How The Body Lies
admin — Thu, 08/13/2009 - 18:46
Oh how we long for official approval for our delusions. Despite the efforts of our dear Father Peters, the Vatican doesn’t seem interested at all in our poor Jane Doe. Evidently not rotting and appearing in a few visions simply isn’t enough these days. Perhaps if she’d gone the ambiguous splotch of paint and hysterical recovery route she’d be in the canon by now.
To be fair to the cloth—both fine and coarse—our more rational institutions aren’t doing much better. Doctors who should know better go in endless circles, and even the debunking doctor that said he’d pull away all the sentimentality of the case ended up with the standard reasoning: she isn’t rotting, so she isn’t dead. No matter what anything else says, no matter that it is easier to accept that she isn’t rotting despite being dead. You cannot defeat the shadows by claiming they aren’t there, you must carry the light into them.
If she will not be put in the ground, she must put on the operating table. We have to see that nothing is ticking, but also what keeps that nothing together without the normal force of animation. Is it—as our charming letter from Matthew Stein supposes—a consequence of modern living that some of us have flesh no longer palatable to the agents of decomposition? Is it that this girl was poisoned and the poison that killed her created a deeper mystery around her death than usual? Or does she represent some stranger principle of physiology, and that if we dare to carry the light into this shadow we may find a whole vista of knowledge previously obscured to us.
Only the knife can answer that. Pray that there is someone with authority brave enough to bring it to bear against that lily white skin.
Arthur Manx
Editor