| March
13, 2006
Body Worlds
Bill and I went to see Body
Worlds in Philadelphia this
weekend. Bill's a massage therapist, and he thought I'd like it,
given what I'm studying.
 It
was intense, and I learned a lot about the body. Previously, my knowledge
of the body was nil. If I thought about it at all, I saw it as a
bag of skin over a vague collection of organs and structural parts.
There weren't any visual gross outs, which I feared,
but you definitely have to wrap your mind around the moral gross-out
factor. This woman died eight months pregnant, and her
provacative pose seemed incongruous with the baby showing in her
womb.
But in the end I think the show's
educational appeal outweighs it's questionable taste. And taste
is an offshoot of our squeamish, puritanical culture,
which abhors death. A few weeks ago a woman dropped 23 stories
from the building where my friend Christian lives. He stumbled onto
the scene and made himself look at her body for
half an hour, until the police and EMT's made him leave. He
said he looked because he's a writer, and also because our
society tries to pretend death doesn't exist. He's right about that.
We hide bodies in Iraq, send people to die alone in nursing
homes, and for funerals, we treat dead bodies as if they're still
alive.
I saw lots of dead bodies, and lots
of penises. Lots of black lungs diseased from smoking. And the female
sexual organs were disappointing. I always imagined fallopian
tubes and ovaries as lovely flowers, but these were barely
noticeable shrunken little husks.
 The
organs were okay, but I really loved the body's structure - bones,
muscles, nerves. I didn't realize how complicated muscles are.
They're layered, and they overlap and interweave.
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