Death, knowledge, life: all of this fascinates me, were it not for the disgust toward the ignorance of many in our species, who in a million and a half years have not advanced beyond death, preparing it generation after generation with ever more sophisticated and perversely used tools.

This new editorial, which will appear during the holiday season and the beginning of the new year, connects in some ways to the previous cover and is a reflection on the theme of the year dedicated to museum intelligence.

What happens during a visit to a museum? Beyond the fact that it is not a very common practice, what truly occurs between the observer and the observed, between the perceiver and the perceived? Let us not call upon neuroscience for the moment; let us remain within the realm of “museum philology,” at the level of the “cogni-perceptive” macrosystem, or, to be consistent with our “Theory of Configuration,” which we will continue to share this season through the “Research” section of our site—let us ask what might happen in the visitor’s configuration.

Imagine a plane, a surface upon which we place, with imagination, what we represent of our life. During these Christmas holidays, we enter a museum still carrying the taste of marmalade on butter, cappuccino, or that strange mix of orange juice and toothpaste from the last dash back to the hotel room before heading out. On this “plane of re-imagined memories,” the projections of sensations and images from breakfast remain vivid: the caresses exchanged with a partner in the sweet idleness of the hotel bed, the ritual of dressing the children, already excited to have slept alone in a room with fridge and television.

The first display case shows the section of a body, or perhaps a war flag still stained with blood. We walk across a floor that tells us that near our home, engines for airplanes and trucks were once built. In the next hall, noble figures from 18th-century Genoa pose, gazing at us as if aware of being observed, almost certain that their image would last forever.

What truly happens, outside of us and within us? Again, let us not limit ourselves to neurological processes, to brain areas activated, to neurotransmitters and molecules produced, because that would be restrictive. We would need further exploration at the quantum scale, for example, to allow for a different reading, one not yet known.

In reality (though the word itself seems elusive here), whether or not we vary the scale of exploration, the only thing that ceases to exist, or rather, loses meaning, is “us,” the visitors. It is one of the many epiphanies of death, not confined to museums but always present, though in certain places it becomes more palpable, more concrete, rendering us less concrete ourselves.

We become like a great “intersection”, colleagues fond of coining pseudo-Anglicisms would say “hubs”, as if the plane of daily life described earlier were suddenly intersected by countless other planes. We may not perceive them directly, except as reverberations, aftertastes, confused states of mind, whirlwinds of images and sounds within us. We cannot place all this on the plane of our daily life, yet we sense the necessity of those further planes, which intersect and penetrate, making our everyday and instinctive dimensions inadequate, surpassed.

If for nothing else, museums have the peculiar ability to catalyze the emergence of new planes of projection. When nourished by information, reasoning, emotions, and interactions with various forms of energy (such as the work of a scholar), these planes become thresholds to true dimensions. What in art is identified as pathos becomes “epiphanized” in ever more engaging forms, influencing habits, lifestyles, professions, research, and existential confessions..

During these holidays, many visit depictions of the birth of Christ, conceived by Saint Francis of Assisi, offering an instant of that event according to the Gospels and ecclesiastical tradition. Why? In an era when theology was abstract and distant, Francis sought to return faith to its root: the simplicity of Christ’s birth. And yet, how many pray before this scene? How many, faced with artistic expressions, religious or otherwise, alter their condition to reach other modes of perception and behavior?

Here lies the crux of the matter, which physics and quantum biology may one day help explain. Are we certain that our psychosomatic unity cannot grant us access to infinite variants of ourselves, as if we were a “multiversal psychosomatic unit”? Each human being is an indivisible body-mind, yet at the same time reflects and influences infinite possibilities of self, like a resonance node in the multiverse. Perhaps this explains that strange state of mind, that subtle excitement, that true intellectual orgasm rewarding us whenever we become more aware of the relationship between ourselves and what surrounds us.

Death and knowledge intertwine here. Every relationship that brings greater awareness makes us die to what we were before, to become something else, beyond our former self, a new phase of the process. Forgive me, but I cannot help but think of the Highlander saga, with its “There can be only one,” stripped of its selective mode and transformed into an inclusive process, flowing toward a cosmic satori, where every perception-perceived relationship becomes being.

What a wondrous role culture plays! Were I a scribe of The Name of the Rose, I would write here of culture’s power. My thought turns to those who confuse culture with jobs, social status, or collective eugenics, as an expression of rivalry, separation, disaggregation.

The famous phrase “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one,” by George R. R. Martin, author of A Song of Ice and Fire, is prophetic in relation to this vision, as are the films and other epiphanic expressions that art and science have given our species.

That strange emotion, returning to the states of mind described earlier, which makes us feel more alive, perceiving ourselves as slightly other than our usual way of being in the world, could it not be the prelude to a more expanded and complete destiny? Are we certain of this dimension of ours, given that, despite all the wise men I have met in my life, none has ever truly demonstrated the existence of what we call life, except with arguments closer to a Buddhist dream than to a satisfying justification?

Death, knowledge, life: all of this fascinates me, were it not for the disgust toward the ignorance of many in our species, who in a million and a half years have not advanced beyond death, preparing it generation after generation with ever more sophisticated and perversely used tools. Instead of traversing the infinite dimensions that, like sirens, call us whenever we seek inspiration from their sister muses, even briefly, even in the simple visit to one of their temples, even with the taste of orange-flavored toothpaste from a Christmas holiday lingering in our mouths, banalities that may soon become distant memories of a lost everyday sweetness, which once tasted of infinity, played, as De André would say, in the shadow of the ruins of an April that will never know spring.