Annabel Lee

By Edgar Allan Poe

-----

It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than love -
I and my Annabel Lee;
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.
And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsman came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulcher
In this kingdom by the sea.
The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
Went envying her and me
Yes! that was the reason
(as all men know, In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we
Of many far wiser than we
And neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.
For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride,
In the sepulcher there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea.

-----


Nox Arcana

Requiem For A Dream

Clint Mansell

Stringfever Bolero

I love strings. This is one of my favorites! Beautiful music, wonderful performance.

Glass Microbiology

Over at Street Anatomy a recent article featured the awesome work of Luke Jerram.

These transparent glass sculptures were created to contemplate the global impact of each disease and to consider how the artificial colouring of scientific imagery affects our understanding of phenomena. Jerram is exploring the tension between the artworks' beauty and what they represent, their impact on humanity.

These are exquisite and the construction just blows my mind. I thought this note from the artist particularly interesting --

I'm also pushing the boundaries of glassblowing. Some of my designs simply can't be created in glass. Some are simply too fragile and gravity would cause them to collapse under their own weight. So there's a very careful balancing act that needs to take place, between exploring current scientific knowledge and the limitations of glassblowing techniques.

Follow the link to see the full 18 page slideshow and a very interesting youtube video of the making of the HIV sculpture.

"HIV"


"E Coli"


"SARS"


"Smallpox"

Dia de Los Muertos

I really dig the Day of the Dead aesthetic. It is a perfect amalgam of bright happy colors and death, a kind of morbid Rainbow Brite sugary confection. I've decided my next puppets/projects need to be easy peezy design-wise and more fun than thinkie so I am going to make some Muertos skulls and/or simple hinged skeletons. Nothing fancy in the construction, literally hook and eye type joints. In my tromp through WonderWebLand I found some really beautiful skull sculptures on Day of the Dead Folk Art Gallery. So inspiring!

Dwight Frye

Nicknamed "The Man with a Thousand Watt Stare", Dwight Frye was in dozens of movies during the 20s, 30s and 40s but most notably (to me) Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein and Vampire Bat. I like watching him; he's got a great head. The iconic mad scientist's assistant.

Yay Fritz! Yay Karl! Yay Herman!

Coffee Shop of Horrors

I drink a lot of coffee. I like the flavor and the ritual of drinking a mug. This online shop makes me smile. Blends with names like Ichabod's Dame, End of the Rope and Burial Grounds (hahaha!)

Coffee Shop of Horrors : "Deviously Delicious!"

Tap tap tap

Why Russia is Awesome - Reasons No. 8076 and 8077

They're both Russian. The first one is Russian with ... Russian subtitles. H-E-L-P-F-U-L. I don't think you really need to know what they're saying though. Recommended viewing procedure --> Watch video 1 while listening to and watching video 2 out of the corner of your eye.

Al Farrow - St. Guerro Reliquaries

Reliquaries are containers for relics, usually physical remains of saints. Things like bones, clothing or other objects that belonged to the person. Al Farrow makes his reliquaries for Santo Guerro (Saint War?) out of guns, ammo, steel, glass, and bone. Clavicles, arms, skulls, jawbone, foot, leg and yup, trigger finger. Really gorgeous work. Take a look at all of the details and angles and much more HERE.

"Femur of Santo Guerro"



"Femur - Detail"



"Femur of Santo Guerro - Detail"


"Cathedral"



"Cathedral - Detail"


"Cathedral - Detail"



"Trigger Finger and Two Ribs of Santo Guerro"



"Reliquary for the Extended Family"



"Monument to Surrender"




"Monument to Surrender - Detail"

Günter Brus

"Gunter Brus was sentenced to prison for making art. Born in 1938 in Arding, Austria, Brus studied at the School of Arts and Crafts in Graz, Austria, and the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna. He was a founder of the Weiner Akionismus group (Viennese Actionism), and that is how he got in trouble.

For a 1968 event called “Art and Revolution” at Vienna University, Brus was filmed stripping off his clothes, cutting himself with a razor, drinking his own urine, defecating, masturbating, and singing the Austrian National Anthem. The film is politely blurry, but the Austrian government found him guilty of “degrading the Symbols of the State” and sentenced him to six months in prison. He fled to Berlin with his family, and did not come back until 1976.

