Cotton season has just ended and there's at least an inch of false snow tangled in the broken, desiccated stalks of now bare fields and gathered in drifts along the road's edge. It looks like there's been some kind of stuffed animal massacre, the Antietam of the plush toy world. The visual miscues are unsettling-- snow-like patches on the ground, the wintry haze and diffused light of dust storms (once the fields are cleared, the earth loses its mooring and takes off in big swirling clouds for more exciting places), and the uncertain horizons warbling in the silvery heat of mirage. Going on vision alone, it looks like December, but in reality it's just that the world is so hot everyone's given up tending it.
My geraniums are dead. This is just as well-- in life they looked fake, and in death they've taken on a much more believable and interesting shape. Now they look like the dirt-caked fingers of monkeys reaching out of the pot at nothing. The caladiums are going too, and have moved from thick, white heart shapes veined with green to collapsed, yellowed lace. I'm taking a special pleasure in watching the zinnias meet their apocalyptic end, since they were so aggressive and overbearing in their prime. Plus, I always thought their blossoms looked like the fake flowers on some moth-eaten old lady hat.
I watched a documentary on crank last night, which was interesting, but probably for all the wrong reasons. I have this fascination with documentaries that, whether on purpose or by accident, end up capturing someone else's absolute dog days, and then try to make some sense out of them, scrape together some salvageable truth to justify having filmed the whole thing. The wreckage on the screen was compelling in its simple portrayal of human misery and grief, but the truths I got out of it were uncomfortable: this too is rural America, not just my fields and skies and birds and trains. The other disturbing thing was how simple rock bottom can look-- a woman in her kitchen, the kettle on the stove, the embroidered potholders hanging on hooks, the free calendar from the insurance company tacked next to the fridge, and her husband filling a syringe with bubbly liquid the exact same sunny color as the paint on the walls, and then gently pulling her arm to him and flicking the reddish bruise hidden in the crook of her elbow. They're both crying. This is the Worst.
When I was a little kid, my parents used to shop at the first Whole Foods, which was in a small storefront on Lamar Boulevard in Austin. It opened in 1980 and a year later, there was a huge flood, the Memorial Day Flood of 1981, where all the creeks rose from their beds and came downtown to wash away cars, furniture, trash, people, and all the pianos from Strait Music, two of which were never found. On the north corner of the building, near the bicycle racks, an artist later painted two different high water marks, lovely little white-capped waves with scrolly dates. I remember standing next to them as a kid (one was higher than my head), and imagining water all around me and Austin floating by like too many toys at bath time. I was enchanted. (I was also, of course, thinking of the clear blue ocean water of childhood fantasy, not the fetid soup of actual floods).
It would be nice if there was a way to mark life's worst points with pretty painted watermarks, and hope that after the flood recedes (assuming it does and you don't have to go with it) this public monument would give some meaning to your loss. As a nation, we're fumbling with that-- there's still no 9/11 monument, despite all the elegant concept drawings. We can't seem to get a handle on how to represent it-- two giant beams of light? a reflection pool? a remembrance wall? a tree for each person? Or some silly movie (with Nicholas Cage of all people) trimming and wedging the whole mess into an easy cinematic formula with a touching Coldplay song in the background?
I don't think there's a clean answer, a neat way to tie up our low points for future remembering. When it happens, it's mostly a mess, and I say this from personal experience, having tried repeatedly to write an accurate and readable account of my own personal dog days. The past, I've found, is slippery. It means different things on different days, and there's no such thing as a complete inventory of the things you've lost or gained from living it. I've tried, many times, to make such an inventory, as if my life were one big cargo ship and I'm in charge of documenting the manifest for the safety and stability of the whole ship. But containers don't stay put; boxes don't stay packed. Life, for me at least, has a way of rocking the same types of things loose to rattle around in the hold and bash into other things, until I trudge down there and lash it all down again.
