marian thoughts

Several years ago, while visiting Washington state family and friends, I went with a close friend from high school to see the "Bodies" exhibit in Seattle. A controversial German gentleman who developed a process known as polymer relacement for preserving organic tissue had prepared all the bodies the exhibit.  I had been reading about the Desert Fathers, whose movement Henri Nouwen sums up in three disciplines: solitude, silence, and prayer.  Being at this "Bodies" exhibit invited us into just such a desert space, and caused us to gaze in wonder and quiet at the mystery that is the human creature.  Each person shuffling about in that gallery was forced  to be alone in a way--to confront his or her own fragility in pleasant, quiet bewilderment ("how fearfully and wonderfully we are made!").  There were two exhibits I found so beautiful that they were painful: a tiny progression of fetuses that had died of natural causes in utero. It seemed to me that each woman caught her breath a little when she came to them. The other was the of the vascular systems surrounding the heart.  Its funny, because when you see these things a tiny part of you wants to deny that this is how you are inside--that you are not made of any stronger stuff.  You almost want to walk away in protest, as if burying these bodies out of sight would erase the fact of decay that no one (except these preserved ones) will escape.  But your curiosity gets the better of you, and you find yourself being careful that no aspect of the human spinal cord go missed or wasted by you.  It is humbling, but you almost have to stare and stare. You remind yourself that down on the street, as you wait in your warm coat for the crosswalk and charmed by the lovely New Year's displays in store windows, these things that you can now see so clearly will be no less true about you--your brief, temporary tendons and muscles are still knit together quite literally by a Someone you have never seen.  Something visceral and in the bones wants to resist this knowledge, this awful fragility, but in the end it must always resolve in an "amen": "May it be to me as you have said." My thoughts returned to Mary again, several weeks after Christmas.  Most of us will never be faced with an angel bringing weighty news like that she received, but every day there are these moments where we can either choose denial or a full affirmation of what has been revealed to us as our true situation: "I am the Lord's servant.  May it be to me as you have said."

I wrote this after seeing the exhibit, and wanted to archive it here.

"Bodies," Seattle, January 2007

I will not speak for hours
but hear deep, gurgled things
between my pelvis and my throat.
I saw a woman springing forward,
fertile, dance high-heeled
with a rubber-coated man whose small,
flaccid member made her giggle.
She could not tear her eyes from him,
admiring his peeled-back buttocks,
the prowess of his perpetual lunge.
A longer man recoiled
from two, white, fatty half-orbs:
a convex invitation punctuated by a nipple.
He grimaced unawares, shuffled over
to another woman and lost himself
in her fallopian links and smiled,
coming to the brief fairway of a uterus.
I saw one child behold another
smaller than a silver dollar,
curled upon itself like a jelly bean.
A narrow void above my groin
and through my abdomen stirred.
I followed yards of empty, looped intestine
whose latex sheen like a used glove
alarmed me.
I saw a fragile forest
of red and blue stemming downward
from a pulsing firmament;
I climbed their lichened branches
into all the hollow chambers of the heart.
Myriad pipes and conduits moved me up
from visceral heaviness
to where grey and lofty matters sit
rippling, electric clouds.
Sometimes from there the eyes flash,
heat and sound let loose upon the world--
some say it is the seat of God.
I saw it there in glass and light,
and I will not speak for hours.