frozen in time

[The following is a short review that I did of the Body Worlds 2 exhibit when it came to the Ontario Science Centre a few years ago. Since the plastinated cadavers have returned, I thought I would re-post it here.]

♦

DEATH AND THE METHODS OF EDUCATION

I spent this afternoon surrounded by dead bodies.

While we can thank the Swede, Susanne Wiigh-Masak, for figuring out how to freeze-dry them before shaking them into dust, it is the German anatomist Gunther von Hagens we can congratulate for learning how to turn them into plastic. Using a patented method he stumbled across in 1977, he is capable of replacing the organic fluids of the deceased with synthetic polymers, effectively transforming cadavers into rigid display pieces: rendered authentically inert. The controversial scientist, who has been in and out of legal predicaments over the course of his career—on charges as varied as illegal importation of the dead to the misrepresentation of his professional distinctions—has been at this game for a while now, and the more recent results of his efforts are presently on display at the Ontario Science Centre, under the moniker of Body Worlds 2. The models are human, preserved at varying degrees of dissection, and arranged in a boggling array of painstaking poses and presentments. These are the real undead, or at least, the un-decomposed, halted on their journey back to the elements of their creation. We can now observe them, suspended, as edifying entertainment: foisting a javelin; illusionally vivisected and spread; sometimes, sliced laterally and fanned into a deck of cross sections; and all the while imitating, or somehow referencing, the life that was there at one time, if life were to continue without skin, or fat, or movement.

Besides the ethical and moral quandaries that were disturbingly absent from the exhibit, so too was the element which science is, although not incapable of, so often guilty of voiding from experience: a sense of reverence. The spectacle was purely clinical, and addressed innovation much more readily than mystery; even though what we were looking at is still very much a mystery: the body, halted and empty.

The room was adorned with quotes, great banners courtesy of thinkers and wordsmiths. It was festooned with applicable dogmas, cut and paste without regard to culture or epoch.

Oh, what a piece of work is man…

(Though you might consider that in the context, Hamlet’s tone was quite acerbic.)

And one from Saint Thomas Aquinas, who imagined a greater purpose, further than simply function in the human form, which is so elegant in symmetry. Does it not suggest a higher design, he asks? A hint of the divine?

Perhaps, but the Greek philosopher was quite plain in his sentiments: death is beyond good and evil, as they are based on sensation, and sensation is rooted in the body. Beyond sensation there is cessation, and therefore nothing. So, there it is.

Not so much after all. No need to concern yourself. They are, in the end, just dead bodies.

It is possible that we now pretend to be a civilization rooted in a reasonable god, one that has freed us from any superstitious notions about the used vessels of life and the stigmas that surround them, but we aren’t; not yet. I’m not sure that I can pretend to forget that. I’m not sure I can really believe in the tinkerers that would not only take it apart and study, but then display it so brashly, with such vulgarity. Some taboos develop in order to harness and protect the intangibles of our lives, which are just as intrinsic as blood and breath. Maybe the dead are not meant to be entertaining, even if they are educational.

Maybe the disquiet I feel is the result of transgressing something, part of that which vacates the body after it stops. Something more.

Or maybe they were just gross.

boys who don’t read

succor

It was a toss up between a support group for the mood disorder or one for the HIV. It was question of which was more pressing: which edge was more keenly felt. At this point, from my perspective,  the two seem ineluctably intertwined. In the end—and after a long circumlocutory path of deliberation—I decided to join one for people newly diagnosed with the virus. Last night, as nervous as nerves can be, I came to a little room and sat with some other equally un-eased men, fidgeting in their chairs. I folded my hands in my lap and tried to look calm. I looked at my shoes. My heart fluttered like a bird in a cage.

When I was vetted for the group a week ago, the coordinators asked for three things I was looking to get out of the experience. I could initially only think of two: “to hear how other people have been dealing with the diagnosis,” and “to lessen my sense of isolation.” They nodded sagely. “And friends!” I added at last. “I’d like to make some new friends.” It seemed an obvious sort of thing to put on the list. Of course, as soon as I did, I was sure that I would probably end up loathing everyone else in the group.

I needn’t have worried. Although I’m probably the youngest person there, everyone’s fine. Everyone’s lovely. It will be a kind and supportive ten weeks together. It will do what it’s supposed to do.

After the break one of the men returned from outside and surveyed the room, pushing his lighter back into his pocket. “Well, I’m obviously the only sinner in the room,” he said.

“Oh, all my sins are invisible,” I said to him cheerfully.

storytellers

It’s funny how what you’re exposed to becomes so inter-referential once you have your eyes opened. More about John Cheever from The Observer:

Nor – who knows why? – is he much taught in universities.