Wednesday, August 30, 2006
Monday, August 21, 2006
Custom markings
One block south of the town square, there is a small shop over which a faded yellow plastic sign hangs that reads, simply, "Shoe Repair." Inside, a man named Felipe Mejia makes incredible, handmade custom cowboy boots for people all over the state. His counters are stacked with photo albums containing pictures of his finished works-- boots with elaborate threaded scrollwork and punched-out leather designs of ranch brands, prickly pears, broncos, guitars, angels, hawks, roses, barbed wire, lightning bolts, skulls, crosses, hearts, longhorns, and volumes of initials. His boots are short, tall, pointy-toed, square-toed, rounded, high-heeled, flat-heeled, medium-heeled, and made from all types of leather in a rainbow of colors, all stacked in giant fragrant rolls in an unruly heap behind the counter.
This weekend was my husband's second visit to the store and my first. He and Mr. Mejia were striking up a deal on the pair of custom boots my husband has long dreamed of-- boots that will accommodate his "duck feet," which are broad in the front and almost dainty in the heel, and will also somehow solidify my husband's identity as a non-native, but enthusiastic, Texan. They converse easily and quickly in Spanish despite my husband's bashful request for patience as he "practices," and I flip through albums trying not to appear strained as I concentrate on understanding.
Like many things in this town, the boot shop is old. A yellowed notice on the wall announces the October 1985 tax rate change, and much of the ceiling is patched with crumbling cardboard to catch the leaks. Mr. Mejia has been working out of this shop for 25 years, and making boots since he was 9 years old. He's easily in his late sixties now, if not older. Flipping through volumes of lovingly made boots, it's easy for me to see that this man is an artist and a craftsman, an original, and when he's gone, there will likely be no one to replace him.
The inevitability of decline in this town, its slow and constant decay, is no longer novel and poetic to me-- if anything it's grown irritating and tends to make me feel even more isolated. The long list of what's not available here, from organic hippie macaroni and Asian pears to bookstores and Argetinian wine, grows longer by the day, and less funny. But in things like the boot shop, things that are unique to this part of the country and saturated with its history of struggle, migration, and its ties to the cycles of nature, the process of loss and decay seems much sadder. Something will really be missing when we lose this.
My husband has decided on chocolate brown leather, calfskin for its softness instead of the wrinkled, weathered look of bullskin. He's chosen a personalized logo, a symbol of his occupation that he's proud of, and has found the perfect color of leather and stitching for it. Mr. Mejia traced and measured both of his feet onto a long white sheet of paper, six different measurements per foot, and scribbled notes to himself in Spanish in the margins. He's even adding a special tuck in the leather of one heel to accommodate the massive callous my husband has from years of ill-fitting footwear.
Well satisfied, they both turn to me with the question I've been dreading: what type of boots would I like?
I'm stuck here. For all the reasons of beautiful craftsmanship and one-of-a-kindness, I'd like a pair. Plus, we've agreed that moving around so much brings with it the pleasant responsibility of finding one nice thing per posting that really reflects that place, and to invest in it as a way of keeping track of each place and honoring the time we spent there. Boots definitely fit that definition.
My problem is this: being from Austin, I've never quite felt comfortable in flexing my Texan-ness among other Texans. Out of state is another story-- in Florida I caught my accent thickening when I was totally clueless and needed help with something, the implicit message being, "Cut me some slack-- I'm not from around here." Out of sheer homesickness, I even bought a shirt online that says, "Fuck Y'all, I'm from Texas," and wore it to dive bars and drunken Marine parties.
But every time I go back home, the message is clearer-- Austin is different from most of Texas. With every anti-Bush bumpersticker, every cross-dressing hobo, and every vegan diner I pass, I realize that what used to look like normal old city to me is in fact consciously, and even aggressively weird compared to much of the rest of the state. So for me to don something as Texan as cowboy boots is cause for more than a moment's cognitive dissonance-- am I allowed to do this? Does this look pitifully wrong on me?
