And I Will Show You Something Different From Your Shadow at Morning, Rising to Meet You
My parents are visiting us this week. I’m not a very good tour guide, because I am neither very familiar with New York City, nor a big fan of the portion with which I am familiar. While the Big Apple certainly welcomes tourism, it does not exist purely for tourism, so unlike Orlando or Williamsburg, there’s no big red line painted on the sidewalk from the airport to the hotels to the real points of interest. Sure, you can find Times Square and the Empire State Building, but there’s nothing to see there that you can’t find in any other big city. The best places in New York City are the little ones, hand-picked for you by someone you know from their own experiences. So whenever friends visit us, Eileene has most of the good ideas of where to go, from which I select something.
This time, we’ve settled on a trip to Ellis Island and an art exhibit called “Bodies.” I know nothing of Bodies except that my sister-in-law enjoyed it with her fiancée, and that it has one exhibit mapping the blood vessels. It sounds nifty.
The artist(s) drained a corpse of blood, then pumped some kind of epoxy or resin in its place, then put the body into a vat of solvent that would liquefy the human tissue and leave the resin behind. The final result is a free-standing cast of the space within the blood vessels. It must have been a terribly delicate prodecure.
I brought up the subject of personal remains once before in this blog, wondering aloud why people would object to having their own corpse disposed of in any but a traditional fashion, with all the parts intact. This exhibit is a perfect example of reasons to consider other options. Most onlookers will pause momentarily, think “Huh. A model of our veins,” and move on. But a few, possibly children ripe for inspiration, will see it and go: “Coooool….” and go on to do something amazing. How could anyone prefer being worm food, or a jar of ashes, to being the next medical genius’s muse?