![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I made a passing reference the other day to odd questions addressed to me on facebook about dead bodies, and someone suggested the topic for a Random Thursday blog. I will try my best to avoid grossing anyone out, but if you run on the squeamish side, you might want to skip this one.
One of my standard anxiety dream motifs is the one where I'm digging in the garden and come across evidence of human remains. And then, because it's easier than dealing with reporting it, or with answering questions about it, I conceal the body again. Except now there's evidence that someone has been messing around with that body, and has taken positive steps to conceal it, and that evidence could reasonably be traced to me. So the dream continues on with me taking further steps to conceal the evidence that I'd concealed the evidence of the body. And spending all my time being anxious that someone else is going to stumble across it. And planning for how I'm going to bluff my way through.
This particular dream tended to occur in contexts where I'd put off some essential activity and the longer it was put off the messier it was going to be. But it also provided me with a useful parable and buzz-word at work. When I talk about the "body in the garden" problem at work, it's how the longer a known issue goes unaddressed, the greater the percentage everyone has in "not having noticed" it in the first place. Because the problem is no longer the original issue, but the fact that people knew about it and didn't do anything.
But in my own life history, the motif of the body in the garden isn't nearly that sinister, so it's a bit surprising that it took on that particular life (as it were) in my dreams.
I think it all started with the bird skull, nestled in cotton-wool in a matchbox, that my maternal grandmother gave me as a curio when I was quite young. (I don't recall how old, but maybe 6 or 7 years old?) I don't recall how long she'd had it, and it was a bit uncharacteristic of her to have recognized that I'd view it as a treasure.
Next came the collection of old, whitened cow bones we found when camping at Joshua Tree National Monument. I think a single bone wouldn't have been as fascinating; but I was caught by the idea of an assortment -- including a pelvis, femur and tibia -- that could be fit together and visualized in terms of the original anatomy.
I remember the pelicans quite vividly. (They made such a great story!) When I was in 8th grade, my dad took my older brother and me out of school for a week (or was it two?) to go down to the tip of Baja California on an ecological survey trip, where we helped with collecting soil and air samples and otherwise enjoyed a holiday on the beach. For some reason of tide and currents, that beach was where pelican carcasses tended to fetch up as they were slowly picked clean by small scavengers. The carcasses tended to be intact and articulated, still held together by ligaments dried to a plastic-like consistency. As one does, I started collecting them up and bringing them back to camp to study further. (As Sappho notes, "If you are squeamish, don't prod the beach rubble!") And towards the end of the stay, my father looked at the collection and laid out an ultimatum: "You see that empty styrofoam ice chest there?" (Because, of course, any perishables in the ice chest had long since been consumed.) "You can only take home what fits in that ice chest."
Did you think this was going to be an ultimatum about not dragging bird carcasses home during a long drive in a packed Dodge van? Oh, so little you know about my family!
So I manged to fit in (I think) four complete skeletons, plus a few extra skulls. And we drove merrily on our way back toward San Diego. My dad liked to avoid the busy border crossing at Tijuana, so we were at a sleepy little border station further east (possibly the Mexicali/Calexico crossing?) in the wee hours of the morning. The US border guard took a look at the scruffy college professor and his two teenage children and said, "You don't look suspicious; I'll just spot-check one container in the car. That one." And, of course, he pointed at the styrofoam ice chest. My dad says, "You aren't going to believe this..." Which of course, is a very silly thing to say to a border guard. They've seen everything at some point. The guard took a look at the pelican skeletons, raised an eyebrow, and waved us on through.
But we haven't gotten to the garden part yet.
It was when I started going to high school -- which involved a couple-mile bike ride that ran along the side of a wilderness area -- that I started hauling home road kills to do my own skeletal preparations. There are a number of ways to remove the flesh from a carcass in order to do a nice, scientific skeletal mount, but only a few of them are compatible with a suburban back yard. So I would pick a secluded location, dig a reasonably deep hole (but not too deep), line it with a sheet of aluminum foil (because you want to confine the eventual results of the process in some way) and bury the carcass in some nice biologically active soil. Then, after a month or two, it was ready for excavation, final cleaning, and mounting. So that dream experience of digging into the dirt and coming upon skeletal remains? There's a reason for it.
When I went off to college (planning, at that time, to aim for veterinary school), I gave a number of the skeletal mounts to my high school biology teacher. But I kept a few: the coyote, the porcupine (collected in Idaho one summer at my aunt's farm), the pigeon, and one lone remaining pelican skull. Processing skeletal mounts in a dormitory environment was, I discovered, considered to be an anti-social activity. I shifted to learning taxidermy. (Still somewhat looked askance, but at least the processing time was a lot shorter.)