Not all Brus’s work was so controversial. In the early sixties, he was making gestural abstract paintings. He became interested in the act of painting more than the paintings themselves, so he started to perform “self-paintings.” His first such work was Aktion, Self-Painting 1: Painting by Hand, Painting by Head, Painting the Head in 1964. In some of the self-paintings, Brus painted a ragged stripe down the center of his head and body. These works are elegant, immediate, and scary. Through his early self-paintings, Brus developed an interest in examining his body and the body’s extreme limits in performance; this line of thought culminated in the scatological works of the late sixties.

What Gunter Brus called the “cesspool aesthetics” of his performances anticipated the work of many artists of the seventies and later, from Carolee Schneemann to Chris Burden to John Waters. In 1970 (the year many experts see as initiating the flowering of performance art in the United States), Brus gave up performance and began developing expressive images in painting, drawing, and artist books. He invented a form he calls “Imagepoems,” texts and drawings that are inseparable from one another. The drawings are apocalyptic and otherworldly in a gentler manner than his performances. They describe nightmares rather than enacting them. Brus’s works on paper have been widely exhibited, and also there have been museum and gallery retrospectives of his performance works. In 1980 he was included in the Venice Biennale, and in 1985 the Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York showed three of the Viennese Aktionists including Brus. In 1998 Brus was featured in the touring exhibition, “Out of Actions: Between Performance and The Object, 1949-1979” which originated at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. Brus has also produced significant work in printmaking with a group of etchings produced in 1982 at San Francisco’s Crown Point Press.

Gunter Brus lives and works in Graz, Austria." (Source)

Bloodstain Pattern Analysis

http://www.bloodspatter.com/BPATutorial.htm

Some of the page doesn't seem to be loading properly for me (things are overlapping or hidden) which is beyond irritating. Don't know if it's just my browser or something I'm doing wrong on my end. Anyway, from what I can see, some interesting stuff. Thanks to Mr. U for the link.

Filed under fun morbid factoids:

* Blood Volume

On average, accounts for 8 % of total body weight
5 to 6 liters of blood for males
4 to 5 liters of blood for females
40 percent blood volume loss, internally or/and externally, is required to produce irreversible shock (death).
A blood loss of 1.5 liters, internally or externally, is required to cause incapacitation.

* Arterial Spurt/Gush: Bloodstain pattern(s) resulting from blood exiting the body under pressure from a breached artery.

Also of note is a link for "High Speed Videos of Blood in Motion" -- includes "Gentle exhalation over two drops of blood on lips" and "Cough Through Bloodied Lips", among many others.

All of this reminds me of Dexter.

Il Silenzio

Via Neatorama: "Conductor/composer Andre Rieu showcases Il Silenzio (a variation of Taps) with trumpet solo by 13 year old Melissa Venema. The song is much more beautiful when played in its entirety, as opposed to what we hear in movie funeral scenes. This is probably the most peaceful five minutes you’ll have all day."

Il Silenzio from Brandon Noonan on Vimeo.

The Coming Plague - 3

Chapter 6 is about Swine Flu and Legionnaires' Disease. I'm much more interested in Swine Flu due to relevance. Hopefully the folks at the board either did not notice or did not care that I posted something that was probably painfully obvious to 99.9% of the population. I shamelessly used the forum as a placeholder for notes that morning. Here they are:

I didn't know this is the same strain believed to have caused the 1918-19 pandemic. 500,000 dead Americans, 21 million dead worldwide, and over 10 percent of the U.S. workforce bedridden during the winter months. In 1918 the world was a lot smaller, human mobility limited, and this virus still managed to travel around the globe in less than five months.

The speed is really phenomenal. As an example I've read anecdotes of women boarding New York subways in Coney Island feeling nothing more than tired only to be found dead when the train pulled into Columbus Circle some forty-five minutes later.

H1N1 got its nickname ("swine flu") from a fella name Richard Shope and an experiment he did in 1932. He showed that folks who were alive during the pandemic had antibodies against the pig virus but children born after did not.

Apparently swine influenzas are so scary because pigs make good hosts, capable of collecting all kinds of different flus from a wide range of animals, birds and humans. And inside the pig all of these different strains can get mooshed up and restructured into something no one is immune to. Crazy-smart these flu bugs are.

Regarding vaccinations. The issue for influenza survival is not individuals, its the overall immunity of an entire population. If a certain percentage of a group is made immune by vaccination the virus can't thrive and either goes into hiding (in a safe piggie for instance) or vanishes.

