Possibility of Knowing
My eye is drawn toward light. Knowledge pools briefly, spinning counter-clockwise. I am submerged. In the museum today I am wondering about the possibility of holding tightly, or of releasing. I should be answering emails but am drifting weightless through my time on earth.
These pictures are from the Brooklyn Museum. Unearthing the Truth: Eqypt's Pagan and Coptic Sculpture examines funerary motifs carved in stone as Egypt transitioned from Pagaism to Christianity to Islam between the 3rd and 6th Centuries. Revealing the uncertainty of the museological enterprise itself, the exhibition asks whether the artifacts in its own collection are real, or if they're 20th Century fakes.
Wandering home later, I'm wondering about the human enterprise of building knowledge, and about the desire to unearth certainty from facts in the ground. Crossing Prospect Park, watching kids on bicycles, I'm considering the possibility that transient affiliations—Pagan, Christian, Muslim—sometimes, briefly, become visible in stone.
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