bones, bare hands and becoming

or: initiation by Bones

It started like a whirl. No, more of an inner jolt; an intense, deep, impulsive, shake of unexpected intense happiness in seeing my supervisor, Dr Gary Robinson [Senior Lecturer in Archaeology at Bangor University], surrounded by bones. I could not care less for anything else. The following two days were spent rearranging appointments and planned sessions, booking train tickets [4 + 4 trains to get there and come back home], planning clothes, food and packing, and then downloading and ordering online books on human remains. Fascinated, engrossed, enthralled, charmed, under a spell. I messaged some friends asking if it was bad for me to be excited like a child in a sweetshop by the idea of travelling for about 4.5 hr to go and “touch + sniff bones”.

Too much?

Too much, too soon?

Could not care less.

Dr Temperance Brennan - Jeffersonian Institute, Washington, D.C.

I downloaded and printed journal articles on handling bones, on the ethics of storing and displaying human remains in museums, on the concepts of what is a body, what is a bone, what can we consider an archaeological resource, on presence and absence of bodies, on bones as artifacts, and detailed drawings of the whole bone structure in our bodies. Then, while having a long bath, I jotted down some ideas from a paleophenomenological perspective, and I thought about questions I wanted answers to. I thought about bones holding silence and what I would want to arise from this encounter. I followed bones like a hog would follow truffles, inebriated just by the idea of roaming wild and being left unsupervised with remains.

I could not sleep. I spent those two days and nights packing and unpacking, and ironing a linen shirt and looking for the appropriate necklace, because even if I am me, I am also Temperance Brennan, the only woman present in my Imaginary Board of Academic Trustees. I let episodes of Bones run in the background, and while eating a rotisserie chicken [because I couldn’t be bothered cooking] while sharing the meat with my two cats, I held bones in my hand like the Magdalene could have done on Easter Sunday if she arrived only some minutes earlier.

At 2:40am I was bright awake, perched on my bed writing “how much presence must be missing before we call something absence?” and “what energy remains in the remains?” and “remains: left over or held back?”. At 5:45 am I was ready in my living room for a 5-minute walk to a train that would have set off only at 6:16 am.

I had planned my meeting with Gary for noon [you never know, trains in the UK!] and instead, at 10:10, I was already sitting in the large library.

I did not know what to expect. I mean, I saw dead bodies and skulls and bones in museums, and bones of animals in a butcher shop. But holding them? Would I have felt scared? Tentative? Hesitant? Unsure? But instead, it was as if I did it before, and I wanted to do more. It is a strange feeling that I cannot even explain. I am fascinated, curious, inquisitive, captivated. Spellbound. All of this and more. And from now on, 1 August will always be my Bone Day.

I questioned myself if I saw them not as human beings and just as artefacts, because I felt detached but at the same time delicate and respectful, as if I were handling something so precious I would lay my life to protect. The following day, journaling compulsively about the experience of me bent over, holding a skull and sniffing it, it dawned on me: I did not see the single person: I saw Humanity. I saw Oneness. They could have been 20, 50, 200, 600, 2,000, or 20,000 years old; it did not matter. I felt something “old and recognisable” while also being “totally new”. Holding skulls is not about holding remains but about touching the continuity of humanity. Not individuals, but Oneness. This is not abstract spirituality, but it is ontological intimacy. There’s something here about bones as threshold objects, neither fully alive nor entirely dead, but mediators between visibility and invisibility, between time and timelessness.

