Death and life are often viewed as the hopeful beginning and the dreadful end.
Our relationship to our body, the instrument that is our filter to the outside world, is often ignored and clouded with fear and ignorance because of that beginning—but more likely because of that end.
I see through my eyes but I do not see my eyes.
Right now at OMSI you get the chance to see the eyes.
It is creepy and eerie in a way that is difficult to pinpoint, but nevertheless it is worthwhile.
Real skeletons strapped with muscle tissue and tendons, veins and organs flapping outward, kick-flip skateboards and jump hurdles down at OMSI in Portland, Ore. starting today.
Body Worlds 3, the brain-child of Dr. Gunther von Hagens, will be on display for anyone who has time to spare and a strong constitution in the stomach region.
If not, you might end up emptying your stomach onto a stomach.
The bodies are preserved, with consent from the donors, using a process known as plastination—developed and perfected at von Hagens’ own Institute for Plastination in Heidelberg, Germany.
Technicians inject different types of plastics into the body and replace the liquids, which preserves the body’s tissue in a pliable and creepy way that is supposedly permanent and makes it so the muscles and tendons shake and vibrate when people walk by.
Half of me expected the body’s eyes to dart and focus at me at any moment.
The exhibit is spread out over two floors in strategically lit rooms with large canvases draped down in the manner of great mansions or cathedrals displaying various quotes on death and our relationship with it made by some of the best thinkers our world has ever produced.
Suddenly death is not something marked with a tombstone and a few eloquent words etched in stone, it is a very real, very vibrant and colorful dissection of ourselves, to show that death is in an intimate and committed relationship with life.
At least that is what the exhibit conveys—death and how much a part of life it is.
However as I walked away from the collection of bodies posed in positions ranging from praying to running—all done with brains, livers, hearts and multiple other organs blown out the back so gawkers could amble by and stick their noses into someone’s else’s chest cavity—I had the much more profound impression of life and its relationship to death.
Here was an exhibit that showed me just exactly how the muscles lining the truck of my body bend and flex to keep me upright and balanced, a showcase that displayed just how negative a consequence smoking can be to the delicate tissues in our lungs.
And it came from the death and preservation of someone else.
We are living until we die and Body Worlds 3 blurs that line and shows just how close we are to the other side.
The “VIP” opening of the event coincided with the graduation ceremony of OHSU, so as I ambled around the completely exposed corpses of people long since dead, there were men and women in suits strolling beside me and making offhand medical observations on the form and function of the displays.
These were health workers who were “in the club.” They had been “seeing the eyes” for quite some time now.
As I leaned intently over a glass box containing the perfectly preserved enlarged heart of a person dead of a heart attack a very well dressed man with gold-rimmed glasses commented to his wife.
“I had a patient with a heart condition just like this one last week,” he said with a smile. “The guy croaked before we could get him into the O.R.”
Doctors and nurses and others intimately involved with the health industry have long dealt with life’s relationship to death while everyone else has voluntarily sheltered away from it.
We live everyday not really understanding how.
The health world knows and it is jaded, in a sense, to the point that they will smile and point out the reason a patient of theirs died last week.
Body Worlds 3 lets us into that exclusive club that sees the eyes, not just through them—even if we are not ready for it.
Welcome to the beginning of seeing the end… Or is it the other way around?
It is all in the eyes.
The love you give comes back in the end.
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1 comment:
Good post Tim. It was great attending with you. It's been my main topic of conversation today.
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