Hello Cruel World

Saturday, November 21, 2009

Burial & other body solutions

BTW, can anyone help, or point me towards help, with information on the usefulness of bodies with metastatic cancer for assorted organ transplants. Would cornea or skin be possible, if nothing else?
Alternatively, should I try contacting various medical schools or anatomy museums to find if they'd be interested in a massively-surgically-altered specimen as an example? Not sure about 'plastination'.

Would have for all these to make sure to, say, shave hair & take some nail clippings for modest burial. Wonder if anyone'd like to try some Victorian-style hair jewellery?

If it appears beforehand no-one wants body or its parts, I'm hoping for a "natural" style burial on a rural hillside I own. There's a polished stone & fossil necklace I also own called 'Drowned in Stone' that's already set aside to wear. We can tuck part of my partner's ashes in too.

(Cunning plan is for a comfy, back-supporting, scoop-seated stone bench on top (local stone is granite), so people can rest & admire the view, with bowl (have a glazed ceramic one might do) on shady side for animals (with climbing ridges for small ones that fall in — seen too many drowned) & water-draining seat, and inscription on back. (E. longiflora decoration wherever — ends?) Also hoping for carefully selected local small shade tree at right position for hottest times. Or *maybe* peppercorn, but needs more distance. For *real* fancy stuff, they could drag a lump of Pyrmont sandstone — there are some in my backyard, or use a rough chunk — up, flatten the top to a slight skillion (water-shedding) & prop it in a convenient spot nearby on the hillside for spreading a small picnic while you're sitting there. Can't work out a place for chunks of the fossil-rich mudstone found under the sandstone layer, it's too soft to leave exposed for more than a few years.

If the council isn't keen, well it'll all have to go up near the rocky summit, tucked into the dry? sclerophyll woodland. Should blend in well, esp. if they do the 'old paint the new stone with milky water' trick to get the granite scungied up.)

Labels: aspirations, mortality, personal, sorrybiz, thoughts, time

[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 11/21/2009 04:09:00 am

Thursday, April 30, 2009

Man alone of animals plays the ape to his dreams

Between ANZAC Day and Mother's Day, as April turns over into May, Sydney feels the breath of winter approaching. There are birthdays and anniversaries important to me in the first week of May, immovably connected with the memory of walking out in the chill of dawn, watching puffs of breath mist out into the air. Daylight saving's ended; dark closes in earlier & earlier; thoughts can turn towards larger themes.
From Bartleby, an excellent & useful site:
Modern Essays, 1921. (Christopher Morley, ed.) 30. Beyond Life by James Branch Cabell:

… romance tricks him, but not to his harm. For, be it remembered that man alone of animals plays the ape to his dreams. Romance it is undoubtedly who whispers to every man that life is not a blind and aimless business, not all a hopeless waste and confusion; and that his existence is a pageant (appreciatively observed by divine spectators), and that he is strong and excellent and wise: and to romance he listens, willing and thrice willing to be cheated by the honeyed fiction. The things of which romance assures him are very far from true: yet it is solely by believing himself a creature but little lower than the cherubim that man has by interminable small degrees become, upon the whole, distinctly superior to the chimpanzee …
And it is this will that stirs in us to have the creatures of earth and the affairs of earth, not as they are, but “as they ought to be,” which we call romance …

Labels: anniversaries, annual cycle, aspirations, literature, quotes, thoughts