Another scary thing about this was the U.S. government's involvement in 1976 and the laws passed placing legal culpability on taxpayers' shoulders. I'm still reading about this though and don't know what the current state of things is. But any federal government involvement in a vaccination program makes me extremely nervous. Frankly, the problems with infrastructure and bureaucracy are the most terrifying aspects of any disease epidemic. People are very consistent, very reliable in the way they manage to muck things up.

-----

(Following is the stuff I underlined)

Re: Structure
At the time scientists knew that when the human immune system successfully overcame influenza infection, antibodies were made against two proteins that protruded from the outer envelope of the spherical virus: hemagglutinin and neuraminidase. The influenza virus was otherwise well protected by a tough protein-and-fat armor made of two layers of viral enveloping: one layer was almost entirely composed of the human heart's nemesis, cholesterol. But the virus was caught in something of a Catch-22: it could not infect and destroy cells without the use of its N and H proteins, yet these very compounds were what attracted the usually successful attack of the immune system.

Over 700 of these proteins protruded from the surface of each virus. The long rod-shaped H proteins performed the job of grabbing on to red blood cells, connecting one cell to another and causing formation of clumps of cells in the bloodstream. N in turn pinched off pieces of the cellular membrane that were wrapped around newly formed viruses, allowing the microbes to flood out into the bloodstream. (155)

------

"The issue was not the overinterpretation of early cases [at Fort Dix], but the subsequent foreclosure of doubt" about the possibility of fulfillment of a worst-case scenario, Fineberg said. "My personal view is that often in such cases it's hard to separate likelihoods from consequences. In this case the consequence of being wrong about an epidemic were so devastating in people's minds that it wasn't possible to focus properly on the issue of likelihood. In 1976, some policy makers were simply overwhelmed by the consequences of being wrong. And at a higher level [in the Ford administration] the two - likelihood and consequence - got meshed." (163)

-----

Unclear, and never clarified in any subsequent CDC publications, was how many of the influenza-ailing soldiers were co-infected with A/New Jersey/76 and A/Victoria/75. Even thirty years later no technology could tell which strain was responsible for disease in an individual who was co-infected, although it is generally assumed that whichever strain is present in largest numbers is the pathogenic culprit. (165)

-----

Re: Legal Stuff
... Congress would eventually pass a law that officially waived corporate liability for Swine Flu vaccines, placing all legal culpability squarely on the shoulders of the U.S. taxpayers. It would be signed on August 12 and designated National Swine Flu Immunization Program of 1976 (Public Law 94-380), scheduled to go into effect October 1, t6he same day the CDC planned to kick off the national flu vaccination program.

The nation would then be irrevocably committed. (169)

-----

The bill stated: The United States shall be liable with respect to claims submitted after September 30, 1976, for personal injury or death arising out of the administration of swine flu vaccine under the swine flu program and based upon the act or omission of a program participant in the same manner and to the same extent as the US would be liable in any other action brought against it. (173)

-----

Panic does not always go hand in hand with epidemics, nor does its scale correlate with the genuine gravity of the situation. (much more on 175)

-----

Next is about the role of disease in the developing world's economic and social policies. Sound boring? It's got stuff like Mobutu, Bokassa and quotes like this... "I am going to a place where morality has no meaning." Guess where that is.

Yeh. Africa.

Thoughts on the Ritual of Art

I've never shared my pure creations; my dream-drawings or puppet-monsters. They are what comes closest to the definition of art. Not something I've just copied. Instead, they are things that come straight from the gulch I call a brain. I've never felt compelled to show them to other people. Not out of shyness; it just doesn't occur to me.

I know there is ritual in their making. I've always been reluctant to try to put into words why or how they Are though. I don't think it's out of fear of over-intellectualizing as much as it is a severe self-consciousness about my awkwardness and inability to articulate. I have a very difficult time squeezing thoughts and feelings into words. And sometimes I think a very important ingredient is sacrificed in my attempt.

Whimsy.

Treacher Collins Syndrome

I missed the NatGeo special on this last night but knowing NG they will re-air it a thousand million times. Filed under Defect and Deformity, Treacher Collins Syndrome:

"Treacher Collins syndrome is a rare genetic disorder characterized by craniofacial deformities. Treacher Collins syndrome is found in 1 in 10,000 births. The typical physical features include downward slanting eyes, micrognathia (a small lower jaw), conductive hearing loss, underdeveloped zygoma, drooping part of the lateral lower eyelids, and malformed or absent ears." (Wiki)

Images via Google. More photos and information at Craniofacial dot net.

