On Saturday Rachelle and I took a friend of ours to the Ontario Science Center to see the exhibit Body Worlds. This show, entitled The Story of the Heart, featured the preserved bodies and body parts of deceased people that had been prepared using a technique called plastination.
I have to admit, I went there with a kind of ghoulish intent. I was interested in seeing how the presence of dead people would make me feel, thinking that the exhibit might be some combination of art installation and haunted house. But the show was taking place at the child-friendly Science Center and it was stubbornly educational rather than artistic.
I had been expecting an uncomfortably intimate experience, but the bodies on display seemed unreal and remote to me. Skinless and struck in a series of Olympic poses, they had been denuded of any personality. In death, they had been reduced to anatomical studies, and the personal details I had hoped for, which would make me feel truly connected to them, were absent.
All the same, the show did reveal just how much the same, we, as human beings, are. We all have the same engine, yet in spite of this, somehow, each one of us remains so very different.
In the close and crowded museum space, a 12 year-old girl and her younger brother were looking at a collection of animal hearts. “ If your brain were on this table,” she began, “it would be the size of a nut.”
An Asian man wore a massive Fisherman’s sweater tucked primly into his corduroy pants. Suddenly, as if the idea had just occurred to him, he would swiftly bend to look at the items on display. With his hands on his hips, he had the appearance of a man doing calisthenics.
A mother and her adult daughter toured through the exhibit. Both blonde and dressed in black, they carried themselves in exactly the same manner. With their arms crossed over their chests, they would look at the items on display with unimpressed, slightly sour expressions. But freed of her mother’s company and put in the proximity of a young man she thought was cute, the daughter became animated and chatty, suddenly enlivened by the exhibit around her.
Mostly though, the children present were young.
A mother of an 8 year-old boy was encouraging her child in his curiosity. She spoke slowly and patiently to him, employing a certain tone to her voice that was clearly reserved for him alone. It was pride, I think, and listening to her, it became obvious that she was throwing her voice just a little more than she really needed to.