How can this be? It is unfathomable, especially in the case of the stories. They are so very beautiful, and singular. Cheever has all the dash of Scott Fitzgerald – an evanescence that calls to mind fine, cold champagne – but he combines it miraculously with a desolate modernism that is all his own. “Cheever’s characters are adult, full of adult darkness, corruption, and confusion,” wrote John Updike in a review of Bailey’s biography he must have written shortly before he [Updike] died. “They are desirous, conflicted, alone, adrift… His errant protagonists move, in their fragile suburban simulacra of paradise, from one island of momentary happiness to the imperilled next.”

The piece is in response to the mentioned biography. It makes a nice precis of the man’s life, especially for those of us who will probably never be moved to read 600 pages or so of his existence in detail. That’s a lot of alcoholism and closeted gay sex.

shots

Medical professionals are out to stab me. With needles. Frequently.

Lately this has been to put something in rather than take something out. (I have given liters of blood to the labs over the past year or so: testing, testing, testing to see which levels say what; where my danger levels locate; whether organs lie fallow or functional.) Vaccinations are in season. Hepatitis B is at the top of the list.

I received shot number two, booster number one, on Friday. I didn’t think much of it at the time: a little prick, a little pain, a band-aid. I was in and out of the clinic in minutes. But then I was at a workshop yesterday and was almost involuntarily nulled right out of consciousness during the lecture, and on my way home felt like crying from the effort it took to place one foot in front of the other.

What is wrong with me? I wondered, and started to feel a little alarmed.

You’ve been shot with a virus, I suddenly recalled. Deliberately. Inert it comes; inert it stays; and your body works around it: antibodies, with any luck, abound. I’ve gotten very little done today. And isn’t it nice to have a working immune system—along with trying to stay awake while it works me right out of commission.

Won’t H1N1 be fun.

audible discourse

A more conceptually adventurous advertising campaign for books:

If you’ve travelled on the subway in Toronto over the past few days, you may have noticed an odd new promotional campaign by HarperCollins Canada centred around Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes and three other titles. The campaign consists of four posters, each with a simple, striking image on it: a woman’s face, a shark, a fetus, or John Lennon and Yoko Ono. There’s no text whatsoever (save a tiny HarperCollins logo in the corner), and in the centre of each image is a tiny port for plugging headphones into.

• Scott MacDonald, Quill & Quire

Pugging in rewards the interpolater with an excerpt from one of the four publications represented.  Although it’s commerce driven, I find it a little more innovative than the ostensibly enriching Poetry On The Way, which frequently makes me wonder: dear me, why?

visitation

A little man with a sparking clockwork device in his pocket, and pupils that reflected light like flat silver buttons, left clues of himself all around—premonitions of a time and place somewhere in the future: he and I would have a conversation in an attic room. Everything that appeared as I went about the city was either foreshadowing or research. As I searched for clues to connect with the visions, a name appeared, and so I went to the library to look it up; only to discover that the name belonged to me, a pseudonym, or, if it wasn’t a alias, there was at least a piece of writing filed under it that was my own. There was the scene again, written down; the same scene that had been plaguing me through unbidden augury, as the days and streets rushed past.

I stepped into the page as across the threshold of a door.

The little man finally appeared in the small attic room, as expected. He was frightening enough to look at. He huffed. He told me “I’m very disappointed.”

“What?” I asked.

“Haven’t you figured it out?”

“Figured what out?”

“Very disappointing indeed.”

He had been hoping for something scarier. I asked him if I was responsible for the scene, the scene that we were playing out and that I had seen, quite clearly, so many ways before being brought into it bodily. He ignored me and asked me what came next. I told him. He said, “Obviously. But we really were hoping for something truly frightening.”

“You want me to tell scary stories?”

“You have it in you. But this…” he cast around, “this is nothing.”

“I found you scary.”

“What? The ominous little man?”

“You’re saying that I could have done better?”

“I’m saying I have to be going.” He shook his head.

“I made you too personal. Too cerebral.”

He perked up a little and looked at me. His eyes flashed. “Yes?”

“You’ve appeared this way, but I only find you disturbing because you’re knowledge-based. You come from knowing too much.”

“Only a few people are gifted enough to scare the hell out of people. We had high hopes for you. It’s sad. Time to go.”

“Wait! Tell me what all of this is about.”

“No. This may have been a waste of time.”

“Are you telling me to write something terrifying?”

He looked at me again: white lights in the dim attic. “Bone chilling. With any luck, you’ll recognize me again.”