Added to this is the pressure of personalization. What image symbolizes Me? I've wrestled with this one for years, even back in the comforting bizarro world of Austin, because there everyone has at least one visible tattoo. The utterly blank canvas of my skin has nothing to do with chasteness or notions of future employability-- it simply reflects profound indecision and the inability to identify something important enough to want it carved into my flesh with a vibrating needle. And this is not for lack of looking-- I'd guess that I've weighed ideas for a tattoo at least five times a week since I was 16. It's just that nothing has tipped the scales.
I've even designed tattoos for other people and sat in during the disturbing moments when my drawings were permanently etched into someone else's hide. But when it comes to me? To my translucent Irish skin? Suddenly up comes the image of local police on the evening news, having to identify my lifeless body by a silly tattoo; or of me trying to blend seamlessly into Latin America after having committed some terrible crime and being given away by my tattoo; or being captured by hostile terrorists, stripped naked, and trying to pretend I'm not American, only to be betrayed by a tattoo; and, perhaps the most improbable scenario, me on the red carpet of some gala event, dressed in Prada and bearing a tattoo that long ago lost all its significance to me but remains trapped under my skin until I can pony up the money for lasers.
Why does all of this come up when I'm considering whether or not to get a pair of custom cowboy boots? Because they're expensive, and I know someone will work hard on them. Because this man, who will not be around forever, will spend four months on them, leaving his personal mark on them, for me, and I'd like to think that if he's going to do that, I could do him the courtesy of choosing a design that has some meaning for me.
And why is it so hard to choose something? I know pretty much who I am and what I like in this world, and I like to think that in some ways I'm unique. Perhaps the problem is the editor in me, the overthinker with the big red pen who loves to cross out huge sections of my past with the margin notes, "overwrought," and "muddled-- needs direction." The editor in me always holds back, reminding me that "there's a better way to say that," or "this particular issue will get clearer with some perspective-- best to wait a while and see what develops." Especially now, when I know there are things about myself I'd like to change, and when every eight months forces huge change anyway, committing to any kind of identifying marker, even if it is a special treat, is difficult and anxiety-producing.
What I'd like to know, from anyone who's gotten a tattoo, from "traditional" and "non-traditional" Texans, from anyone who's ever struggled with identity or wondered what the hell they're doing in life, is how do you know when you've hit that sweet spot of finding something purely "you"? And how do you hold on to it?
This weekend was my husband's second visit to the store and my first. He and Mr. Mejia were striking up a deal on the pair of custom boots my husband has long dreamed of-- boots that will accommodate his "duck feet," which are broad in the front and almost dainty in the heel, and will also somehow solidify my husband's identity as a non-native, but enthusiastic, Texan. They converse easily and quickly in Spanish despite my husband's bashful request for patience as he "practices," and I flip through albums trying not to appear strained as I concentrate on understanding.
Like many things in this town, the boot shop is old. A yellowed notice on the wall announces the October 1985 tax rate change, and much of the ceiling is patched with crumbling cardboard to catch the leaks. Mr. Mejia has been working out of this shop for 25 years, and making boots since he was 9 years old. He's easily in his late sixties now, if not older. Flipping through volumes of lovingly made boots, it's easy for me to see that this man is an artist and a craftsman, an original, and when he's gone, there will likely be no one to replace him.
The inevitability of decline in this town, its slow and constant decay, is no longer novel and poetic to me-- if anything it's grown irritating and tends to make me feel even more isolated. The long list of what's not available here, from organic hippie macaroni and Asian pears to bookstores and Argetinian wine, grows longer by the day, and less funny. But in things like the boot shop, things that are unique to this part of the country and saturated with its history of struggle, migration, and its ties to the cycles of nature, the process of loss and decay seems much sadder. Something will really be missing when we lose this.
