I spent the morning looking at body parts.
Not something I usually do, I'm prepared to admit.
But my class and I were at a lab looking at cadavers
of people who had generously donated their bodies so that
students like me could see genuine iliotibial bands and
brachioradialis muscles, diaphragms and pancreases,
carotid arteries and scapulae…
There were half-a-dozen trolleys in the lab. One had a couple of arms and a few more shoulders after various degrees of dissection so that we could see the different muscles in different layers. Another had legs all the way up to the waist; another torsos with hearts that had bits of the wall cut out so you could poke your fingers into the different chambers; another had brains — nothing else, just brains.
I guess I should have expected it had I thought about things at all beforehand but the muscles on the bodies themselves looked just like any other meat straight off the cow or the lamb. I can't say what I was expecting; perhaps because the human body is ‘special’ in some sort of speciesist Great Chain of Being-style we-are-at-the-top-of-the-heap way. In the lazy kind of thinking I happily indulge in, I suppose I assumed that it would somehow be different.
Why is it that the thought of eating human flesh is so repugnant. I am certainly not advocating it: the thought revolts me but I'm just asking why? A morning looking at body parts for civilians like me is a little bit of an odd way to spend time and does leave a lad thinking about wierd things like this.
I could try to lighten the tone of this post with jokes about carrying bits up to the north tower in a lightning storm with my assistant Igor and so on. Yadda yadda yadda. Frankenstein. “Give my creation life” etc but I'm just not in the mood after today, really.
¶ 5:10 pm
the results of generations of Christian ethic re 'the soul' of course.
Christian literature claims animals have NO 'soul', so they lost me.
I could eat human flesh much more readily than animal actually.
"Throw anothe gluteous maximus on the barbie! I'm ready for a glutfest!" sorta thing.
I honestly believe that our society's habit of eating (too frequently) the flesh of animals who have been stressed before and during slaughter, is the reason for all the diseases owned by "one in six of the population" etc.
It's all the fear hormones contained therein.
I've heard that idea of the dangers of eating the meat of animals that are frightened at the point of death. But what if all those fear hormones are actually good for us? Hurrah for adrenaline and norepinephrine! Mmm, tasty thyroxine…
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