And then he left, out the back door. A window cut into the wall looked out onto the enclosed staircase, but the landing was behind the door, occluding my view of him. The walls of the stairwell flickered with fizzled blue light. There was a grumble, and then a dark shape harrumphing down the stairs.

I was left alone in the room.

upon a time

Beside the fact that guardian.co.uk may be transposing portions of my own inner dialogue to get ideas for its content these days, there is an entry posted by David Barnett related to fairy tales and their age-appropriateness up on their books blog:

When our son was very young I embarked on a mission to expand his literary horizons and purchased a copy of the fairy stories of the Brothers Grimm to read to him each night. He was little more than a babe in arms at the time, and the whole enterprise was really a tool to lull him into a peaceful sleep. He often dozed off within a couple of pages of each story, but I would continue to read aloud in hushed tones, largely for my own edification.

If he slept soundly, though, I went to bed more troubled. The Disneyfication of fairy stories over the past 70-odd years since Uncle Walt released his animated take on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs has put into most people’s minds a primary-coloured world of beautiful people facing dastardly villains and apparently insurmountable obstacles on their path to a life of happiness alongside Mr or Ms (or, more likely, HRH) Right; a world where good always triumphs and there’s no better relationship than one built upon the size of a kingdom. A world, largely, for children. But the picture painted by the Grimms was of a vast, dark, world-encompassing forest in which still darker deeds were committed – and went unpunished.

They’ve gone further: over on the site they’re publishing a whole range of the tales themselves, along with some first-rate, bite-sized analyses of their themes.

ah, education

I’m presently inundated with scraps from my past, after cleaning out the attic of the old homestead with Turtle on Thanksgiving. I restricted myself to one, supposedly manageable, box of stuff, but it’s full of little bits and pieces, all snaggled up in the tar-paper of memory. I’ve been half-heartedly poking through it.

AI has forbidden me to tell him any more stories from my childhood, on the grounds that they are generally too horrible and depressing. When he placed this ban I was a little taken aback, as I’ve never really viewed my youth as being utterly terrible, or not even so awful that I am disinclined to revisit it. I do recognize that it was hard,  but I’ve always assumed it was only as hard as it is for everyone who’s a little different, especially growing up in small towns (or, even smaller than small towns: villages and scant crossroads mired in the middles of nowhere).

However, I do get a sense of it objectively from time to time, and I begin to recognize that my experience may have been a little more harrowing than that of the average youth. Case in point being this short piece that I had written at the end of grade 8, after being asked to produce your fondest memory from grade school:

To tell of the things that have happened to me at ______ along the lines of happiness and joy is easy in the simplicity of the list. The total amount of things would not amount to over a paragraph long, and I have no intention of making experiences that were totally horrid sound wonderful. Truthfully my life here was a living nightmare. The uncounted times of me coming home with a knot in my throat and unshed tears coming to my eyes are so many that I could not even estimate them.

It goes on, of course, outlining a few examples year to year, and calumniating with a parting shot, “Thank you for scaring me for life ______ I’ll ALWAYS remember you for it!!!!!!!” which may have been a little over the top. Actually, reading it now, I’m struck by two things. First, that while I do still remember the school body for its adversarial bent, even more clearly I remember my teacher going apoplectic after handing in my little scripted gem. (I think his exact words were “It’s and insult to your classmates, an insult to your school, and most importantly, I find it an insult to me.”) Second, although it’s a tidy bit of prose for a kid in grade 8, I suspect I’ve always been inclined to write the way that I speak, and if I was that formal in elementary school, some of the problems I experienced may not be such a mystery.

an extra hundred acres

Well, reviews of the new Pooh adventure are finally coming in. The word? Superfluous but still somehow apropos:

It’s a steel-hearted grown-up who can read the last chapter of The House at Pooh Corner without getting a lump in the throat. Christopher Robin is going away to school; his days of doing Nothing with his cuddly toys – Winnie the Pooh, Piglet and the rest – are at an end. He begs Pooh not to forget him – but we know that childish things are being put away. The sense of childhood’s fleetingness is a choker: don’t ever read it on a train.

A sequel is surely otiose – as contrary to the spirit of the enterprise as “Hamlet II” or news that Bambi’s mum just has a flesh-wound after all. But that hasn’t stopped Egmont from trying, with the blessing of AA Milne’s estate. What is remarkable is how well David Benedictus’s new stories work, complete “with decorations by Mark Burgess”.

• Neville Hawcock, FT.com

I remain a little skeptical; however, I suppose if I’m a fan of reading Pooh Bear as a stellar embodiment of the teachings of Lau-Tse, then I can swallow an estate-endorsed sequel.