Death and the Methods of Education
Body Worlds 2 at the Onatrio Science Centre
This afternoon was spent regarding dead bodies.
While we can thank the Swedish for freeze-drying them, it is the Germans we can congratulate for learning how to turn them into plastic. These are the real undead, or at least, the un-decomposed, halted on their journeys back to the elements of their creation. We can now watch 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 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 of thinkers and wordsmiths.
Oh, what a piece of work is man....
(Though one might consider that in that context, Hamlet's tone was quite acerbic.)
And Saint Thomas Aquinas, imagining a greater purpose than function in the human form, which is so elegant in symmetry. Does it not suggest a higher design? A hint of the divine? Perhaps, but the Greek philosopher was quite plain: 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 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, 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 apart and study, but display so brashly. Some taboos are developed to harness and protect the intangibles which are just as intrinsic to our lives as blood and breath. Maybe the dead are not entertaining, even if they are educational.
Maybe the disquiet I feel is the result of transgressing something that is part of that which vacates the body after it stops. Something more.
Or maybe they were just gross.
This afternoon was spent regarding dead bodies.
While we can thank the Swedish for freeze-drying them, it is the Germans we can congratulate for learning how to turn them into plastic. These are the real undead, or at least, the un-decomposed, halted on their journeys back to the elements of their creation. We can now watch 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 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 of thinkers and wordsmiths.
Oh, what a piece of work is man....
(Though one might consider that in that context, Hamlet's tone was quite acerbic.)
And Saint Thomas Aquinas, imagining a greater purpose than function in the human form, which is so elegant in symmetry. Does it not suggest a higher design? A hint of the divine? Perhaps, but the Greek philosopher was quite plain: 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 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, 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 apart and study, but display so brashly. Some taboos are developed to harness and protect the intangibles which are just as intrinsic to our lives as blood and breath. Maybe the dead are not entertaining, even if they are educational.
Maybe the disquiet I feel is the result of transgressing something that is part of that which vacates the body after it stops. Something more.
Or maybe they were just gross.
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