My husband has decided on chocolate brown leather, calfskin for its softness instead of the wrinkled, weathered look of bullskin. He's chosen a personalized logo, a symbol of his occupation that he's proud of, and has found the perfect color of leather and stitching for it. Mr. Mejia traced and measured both of his feet onto a long white sheet of paper, six different measurements per foot, and scribbled notes to himself in Spanish in the margins. He's even adding a special tuck in the leather of one heel to accommodate the massive callous my husband has from years of ill-fitting footwear.
Well satisfied, they both turn to me with the question I've been dreading: what type of boots would I like?
I'm stuck here. For all the reasons of beautiful craftsmanship and one-of-a-kindness, I'd like a pair. Plus, we've agreed that moving around so much brings with it the pleasant responsibility of finding one nice thing per posting that really reflects that place, and to invest in it as a way of keeping track of each place and honoring the time we spent there. Boots definitely fit that definition.
My problem is this: being from Austin, I've never quite felt comfortable in flexing my Texan-ness among other Texans. Out of state is another story-- in Florida I caught my accent thickening when I was totally clueless and needed help with something, the implicit message being, "Cut me some slack-- I'm not from around here." Out of sheer homesickness, I even bought a shirt online that says, "Fuck Y'all, I'm from Texas," and wore it to dive bars and drunken Marine parties.
But every time I go back home, the message is clearer-- Austin is different from most of Texas. With every anti-Bush bumpersticker, every cross-dressing hobo, and every vegan diner I pass, I realize that what used to look like normal old city to me is in fact consciously, and even aggressively weird compared to much of the rest of the state. So for me to don something as Texan as cowboy boots is cause for more than a moment's cognitive dissonance-- am I allowed to do this? Does this look pitifully wrong on me?
Added to this is the pressure of personalization. What image symbolizes Me? I've wrestled with this one for years, even back in the comforting bizarro world of Austin, because there everyone has at least one visible tattoo. The utterly blank canvas of my skin has nothing to do with chasteness or notions of future employability-- it simply reflects profound indecision and the inability to identify something important enough to want it carved into my flesh with a vibrating needle. And this is not for lack of looking-- I'd guess that I've weighed ideas for a tattoo at least five times a week since I was 16. It's just that nothing has tipped the scales.
I've even designed tattoos for other people and sat in during the disturbing moments when my drawings were permanently etched into someone else's hide. But when it comes to me? To my translucent Irish skin? Suddenly up comes the image of local police on the evening news, having to identify my lifeless body by a silly tattoo; or of me trying to blend seamlessly into Latin America after having committed some terrible crime and being given away by my tattoo; or being captured by hostile terrorists, stripped naked, and trying to pretend I'm not American, only to be betrayed by a tattoo; and, perhaps the most improbable scenario, me on the red carpet of some gala event, dressed in Prada and bearing a tattoo that long ago lost all its significance to me but remains trapped under my skin until I can pony up the money for lasers.
Why does all of this come up when I'm considering whether or not to get a pair of custom cowboy boots? Because they're expensive, and I know someone will work hard on them. Because this man, who will not be around forever, will spend four months on them, leaving his personal mark on them, for me, and I'd like to think that if he's going to do that, I could do him the courtesy of choosing a design that has some meaning for me.
And why is it so hard to choose something? I know pretty much who I am and what I like in this world, and I like to think that in some ways I'm unique. Perhaps the problem is the editor in me, the overthinker with the big red pen who loves to cross out huge sections of my past with the margin notes, "overwrought," and "muddled-- needs direction." The editor in me always holds back, reminding me that "there's a better way to say that," or "this particular issue will get clearer with some perspective-- best to wait a while and see what develops." Especially now, when I know there are things about myself I'd like to change, and when every eight months forces huge change anyway, committing to any kind of identifying marker, even if it is a special treat, is difficult and anxiety-producing.
What I'd like to know, from anyone who's gotten a tattoo, from "traditional" and "non-traditional" Texans, from anyone who's ever struggled with identity or wondered what the hell they're doing in life, is how do you know when you've hit that sweet spot of finding something purely "you"? And how do you hold on to it?
