DISSECTION

Body parts in jars: pickled penises, splayed vaginas, coiled and then uncoiled intestines in colors ranging from pink to grey with the occasional flourescent dye spot. I thought of the blue stamp marking the fat of the Sunday roast beef. I looked again at the wall of human parts. The spirit of this display was that of a child's having taken a clock apart, arraying the insides, yet here there was no intention of putting the pieces back together again. We had all the components to build a body but that was not the task at hand.

In some traditions certain secrets are considered fatal to the uninitiated. We are now in a darkened chamber of secrets, closed to the public. Today is our indoctrination.

"Now that you've looked around," Dan, our teacher, chirps, "we can move on to the autopsy room."

I check the reaction of my peers. A few faces are bloodless, whitened. This visit has replaced our Sartrean nausea with actual nausea.

We enter what appears to be an operating room. On a stretcher there's a body: bloated corpse, face covered, everything under a band of cloth except at the sides where breasts and thighs bulge out.

"Is everyone okay?" Dan checks our reactions. He has such a gee-whiz manner. In jeans and a flannel Blackwatch shirt he looks like a middle aged park ranger who should be leading us on a mushroom forage rather than into the humanist tradition abroad. "I wanted you to experience how the early artists discovered the inner geometries of the body. They attended autopsies and surgeries such as this one. Leonardo..."

Liza - "Sleaza" to the chosen few - interrupts, "Diego Rivera used to haunt the undertakers. Yeah that's what I've heard. He once bought a corpse from some bloke just for the experience of eating human flesh. To get to know humanity better. They call it carrion, don't they?"

Dan chooses to ignore her, "So the artists would watch the surgeons peel back the skin to reveal the musculature, the bones, the inner architecture. And through their records of these investigations you have most of the work done for you already, you have all these marvelous anatomy books at your disposal."

I looked over at big, blond and brilliant Sleaza in her old leather jacket. She hadn't been fazed by Dan's passive aggression or everyone else's lack of interest in her facts. She was touring the room with her eyes, taking in new details.

"Each year I bring my new students here. I think it's good for you to see this in person. We'll be drawing from the skeleton in class but this is where it all begins."

I thought of an earlier school field trip, the one a trio of fifth grade classmates had independently taken to the Abattoir. I brought the camera. After demanding to see the place, the manager finally gave in and took us on a short tour. Outside, in a small yard cows were pressed together and chickens were stacked in crammed boxes squawking. Inside, pigs suspended on hooks went through a flame-thrower to have their bristles scorched off. "In order to make them tender for the table." our guide explained. The smell of urine, blood, and burnt feathers, and the trays of steaming organs will reside in my head forever.

I will be alone in some new city, under moonlight, and she will float into my consciousness while I try to fall asleep. I am not going to forget encountering this corpse. I will think of her voluptuousness; the blue and marble-veined flesh sneaking out. The image of her inert tit will be the testimony of a life lived. I will remember the history I reconstructed, of how her breast rose from a flat girl's chest, was probably kissed and bitten by some admiring young man, then possibly was used to feed a child or children and later, how it diverted her to harden the nipple by her own touch, alone. I will remember the presence I reconstitute.

The medical students are grinning at us. It amuses them to find us in their domain. They discuss how during last year's visit an art student threw up. They drink coffee around the body and they'd have continued smoking if their professor hadn't come in and chastised them for it.

The professor pulls the cloth up to the woman's neck and down to her pubes. They then discuss her dead body as the sum of damage she's done to it. The liver, the skin, the evidence of abuse... as if she can be blamed for ageing. At first I consider their manner of perceiving the body as soulless, as a calculated effort to display detachment. Then, I realize that they'd feel the same indifference towards her if she were alive and walking with her shopping bags down their street or seated beside them on the bus smiling over a newspaper article. If they had no personal gain from her or responsibility towards her they'd never recognize a soul within. They'd bury her alive with their looks if they looked, they'd ignore her in a way that would make her as invisible as the air.

The med students exude a slight giddiness around us which is due to the fact that some of us are stunning. There is Janelle, with thick chestnut brown hair straight down her back and a very short skirt. There is Paul, with Bambi eyelashes and an elegant silhouette. And then there's Sleaza who is especially interesting to them and for whom they are willing to answer each morbid inquiry in great detail. However, their attitude towards us and towards the corpse is filled with similar contempt. There is, however, more interest, on their part, in fucking some of us. We are potential meat for their hungry egos but, they will not entitle us to souls either.

We hover close to the corpse investigating the death so that we can pursue our livelihoods. I notice Sleaza writing her name in oversized loopy letters on a scrap of drawing paper. With a lascivious grin she hands it to one of the lab-coated.

"I think that's it for today," Dan announces then glances at his watch. He thanks the Medical School staff for sharing the morning with us and we leave the building. "I'll see those of you who take Life Drawing with me after lunch." He waves, turns away and traipses down the street towards the school. He seems relieved to have completed his part in our initiation.

We stand on the corner, blackened-by-charcoal-finger-nailed art convicts with red marks in our armpits from wedging our manila pads up there. A crew of manque punks and fashion victims with only a couple who are still clothed in wholesome attire by their suburban parents We look around at each another. Directionless, we don't leave the spot. We are left vulnerable to what we feel: the cold wind, the red of fallen leaves and the manic cerulean sky.

© Maija Beeton, 1994