Downtown - Everythings Waiting For You

A little Petula Clark this afternoon.

I had to be at work at 6:30 am for a meeting, even though this is my Sunday. It was dismal and bleak, cool and drizzly all due to Katrina's influence, which proves my point that women whose name begins with the hard "K" sound are best avoided at all costs.

So after the meeting, I thought I would I take advantage of being up north by stopping into Playhouse Square and purchasing my tickets for the upcoming fall season of entertainments.

Well. Seems they don't like to open the box office before 11 am. So I had an hour to kill, and the allure of the Starbuck's across the street notwithstanding, I was feeling petulant and was almost going to go home, when it occurred to me that today would be a fine day to correct a character flaw.

A few years ago, I read something that that so intrigued me that I spent most of the lecture time I was supposed to be leading in my graduate seminar on the avant garde theatre discussing it.

The exhibition in question is "Professor" Gunther von Hagen's Bodyworlds, in which the "professor" takes corpses and dissects them in various ways and means and stages them for scientific and artistic purposes.

Now, in my wayward youth, when I had an inexplicable fascination with Jack the Ripper, Hammer films and all things gruesome, I probably would have eaten it up. Now, however, I was completely morally repulsed. I swore I would never attend a show if it came to the US. I remain surprised and perplexed that I have become someone so very different from who I used to be...

So, what do you know. There it is at the Great Lakes Science Center. And since one of my pet peeves is people mouthing off about things that they haven't experienced, I thought I would go see it for myself.

The first thing you see is a great, big, furry camel. That part was pretty okay. Its head and neck have been sliced into thirds so you can see the flexation of the camels neck. The vast interior spaces where all the guts should be was interesting, as was the look you get of the contents of the beast's stomach - a bunch of dried out grasses and twigs...but the camel baby was just unnecessary. This got me to thinking of all of the vignettes of the "stuffed" animals at the Carnegie museum, which I hold in fondness in my heart as they were friends of my childhood. Shooting and mounting animals for science...that's another can of worms.

Ok...so you go in and there are slices and pieces of real, dead people. It's all real, but "plastinated". Then you get to the posed corpses which are dissected to show, oh, muscle groups, or tendons, or how much Gunther von Hagens can replicate works of art ala Dali or Boccioni's Unique Forms of Continuity in Space.

I was expecting this little adventure to take the one hour I had to kill before the box office at the theatres opened - it took two hours, and believe me, I was not dawdling. For most of the exhibit, I was light-headed, nauseous and overcome with the feeling that I was walking through a sociopath's laboratory of brutality. Toward the end I just stood in the middle and did a 360 - taking in all of the dismembered bodies, the slices and pieces, and the tortured corpses, with their equally unnecessarily lifelike glass eyes. A few of the "exhibits" had what looked to me like Russian prison tattoos on their hands (those that still had skin that is). And who signed the permission slip for the plastination of the many fetuses?

On your way out, they have a table of information and sign-up cards to donate your body for future plastination. Von Hagens has a whole stable of workers in China dissecting corpses and plastinizing them even as we speak...

The horror of feeling like an accomplice to a madman was unshakable. However, I found my moral indignation very fascinating. And, I have to say, I did learn that that body is in reality a very small thing. Kidneys easily fit in the palm of your hand. Your brain is stupidly small. You absolutely do not want to have a look at your lungs if you have ever smoked.And the space you have for all of your guts - it is impossible to believe your body really functions. It truly IS a miracle.
BUT - this does not excuse the display of corpses. Sorry. Back in the day of true artisans and scholars, they made extremely realistic wax models that showed the very same things. If all of this stuff was plastic, or wax, I would have been quite pleased with it. Do check out the site for the wax museum in France (not a wax museumof famous folk ala Madame Toussard, its an anatomical wax museum).

What von Hagens exhibit never illustrates is the seat of the emotions, and these cruel mockeries left me deeply saddened.

To cleanse my aura, I went a few blocks away from the insanity passing itself off as science, and entered Cleveland's City Hall, where three Buddhist monks (Tenzin Thutop, Lobsang Gyaltfen and Nawang Topgyal) from the Namgyal Monastery, the personal monastery of H. H. Dalai Lama of Tibet, were beginning a sacred Kalachakra mandala for healing. They were amazing to watch. Two sat atop a square blue platform, silently bent over the sketch of the mandala they are to create over the next few weeks. Using a small ridged brass funnel (the chak-pur), they scooped up a few grains of sands, and by rubbing the pointy end of another funnel over it, the internal vibrations cause the sand to trickle out, and they created lines just a few grains of sand in width. I watchd them for a long time, and was treated to the sight of one of the monks carefully taking out a piece of cloth and putting it over the wide end of the funnel, and gently inhaling, sucking up a few errant grains - the eraser for the mandala.

The third monk sat reading cards of prayers. When he got up to join the others, I noticed all of the monks wore Timberland-type hiking shoes and rust colored ankle socks.

There was a lovely altar set up near the platform, with fruit, bells and icons of the Dalai Lama, and a boombox next to that playing Tibetan bell ringing. I am sure the monks would have liked some incense burning, (I thought it would have been a nice addition) but I am sure there is some PC reason that incense smoke would offend those sensitive to odors.

Anyway, I look forward to several more visits as the monks complete the mandala, then disassemble it and return the sand to Lake Erie.

The mandala is an image that aids an individual along the path to enlightenment and eventually a perfect balance of body and mind. Watching them this afternoon certainly healed me.

And I did get some killer seats for a couple of shows.