Monday, August 14, 2006
Lysol for the soul
Right now, surgeons could operate on my kitchen floor. Babies could eat out of my bathtub. People with no immune systems could crawl face down across my living room carpet, inhaling deeply, and there would be nary a sneeze. Why?
This is what I do when things get on top of me-- I go hunting the source of my discomfort with a bottle of bleach and an old toothbrush. Surely it's the scum around the bathtub drain that's making me feel like this! Or the dust on the window sills! Or the crumb tray in the toaster! Whatever it is, I'm convinced that if I look hard enough, and scrub hard enough, I'll find it.
Right now the floors are so spotless they squeak under my feet, and somewhere off at the other end of the house, the cat is sneezing out carpet freshener from his hiding place under the bed. As for the dog, her shepherding ancestry is keeping her vigilant-- something is wrong with one of the flock, and she tails me from room to room, ears flat, eyes sharp, waiting.
I've seen my psychologist once, about a month ago, and until the end of this month, I'm to wait out scheduling conflicts and his yearly vacation, and keep a journal of my emotional responses to food, stress, all the usual suspects.
Usually journal writing is something I'm good at, and something that helps, but lately it's felt like the unsettling equivalent of milking a rattlesnake's fangs into a glass-- what do you do with the venom if you can't figure out the cure?
The journal I'm writing in has a painting on the front that used to be one of my favorites:
The full title of the painting is "Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate One Second Before Awakening," and next to "The Temptation of St. Anthony," it's my favorite Salvador Dali painting. I read that what he did for this painting, and for many others, was to sit in a comfortable chair with a key in his hand, and a saucer on the floor directly beneath his hand. Then he'd nod off. When he was relaxed enough for his hand to drop the key, it would hit the plate and waken him, and he'd immediately paint whatever messed up dream image was in his head right at that moment. Hence, a woman being menaced by a rifle coming out of two tigers coming out of a fish coming out of a pomegranate with a spindly-legged circus elephant strolling in the background. Happens to me all the time.
But last night as I was unable to sleep and trying desperately to milk the venom out of my own head, I saw something new in the painting that disturbed me. In so many ways, it's an accurate picture of bulimia-- all kinds of hidden menaces rocketing out of a single piece of food and mounting a direct attack on the exposed body, a body which seems blissfully unaware of what's about to hit it. And the elephant in the background-- when you look at "The Temptation of St. Anthony," those circus elephants seem to represent all kinds of impossibly sinful decadence, the frightening excesses that tempt us all. Thin enough, pretty enough, strong enough-- the promises that draw me further and further out.
I stopped writing last night, unsure of whether it's a good idea to relax and let the key drop. What if the ultimate answer in all of this is that I'm just not equipped to handle the life I've chosen? Would I be willing, then, to let go of the compensation of fixating on food and weight if it meant I had to look harder at how I deal with stress (which seems to be the one element of the equation that's not going anywhere)?
Maybe I'm reading too much into this. Judging my aggressively sparkling house, I am reading too much into this. One thing I've learned though-- one morning of slinging bleach is no match for years of built up grime.
This is what I do when things get on top of me-- I go hunting the source of my discomfort with a bottle of bleach and an old toothbrush. Surely it's the scum around the bathtub drain that's making me feel like this! Or the dust on the window sills! Or the crumb tray in the toaster! Whatever it is, I'm convinced that if I look hard enough, and scrub hard enough, I'll find it.
Right now the floors are so spotless they squeak under my feet, and somewhere off at the other end of the house, the cat is sneezing out carpet freshener from his hiding place under the bed. As for the dog, her shepherding ancestry is keeping her vigilant-- something is wrong with one of the flock, and she tails me from room to room, ears flat, eyes sharp, waiting.
