child made of sand (thomas lux)

(poet thomas lux)

the second book i read / pondered during my trip back to mississippi was the advance reading copy of thomas lux's child made of sand. first off, it's a handsome book:

a lovely yellow / red / white colour scheme with a chunky sans serif. nice. now, let's talk about the 65 pages of poetry between those yellow covers.

what i noticed, reading the collection through from cover to cover for the first time, was a recurring image: a handless god. a god who is either literally or symbolically handless - possibly indifferent, possibly impotent, possibly resentful.

From Whom all Blessings Flow 

[...]
Nobody ever sees Whom around.
Whom gets credit
for what Whom never lifted a pinky
to do, or not to do.
Whom doesn't have, I think, a pinky.
[...]

the speaker of "every time someone masturbates god kills a kitten" gives god a proper talking-to: after a list of alternatives (why not kill rats, snakes, clams instead?) he demands, "how 'bout a little less hard-ass?"

kittens are not the only ones faced with death in this collection. there is a horse that drops dead, there is the thought of death in general, death by hanging, suicide, one's own mortality. there's "a frozen ball of rattlesnakes" we cannot be sure are dead or alive.

many of the poems in child made of sand are at the same time funny and disturbing, such as "ermine noose" and "graves rented by the hour". other poems are simply beautiful, like "not the same mud as in 'two tramps in mud time'"or "the drunken forest" or "the moths who come in the night to drink our tears". their strengths lie in the well-crafted images that suggest lux is an observer with attention to detail:

[...] the fog of mud, what first
grips your ankle so whisperly, a little warmer
than the water above it, a satiny sock [...]

(from: "not the same kind of mud")

images of illness go hand in hand with the theme of death, and there is illness in this book: leprosy, nervous breakdowns, birth defects: "boy born with small knife in his head". in "rue de la vieille laterne", lux eulogizes the french writer gerard de nerval (1808-1855) who had the endearing habit of taking his pet lobster for walks on a silk leash. de nerval, after three mental breakdowns, took his own life in 1855 (wiki).

then again, there are a few poems i find it hard to warm up to - the "elegy" for cesar vallejo, "the queen of truth", "madsong", and most of all, "the riverine farmers" - the ending in particular feels, to me, rather heavy-handed, possibly because of the dominant end-rhymes and a tone that - again, to me - sounds too educational, too intent. however, that's a matter of taste.

overall this is a lovely collection. when it comes out in november, you might want to check it out!

the curious life of the dead (stiff)

so i've been parallel reading howards end and stiff. since the semester starts again today, i wanted to tell you about stiff before the madness of school catches up with me. stiff was a spontaneous gift from a friend of a friend who noticed i was looking at it while they were practicing for an upcoming performance. i have to say that some passages made me feel a little unwell - i have a very vivid imagination, a very tangible, physical imagination, and if that is true for you too, be aware of it. at the same time, the book is not gross. it is in no way revolting or shocking. mary roach treats the subject of corpses with just enough humour, some detachment, and respect at the same time.

from: waterhouse: sleep and his half-brother death (1874)

the idea of death something like the waterhouse painting above is still quite common - it's a common trope in movies, faerietales, and the likes. death as the brother of sleep. death as something peaceful, something unchanging and permanent, but not utterly alienating. the body is not much changed, in fact death (on the right) looks only a little stiffer, a little less relaxed than sleep (on the left). roach suggests that in the past, often people who chose to not donate their body to science or not to allow autopsies on their loved ones did so because they felt the peace of the dead would be disturbed or the memory of the decedent desecrated. she argues that the increase in people's willingness to will their own bodies to research after death is a direct result of the increase in the general public's understanding of the chemistry and biology of the body, especially the dead body. considering the processes of decay a dead human body goes through naturally, or when buried, letting others use the body for a common good seems more of an option. eventually, each body will cease to exist, whether it is buried, cremated, embalmed or autopsied.

while i still don't know that i would offer my body up for research, roach's book has given me a much better understanding of what is in store for the body after physical death. the american practice of embalming both fascinates and frightens me: it involves replacing the blood of the deceased with a formaldehyde solution. the reason this is so popular is that it gives the dead person that "alive" look - refilling some of the tissue that has inevitably collapsed or shrunk with the dehydration and other effects of physical death. with the help of some special make-up (yes it has to be special, since most of what you and i may use normally is designed to work on warm, living skin, rather than cold) and some aces up the embalmer's sleeve [such as moisturizing creams, plastic eye caps to keep the eyes from looking sunk and collapsed, which due to dehydration they will, and then some tricks to keep the mouth from falling open], your loved one can be made to look like they were, indeed, just sleeping. as i already mentioned in my ramblings about janet frame's daughter buffalo, the whole idea of chemically treating the dead to postpone or (as in lenin's case) even halt for decades the process of natural decay seems a bit iffy. formaldehyde is not exactly spring water, and considering it is a proven carcinogen, allowing it to seep through into the ground and into our drinking water seems like a less than brilliant idea. i am relieved to know, now, after some reading up, that embalming is rarely done in germany. i know you're going to say, hey, you'll be dead, you won't even know what happens to you, but to be honest i still don't like the idea of strange chemicals messing with my body.

