[The Dayton Daily News printed the following article by Ron Rollins on Sunday, May 11:]
You know that old saying about the body being a temple? Well, maybe not so much.
One way to think twice on the matter would be to visit the “Bodies” exhibition, which is running until Sept. 1 at the Cincinnati Museum Center at Union Terminal. Curious and looking for a road trip, my grown son and I checked it out a few weekends ago, having heard a lot from family and friends about how cool and fascinating it was.
To tell the truth, I’m sorry I went.
It’s expensive, for one thing–$23 for adults, which is a lot for the average museum gig. I expected to get my money’s worth.
But by the end of the whole gallery–a succession of about 20 real human bodies stripped of skin and arranged in various states of dissection or action to show the workings of the physique and organs–I didn’t really learn that much. Apparently, I paid more attention in high school biology than I thought.
I mean, sure, I learned some thigns. Like how tiny the pituary gland really is (dime-sized), and what a breast-cancer tumor looks like.
As an ex-smoker, it is something to see what blackened lungs really look like, and as a jogger it’s neat to see the tendons, joints and sinews in the legs and feet, and wonder how they put up with all that pounding. But overall, my general knowledge of the body and how it works wasn’t vastly increased.
I was intrigued, I admit, at how interested people seemed to be in these dissected, plasticized corpses. They wanted to be close to them, to nearly touch them, to look inside and marvel at the complexity they revealed. To observe a healthy young person examining a body and watch them figuring out what makes their own physique work was rather satisfying people-watching of a rare sort.
Even with all that, I felt that there was something not quite right about it all. I felt some kind of itch. A metaphysical stone in my shoe that kept me from fully plunging in and enjoying the show.
Namely, that it was a show. I was bothered by the whole temple thing–the fact that my physician father spoke often to me through the years about the sanctity of the body, and its awe-inspiring mystery. If it’s a temple, I wondered, then a temple for what? For all that makes us more than just bones and muscle–the magic of the special spark, the intellect and the spirit, that makes us human.
Whatever that spark is, it’s what was missing from “Bodies.” The show made that spark seem inconsequential and unnecessary. Quaint.
I found myself wondering: Who were these people? Where did they live? What did they know? Who did they love? Who loved them? What were their hopes, their dreams?
Whose flesh had been flayed and dipped in resin for my–well, for my what? My education? Insight? Not really. As I said, beyond the first blush, there is fairly little the average educated person will learn about the body from “Bodies” that they did not know before.
So, then…for my entertainment? Yes, I’m afraid so. I go to a museum to be entertained, friends, and if it’s by art or photography or sculpture or dinosaur bones or historical artifacts, then fine.
But should the human body, the thing that once held a life, be turned into a mere artifact? Or displayed like a sculpture?
It all felt so…so…Victorian. Like the Elephant Man put on display in a parlor.
So Ancient Roman. So…uncivilized, even in its glossy sheen of arm’s-length professionalism.
Sorry, but it didn’t feel right.
[You can contact Ron Rollins at (937) 225-2165 or rrollins@DaytonDailyNews.com.]
Tags: america, culture, current events, death, dehumanization, humanity
