by Zoe Hitzig
Volume Two. Thorax, Abdomen and Extremities, with 378 Illustrations,
Most in Color.
Apt that Fig. 1 presents external form of a female breast and chest,
surface, grayscale,
intact and mapped region by region with a fan of bayonets sketched to
this or that
latinate term. Mapped like a virgin. Each term a whisper, a small assertion
of humanity
taken as consent, collateral. As
ransom.
Preparatory work done to gain access to deeper regions (e.g. the cutting
of muscles,
reflection of parts, disarticulations and separation of muscles and blood
vessels by means of
retractors) has not been explained in the legends when the steps
in the prep-
aration were self-evident. The human figure is self-
evident, I have
often thought—its only evidence is itself. We draw definitions
to learn,
draw nude models in studio classrooms to learn about shadow,
draw
the dead to discover what casts it and why definition does not always
suffice.
Draw with Fig. 88, the hand, collateral. An extremity’s extremity. Fingers, more
extreme.
Ring and pinky ones untouched touching the page.
The cut
begins at top-center of the middle finger fingernail down the now-blue
tendon
to the watchline. Another cut, perhaps along it. There is a crease on my wrist
where my hairband
sits when I sleep with my hair down. There is always hair where extremity
begins.
On pulled-away skin, the flap, poses a tattoo which even in death this hand cannot
escape, a signature
heavy with, without. Signature is an invention of death, in fact,
like words
themselves. Anatomie des menschen or untermenschen?—
semantics too
are life or deadly. And legacy. In Fig. 321: legacy parallels
legs
the way a willow in a Viennese garden affirms and denies the city with its
branches. What branch
am I and where do the veins in my left and right hands
coalesce
on their long journey back to
the heart?
Exquisite drawings make carefully sought answers
almost too precise.
Did the anatomists ever climb out of themselves to watch from
above, from
dorsal then ventral view, ever survey
their desks
with watercolors, cadavers, surrounding brushes, pencils, palettes
also
scalpels, forceps, occasionally drawn into view? This intersection of craft and thought,
body at
the center, accretes meaning with every blot, every nib, I begin
to smell
the flesh
as it gets
torn away,
layers—
lips and
labia—
wettest
in life
sourest
in death
but not
to be mis-
taken for
protest
as my own many-times-great grandfather, grandson of a
Useful Jew
was the first man to apply current to the brain, to cortices of Prussian soldiers
with
already-fractured skulls. And the first Jew to win a Nobel prize.
Also kin.
Called Adolf. Discovered barbituric acid, from which all
barbiturates
are still made—not coincident—Nobel himself invented
dynamite,
the merchant of death is dead his premature obituary read before he invented
the prize:
for the advancement
of; for me and
for; for four
dismissed; for
sciens, scientis;
for the opposite
of ephemera;
for the lusty;
for illustrators;
for the
illustrated;
for the illustrious;
for the luster
on the back of a man
waiting to enter the gas chamber. The lights are also hot on the withers
of a filly
on a conveyor belt in the modern abattoir. She might shiver. He
will not.
Turn a page and you will wonder what scalding bronze poured down your
trachea
might feel like. I feel it now. I let it harden and if you tear my flesh
away you will
do me a favor because Harvard Medical School now boasts a four-to-one
student-to-cadaver
ratio and there is a waitlist to donate. A waitlist to donate while Burke and Hare’s
death masks
wink to each other over clemency in a museum
overseas.
Turn a page and you might hear—crunch—the sound
of a stack of paper
cut by a guillotine—crunch—might hear 1,871 slices—
crunch—into
the axial plane of a man who killed a man and after 12 years
in a cell
was injected, killed. He had offered to be sliced into
millimeter-thick
sheets yielding 65 gigabytes of images which demand more than 8
Macbooks
to view. Sign me up. I too will get immortal as
we build
cathedrals for relics before worship. Now we have a rose window
to replace the old
a better newer thinner millimeter-thin stained plastinate made from
a cross-section
of a noble condemned who gave his body to Science and possibly
truth.
The wrist slices might replace our Eucharist, the priest
must serve
them as the wardens served two
requested
cheeseburgers the night of to the to-be-sliced who
refused them.
