taste what I've seen

[review of the plasticine injected humans of Gunther Von Hagens' bodyworlds II exhibit.]

Every morning when the first burst of light hits our eyes, the top layer of retinal cells is scorched off and we literally see the world with new eyes. Today set my senses on fire.

Driving across country side in a beat up car, blasting bouncy music and counting hawks till we hit the stench of a dirtier post-industrial city, flat and stuck somewhere between the decline and the future. We parked next to the birthplace of rock and roll and spilled downhill to the science center like a sore anachronistic robot thumb on the decaying gull covered lakeside dock. Inside got us even higher on omnimax x-ray specs of infinitesimal daily life body processes. Birth to breathing to bloodcell decay, strangely no shit or sickness though just as much part of being human. But there was more to come. Further, the mannequin lover's dream turned flesh from plastic; bodies peeled back muscles bone, whole nervous systems and arteries standing naked alone, bodies cut up and posed like Burroughs' lunchbox juxtapositions. Skateboard yoga and babybearing bodies fencing, faces spliced and facing themselves, chests doored out holding intestines aloft. Bodies without organs next to organs without bodies, exploded 20 ft across spaced out layers to give the impression of being a body at all.

Walking around with eyes far out we couldn't help but feel our own cell systems want to seperate. Signs say now accepting donors for plastinication. What a way to go. To a taste for beauty and a grotesque mind. Stepping back into the clouds, everything wanted to drift away with us, car engines tree rings office buildings similarly expanded and explained, intimate gearworks and growth cycles blown up to metasystemic proportions and chalklined onto the city streets. Now I usually find myself behind the far edge of appearances and try not to take anything at surface value, but this was priceless and hard to take for real. There's a story Alan Watts tells his kids about god, saying he's in this grape, cut it open. Now he's in two, cut, four, cut, to infinity, cut. In fact he doesn't seem to be there at all. Cut far enough and you just make atom bombs and maybe learn a little how it all fits together. Our analytical prostheses.

Anyway, it was all rather exciting, then went out for margaritas and enchiladas with some city wrecked friends and drove off into the smog lit night for home.

I wonder what tomorrow will look like.