Bodies ARE art!!!

Another funny London story. From what I remember, when we were all traveling throughout England, we all went to the same cathedrals, museums, ruins, etc. together as a group. But when we were in London, we each went to what we wanted to go to. There were soooo many museums, shows, churches, etc. just within London alone to see. Four months was almost not long enough to see all that I wanted to see.

Anyways, though the professors mainly gave us free reign over our extracurricular activities there in the city, they would sometimes suggest things to go to. Dr. C, the main professor of our group, is a humanities professor. Obviously, VERY into art. He arranged a time for whoever wanted to, to go to a furniture exhibition. I really didn't care that much about spending my time to see furniture, plus I had to read and write a paper on Heart of Darkness, a novella by Joseph Conrad. Our studies over there were EXTREMELY rigorous. I swear we were all trapped in the center for a month during midterms. It made me resentful. Here I was, in this amazing city to which I might never get a chance to return, and I was sitting in the library, studying my brains out. Oh well.

Anywho, I was with a couple of friends when I went down to breakfast the day of the furniture exhibition trip. We saw Dr. C there in the foyer.

"So, Karlenn, are you going to this furniture exhibition with us today?" he said, with a huge anticipatory grin on his face.

"Um, well, no...."

"What? Why not?"

"Well, I still have to read House of Darkness. And you know, it's just... furniture. It's not like it's art or anything."

He stomped his little foot. He is a very little man. "Karlenn," he yelled, "Furniture IS art!!! And it's HEART of Darkness, not HOUSE of Darkness! It would be a lot more of a convincing excuse if you at least got the NAME right!"

My friends and I laughed and laughed. We quoted him for weeks after that - "Furniture IS art!!!"

Last weekend, my sis, Lex, invited the fam to go with her to the Bodies exhibit that's being displayed at our city's museum. She's gone to it before and just adored it. She's all sciencey. Always has been. I was a little trepidatious. I remember when I took Anat and Phys in high school - we took a field trip up to Ricks, as it used to be called, to watch the pre-med students there dissect human bodies. I'll never forget how awful that was for me. I could see the peoples' hair sticking up out of the cloths that were covering their faces. It was the hair and the fingernails that really got to me. I kept thinking, "A few weeks ago or whatever, those fingernails were moving. They were writing and gesturing and helping, and now they're not." It was traumatic for me. I'm a sensitive flower. :) Plus, the formaldehyde was a killer for me. Oh, the smelllllllll..... As Joseph Conrad would say, "The horror! The horror!!!"

When Lex initially told me all about the exhibit when she saw it in Vegas a few years ago, I was like, ugh. Dissection flashback. Nooooo thanks. But, when she invited us last weekend, I went along in the interest of not getting left out. That's always a huge motivator for me.

I am sooooooooo glad that I went!!! I know that this exhibit has always been very controversial - these are real human bodies that have had all of these things done to them. For example, the skeleton was taken out of one guy, and he is displayed with his skeleton holding hands with his musculature. One entire body was cut into cross sections. There is one that wasn't on display here (our museum is so very teeny), but I've seen pictures of it before, of one guy, in muscle/bone/tendon form, carrying his skin around. When you hear snippets of peoples' conversation about it, or when you see pictures of it, you think, "How glib, to treat these people, who lived real lives, in such a flippant way." It seems very irreverant.

But that was not the case at ALL. The feeling in the exhibit was absolute reverence. The man who came up with these things was not trying to be funny or bombastic. He wanted to show us how amazing the human body is. People spoke in respectful whispers. Yes, there were peoples' testicles and breasts, just out there for everyone to see, but there were no snickers or snide remarks. It was just a feeling of awe. It honestly, seriously, reminded me of the reverence and respect that I feel when I'm in the temple. I kept thinking, over and over, "God is amazing. Our bodies are amazing. They are a true miracle."

I'm here to say that bodies ARE art.

Some things that stuck out for me -

They had a little thyroid display, which is interesting to me for obvious reasons. I got to see a real thyroid gland. And I got to see a thyroid gland that has a goiter on it, from untreated thyroid disease. I thought to myself, "I had one of those in my neck! And there it is!!!"