I've seen my psychologist once, about a month ago, and until the end of this month, I'm to wait out scheduling conflicts and his yearly vacation, and keep a journal of my emotional responses to food, stress, all the usual suspects.
Usually journal writing is something I'm good at, and something that helps, but lately it's felt like the unsettling equivalent of milking a rattlesnake's fangs into a glass-- what do you do with the venom if you can't figure out the cure?
The journal I'm writing in has a painting on the front that used to be one of my favorites:
The full title of the painting is "Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate One Second Before Awakening," and next to "The Temptation of St. Anthony," it's my favorite Salvador Dali painting. I read that what he did for this painting, and for many others, was to sit in a comfortable chair with a key in his hand, and a saucer on the floor directly beneath his hand. Then he'd nod off. When he was relaxed enough for his hand to drop the key, it would hit the plate and waken him, and he'd immediately paint whatever messed up dream image was in his head right at that moment. Hence, a woman being menaced by a rifle coming out of two tigers coming out of a fish coming out of a pomegranate with a spindly-legged circus elephant strolling in the background. Happens to me all the time.
But last night as I was unable to sleep and trying desperately to milk the venom out of my own head, I saw something new in the painting that disturbed me. In so many ways, it's an accurate picture of bulimia-- all kinds of hidden menaces rocketing out of a single piece of food and mounting a direct attack on the exposed body, a body which seems blissfully unaware of what's about to hit it. And the elephant in the background-- when you look at "The Temptation of St. Anthony," those circus elephants seem to represent all kinds of impossibly sinful decadence, the frightening excesses that tempt us all. Thin enough, pretty enough, strong enough-- the promises that draw me further and further out.
I stopped writing last night, unsure of whether it's a good idea to relax and let the key drop. What if the ultimate answer in all of this is that I'm just not equipped to handle the life I've chosen? Would I be willing, then, to let go of the compensation of fixating on food and weight if it meant I had to look harder at how I deal with stress (which seems to be the one element of the equation that's not going anywhere)?
Maybe I'm reading too much into this. Judging my aggressively sparkling house, I am reading too much into this. One thing I've learned though-- one morning of slinging bleach is no match for years of built up grime.
Thursday, August 10, 2006
The A Hole is Now Open
One of my favorite things to do on road trips is photograph ridiculous signage. The hobby has evolved into an elaborate ritual where I pack along a small notebook for writing down names and locations, and, of course, the camera, so that I can shatter virtually any quiet moment with the shout, "Holy shit, pull over!"
Podunk hair and nail salons are usually my bread and butter, since there's an unwritten law that they must derive their names from the most ham-handed puns the gals could cook up after a night of too many cosmopolitans-- "Cuttin' Up" is a popular choice, but I've also stumbled across such gems as "Continental Hairlines," "The Hairport," and "The Mane Event."
The above picture is of an establishment not far from my current hometown, and the only thing I've done to it is remove the phone number beneath the name. Yup, "A Hole" is the honest-to-God name they've filled in on their bank loans and business cards. And just in case you thought maybe these folks were just shooting for that first listing in the phonebook, and that's what the "A" means, they made sure to clarify their real intent by graphically enhancing the "O."
(Incidentally, I nearly clotheslined a cyclist when I leapt from my car in my frenzy to secure proof that someone would name a business after a schoolyard taunt. Sorry, dude.)
Another hobby is going to the annual Art Car Show in Austin, where people openly scorn bluebook values in a quest to turn their vehicles into mobile collage pieces using everything from plastic dinosaurs and Barbie doll heads to welded silverware and shag carpeting. I'm completely in love with the idea of an art car, both for its reckless abandon with found objects and adhesives and for its utter inconvenience on days when the owner is violently ill and just wants to duck into the pharmacy for some Immodium and Advil-- anonymity is impossible when your car is covered in chess pieces and spouts bubbles from the tailpipe.
