I had a little free time Wednesday morning.  It was the perfect day for a trip to the museum.  One of the things I love about where I live now, is I'm right on the avenue of the ahts.  I can pop in to the museum for a quick visit on a whim. 

I tend to like to go when it's quiet and I can be alone with the art. It can be difficult in museums as aggressively marketed as the MFA.  Not that I'm complaining that people are visiting museums.  That's definitely a good thing.  Regular trips to the museum were all that saved my childhood from being swallowed whole by mindless sport.  I first found my soul — through intimations, you understand — at the museum. 

Although museums themselves have changed a good deal, even in my lifetime (they no longer have that peculiar museum smell, for one thing), now more than ever they seem to me a refuge from the world outside.  I know some people think of art museums as art mausoleums.  The way they organize, categorize and catalog art — especially premodern art, which we like to think had a different function and place in traditional societies — alters its meaning in ways its makers surely never intended. 

The superlative example is the until-recently prevailing view of Greek sculpture as something austere and superserious.  But if obsessing over original intent is sport for some, for others the objects themselves speak eloquently of the mystery of making things.  The objects themselves are imbued with spirit, and something in them speaks to something in us.  That we recognize form itself, completely devoid of context, and it resonates so powerfully, is a key ingredient of our humanity.

There is tremendous value in crystallizing that insight.  It's very easy in the world to lose the thread of our humanity, which is, after all, a supreme abstraction (though I wouldn't go so far to call it an illusion).  For me, there's nothing like stepping out of the hurly-burly of the workaday world and into the orderly abstraction of a museum to reconnect with my humanity.  There's too much background noise in the world outside to hear that crystalline high note that, isolated, resonates through the galleries of great museums.

What museums surrender in context they more than amply make up for in lack of it.  Viewed through a humanistic lens, the thread of connectivity in art history is the story of our humanity itself in its various expressions, manifestations, and demonstrations. 

I was thinking about all of this Wednesday after finding myself pushed by a natural aversion to noisy crowds of schoolkids into a quiet corner, far from the more popular representational art.  I don't usually spend much time myself among the artifacts.  I breeze past the ancient earthenware pots, on the way to the art that more closely resembles life (as Friends of the Blog know by now, I like my art like my men — big, hard, and well, with its junk out). 

But this time, something about the quiet calm of the galleries held me there, and something opened up for me, briefly, as happens occasionally when you stand still in the stillness and look around.  I don't know that it was as powerful as an I-Thou moment but I can say that there was a moment of "transubstantiation".  Spirit turned flesh.

In the end, what museums teach us is a shocking truth: only our art survives. The cave paintings at Chauvet tell us more about human life than the bones of those who dwelt there.  Not that the bones of our ancestors can't tell us a good deal about our bodies, but in art is vouchesafed the human soul. 

The objects we shape with our hands become evidence of a human heart.  And these objects communicate, and their power resonates, over millennia. 

This is why our attachment to objects — not the hording of rubbish, but the deep attachment to evidences of our humanity — like books, is perfectly understandable, and not merely an hysterical reaction to the ipad.  We are right, in my opinion, to be wary of this colonization of the actual by the virtual.  We are right to fear the loss of the actual should the virtual world collapse.  Anyone who has lost a cellphone, or who's been visited by the blue screen of death, knows the pain of loss I'm talking about.

Once we surrender the sense of tactility, the feel for making actual things (which is also the thrill of making things actual), we surrender an essential part of our humanity.  Our objects are all that is left of us in the end.  Not the coded "us" of the genome, but the mysterious "us" of lived experience.  The evidence that life not only begets life, but on rare occasions begets beauty as well.