It’s May day. 34 degrees. Sunny. The May Day protests have begun and I have been busy planning a camping trip, drafting parts of a slide deck for an upcoming presentation, and squinting at an old black and white photo in an attempt to translate the text of an Egyptian sarcophogus. I have no idea where I put my magnifying glass… but I eventually get it finished. Part of it reads the following, *‘An offering which the king gives Anubis, the one before the divine booth, upon his mountain. The one in the wat, lord of the sacred land. A good burial in (the) wonderful tomb of (the) necropolis, the revered one before the great god, Nakhtankh, the justified.’* before going on the name different gods and how revered Nakhtankh was before each of them. I’m a poor student, I need to make flashcards for the names of the gods, I need to translate more statues and sarcophogi, I need to unlock the words put on display at the museum without translation… It bothers me to no end that museums do that… I once went into a museum and walked up to a ancient intricate golden label and I wanted to read what it said on the card next to it, but all it said was the date and that it was in fact a label, I died inside. I think that’s one of the many reasons I want to learn hieroglyphs, Old English, Hebrew, and Latin. The museum is a place of objects cut off from culture, time, and translation. A place to get exposed to art like one gets exposed to light from a lightbulb instead of the sun. There’s something false about that, something broken, something lost… I don’t want exposure. I want inundation. I wan’t to drown in stories, histories, tales, lives lived, lives lost, the little moments between people, the whispers, the prayers, the slang, the doodles, what they thought was worth remembering, what they mourned losing and so much more. We don’t get that at the museum. We get stolen objects cut off from everything they represent and cut off from the people that object means so much to. I want my education the same way… I want to pour over maps, study philosophy of the ancients, not as a modern student looking at it through the lens of our modern world, but by attempting to recreate how they viewed their own world in their time. I want scrolls on my desk, ink pots, oak gall ink, and papyrus… I want to make my own illuminated manuscript, my own handwritten herbal, tactile things, real things. When I listen to lectures on Leonardo DaVinci, I want to pour over his journals, I want to make my own silverpoint and scratch it onto handmade surfaces prepared with boneash. I don’t know what you call this, so I’m labeling it ‘Experiential Scholarship’ and it’s something I think we all need in our day to day lives. Especially as our world become more and more digital. I don’t know, I feel like we are losing more and more every day. More our world, more of cultural memory, artifacts, physical objects, species, landscapes and lives. What can we do about it, if not to fall headfirst into it all and make it a part of us all over again?