Art Car Shows in Austin have a very pronounced atmosphere of weirdness-- the whole thing takes place on 6th Street with people reeling in and out of the bars to gawk at each car, and usually at least one leathery biker mama shows up in buttless chaps. But coming across an art car nestled in between the minivans and the BMWs in the parking lot of a Houston Linens N' Things is like stumbling across the giant pink vibrator in your grandmother's stocking drawer-- it's a little shocking.
But I maintain that it's a special person who is willing to spend the time, energy, and money turning their jeep into a tiger. I can't imagine the sleepless nights given over to creative musings, doubts, frustrations-- should the headlights be more catlike? Are the glow-in-the-dark tiger heads mounted on either side of the front grill overkill, or the perfect touch? But the true mark of a car artist is the ability to find that one little detail (or two, as the case may be) that really pushes the envelope:
Brilliant.
Wednesday, August 02, 2006
Thank you, dead people
Last weekend I went to see the Bodyworlds exhibit at the Houston Museum of Natural Science.
I was entirely unsure of how I'd react to a giant room full of real dead bodies carefully preserved in plastic and posed artistically-- I have an intense interest in human anatomy, both from a medical and an artistic perspective, but I've also got this nasty habit of hitting the floor in a dead, twitching faint when anyone gets near me with a needle or even talks convincingly about doing invasive medical things to me. So this weekend could have gone down one of two very different paths-- either I block the flow of museum foot traffic by stopping and sketching the exhibits, or I block museum foot traffic with my inert and unresponsive body, possibly bleeding from the head.
Thankfully, it was the sketching.
The full bodies were just as breath-taking as I'd imagined they would be. I had seen pictures of some of the posed bodies, but the amazing thing was being able to walk around them and sketch from different angles, seeing how the lines of each body, and the character of the pose as a whole, completely change relative to where you stand. Also, the eye-line of the body, where the person's gaze is trained, effects how you feel looking at it, even though these people are obviously dead and no longer looking at anything.
I've sketched living naked people before in a figure drawing class, and the gaze there was significant as well-- if someone's standing there naked and looking straight at you, it affects how you feel about standing there clothed and drawing them. Without getting too New Age-y about it, it's that their essential humanity, their nakedness, their quality of being stripped down to the common denominator of what makes us all human-- just a warm sack of bumpy skin with some battle scars-- is more intense when you know they can see you looking intently at them.
At the Houston exhibit, this feeling was much stronger. The exhibits had a quality of intimacy and sacredness that went far beyond that of a living naked person being studied for form and structure. These people were more naked than naked. Their ribcages were opened, their muscles were splayed back, detached from the bone to show the tendons beneath, their skulls were opened to show the cradled brain. And because I didn't know their names, because they would never be able to look back at me, looking at them and at the revealed mysteries of their insides, was something close to what it felt like to walk over the tombstones in the floor at Westminster Abbey. Gravity, reverence, awe.
What I wasn't expecting was how touching it would be to look at the isolated organ specimens. Laid out carefully in glass cases arranged in rows between the full body exhibits were samples of individual organs, both healthy and damaged, and grouped by systems-- skeletal, circulatory, digestive, nervous, reproductive, endocrine.
I was expecting to see these parts with a much more clinical eye, as things with less impact than if they had been part of a whole. I expected that if I was looking at a spleen, and I couldn't see who it had belonged to, then I could look at it as just a spleen, a thing that manages the recycling of old red blood cells. Without a body to put it into context, it would be like looking at any plastic model from a high school biology class.
But as I gazed down through the smudged fingerprints on the glass, I realized that I wasn't looking at a model, or at an organ with no body (or nobody) attached, I was looking at my own spleen, my very own lungs tired from running, my long-suffering stomach.
Each organ became a humble and heroic reflection of my own, and if it's not too weird to say, I felt a real wave of sympathy looking down at that stomach. It was so small, and so simple-- just a sack with some tubes-- and here I've been waging this war on my own, demanding that it not only digest whatever food I allow it to keep, but also that it bear the weight of all my stress, and in return all I do is ignore its distress signals. Poor little thing, I thought.