Bone Yard

I got bones and brains and hearts for my birthday this year. Kind of a delightfully macabre twist on Wizard of Oz or something. Seriously, it is very awesome to have friends and family who know me well enough to know I actually would love a jar of real honest-to-blood brains, a gorgeous non-bleached skull and an emerald jelly-bean-green heart pendant that matches my new 1950s-ish strapless dress.

Anyway. In celebration, I present Moth Kingdom, a nice collection of images and weirdness from a fellow morbid traveler. In response to Why Tumblr? Jackson says, "I like sharing things with people who I can connect interests with. There’s surprisingly a lot of you out there." Ah, I know the feeling (the surprise). As well as having stellar taste, he's also very easy on the eyes.

These are some of the awesome things he finds on Flickr...



(Source: Thanatos.net on Flickr)



(Source)



(Source)



(Source)



(Source)



(Source)

Craniocoolness

(Source, "Volume rendering of a mouse skull (CT) using shear warp algorithm, Christian Lackas)

Werewolf Friday

I don't much care about the date but the day has held a certain allure for me ever since I read that you can turn into a werewolf if you sleep under a full moon on a Friday. First read this at teen age in a big hardcover red book with "Amazing" in the title. Can't remember the name exactly though. Here is another neat site with more info -- Becoming a Werewolf and Metamorphosis Theories

The Hot Zone

Just filing something I wrote up about this book awhile back. May re-read this one and take better notes.

----

*(There is A LOT of liquefying flesh in this book.)

The Hot Zone, by Richard Preston


“No instruments, no senses can tell you if you are in the presence of the predator. You can’t see it, you can’t smell it, you can’t feel it. You don’t know it’s there until you start to bleed.”

-----

This story is a testament to the fact that truth is stranger, and scarier, than fiction. A hot zone is an area or person saturated with deadly, highly contagious disease. The primary hot zone in this story is a primate quarantine unit in Reston, Virginia where an outbreak of an unknown virus is killing monkeys. This is not only about the discovery but the containment mission. No one is sure what the virus is but they know what it looks like: Ebola Zaire.

Ebola Zaire is the deadliest known strain of Ebola. It has a ninety percent kill rate and is called a “slate wiper”. It’s unimaginably contagious. And it’s incredibly fast -- it does to people in ten days what AIDS does in ten years.

So what does it do? It attacks every organ and tissue in the body except for skeletal muscle and bone. It transforms almost every part of the body into a digested slime of virus. The blood clots and thickens but at the same time hemorrhages uncontrollably. It chews up connective tissue with particular ferocity, turns collagen into mush and the under layers of the skin die and liquefy. The skin bubbles up in a rash that looks like tapioca pudding. The skin goes soft and pulpy and can tear off at the slightest pressure.

One of the classic hemorrhagic fever symptoms is [i]vomito negro [/i] -- “a stew of tarry granules mixed with fresh red arterial blood. It is hemorrhage and it smells like a slaughterhouse. The black vomit is loaded with virus. It is highly infective, lethally hot, a liquid that would scare the daylights out of a military biohazard specialist.”

The surface of the tongue sloughs off. The lining of the gut sloughs off into the bowels and is defecated with large amounts of blood. Everything bleeds, every opening no matter how small, eyeballs fill with blood and tear ducts cry blood. Victims sweat blood, salivate blood, leak blood out of nipples, and all of the usual suspects like noses, mouths, ears, genitalia, rectum, and any needle puncture mark. Testicles bloat up and turn black and blue. Fetuses are infected, their cells pigged on virus until they explode, bleed out and are spontaneously aborted in an unrecognizable mess that would rival any scene in the most gruesome horror movie.

Severe brain damage is sustained throughout the course of the infection, violent behavioral changes sometimes occur and the last stages are accompanied by epileptic convulsions. Victims do not go quietly. Blood is everywhere. After death, corpses decompose insanely fast, since the internal organs are dead or have been partially dead for days already, cooked by fever. The body melts down, literally, liquefying faster than a slab of fat on a hot fry pan. It’s said that you have to autopsy Ebola victims very quickly because “you can’t dissect gumbo.”

