Corpses (a cheery title)

I choose this as my first musing because I've been thinking about it for most of the day and beacuse it's the subject I've chosen for my new college main project (we were given the subject of "The Living and the Dead" and they'll see what we do with it, basically).

Corpses, essentially, are animal organisms whose nervous systems are too badly damaged (esp. The brain). We label them as 'dead', though in fact this is so far from the truth that it boggles me... Anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of biology knows that a corpse is teeming with life, continues to be part of the biosphere (anyone who's read John Stewart Collis' "The Triumph of the Tree" may remember a rather illuminating bit about a cow's relationship to it's feild), indeed, eventually becomes part of the medium for new bodies with fully functioning nervous systems, a sort of materialisic reincarnation. Coral reefs could be described as remarkable biuldings made up of corpses (perhaps eerily paralleled by certian architectural oddities such as this chandeleir in the czech republic). An idea for a quick, simple, possibly slightly cheapskate artwork would be to scoop some soil up from a local forest and label it 'graveyard earth'. It's bound to be true, eventually.

Another thing I've always loved seeing are the corpses of towns and cities, particularly the wonderfully evocative photos of Pripyat near chernobyl, with it's moss growing over people's abandoned posessions, its wonderful un-lived-in-ness that's so utterly alien to a city, it's surprisingly sucessful animal population, and - a find so wonderfully strange that it tickles my xenobiology branches - an adapted fungus scraped out of the reactor that eats gamma radiation. Also of note are some of the ghost towns of america (at least the ones where there's enough plantlife to acheive the metaphor I've been looking for in the project). These are relevant as the corpses of cities - It can no longer support it's nervous system (humans) but thousands of different strains of life invande and grow out of the crevices to slowly bring it back to the earth.