I see dead people…
I had mixed feelings about going to see Body Worlds 2 & the Three Pound Gem on a recent jaunt to San Jose. I had heard there was some questions as to whether the donors knew hanging a skateboard hand plant would be their final resting place (but Wikipedia seems to indicate they did). Many people I told about the exhibit said they wouldn’t go, that it seemed “creepy.”
I don’t really get grossed out by such things. In fact, back when I was an obituary writer and then criminal justice reporter, the coroner and his assistant deputy coroners said I could see them perform an autopsy, as long as the deceased wasn’t part of a criminal case (so I wouldn’t show up in any future court transcripts, etc.), but it never happened.
Going there, I did think of it as more of a science exhibit. But afterward, it was predominately an art exhibit. It does take a bit of adjustment to realize that you’re looking at actual corpses pretending to figure skate, ski jump, and hit home runs, but eventually you start to marvel at how the various systems of the body work together. It is less about some anonymous donor trapped in a skateboard pose, but what muscles work together to make the body pull off such a pose.
You can see what it means to have an artificial hip, replacement heart valve, the effects of smoking on a lung, and they become more real than anecdotes and pictures in textbooks. Seeing the lungs of a coal miner, looking much like coal themselves, made me think of my grandfather who receive a black lung check and somehow stayed alive into his 80s. How every morning, there would be noises from the bathroom, like he was trying to cough something up, and that sometimes black stuff would actually come out, and now here’s what those lungs possibly looked like (although his black lung ultimately didn’t cause his death, go figure).
The more the exhibit went on, the less they were corpses. You just get pulled into the exhibit and realize how the body is such an amazing, interlocking system: How the bones in our ears are nearly the size of grains of rice; the minuscule nervous system; the amount of blood vessels in your arm.
The strangest part of the exhibit was that, after seeing these skinless corpses, I wanted to start muscle training. I mean, living in my gay ghetto, it’s not an uncommon sight to see muscular people. But something about seeing the exhibit made it more important to get muscle training back into the mix, rather than my all-cardio approach. I have no idea why that is, exactly. Seeing the younger, athletic corpses made it seem more relevant in a way it never was before.
Of course, wanting to get rid of the fat is nothing new, and there’s a bit more of it now than there was recently. But again, the fatter corpses made body fat even less appealing. It seems the opposite of vanity that I’ve become more interested in building muscle and losing fat because of what it looks like on the inside (it is all about while I’m alive, though, I’m not concerned about having a hot corpse).
So, a lot of strange things came out of the visit. All of the creepy downside was non-existent, and somehow seeing all of the dead people made me question how I’m living… all due to a graceful, thought-provoking exhibit. Good stuff…
So, I would recommend anyone on the fence go see it.
