Friday, July 22, 2011
Fulcrum
So much was going on at one time; I'm empty now inside. But I know what it is. I have put my inner self to sleep, for a little while, and am trying my luck in the hard-edged, concrete world of the outside. Once I have secured a better place for the animal I can turn back in on myself and water the seeds that have gone to sleep under the soil.
Thursday, July 21, 2011
Life in Death
I'll tell you about another time I felt happy. It was towards the end of our Anatomy class, when our teacher told us that some of the kids from the Zoology class were offering a look at their dissections, you know-- to see what was going on at the other branches of the taxonomic tree.
A bunch of us were curious to check it out. We were told that the Zoo class got specimens in from all over the county, and dissected them, putting their skeletons up for display. All of us had done our cadaver dissection at that point, and weren't about to be put off by a little biology.
Anyway, when I walked in the door, it was amazing. They had a deer, a mountain lion, and a fox all in various stages of dissection. The deer was laid out on a large table, with its open belly looking like a barrel. The scarlet blood pooled between its ribs. There was fur and blood everywhere.
The smell was intense and unmistakable. The animals were not treated with any sort of preservative, and the ripe stench of dead biological matter had well set in. Flies buzzed around. The only time I could remember smelling anything like it was when I cleaned out the fridges filled with chicken when I worked at a barbecue joint.
The whole thing was fantastic. It was savage, intense, messy. Students were walking around with filtration masks and gloves while the vibrantly dead figures lay, exploded open, on various surfaces. There were skeleton models of various animals set up around the room.
As I walked around, I was joined by the girl I had a pretty severe crush on. We strode the room, peering over people's shoulders, taking in the pools of blood and the skin and the muscles and the bones and the paws and the teeth. The smell was like rotten vinyl. Her hair looked like the red patch of a blackbird's wing. I felt great. Some atavistic part of my brain was definitely being spoken to, some simian part that looked at the slaughterhouse scene and saw only triumph. I felt like picking up a femur and running out to smash the first thing I saw, hooting all the while. It was gross and primeval and totally exhilarating. I wished I could visit the room whenever I wanted, to get some sort of visceral impact.
My modern routine is fairly safe and sanitary, for the time being. But it was nice to look at animals, to see biology in an up-close and impolite way, to know that some sort of identification with carnage rumbles and paces around the back of my modern, civilized brain. It's reassuring.
A bunch of us were curious to check it out. We were told that the Zoo class got specimens in from all over the county, and dissected them, putting their skeletons up for display. All of us had done our cadaver dissection at that point, and weren't about to be put off by a little biology.
Anyway, when I walked in the door, it was amazing. They had a deer, a mountain lion, and a fox all in various stages of dissection. The deer was laid out on a large table, with its open belly looking like a barrel. The scarlet blood pooled between its ribs. There was fur and blood everywhere.
The smell was intense and unmistakable. The animals were not treated with any sort of preservative, and the ripe stench of dead biological matter had well set in. Flies buzzed around. The only time I could remember smelling anything like it was when I cleaned out the fridges filled with chicken when I worked at a barbecue joint.
The whole thing was fantastic. It was savage, intense, messy. Students were walking around with filtration masks and gloves while the vibrantly dead figures lay, exploded open, on various surfaces. There were skeleton models of various animals set up around the room.
As I walked around, I was joined by the girl I had a pretty severe crush on. We strode the room, peering over people's shoulders, taking in the pools of blood and the skin and the muscles and the bones and the paws and the teeth. The smell was like rotten vinyl. Her hair looked like the red patch of a blackbird's wing. I felt great. Some atavistic part of my brain was definitely being spoken to, some simian part that looked at the slaughterhouse scene and saw only triumph. I felt like picking up a femur and running out to smash the first thing I saw, hooting all the while. It was gross and primeval and totally exhilarating. I wished I could visit the room whenever I wanted, to get some sort of visceral impact.
My modern routine is fairly safe and sanitary, for the time being. But it was nice to look at animals, to see biology in an up-close and impolite way, to know that some sort of identification with carnage rumbles and paces around the back of my modern, civilized brain. It's reassuring.
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