Museum Moans

My inaugural post. Below is part of something I wrote for a retreat last year and shared with my community members-- my 'Personal Narrative'. Hopefully it can stand alone, but if it seems incomplete, that's because it is. I will continue to post parts of this Personal Narrative, piece by piece, until it tells a (sort of) cohesive story of who I am. Such posts will be aptly tagged as 'personal narrative'.

I learn a lot about myself every time I go to a museum.

I wish I could like museums. I think this vacant plea pretty much sums up who I am with disturbing effectiveness. Every time someone suggests a museum as an activity for filling the afternoon, I engage in an exhausting discourse of self-talk, pumping myself up, saying this will be the time you mature and learn to love those pedantic palaces of pain. I flash my student ID, pay my fee, and courageously cross the precipice—leaving this crazy, chaotic world to enter an odd, ordered one. I enter as a king’s knight, dawning mail of mental preparation and new beginnings. I leave as a peasant’s toddler, miserable and wanting someone to change my pants. Eight minutes is usually the breaking point. I can lie to myself for up to eight minutes. After that, I have to admit how much I really hate being at museums. I do appreciate the works, the paintings, the animals, the postage stamps. Whatever it is the museum features, I can usually respect its creation or importance to a fragile human existence. With that being said, I never enjoy my time in museums. It’s the moaning that always ruined it for me.

It was May 22nd, 2012. The place really was beautiful. White stone held together by the Incan Gods, an equatorial sun that brought sweat to my arms and peace to my heart. It sat atop a mountain, this museum of Ecuadorian art becoming just what it contained. A vista of Quito rested below, the city angry with activity, but begging to be left alone, if only for this one afternoon. I was entranced. I knew this would be different. I was in a foreign country, the land of my father, absorbing its history and with it my roots. The museum guide met us outside and led us down the pathway, which traveled like a serpent back to its nest, sure of where it wanted to go, but distracted by the smells of nature and its grace along the way. We entered, a foyer alive with Amazonian color and texture, decorated with paintings of this humble nation’s proudest artists. I was listening to the guide’s passionate pontifications, and like an infant, I knew the language was right but still it meant very little to me. I was absorbing the emotion with my eyes and an even more careful focus on the eyes of the guide. They told me what I needed to know. We got to a piece that I loved. It was a hand, and in it was the city of Quito. I knew just what it meant. The hand was representing the mountains of Pinchincha, which surround the city and hold its people and their stories in a protective embrace. I was starting to feel protected by that hand, too, and those mountains. Then it all broke. The assistant teacher of my Summer abroad program broke the shit out of this moment. I guess she liked the painting too, but unlike me, she had to moan her little face off when she saw it.

You can pretty much find museum moans anywhere there is a combination of museums and humans. They are especially prevalent in guided tours-- of Warhol exhibits, Chicago urban architecture, historical figures’ homes-turned-museums, or the like. The expert says something interesting, maybe even moving, and someone has to make one of those “mmmm” sounds. Someone always has to do it. I was never certain what it conveyed. The uncertainty, however, will not keep me from partaking in the overconfident outburst of conjecture which ensues.

When the moan follows the telling of a fact, I think it is a moan of “that is something I knew either consciously or deep down inside, because I am well educated, cultured, and refined. I will show my gratitude, via moan, for awakening that dormant fact within me.” These ones are usually high-pitched. It’s like the new information enters the brain as waves, destructively interferes with the knowledge that was already there, and it all leaves as a bright and high-energy sound. Then there is the related moan of, “Wow. That piece moved me in such a way that I need my present company to know. It would be improper to articulate verbally at the moment, so I will just let out a museum moan. They will know I was touched, that I have a large capacity for being emotively inspired by art and historical wonders. They will, as a result, like me more.” These ones may not even require a preceding comment to initiate, but just a carefully directed glance at something powerful. They tend to be as baritone as the body will allow—guttural—carrying a craving that is absent in the first form. There seem to be a lot of little subtleties packed into each and every moan. I would argue, perhaps, that no two moans are exactly the same, similar to snowflakes and fingerprints. Similar to people, too.