For so long I've been worried about whether or not problems with my health show from the outside, but in the margins of my sketches, among notes I took on what other people were saying when they looked at the exhibits ("I don't smoke that much," and "Dude, that's what my dad's liver must look like"), is the phrase "Whatever you do on the outside eventually shows up on the inside."
I have nothing but the deepest gratitude for the people who donated their bodies for this exhibit.
I was entirely unsure of how I'd react to a giant room full of real dead bodies carefully preserved in plastic and posed artistically-- I have an intense interest in human anatomy, both from a medical and an artistic perspective, but I've also got this nasty habit of hitting the floor in a dead, twitching faint when anyone gets near me with a needle or even talks convincingly about doing invasive medical things to me. So this weekend could have gone down one of two very different paths-- either I block the flow of museum foot traffic by stopping and sketching the exhibits, or I block museum foot traffic with my inert and unresponsive body, possibly bleeding from the head.
Thankfully, it was the sketching.
The full bodies were just as breath-taking as I'd imagined they would be. I had seen pictures of some of the posed bodies, but the amazing thing was being able to walk around them and sketch from different angles, seeing how the lines of each body, and the character of the pose as a whole, completely change relative to where you stand. Also, the eye-line of the body, where the person's gaze is trained, effects how you feel looking at it, even though these people are obviously dead and no longer looking at anything.
I've sketched living naked people before in a figure drawing class, and the gaze there was significant as well-- if someone's standing there naked and looking straight at you, it affects how you feel about standing there clothed and drawing them. Without getting too New Age-y about it, it's that their essential humanity, their nakedness, their quality of being stripped down to the common denominator of what makes us all human-- just a warm sack of bumpy skin with some battle scars-- is more intense when you know they can see you looking intently at them.
At the Houston exhibit, this feeling was much stronger. The exhibits had a quality of intimacy and sacredness that went far beyond that of a living naked person being studied for form and structure. These people were more naked than naked. Their ribcages were opened, their muscles were splayed back, detached from the bone to show the tendons beneath, their skulls were opened to show the cradled brain. And because I didn't know their names, because they would never be able to look back at me, looking at them and at the revealed mysteries of their insides, was something close to what it felt like to walk over the tombstones in the floor at Westminster Abbey. Gravity, reverence, awe.
What I wasn't expecting was how touching it would be to look at the isolated organ specimens. Laid out carefully in glass cases arranged in rows between the full body exhibits were samples of individual organs, both healthy and damaged, and grouped by systems-- skeletal, circulatory, digestive, nervous, reproductive, endocrine.
I was expecting to see these parts with a much more clinical eye, as things with less impact than if they had been part of a whole. I expected that if I was looking at a spleen, and I couldn't see who it had belonged to, then I could look at it as just a spleen, a thing that manages the recycling of old red blood cells. Without a body to put it into context, it would be like looking at any plastic model from a high school biology class.
But as I gazed down through the smudged fingerprints on the glass, I realized that I wasn't looking at a model, or at an organ with no body (or nobody) attached, I was looking at my own spleen, my very own lungs tired from running, my long-suffering stomach.
Each organ became a humble and heroic reflection of my own, and if it's not too weird to say, I felt a real wave of sympathy looking down at that stomach. It was so small, and so simple-- just a sack with some tubes-- and here I've been waging this war on my own, demanding that it not only digest whatever food I allow it to keep, but also that it bear the weight of all my stress, and in return all I do is ignore its distress signals. Poor little thing, I thought.
For so long I've been worried about whether or not problems with my health show from the outside, but in the margins of my sketches, among notes I took on what other people were saying when they looked at the exhibits ("I don't smoke that much," and "Dude, that's what my dad's liver must look like"), is the phrase "Whatever you do on the outside eventually shows up on the inside."
I have nothing but the deepest gratitude for the people who donated their bodies for this exhibit.
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