All of this is painstakingly described before the reader gets to Reston so we know what the possibilities are. What they find is first mistaken for simian hemorrhagic fever (SHF), which is deadly to monkeys but harmless to humans. Only later, after it has been handled and breathed, do scientists realize that it looks like Ebola. But it has mutated and now the most important question is: is this new strain airborne? Is it communicable through the air like the flu? Will it jump from the monkeys to humans from less than blood contamination?

“Imagine a virus with the infectiousness of influenza and the mortality rate of the black plague from the Middle Ages - that’s what we’re talking about.”

Preston does a fantastic job of detailing the bureaucracy circus; the government agencies in pissing contests, the controlled chaos of the containment operation, the barely suppressed panic and nightmare aftershocks experienced by all involved. This aspect may be equally, if not more, disturbing than the virus itself. North America has never experienced a deadly virus outbreak that turns people into bleeders. The soldiers involved do not get hazard pay to work with this stuff because it‘s not considered a war zone. Privates got their usual pay - seven dollars an hour. Getting a glimpse of how people perform when they are put in such a chaotic situation, with the intense fear of an extremely painful, horrific death, is not exactly comforting.

It’s so peculiar to read what the scientists and virus hunters in particular have to say about diseases like Ebola. They all seem to revere it while being simultaneously scared shitless. They talk about its beauty and purity and the fact that it could wipe out the human species in the same sentence. By the end of the book I fully understood their profound respect.

It’s strange to think they are working with this stuff here in MD. They call the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID, Ft. Detrick) a “virus zoo”. It houses scores of virus strains and is affectionately referred to as “The Institute” by its staff, with a biocontainment hospital called “The Slammer” and a biocontainment morgue called “The Submarine”. All very surreal. Frederick is maybe an hour away from me, maybe less, and although I was aware of Ft. Detrick, I had no idea this was taking place there.

-----

I'm having a really difficult time finding LARGE, up-close, graphic, high resolution, in your face, clear, distinct pictures of Ebola (or any of the hemorrhagics) victims. I'd really like that. In colour.

Until then, this'll have to do.

The Coming Plague - 2

Why do all the worst diseases come from Africa. Chapter 4 of The Coming Plague was about Lassa Fever.

"Signs and symptoms of Lassa fever typically occur 1-3 weeks after the patient comes into contact with the virus. These include fever, retrosternal pain (pain behind the chest wall), sore throat, back pain, cough, abdominal pain, vomiting, diarrhea, conjunctivitis, facial swelling, proteinuria (protein in the urine), and mucosal bleeding. Neurological problems have also been described, including hearing loss, tremors, and encephalitis. Because the symptoms of Lassa fever are so varied and nonspecific, clinical diagnosis is often difficult." (Source - CDC website)

CDC's website includes summaries of all major disease/viruses. Also, of note, a section titled "Outbreak Postings".

Currently reading chapter 5 about Ebola. One of the initial eyewitness reports, which proved eerily accurate, had this to say: "Findings. The affliction is characterized by a high temperature around 39 degrees C; frequent vomiting of black, digested blood, but of red blood in a few cases; diarrheal emissions initially sprinkled with blood, with only red blood near death; epistaxis [nosebleeds] now and then; retrosternal and abdominal pain and a state of stupor; prostration with heaviness in the joints; rapid evolution toward death after a period of about three days, from a state of general health."

Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. ~ Albert Camus, The Plague, 1948

The Eyewriter

The Eyewriter from Evan Roth on Vimeo.

Graffiti artist Tony Quan suffers from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) and is unable to move any part of his body other than his eyes. But thanks to an open source computer project called EyeWriter, he can still draw. The technology tracks the movements of his eyes, allows him to select different shapes and colors, and then projects his images onto the sides of buildings. The above video is a selection from a documentary about the project. (Found via Neatorama)

2012: Carnival of Bunkum

Via h+ Magazine, by Mark Dery (author of Pyrotechnic Insanitarium)

Quote from the article:

I like a good apocalypse as much as the next American, which is why I’ll be braving the Stepfordian horrors of the local mall for the opening of 2012, the German director Roland Emmerich’s latest exercise in disaster porn. The trailer is awesome. It’s got John Cusack in a puddle-jumper plane dodging collapsing skyscrapers, John Cusack in a car playing dodge ball with a meteor shower, and John Cusack squealing around a corner on two wheels, yelling, to no one in particular, “When they tell you not to panic, that’s when you run!” Plus, it’s got every New Yorker’s idea of schadenfreude-gasm: California barrel-rolling into the Pacific.