an ecologically sensible coffin, by http://www.englishwillowcoffins.co.uk/index.htm

 here are some eco-friendly ways to go, if after reading this book you still decide you don't want to serve in one of the many capacities corpses have served in over the centuries.

another eco-friendly coffin, made from recycled paper.

roach makes a good case for the important role of donated / willed corpses for research. these have allowed scientists to learn a great many things in many areas of our daily lives. yes, virtually all crash testing is done with dummies these days, but there was and is only one way to know the limits, the thresholds of the human body, how strong an impact can be before it does organic damage or breaks a bone. once these limits are established, we can work with dummies and probes and such, but we only know these limits because there were people who willed their bodies to research. much medical training, until recently, included work on corpses when available. how else could a surgeon know where and how to find or fix a certain piece of your anatomy, if s/he has never seen it in the big picture? in the past, say, the 17 to 1800s, the bodies of executed criminals were made available to scientists for these purposes, autopsy being considered an added penalty on top of death. there were not enough corpses to go around, and so a trade in bodies began - which roach describes in chapter 2, crimes of anatomy. consider this:

[Body snatching] was a new crime, distinct from grave-robbing, which involved the pilfering of jewels and heirlooms buried in tombs and crypts of the well-to-do. Being caught in possession of a corpse's cufflinks was a crime, but being caught with the corpse itself carried no penalty. [...]
Some anatomy instructors mined the timeless affinity of university students for late-night pranks by encouraging their enrollees to raid graveyards and provide bodies for the class. At certain Scottish schools, in the 1700s, the arrangement was more formal: Tuition, writes Ruth Richardson, could be paid in corpses rather than cash. (43)

the body snatchers were also called (ironically enough) resurrectionists.the situation is different now, - according to roach there is almost a surplus of donated bodies. while there is still research that needs doing, in forensics as well as in medicine and safety testing for vehicles etc, and plastic surgeons need close-to-life materials to learn and practice their procedures on, a lot has already been achieved. roach cites alert king's calculations, in 1995, that

vehicle safety improvements that have come about as a result of cadaver research have saved an estimated 8,500 lives each year since 1987. For every cadaver that rode the crash sleds to test three-point seat belts, 61 lives per year have been saved. For every cadaver that took an air bag in the face, 147 people per year survive otherwise fatal head-ons. (92)

one touchy area is, according to roach, however in need to more willed corpses: pediatric impact studies, or any studies really, i would imagine, where the bodies of children would be needed. children do not usually will their bodies to anyone or anything. it's not the sort of thing children worry about, and it's not the sort of thing they should worry about. and who would want to bring up the option of body donation with grieving parents? (95)

not all the bodies researchers work with are willed or donated. sometimes, the body is all they have to solve a crime or find out the cause of an accident, a plane crash or such. there are professionals out there who have studied the types of injuries different types of accidents or assaults will create, the type of decay that occurs naturally and under various conditions, and can tell much from "just" the body at the scene of an accident or crime. (yes i know, there are lots of tv shows / series about that, right? csi this and csi that. keep in mind, as you read this blog, that i don't even own a tv.) 

medical schools are beginning to work with digitized corpses, a collection of  images of a great number of "slices" of an actual corpse, giving a (re-usable) three-dimensional image for medical students to work with and study.

overall, this book is fascinatingly interesting. it is well-written and quite readable, even for someone as squeamish as myself. i still have about half of the book ahead of me, but i would recommend it to anyone who is curious about the human - dead - body.

more to read:

• preservation procedures for different countries: http://www.afif.asso.fr/english/preservation.htm#Europe
• formaldehyde myths & risks: http://www.themodernembalmer.com/pdfs/20090620myths.pdf 
• thanatos, the greek personification of death: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thanatos
• zeit: wie man in deutschland begraben wird (2004)
• hygienische totenversorgung: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygienische_Totenversorgung
• thanatopraxie: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thanatopraxie

the last taboo? (daughter buffalo)

so this is what i am currently reading. janet frame's daughter buffalo. it's been on my list of books to read for a while now, - about ten years ago i "discovered" frame for myself, when i found one of her books (her first, the lagoon and other stories) in the foreign language section of a german bookstore. i devoured the book and decided to read as much of her writing as i could lay hands on.

i did read a bunch of her books, though by far not all of them. i thoroughly enjoyed the lagoon, - a  collection of very short, intensely interesting short stories, - and fell in love with owls do cry and also with scented gardens for the blind (both novels). her short story collection you are now entering the human heart is also good, though (maybe because it was "first contact"?) the lagoon stories still seem the strongest to me. i got swamped with work somewhere during the adaptable man, and also never finished reading her three volume autobiography. i remember reading her poetry collection the pocket mirror and being a little disappointed - i guess her intense, poignant prose is a hard act to follow. her prose, in itself, is very poetic, maybe that's why.

