Who are we, really? The current exhibits at London’s Wellcome Collection provide several intriguing suggestions. I loved a photo of the neural network pulled from the body, which looked like some kind of fairy shrimp, and a photo of many pairs of socks shaped like chromosomes. But I wasn’t moved to pull out my camera until we got to a printed edition of the complete human genome. Each volume had a thousand pages, with type so small it was difficult to read without a magnifying glass.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/89056025@N00/14629731965/
Human-being-as-library is an attractive metaphor to me, not least because when I was growing up, I often visited my Dad at the academic reference library where he worked. Plus my Mom was a writer and our home was full of books.
Reading was always a great way to live in my head.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/89056025@N00/14606755696/
Antony Gormley is famous for making casts of his own body. His art prompts us to ask deep questions about the meaning of human embodiment and habitation, such as, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we could stand on the ceiling?”
But as some of the art unearthed at Pompeii demonstrates, people have been indulging in gravity-defying fantasies for a long time.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/89056025@N00/14443141189/
One of the sculptures I particularly liked was a human skeleton with the skull substituted for the pelvis and vice versa. Such acts of imagination strike me as essential to who we are as social and ecological beings, attractive as it might be to pretend that we are entirely scrutable — recorded in the Book of Life or programmed in the hard drive of our genes. Besides, 90% of the cells in our bodies belong to microorganisms.
a blown-glass sculpture
of the HIV virus—
loud children swarm past
Liking these travel-thought-poetry-thought pieces.
Thanks!