Please follow the link to read the article in its entirety! Apologies to Mr. Dery for my majorly rude and illegal error in posting the article here.

Sköll and Skulls

I love the name of the Norse wolf and how it jig-saws two of my favourite things if by nothing more than a vague similarity in look and sound.

Puzzle piece Uno -- In Norse mythology, Sköll (Old Norse "Treachery"[1]) is a wolf that chases the horses Árvakr and Alsviðr, that drag the chariot which contains the sun (Sól) through the sky every day, trying to eat her. Sköll has a brother, Hati, who chases Máni, the moon. At Ragnarök, both Sköll and Hati Hróðvitnisson will succeed in their quests. (wikipedia)



Puzzle piece Dos -- Richard Selzer is such a cool cat. Master wordsmith, he perfectly conveys the sheer awe and reverence I have for this peculiar thing we both are and have, we call both “it” and “I”. Following are selected parts of my favourite essay of all time. I understand the sentiment completely; I share this total enthrallment with the ultimate storyteller -- bone.


-----

“Bones”, Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery, by Richard Selzer


Bones. Two hundred and eight of them. A whole glory turned and tooled. Lo the timbered femur all hung and strapped with beef, whose globate head nuzzles the concave underpart of the pelvis; the little carpals of the wrist faceted as jewels and as jewels named -- capitate, lunate, hamate, pisiform; the phalanges, tiny kickshaws of the body, toys fantastic, worn upon the hands and feet like fans of unimagined cleverness; the porcelain pile of the vertebrae atop which rides the domed palanquin of the very brain; the vast, slumberous pelvis, called to wakefulness by the sweet intrusion of sex or the stirrings of an impatient fetus. Out of this pelvis, endlessly rocking, drops man. I agree with those African tribes who decorated themselves with bones. It is more to my taste than diamonds, which are a cold and soulless shine. Whist bone, ah bone, is the pit of a man after the cumbering flesh has been eaten away.



Bone is power. It is bone to which the soft parts cling, from which they are, helpless, strung and held aloft to the sun, lest man be but another slithering earth-noser. What is this tissue that has double the strength of oak? One cubic inch of which will stand a crushing force of two tons? This substance that refuses to dissolve in our body fluids, but remains intact and solid through all vicissitudes of temperature and pollution? We may be grateful for this insolubility, for it is what stands us tall. How is it that in these rigid, massive pieces is the factory of the blood, wherein each day, one million million red blood cells are made and discharged into the circulation to course their three-score-and-one-days, then die.

Stony and still though it seems, bone quickens; it flows. It is never the same at any two moments. The traverse of calcium from the blood to the bone and back again is a continuous thing, which ceaseless exchange of mineral is governed by hormonal potentates from glands afar. Fluid, too, is pressed into, then extracted from, the bone in a never-ending current, yet slow as Everglade.

Break a bone, and almost at once the blood clot between the two fragments begins to carnify. Fibrous tissue and blood vessels invade it, turn it meaty. Now, with cast or screw or metal plate, immobilize the bone so that further disruption will not take place, and the jellied mass is entered by bone-forming cells, the Blasts. Calcium salts are accepted here, and in time there is a bridge of new bone between the fragments. It is the trauma itself, the fact of fracture, that triggers the restoration. It is a cellular call to arms, a furious mobilization, an act of drive and instinct. It is the wisdom of Bone.

Ah, but there is more to the skull than helmet to the brain, to the sternum than shield to the heart, to the ribs than staves of the thorax. The rest of flesh is transient, strung like laundry upon a lattice. To dwell upon bone is the contemplate the fate of man. Bone is the keepsake of the earth, all that remains of a man when the rest has long since melted and seeped and crumbled away. It endures for a million years and, if then dug up from the ground, suggests still to anthropologists the humps of meat that once it wore, and to poets the much that was from the little that remains.

So, I have decided. No gourd, nor royal drinking cup, nor forest strew for me. Upon the wall of some quiet library ensconce my skull. Place oil and wick in my brain-pan. And there let me light with endless affection the pages of books for men to read.



* (I do not have source info for the skull artistry but thought the work was exquisite nonetheless)

A Country for Old Men

Tell me a story, Old Man. You have so much more than my attention.



Bacon and Burroughs



Lance Henriksen



Ian McKellen



Rade Serbedzija



Sam Elliott



Cajal