Body-worlds

[BarTopDancer]

Originally Posted by blueerica

Oh, and you'll hear lots about it tomorrow!!!

Don't make me leave you on the side of the road somewhere in the [shudder] 909!!!!!! I love you to much to put you through the trama of being stuck in that horrible place for longer than necessary. But if you bring it up I may be forced to leave you, though I'm pretty sure that when COPS and Jerry [Springer] show up this afternoon they will be happy to arrange transportation for you out of that horrible horrible place.

[innerSpaceman]

HELP!

Zapppop and I went to see the Body Worlds exhibit last night, and now I am scarred for life!

I can't stop seeing through people to their musculature and circulatory systems. I look right through their deadened eyes to their tiny brains (that, if flattened would cover 1.5 square miles, but which are so freaking small inside our heads that I can't believe they control our bodies). I feel my own self looking out from inside my skull, and I am too conscious of all my internal organs packed together doing their amazing stuff - - and far too conscious of the 1001 things that can (some of which WILL) go wrong with them.

I feel so tightly packed it hurts. Muscle and sinew and nervous systems and circulatory systems and bone and lungs and heart and kidneys and that huge liver, all crammed, packed, intertwined in bundles inside my skin. And how is it that it keeps functioning (until it doesn't)? And how is it that we can move about in these portable bio-factories, and drive cars and dance and make love and type on message boards?

I can't help feeling like a Self-Animated Meat Puppet.

And too many of the the freaking cadavers had eyes that - bloody hell - looked no different than living eyes! Gak, the eyes are no longer the window to the soul for me, but rather my window to look inside your complex, miraculous and absolutely disturbing human body.


Arragggh, I can't make love with my boyfriend this morning. I keep seeing his insides and it's not as attractive as his outsides. I can't even stay in bed awake, because with my eyes closed all I see and feel is the S.A.M.P.

Oh, woe, we are all but S.A.M.P.s (self-animated meat puppets), and there is no escape - - except for the horrible death that inevitably awaits us through one of the dozens of painful and horrific causes that was illustrated for me last evening.



Beautifully artistic and creative and imaginative and mind-expanding and educational displays of fantastically plasticized human cadavers, dissected and presented in a myriad of unbelievably trippy ways. But not for the faint of heart or, in my case, freaked of mind.

[FEJ]

I Agree..I saw it last week. I loved the circulitory system. The duck was cool..

[Tramspotter]

I see dead people.


Oh yeah a couple of duck arterial systems and a disected horse too.

Horses have huge tracheas BTW.

What was tripping me out was the cross sectional resins.

Preshettuo anyone?

[blueerica]

HAHA!

You know, I'm still thinking about my muscles.

The IMAX movie has me pondering my digestive system. GLURP GLURP!

[MerryPrankster]

The BW show sounds fascinating to me -- I love all your different opinions on the show too! I'd really like to see it. But I checked their web site and I see that it will be in Chicago through Sep. '05. Wow, that's seems like such a long time. I wish they would have extended the tour on the west coast. Maybe up to SF and Seattle? I wonder if they will bring it out west again?

[FEJ]

I understand what your saying iSm, and I do like the term S.A.M.P., but I disagree. (And I am not trying to invalidate your thoughts or feelings, just show mine also)
I thought it was amazing that they could show all of those things. I thought it was facinating to see what a hemmorage looked like in cross section or an actual anurysm. Also the whole exhibit on the embryo to child, especially the mother was really informative. things that pictures and video do not do justice.

For me, The body is just the vessel in this part of the journey......



or not.



Either way , I am amazed at the wonders of the human body. If I sit and worry about what can co wrong, and nothing does, thats not really living, is it.

I remember an old addage, eat healty, exercise, die anyway...
Might as well enjoy what I can, do what I can, and not worry about whats out of my control.

I get more scared of the "self" part in the S.A.M.P., that is, worry more about others harming me than my own body failing.

I think the body is a wonderful mechanism, inside and out.

[innerSpaceman]

Originally Posted by ubergeek42

Either way , I am amazed at the wonders of the human body. If I sit and worry about what can co wrong, and nothing does, thats not really living, is it.

Oh, hehe, don't get me wrong. The exhibit was fascinating above all else, and I certainly don't (and don't intend to) go around worrying about potential illness or fatality.

I was just posting my rather visceral reactions to the knowledge which I already had being exhibited so strikingly. I've studied anatomy and biology quite extensively, but I've never seen dissected human cadavers before. I am certainly left with a palpable sense of my mechanics and inner biosphere, which may last a week or a day or the rest of my life for all I know. But I am now uber-conscious of the "me" housed inside this shell of amazing functionality. A functionality that is somehow even more mysterious to me having seen it laid out so tangibly last night.

I am having renewed ponderings on whether my fervent belief that we are beings of energy inhabiting a body is really the certainty I feel it to be ... or whether we are, in fact, all inside here - - a consciousness produced by this baseball sized brain.

In other words: Which kind of S.A.M.P. are we? The self-animated meat puppet, or the soul-animated meat puppet? It's going to be the stuff of my ruminations for a little while.

[FEJ]

Originally Posted by innerSpaceman

....or the soul-animated meat puppet? It's going to be the stuff of my ruminations for a little while.

it is my daily rumination, kind of keeps me in check..

[blueerica]

I really enjoyed my visit to Body Worlds. I was particularly interested in the "plastination" procedures. How they do it, is just amazing, IMO. It was nice to see it actually in someone, as opposed to the start plastic models I got in school, or the cat dissected in phys. anatomy.

Doesn't mean I can't trip out, though...