The bodies, and the body parts, looked...plastic. They are preserved in such a way that makes them just seem like plastic displays. I had to keep reminding myself that these were real bodies and real organs. They also injected certain things with colors, making them very bright. Which made the plastickeyness even more defined. Yes, I just made up a word - plastickeyness.

The alveoli that function within the lungs are BEAUTIFUL. They look like baby's breath. So pretty. True art. And the liver is really pretty. So smooth. It looked like clay.

I have a friend with a pituitary tumor, and there was a brain that was cut in half, showing the pituitary nestled right there in the middle of it. It's so tiny. It's amazing that something so tiny controls so many really important things.

Speaking of tiny, the brain is smaller than I thought. And the ovaries are smaller than I thought.

And the kidneys are ENORMOUS! I always thought they were little, like, I don't know... kidney beans, honestly. But they're the size of my fist!

They had a room of just the circulatory system. This scientist dude figured out a way to inject something into the veins that hardened them and turned them bright red. Then he put some kind of chemical onto the skin that melted the skin, muscles, everything else away, leaving an entire, intact circulatory system, just by itself. It was suspended in some kind of liquid. That was amazing. I thought that we had, like, a few veins in each arm and leg, and a bunch of big ones in our thoracic area. But there are billions of littler veins and arteries that branch out of the big ones. The poster next to it said that there are 10,000 miles of just veins and arteries in one body! AMAZING!

There were lots of displays showing a normal organ, vs. a diseased organ, side-by-side. I got to see all kinds of organs with cancer in them. There was a whole woman body who had died of undetected breast cancer. And you could see the cancer, right there in her breast. Which made me panic. Should I start to get mammograms? I need to look that up. I feel like people say you start getting them when you're forty, if you don't have a family history of breast cancer, which I don't. Other cancers, yes. But not breast. So far.

The most interesting thing for me was the smoker's lungs, vs. normal lungs. OH MY GOSH. What a difference. A normal set of lungs is pinkey-peach. Beautiful. Smooth. The smoker's lungs were dark grey, with big black spots all over them. It was such a stark contrast. There is a big, clear, plastic box in between both lungs, with a slit in the top for people who want to stop smoking to throw their boxes of cigarettes in. There were a few packs, plus a big cigar in there. I've heard that, in different cities, as the exhibit goes on, that box fills up and up and up to the very top by the end of the exhibit. This is the very beginning, so there wasn't much there. It made me wonder if those packs were put there by a museum curator, or by real people. One little girl led her grandmother over to the lungs and said, "Look, Gramma. Look at what you're doing to yourself." The grandma just chuckled and walked away. That's probably what most people do. :)

There was a cross section of a person's head, a person who had suffered from a stroke. It showed a dark area where the hemorrhaging had occurred. I thought that was really interesting.

The Fetus Room. Ah, the Fetus Room. They have a sign outside of it, warning you that, if you're sensitive to things like this, don't go in. I worried at first, but then decided to go in and see. I'm so glad I did. All of the fetuses in there died of natural causes during pregnancy. And again, they all looked plastic. They had fetuses clear from one week old to about 25 weeks old, all lined up from youngest to oldest. It was so amazing. Again, I kept thinking, "Heavenly Father is amazing. It's a miracle!" How quickly they grow and develop. I was just blown away. It was kind of hard for me to see the little fetus that was 8 weeks old. I had a miscarriage three years ago, and I just... couldn't take my eyes off that little guy. I shed a few tears. But it really was okay. It didn't traumatize me. It just made me think, Wow. I'm glad I got a D&C instead of passing the baby at home. They really are quite big by then, and they definitely look like little babies. I don't think I could have handled that. It's amazing that they already look like babies at only 8 weeks.

So anyways. It was wonderful. I'm so glad I went! I'm a very sensitive girl, but it was not hard for me to see these things at all. Heavenly Father is amazing. Our bodies are amazing. And we need to take better care of them. That stuck out to me, as well.