Lughnasa                        Waxing Harvest Moon

Sin and Salvation has ended for me.  It will leave without another tour on my part, though I may go check it out once more on my own.  One of the most pleasurable tour experiences I’ve had in what is now 8 + years of volunteering at the MIA, this  show brought together a number of interests of mine, including the PRB.

With most things I do I hold myself to a very high level of expectation, a curse left over from days as a good student.  Maybe I should say, as they do often in the Hebrew Scriptures, a curse and blessing.  The blessing usually comes in the preparation which always gets my full attention.  I love research.  The curse begins to strike soon after, that is, when any work has to go beyond my study and into the world.

First, there is the anxiety.  Have I prepared well?  Have I prepared enough?  Have I focused on the right material?  If these questions sound familiar from finals week, you know what I’m talkin’ about.  Then, there is the time just before and sometimes in the very beginning of a presentation or tour when the same questions come flooding back, always in a place where there is no more hope of doing more.

At some point, usually after an introductory moment, the anxiety subsides and the presentation takes over on its own.  Sometimes, a critical look or remark can throw me even then.  That’s the worst, to be thrown off after having found my stride.

Sometimes then, at the very end,  when the preparation and the presentation is over, if people make a substantive show of appreciation, the blessing returns.  At this time it is a great boost, a confirmation of what I always wish for, the coming together of content and audience for an aha moment, or a huh!  I hadn’t thought of that.

Today, on this last tour of the Sin and Salvation show, I experienced a double blessing:  a show of support with good questions, interaction, clapping, people shaking my hand, others staying behind to discuss their insights, even a woman who went on the very same tour a week ago and returned with a friend to do it all over again.  This was a double blessing because as a special exhibition I had given my tour over and over.  Most of the time it was well received, but this affirmation at the end gave  all the research and other tours a positive glow.

Sin and Salvation can have that effect, I guess.

Lughnasa                         New Moon (Harvest Moon)

Sin and Salvation tour last night went well.  Around 40 people poked and prodded, offered their ideas and shared insights as we went on my quirky tour of William Holman Hunt’s paintings and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.  It was the third Thursday at the museum, too.  On this night their are led lights to give lobby walls and halls a different color texture, white furniture in conversation pods, a cash bar and music, this night an all woman band playing indie rock.  The museum felt young, hip, happening.  I liked the energy, the feel of it.

The scene that would have attracted me in my twenties and thirties.  See and be seen, so important to singles gave an opportunity for dress up, which some took to the mid-Victorian extreme in honor, I imagine, of the Sin and Salvation exhibit.  A  man in top hat and green vest escorted a hoop-skirted young woman.  A woman in a feather hat and post-WW II purple dress added a retro flair, too.

Lughnasa                                   Waxing Green Corn Moon

A tour with students attending a summer Chinese class went well.  These kids were a bit shy at first, but they warmed up and began to interact.  We investigated the honoring of ancestors, the development and elaboration of Confucian thought and Taoist thought as well as the introduction and spread of Buddhism.  I’ve still not hit on a good way to talk about these three.  In the West we often refer to them as religions, but they’re not, at least in their original forms, religions.  They are philosophies of life, but philosophy of life is an opaque term.  The word religion obfuscates and philosophy creates confusion.  Still a conundrum.

After that tour I spent some time wandering in the temple, as Mark Odegard once referred to the MIA.  The American art tour for the Chilean students this Friday has forced me to investigate new works and revisit in a new way some I already know well.  Jean-Marie told me about a tour she gave called, Picturing America.  Some good tips there.

Lunch with Antra, Sally, Mary, Jean-Marie.  Mac and cheese from the bambino menu for me.  Back home.  Nap.

Now, work out.