Body Underworlds
My apologies to loyal readers for long silence. When I began this blog I promised myself never, like a deadline-harried journalist, to post unless I had something to say, and various non-cybernetic duties have recently commanded my attention. Look for a longer piece in late March. In the meantime, I am informed that the following letter to the editor will appear in the coming edition of the San Diego Jewish Journal:
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It is one thing for more or less paganized Southern California to entertain repeatedly the traveling exhibit of the human dead called "Body Worlds." It is quite another for a so-called Jewish Journal to advertise it.
What pretends to be a museum exhibit of scientific interest is, from the Jewish or indeed any religious viewpoint, a sacrilege—the reduction of the sacred human bodies of actual people to curiosities to be exhibited in the name of reductive scientism or post-modern sensationalism or both.
It makes no difference that the people who once lived in these bodies gave their permission to be polymerized and put on display. Their benightedness does not justify ours. Nor is the exhibit justified by the pretense of advancing anatomical education, the defense indulged in by the ghoulish Dr. Gunther Liebschen von Hagens, who admits that he is “forced in his daily work to reject the taboos and convictions that people have about death and the dead” and is “asking viewers to transcend their fundamental beliefs and convictions about our joint and inescapable fate.” Can you not recognize the familiar cold-blooded tones of atheistic rationalist pride?
Von Hagens thinks of himself as a heroic defender of the scientific freedom to treat the human body as a mere thing in the name of rubbing viewers’ noses in the cold hard facts of physical mortality, a freedom that seems not to be hampered in the least by anyone. But must the Jewish Journal participate in the promotion of this depressingly unresisted giant step toward barbarism?
_________
It is one thing for more or less paganized Southern California to entertain repeatedly the traveling exhibit of the human dead called "Body Worlds." It is quite another for a so-called Jewish Journal to advertise it.
What pretends to be a museum exhibit of scientific interest is, from the Jewish or indeed any religious viewpoint, a sacrilege—the reduction of the sacred human bodies of actual people to curiosities to be exhibited in the name of reductive scientism or post-modern sensationalism or both.
It makes no difference that the people who once lived in these bodies gave their permission to be polymerized and put on display. Their benightedness does not justify ours. Nor is the exhibit justified by the pretense of advancing anatomical education, the defense indulged in by the ghoulish Dr. Gunther Liebschen von Hagens, who admits that he is “forced in his daily work to reject the taboos and convictions that people have about death and the dead” and is “asking viewers to transcend their fundamental beliefs and convictions about our joint and inescapable fate.” Can you not recognize the familiar cold-blooded tones of atheistic rationalist pride?
Von Hagens thinks of himself as a heroic defender of the scientific freedom to treat the human body as a mere thing in the name of rubbing viewers’ noses in the cold hard facts of physical mortality, a freedom that seems not to be hampered in the least by anyone. But must the Jewish Journal participate in the promotion of this depressingly unresisted giant step toward barbarism?
posted by G.Rap | 7:37 AM
1 Comments:
I saw the body exhibit in Boston. I remember walking into the hall feeling a queasy. I left feeling sad and disappointed. If the exhibit had simply stayed an anatomy exhibit, I would have marveled. One should approach a dead body queasy, but beyond then there is much a body can teach – ask a second year medical student, a coroner, a poet, a friend, a relative. Von Hagen's totally missed the point. Dead bodies are not artists’ materials. The erect, eviscerated, flayed, and splayed bodies in 'living' poses did not communicate the physical poetry of exertion or rest. The false red bodies with their fake eyes did not suggest life or vitality. When I came upon the skinned body of a young soccer player, all I could think was he had been someone's son. You cannot pretend a dead body is anything else than what it is. I don't think von Hagens understood life as well as he should have.
The sight that most moved me was a dissected brained in display case. A bluish stain the size of a quarter marred the frontal lobe. A cerebral hemorrhage. It had killed a brain, and with it a mind and heart and life. I have not seen anything which so dramatically made clear the mystery of flesh and spirit.
I have attended deaths. It is startling how hollow the body is when the soul departs it. I have seen mummies in exhibit. I saw the Irish bog man. Lenin and Khomeini are still on exhibit. Lincoln was, I heard, until he got too black to look at. I never know quite what to make of the sight of a dead man in a glass case. I looked at my Uncle Walter lain in his pine box – the undertaker used stuffing to give him a big happy smile, the kind he never wore in life. We keep waiting for the death to tell us something – anything!
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