Not long ago, something quite dramatic happened. I caught myself making a museum moan, and it was magic. I popped my MM cherry, to borrow from the distasteful parlance of our time. A truly transformative moment in my life, comparable to that time in first grade when I pooped on the classroom floor. Almost identical situations, really, the more I think about it. It turned my understanding of the moan on its head. My first museum moan didn’t take place in a museum; it took place in my bedroom. I wasn’t looking at anything from Picasso’s Blue Period; I was looking at small black print on off-white paper. I guess I had always thought museum moans were social tools employed with arduous deliberation. I thought that they served a communicative and manipulative purpose. I thought they were just another device invented by the unbounded shallowness of man. I didn’t realize that museum moans are real—they can happen without any prior consideration of the surround. I was all alone for my first museum moan, just a boy and his paperback. There was no social context that would have fired the museum moan neuron in my brain, if such a thing existed.

My museum moan just happened, without my permission—like a thunderstorm or a homicide—and like thunderstorms and homicides, it made me realize a few things.

One, that I am cynical and pretty judgmental, for thinking all those museum moaners who had ruined my museum experiences were as self-conscious as I was. I always thought they moaned for my sake, so that I could learn something about their complexity. I thought they were as aware of others’ perceptions of them as I was of theirs of me. A lot of prepositions, but one takeaway: I now understand they didn’t have a choice but to moan. The moan spoke for them, because they were drowning in some other power and weren’t capable of speaking for themselves.

Two, my museum moan made me realize how I am an animal. Not the kind that lifts a lot of weights, but more like the kind you find in zoos, or on safaris. Textbooks tell me this, but often I forget. I am inextricably one with the physical. There is nothing I can do but accept it. I think it is probably why people started kneeling to pray, and bowing to worship, and hugging to show care. We are animals, and we must speak with the physical tools at our disposal. The body gives us shape in space, and it also shapes our souls. I sometimes assume we have advanced too far to be considered animals. I recently read that we invented glucose-level-reading contact lenses, for goodness sake. We fall in love. We do some pretty remarkable things. My museum moan, however, was a reminder that there is still this primal side. Maybe moans are now connected to higher-level emotion, and not just the survival ones like pain or hunger. This might indicate some semblance of advancement, but there is no way of really knowing what the cavemen moaned for. So maybe we haven’t come very far at all.

Three, I realized it is possible that I just never really cared much for museums, with or without the serenade of moans. If I really liked them, why have I never moaned in one in the past? Because I have never moaned in a museum—never sincerely. I can guarantee you. I am the type of guy that would remember moaning in a museum. Forgetting something like that would be like forgetting the first time I kissed a girl, or ate buffalo chicken pizza—just a pure impossibility. So now that I have successfully established that I have never moaned in a museum, I have to ask myself why. There are two possible explanations, and I do not like how either makes me feel. The first, and this is what I am leaning towards, is that the museum moans were the primary cause- the prime mover- in my distaste for museums. This one stings because it suggests that I let my judgments of other people be an impediment to what I could be enjoying for myself. It suggests I am so charged by the energies of others that I forget what I should be present to. It suggests I have trained myself to never live freely. The other explanation is that the moans were not an issue; rather, I just do not have a visceral reaction to human creations that is strong enough to elicit an unconscious seeping of emotion in the form of a moan. It suggests that I am incapable of appreciating the works of those that came before me in the same way that other people are. It suggests I am incapable of really loving beauty, or wonder. This one seems a little extreme.

I suppose I could put both theories to the test by walking through a museum in complete solitude, and seeing what happens, but then memory and conditioning still linger as factors. The ghost of Pavlov just pouring drool all over my master plan. I think it might be too late to know how I really feel about museums. I would have to completely overthrow the way I think. I would have to revolutionize my mind. Coup d’brain.

It is exactly this that recently shoved me off my moanless edge: the challenge to overthrow the way I think. It is a challenge that has helped my writing this immensely. I moaned because of carefully chosen, but brazenly unfiltered words that appeared in a bound book. The book was “Blue Like Jazz” by Donald Miller- or just Don, because we share a birthday. I moaned my entire way through this thing. It is like the man does not know how to create a sentence without also creating a masterpiece. I moaned because his writing spoke to my soul, and truly, it is the soul that moans. Finally, I moaned at a masterpiece.

#personalnarrative