I still have the coyote, the porcupine, the pigeon...and one lone pelican skull.
One of my standard anxiety dream motifs is the one where I'm digging in the garden and come across evidence of human remains. And then, because it's easier than dealing with reporting it, or with answering questions about it, I conceal the body again. Except now there's evidence that someone has been messing around with that body, and has taken positive steps to conceal it, and that evidence could reasonably be traced to me. So the dream continues on with me taking further steps to conceal the evidence that I'd concealed the evidence of the body. And spending all my time being anxious that someone else is going to stumble across it. And planning for how I'm going to bluff my way through.
This particular dream tended to occur in contexts where I'd put off some essential activity and the longer it was put off the messier it was going to be. But it also provided me with a useful parable and buzz-word at work. When I talk about the "body in the garden" problem at work, it's how the longer a known issue goes unaddressed, the greater the percentage everyone has in "not having noticed" it in the first place. Because the problem is no longer the original issue, but the fact that people knew about it and didn't do anything.
But in my own life history, the motif of the body in the garden isn't nearly that sinister, so it's a bit surprising that it took on that particular life (as it were) in my dreams.
I think it all started with the bird skull, nestled in cotton-wool in a matchbox, that my maternal grandmother gave me as a curio when I was quite young. (I don't recall how old, but maybe 6 or 7 years old?) I don't recall how long she'd had it, and it was a bit uncharacteristic of her to have recognized that I'd view it as a treasure.
Next came the collection of old, whitened cow bones we found when camping at Joshua Tree National Monument. I think a single bone wouldn't have been as fascinating; but I was caught by the idea of an assortment -- including a pelvis, femur and tibia -- that could be fit together and visualized in terms of the original anatomy.
I remember the pelicans quite vividly. (They made such a great story!) When I was in 8th grade, my dad took my older brother and me out of school for a week (or was it two?) to go down to the tip of Baja California on an ecological survey trip, where we helped with collecting soil and air samples and otherwise enjoyed a holiday on the beach. For some reason of tide and currents, that beach was where pelican carcasses tended to fetch up as they were slowly picked clean by small scavengers. The carcasses tended to be intact and articulated, still held together by ligaments dried to a plastic-like consistency. As one does, I started collecting them up and bringing them back to camp to study further. (As Sappho notes, "If you are squeamish, don't prod the beach rubble!") And towards the end of the stay, my father looked at the collection and laid out an ultimatum: "You see that empty styrofoam ice chest there?" (Because, of course, any perishables in the ice chest had long since been consumed.) "You can only take home what fits in that ice chest."
Did you think this was going to be an ultimatum about not dragging bird carcasses home during a long drive in a packed Dodge van? Oh, so little you know about my family!
So I manged to fit in (I think) four complete skeletons, plus a few extra skulls. And we drove merrily on our way back toward San Diego. My dad liked to avoid the busy border crossing at Tijuana, so we were at a sleepy little border station further east (possibly the Mexicali/Calexico crossing?) in the wee hours of the morning. The US border guard took a look at the scruffy college professor and his two teenage children and said, "You don't look suspicious; I'll just spot-check one container in the car. That one." And, of course, he pointed at the styrofoam ice chest. My dad says, "You aren't going to believe this..." Which of course, is a very silly thing to say to a border guard. They've seen everything at some point. The guard took a look at the pelican skeletons, raised an eyebrow, and waved us on through.
But we haven't gotten to the garden part yet.
It was when I started going to high school -- which involved a couple-mile bike ride that ran along the side of a wilderness area -- that I started hauling home road kills to do my own skeletal preparations. There are a number of ways to remove the flesh from a carcass in order to do a nice, scientific skeletal mount, but only a few of them are compatible with a suburban back yard. So I would pick a secluded location, dig a reasonably deep hole (but not too deep), line it with a sheet of aluminum foil (because you want to confine the eventual results of the process in some way) and bury the carcass in some nice biologically active soil. Then, after a month or two, it was ready for excavation, final cleaning, and mounting. So that dream experience of digging into the dirt and coming upon skeletal remains? There's a reason for it.
When I went off to college (planning, at that time, to aim for veterinary school), I gave a number of the skeletal mounts to my high school biology teacher. But I kept a few: the coyote, the porcupine (collected in Idaho one summer at my aunt's farm), the pigeon, and one lone remaining pelican skull. Processing skeletal mounts in a dormitory environment was, I discovered, considered to be an anti-social activity. I shifted to learning taxidermy. (Still somewhat looked askance, but at least the processing time was a lot shorter.)
I still have the coyote, the porcupine, the pigeon...and one lone pelican skull.
