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.