I did not use gloves, but my bare hands, directly, to hold them. This image still strikes hard. The decision to use my bare hands as unmediated touch makes my interaction almost priestly or shamanic. It’s not forensic. It’s not antiseptic. It’s relational. I wasn’t analysing. I was meeting. This is a sacred gesture of presence, and in itself a methodology. When Gary was handing me a skull and then trying to add its respective jaw to give it a semblance of reality, I wasn’t really bothered. I was interested in the top of the skull. The nose, the ears, the eyes, the cranium. That bit where the spine is attached [notice my scientific fluency!] that bit where the spine would get in I wrote in my notes. But then I was looking for the mastoid, and where you see those tiny holes for the blood vessels.  I didn’t feel a connection to the jaw… this wasn’t sentimental, it wasn’t memento mori; it was structural awe, in the same way I find scaffolding sensual and carnal. I think that I speak of bones like the artist in me sees negative space: not as isolated components, but as integral relations, as puzzle pieces of a larger intelligence or in the same way when I hold my camera, I see everything in black and white. This structural phenomenology might become an important term in my work, perhaps maybe a form of corporeal grammar?

I wish I had stayed longer, I wish I had been left alone with them, I wish I had a longer table to lay them out, arrange them as human beings and not bags of bones. I was looking for a hand. As an artist who draws and finds hands intriguing, I really wanted to see a hand and guess what? In my mind’s eye, I imagined a hand. Not a plastic bag holding a mismatch of bones of different shapes and sizes. Out of gesture, I had this form-image in me, but what I faced, instead, was matter. And then, I had this sort of bizarre and maybe irreverent idea: what if I artistically arranged the bones, not as they are supposed to be in reality, in a body, but by some personal law of aesthetics, maybe a tad minimalistic, even.

Maybe there is something in me that sees bones as puzzle pieces on a larger scale, like a code someone needs to crack. Maybe in there, there is the Common Denominator Rule of Life, an invisible Ariadne’s thread that would answer that question I asked Prof Cuder when I was at school: where do we go when we die? What does it mean to be alive? Maybe there is a code, a lymph-flow of some sort that we could follow; maybe in their whispers [because they do talk, you know?] they are telling the story of the before and the after.

In an almost hologrammatic way, I could see People, not persons, not bodies. Not just bones. I saw the Human Race. And it is beautiful. I have a dear friend who is a doctor, and I am sure that Giovanni would see bones in his way, different from mine: their physicality, their role; or my friend, Revered Sue, would probably look at bones from a religious perspective. Me? I am in awe. I don’t even know in awe of what. I am just in awe. I am not fascinated by the concept of death; I am not enthralled by decomposition. I am not captivated by morbidity. I am not dramatising decay. I think that what I am trying to say is that death is not the enemy of life, but its mirror. And within that mirror, a kind of silent knowledge resides. I am not seeking spectacle. I am seeking wisdom. That makes this sacred paleophenomenology.

But I feel this deep sense of Knowing, within me. I know that Death is as important as Life. There is beauty in the process of birth, of a new life that comes into being with all its potentiality, but also a beauty and delicacy in death and in all the potentiality of what comes after, that we yet do not know of, but that we will all encounter.

I have a sense of being able to contain them all [whatever this “them” is]: I wrote in my journal I see them all, I contain them all. There is the very first episode of Chuck, where the main character gets downloaded a program into his brain, and from that moment he can see, understand everything, speak any language, and do anything. A portal opened, and a threshold was crossed. I feel the same thing: something is different, I feel a shift within me, something has changed. I touched human remains, bones. I held them, I experienced them, and I experienced myself in the process. This wasn’t just an experience, it was an upload, a data-packet of some kind. I am no longer quite on the same level of inquiry as before. I passed a threshold. This confirms that my work is not just descriptive, but it is initiatory. I am creating a paleophenomenology of transition. I even experience my own corporality differently, the way I hold space. In a very simple way, I was saying to a friend, I notice the surrealness of calling someone “big-headed” since the skull is actually so small and light and fragile. Somehow, I think that we should think more about the entirety of our journey, not just of life itself: where were we before birth? And where are we going after?

There’s something crystallising in me that’s not just about the day, but about the direction of my vocation. I am not just researching. I feel I am remembering something ancient and essential.

And I will be forever grateful to Gary, because he opened up a space for this experience where I felt free to feel, experience, touch, sniff [!], disclose and trust.

And I felt that the bones trusted me, too.

onwards + upwards,

mx