[ToC]

 

ON DISSECTING THE BODY AND LUMBER

Sandy Florian

The body is a wonderful thunder. Different from other machines in that there’s no empty space. Built with deformity and packaged in wrapper, everything here fits to perfection. So, work, for one, in total darkness. Revelations are no less astonishing for being so obvious. Violate the body before trying to understand it. Make space. Make light. Make pictures on the structures and functions. Collect the pictures the large library, that weird repository for words. This is a seeing with the self-same eyes.

If the eyes are false, pluck them out. Stack them in infinite heights. Cut the body into four pieces, and separate into sections about the head, the neck and thorax, the abdomen and the pelvis, the thighs and knees, et cetera, represented by the black racks in the stacks. Mill the body rather than slicing it. Then pack it in a slurry of frozen alcohol. A rotary rasp. Ground the tissue. In the anatomically more complicated female, provide three to one. Ditto thrice.

It is like rock-hard diamond. It’s like the grain of log. This is all curiously done by hand. But fat resembles nerve. Nerve resembles bone. And only someone who knows his eyes can tell twin from twin. The solution? Finer cuts.

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I experienced this as an investigation of the detached, detachable, or detaching body in its crudest and most scientific expression.