Flights

SEEING IS KNOWING

Each of my pilgrimages aims at some other pilgrim. In this case the pilgrim is in pieces, broken down.

Here, for instance, is a collection of bones – but only bones that have something wrong with them: curved spines and ribs in ribbons, taken out of what must have been equally deformed bodies, treated, desiccated, and even varnished. There is a little number by each bone to help the viewer locate a description of the illness in a directory that has long since ceased to exist. What kind of durability, after all, does paper have in comparison with bone? They should have written right along the spine.

And here you have a femur that some curious person sawed open lengthwise, in order to take a peek at what was hidden inside. Said person must have been disappointed with the result, because they then tied the two halves together with hemp string and put the femur back in the showcase, their mind already elsewhere.

The showcase holds several dozen people with no relation to one another, separated from each other by space and time – now in such a beautiful resting place, spacious and dry, well-lit, and condemned to eternity in a museum. They must be the envy of those bones that got stuck in eternal wrestling matches with the earth. But aren’t there some among them – the bones of Catholics, perhaps – that worry as to how they will get found on Judgement Day, as to how, dispersed as they are, they’ll be able to build back those bodies that committed sins and did good deeds?

Skulls with growths of all conceivable structures, with bullet holes and other holes, or atrophied. Hand bones wrecked by arthritis. An arm with multiple breaks that then healed naturally, randomly: petrified long-term pain.

Long bones that are too short and short bones that are too long, tuberculitic, covered in patterns of alterations; you might think they’d been eaten by bark beetles. Poor human skulls, backlit in Victorian showcases, where they bare their teeth in big grins. This one, for instance, has a big hole in the middle of the forehead, but nice teeth. Who knows if that hole was lethal. Not necessarily. There was a man once, a railway engineer, whose brain was run clean through by a metal rod, but he lived for many more years with that wound; needless to say this came in quite handy for neuropsychology as it proclaimed to all and sundry that we exist primarily through our brains. He didn’t die, but he changed completely. He became a different person, as the expression goes. Since who we are is dependent on our brains, let us proceed directly to our left, down the hall of brains. Here they are! Cream-coloured anemones in solution, large and small, some brilliant and others that couldn’t count to two.

Next comes the designated section for fetuses, miniature munchkins. Here are the little dolls, the smallest specimens – everything in miniature, so that a whole person will fit in a little jar. These youngest ones, the embryos, which you can barely even see at all, are like little fish, little frogs, suspended from a horse’s hair, floating in an expanse of formaldehyde. These bigger ones display the order of the human body, its marvellous packaging. Little not-yet-human crumbs, semi-hominid young, whose lives never crossed the magic border of potentiality. They have the right shape, but they never grew into souls – perhaps the presence of a soul is somehow connected with the size of the shape. In them matter had begun, with somnolent obstinacy, to gear up to live, to accumulate tissue and get organs going and systems running; work on the eyes was already under way, and the lungs were being readied, though to light and air there still remained a ways.

The next row holds the same organs, but now fully grown, pleased to have been allowed by circumstances to attain their full dimensions. Their full dimensions? How did they know how big they were supposed to get, when to stop? Some of them didn’t: these intestines grew and grew, and it was hard for our professors to find a jar that would contain them. It’s even harder to imagine how they would have fit into the stomach of this man who figures on the label as a pair of initials.

The heart. All its mystery has been conclusively revealed – for it’s that unshapely lump the size of a fist, its colour a dirty light brown. Please note that that is, in fact, the colour of our bodies: greyish brown, ugly. We would not want to have walls in our houses or a car that colour. It’s the colour of insides, of darkness, of places light can’t reach, where matter hides in moisture from others’ gazes, and there isn’t any point in it showing off. The only extravagance able to be afforded went to blood: blood is a warning, its redness an alarm that the casing of the body has been breached. That the continuity of the tissue has been broken.

In reality, on the inside we have no colour. When the heart pumps out blood as it’s supposed to, blood looks just like snot.