Who is my creator or yours? Fig. 378. According to the Uniform
Anatomical Gift
Act the skin binds a book, which would be beautiful if
true by
the law of collateral damage.
Volume One. Head and Neck. Making love I wonder were they thinking
of it
of the end as I do each time? The red of eight years
softed pale
by last three months, by prison, now the pink of the skin between
my thumb
and forefinger, almost translucent, not transparent, dumb with
effort stretched
in two directions, comfortable when rounded against this cylinder, pressed
against
the intimate, inanimate, against all that stands too tall against liberty.
I hear their
sighs with me and go to them. Hear the pink and read red as the red
orchestra,
brilliant, uncaptured, never watercolor. Something flowers
in her.
So rarely are women criminals we know little about female
parts
so rarely, in fact, this Nazi anatomy is used to demonstrate that
rape
itself is contraception. Yes someone actually believes that and
he lives
a short flight from me, a flight to get on which I wouldn’t even
get
frisked. Frisking is important as that stern airport security woman in Amsterdam, tight burnt orange with buttons. Ran her hands all
over concentrated two fingers on my
labia, pressed hard
into them and
I think of her when I slip into kilt and roll the waistband
to make
hem clear keen knees more cleanly, unstuck to the slashes on the backs
of them.
How clean and tired the world in which we learn from kin alone
clean, beautiful—
tired. Do not dissect a frozen fetal pig, delivered from a gray warehouse
to your
navy and gray kilted and pressed classroom. Slice open the pregnant one
digging
for truffles in your yard, flip it over and make one long clean cut along its pink-gray
underbelly
the squeals will be enveloped by history the hungry shadow, the amoeba emerging
from your
sternum in these moments for these sounds and scents, reach
through
the reddest red and fish out the fetus, relish the warpaint
staining
your kilt, make holy stigmata on palms and left rib, laugh
and lie
on the lawn. Like Manet you will be loathed for the correct
placement
of the heart. Cut the umbilical cord and you can do
science.
History and men enjoy a peace they somehow feel they earned
by buying
bonds or listening to a speech. Remarkable meaning is accessible
by private jet
as there is no difference between holding bonds and holding
someone
in them. A bond is a promise to someday release, asking
how
to find meaning in such a world misses the point entirely.
This
is meaning—spontaneous, organized into new meaning
as currency
wanders from cigarette to bully mark in camps nearby and across
the continent
as exactly one thought arranges itself into exactly one action across
time
into
crimes
bigger than
we ever meant
to contain.
As if Sikhs would give away cured meat for free forever. As if
there
were such a thing as death support. As if sex were always a moral
act.
Our necks sticking to hair, hair standing in for veins, veins for arteries,
are bloodless
as carefully drawn legacy, wan as encephalon drawn in an
anatomy book.
Something flowers in her. I feel it too. They lust for life,
believe:
Believe with me in the just time that lets everything ripen.
Volume Three, index,
University of Vienna
Medical Hospital
and Uncle Johannes
in the premature
birth ward
we cannot speak
their ears
fine as thumb-
knuckles
to whisper is to
make sounds without
vibrating
the strings
in the neck
but to push
with breath
a thought—
non-human
cooperative
species known
to whisper—
there are two—
cotton-top
tamarins and
barbastelle bats
charge pursuit
with sonar
and whisper
to avoid
detection by
eared moth prey
and when does
it begin this life?
A sonogram or as
we once believed
if eyes were sealed
the fetus cannot
become—
the shorter the cervix
the greater the risk.
Do you know
the form of your curl
at twenty-three
weeks—
what a privilege
it is to palm such
vastness?
I—
must resuscitate
regardless of
guardian wish.
Notes on Pernkopf Atlas
Lines in italics were lifted from the following texts: Helmut Ferner’s Preface to the W.B.
Saunders Company 1964 Edition of the Atlas of Topographical and Applied Human Anatomy by
Eduard Pernkopf; “To and From the Guillotine” a poem written by Clara Leiser in the memory of
Mildred and Arvid Harnack; and a stolperstein that stands in memorial for Libertas and Harro
Schultze-Boysen.