O, what a tangled web we weave...

Saturday proved to be a day with much to think about. It all started with the characterization of a modern day Fool in Laurie R. King's To Play the Fool. I think I could see in this, more so than in the Arthurian legends we studied, how the Fool acts as a mirror for others, in a trickster-ish fashion. And the idea of someone taking on this role in the modern day was also sort of fascinating: how being a Fool means to give up your own will, completely. The Fool character did it to such an extent that he would not even use his own words, instead speaking only in quotations from the Bible and Shakespeare and the like. Another character remarked that in doing this he was giving up a great deal of power.

So I read this and somehow it all felt...familiar. Like I know someone like this, or have come across them at some point in my life. And that was kind of cool, too.

And then I went to the Franklin Institute and saw the Body Worlds exhibit. For those who may not know, the Body Worlds exhibit features real human bodies preserved through a method called plastination and dissected in various ways to provide a real understanding of the workings of the human body. The bodies are all donated, and they have an example of the donation papers on the wall, which I found interesting. Not only do they ask for permission to receive the body and plastinate it, but they also check on whether the person minds his/her body being donated or loaned to academic or medical institutions for instruction, being put on display, etc. They also say that people often express disbelief that this could be a real body and ask to touch the exhibit, and if the donor minds people touching their body. What was really interesting is that they ask the person's motivation for donating their body...one of the choices was that, in this way, they will be preserved for a long time, if not forever; they will leave a legacy. That has interesting implications...

I was hovering between avid interest and a sort of unease during the whole exhibit. I knew that I couldn't let myself think too much about the fact that these were actual dead bodies; that these slices were made by cutting the body, or I would be too grossed out to appreciate what was being shown. There's something a little disturbing about being able to...turn your brain off, or avoid thinking something so you don't suffer the consequences of that thought. I'm not quite comfortable with the ease at which I could do it.

One thing that was, without a doubt, amazing and cool was the way they were able to preserve just the arterial system in its original form. Apparently they did it by injecting the plastic dye into the blood vessels and then dissolving the rest with acid. But it was really amazing to see all those blood vessels in the exact shape of the arm, even all the tiny capillaries in the fingers. You could even see the areas of greatest concentration of blood vessels, like in the fingertips. That was really neat.

One thing I am also a bit uneasy about is that the creator of the plastination technique and the exhibit feels that he is not only providing a scientific service, but is also creating works of art. I don't know how I feel about someone making art with a human body. I mean, I know that many artists feel that the human body is a work of art, but they portray it with outside materials. To do so with actual human parts...is a bit weird to me.

I didn't even have much time to absorb everything because we had to hurry to see Harry Potter on the IMAX (and which was not as impressive as I'd hoped). I wish I had more time to think about things, because there were many thoughts in my head that seemed somehow connected, but that I couldn't quite work out. And now I have the distractions of work and grad school applications to worry about...hopefully my subconscious will work on it, so I don't lose it all.