At the anthropology museum, we’re briefly holy
There's so many of us in the dark exhibit hall admiring small relics of another place and time. The security guard walking with his hands behind his back catches my eye and I put my phone back in my pocket, resetting my face into a look of humility the ancient museum seems to require.
A couple in their 70’s hurriedly rounds the corner in front of me. “Here it is, John!” her voice thunders above the quiet undercurrent of the exhibit. She’s waving frantically at a glass case filled with ancient forms of currency - lush white shells and animal hides. Her husband, behind her, holds his digital camera out with his arms fully outstretched, snapping photos of the jaguar’s limp skin. The woman smirks. She’s not rude or indignant, more satisfied that she found what he wanted to photograph.
I picture them in their living room in Wisconsin at 6 pm. For her, orange juice and vodka. For him, a dark lager hand poured from two separate cans into an extra large Green Bay packers glass. They're staring at their TV and yelling out answers to Jeopardy. They're competing with each other as they sit on their plastic polyester couch. Sometimes she lets him win because she enjoys his enthusiastic hand waving. She'll tell her friends that's why they've been married so long - she loves his antics, encourages them.
If all goes according to plan, they're closer to death now. All these plastic and metals will be organized and hidden from view by their one child and his wife. Their bodies, the contents of their freezer (the meat, not the plastic wrapping) will transform easily to dust. The rest will live on and on until, in 2000 years, it’ll be displayed with a small placard that reads,
“The typical living set up of a middle aged couple living in the middle of what was the United States of America - two soft plastic filled chairs, a plastic remote, a TV. We've recreated the glass elements such as the vodka bottle, beer bottles, and cups. This period of human civilization was marked by excessive amounts of leisure time. This couple would spend their evenings defrosting meats and playing games with the television.”
I go downstairs to the basement of the museum. It's mustier and death is no longer suggested. It’s blatant. Behind the glass, in a little shelf created by matted down dirt, is a skeleton shaped with elbows propped on their knees and skeleton hands placed to prop up a face. The skeleton seems like a teenage girl set in an image of eternal boredom. I can't tell if the gravesite is dug up and moved here or if this is the actual site of a grave laid bare and covered with glass so tourists like me can shiver starting with their heart. Either way, it feels almost illegal to witness a skeleton in this way.
The last will I made was at 11 years old during a period when my parents were more obsessed with death than usual (their mothers both died suddenly and young). I vowed to leave my large stuffed animal Lammy to my sister and if she was also dead, my best friend. I signed it with a thick marker.
A few weeks later, on a school field trip, a lady in a dark green uniform gave my sixth grade class a tour of the city dump. She pointed out bits of trash that might be ours and asked us to name something we had thrown away recently. She seemed more excited than the task required. At the end of the tour, she said, “If you all really want to make a difference, get into waste management! We have more trash than we know what to do with!” Then, she gave us each a teddy bear with polyester fur and a solid plastic hat with the words waste management written on it.
So many of the artifacts in this museum were natural. Stone carvings, fur, bone, thread, wax. I felt envious of their ethical existence. It seems more moral to have everything you create in your life, everything you touch or play with to disintegrate just like you. Less self absorbed, more cool breeze. Instead, there’s this red stapler, this computer, an electric toothbrush and 97 other plastic and metal objects I lug from place to place.
something to read & something to write
Something to read: Girls Can Kiss Now by Jill Gutowitz is a series of essays I seriously cannot stop talking about. The writer came out at 23 and tracks her queer experience through essays on pop culture beginning in the 90’s.
Something to write: Alongside many people in my writing group, I’m participating in Escapril, 30 days of poetry prompts for the month of April. Today’s prompt is, “If I told you, you’d go mad.”
Love,
Zoe
Loved this. And the idea of imaging people's lives in different place then when you see them .