Ghoul

Death is before me today:
Like the recovery of a sick man,
Like going forth into a garden after sickness

Death is before me today:
Like the odor of myrrh,
Like sitting under a sail in a good wind.

Death is before me today:
Like the course of a stream
Like the return of a man from the war-galley to his house.

Death is before me today:
Like the home that a man longs to see,
After years spent as a captive.
A Babylonian meditation on death
From: Masks of God, by Joseph Campbell

I found that poem (prayer?) in the first volume of Neil Gaiman's Sandman series, Preludes and Nocturnes, tucked inside the last story where Dream contemplates his sister, Death. Most people, he recalls, are scared of her, or revile her...this long-dead Babylonian celebrated her gift and longed for her the way exhaustion longs for sleep, or pain for release.

You can tell a lot about a culture by its image of death. Mayans had Ah Puch, the owl-headed ruler of the 9th hell, who's screech-owl children heralded when someone was fated to die. Lithuanians had Giltene, a maiden dressed all in white who strangled the sick with her hair. The Norse had Hel, the demon offspring of a half-mad father, a hag with a beautiful face whose legs crawl with rot. The Sumerians had Ereshkigal, the dark and obsessive goddess of the underworld who threatened to loose the souls of the dead on the living whenever she felt snubbed. (Interesting side note: most of these examples are of a female incarnation of death -- death wasn't violent so much as sneaky; Greek sirens stealing the breath from heroes, or mermaids seducing doomed sailors with watery kisses -- Italians call orgasms "the little death", so I guess it's no wonder that in many cultures death is not only a woman...but a beautiful one.) And we Westerners, we have our Pale Rider, the 4th and most terrible horseman, riding towards creation with his scythe sharpened, all hell following after.

Some cultures look on death with horror. Americans certainly do -- we view it as a tragedy, as some terrible boogeyman that comes to collect our souls like a crow after a shiny object. We look at bodies much in the same way we look at bodily functions -- perfectly natural but all the same, slightly embarressing and best kept out of polite conversation. Egyptians used to venerate their dead, but of course, that was back in the days when well-to-do Egyptians used to let their wives...uhm...ripen...a bit before shipping them off to the embalmer...who knows what those sickos got up to when no-one was around to watch. The general feeling was that it was better not to provide them with any temptation, especially if the wife in question was especially good-looking. I leave you to ponder the ick factor.

Dear reader, you may be asking yourself what the deal is with today's admittedly morbid blogspot. Well, I've been doing a lot of thinking about My Life Plan, and I've made a decision. (As my father told me today, I'm not getting any younger, and I need to stop...in his immortal words, not mine..."farting around" and get started achieving my goals.)

Well, I've decided -- I want to be a death investigator. You know, like the creepy blonde lady on the original CSI or the girl from Crossing Jordan. I haven't -- quite -- decided if that means I need to go to medical school and specialize in forensic medicine (just a nice way of saying "morgue mama", really) or if I ought to get a combined JD/Masters of Forensic Science and specialize in hard tissue analysis. Hard tissue -- bones and teeth -- is a lot easier to deal with than soft tissue. Soft tissue is the squishy stuff of horror movies. It has the bad manners to retain human-ish characteristics like facial features, tattoos, nail polish. It preserves the rude bits...genitalia, that sort of thing. It tends to get infested with maggots. And it smells vile, even fresh...like a boiled boot mixed with rancid pork. It's the sort of smell that crawls up your nostrils and sets up camp. Hard tissue, on the other hand, doesn't really smell. It's a bit waxy when it's fresh, yellowish and slightly offensive, the sort of smell that apologetically tugs on your sleeve to get your attention. Dry bone doesn't small at all. I wonder if that says something about me -- that I can handle all manner of gore and ghoulishness, as long as it doesn't offend my tender nostrils.

Currently reading: Teasing Secrets from the Dead (Emily Craig, PhD) and The Egyptian Bookshelf: Disease (Joyce Filer).

The dead cannot cry out for justice; it is a duty of the living to do so for them. Lois McMaster Bujold