so now i am reading daughter buffalo. i am noticing more and more that i am getting to the point where, while i can hardly wait to read on, i am also reluctant to read on because it means coming closer and closer to the last page. this happens to me a lot when i read a "good" book. its words and images weave a world around me that i want to stay in just that little bit longer. at times finishing a "good" book can be a real struggle that way - because you know that, while you can of course read it again and again and again, it won't be the same. no two readings are ever the same. finishing a "good" book is a bit like a tiny death in itself. which takes us right into this novel!

talbot edelman, a NYC medical student specializing in the study of death, unexpectedly finds a friend in a random stranger, turnlung, who is a poet from a different place and also deeply interested in death. they exchange the lessons in death education they have had through their lives so far. they take turns in narrating this novel, independently of each other, so we get to see both sides of the encounter. frame is a fine observer of persons and behaviors, and these two characters are more than interesting. and while you may shudder at the idea of a novel all about "death education" and dying, or may already have decided not to read it, it is not really a gloomy book.

how do we talk about death? do we talk about death? do we have our own words for what we feel when someone dies, or when we talk to someone who has just lost someone? when we talk about those who have passed on, - how do we talk of them, how do we think of them? is death part of life, or apart from life? are we curious about it? are we allowed to be curious about it?

death, probably more so than anything else, is possibly the last taboo of our day. on my way to work and back and during any visit to the newsagent's i see so much openly advertised and published that - fifteen, twenty years ago, when i was a teenager - would not have been displayed so publicly anywhere. the only thing you cannot find magazines about at that generic newsagent's is death. there are health magazines, yoga magazines, periodicals on parenting, tattooing, fetishes, growing cannabis, and training your dog, journals for birdwatchers, astrology rags and supernatural magazines, but nothing on death and dying.

are people really not curious? i have to admit that i am. i have been for a long time. and i will also admit that there are questions i ask myself that i have not really dared ask aloud. even simple, technical ones. like, is it true that when people die, in the U.S., they replace the dead person's blood with some chemical to slow down decomposition? how does that affect the environment? and is it true that, again in the U.S., lots of make-up is applied to the corpse to make the person look, well, less dead? and there are so many other questions. but how, who and when do you ask?

in any case, talbot and turnlung have set out, independently at first, to explore death. they make many interesting observations and have different motivations for wanting to know. i will let turnlung introduce himself (taken from chapter 4):

I said that, to survive, from the moment we are born we must be capable of turning against. Before birth, we are against air, against breathing, yet we survive to breathe and love the air, we become turncoats - turnskins, turneyes, turnmouths, turnhearts, turnlungs. And having known life, we are against death even when all messages from the country of death convince us that our final role must again be that of turncoat, turnheart, turnlung. 

but talbot and turnlung are not the only intriguing characters in this novel. we also meet talbot's dog sally, and a headmistress of a northern school who shares her own death education. different types of death are considered: death in youth, in old age, in sickness, sudden and unexpected deaths, literary deaths, anonymous deaths, deaths in the family, and one's own personal death. the passage about literary death, to me, was particularly interesting, since it ties in poetry and how literature can serve in mourning by lending to us feelings we might feel we do not have enough of all by ourselves. how do we mourn? how long should we, could we, may we mourn?

this book gives no answers. it gives no recommendations. it piques your curiosity and lets you look right at death where you would usually feel worried people might think you're staring. it is because of the peculiar character of talbot and because of his detached observations that it becomes ok to be curious - and to maybe learn by proxy. meet talbot. (this is from chapter 1)

I  learned little of [death] in my own home. Our garbage was removed by an automatic disposal unit. Everyone took many baths, drying with thirsty towels which in their turn played the family game by seeming to render invisible all traces of hair, stains of living, dust, sweat. All our happy conversations, our plans lovingly composed together, had no mention of death. In winter, when the snow was deep and the year's leaves had died and were buried, when only a few creatures - squirrels, cardinals, crows - could be seen, you might have imagined that even we would be tempted or persuaded to surrender ourselves or part of ourselves to the surrounding death-light, [...]

Yet each winter we let pass the opportunity to invite death as a rightful guest, without fuss, into our home, and before we knew it the trees had new leaves, the sun melted the iron bars of the winter prison, and death, unfrozen, flew away as a scarlet bird, a golden bee or fly, as if it had never been; and for us, it had not, for us, the sun was like money, always with us and in use.

i am now half-way through this book. i am enjoying it because it deals with an interesting subject in a way i can handle. in a language i understand - the language of experience, image, and poetry. even if i did not know this book was by janet frame, i would have guessed it - the characters, their voices, the detailed observations, all her strengths are there. if you feel up to it, if i have managed to make you at least a little bit curious, go see if your local library has a copy of this book. it's been published a few times since it first came out in 1972 (i have the flamingo edition from 1993) so should not be too hard to find.