We are not our bodies
but what will become of them one day?
The Environmentalist said he wants to be gracefully decomposed in a controlled and scientific “wild” setting and turn into fungi. Give back to the world. Become one with it. I guess that’s what we should all strive for, I silently tell myself. It would be beautiful — in a Guillermo del Toro meets Cronenberg kind of way — to become a sprouting mushroom log. Something about controlled wilderness seemed like an oxymoron to me, but the idea was better than rotting away inside a coffin into bones. Who popularized this strange concept of a tiny, forever underground prison? It brings new meaning to solitary confinement. I would probably never rest in peace in one.
I had read that the bodies of people who get cremated can sometimes randomly sit up in the flames, screaming. Some part of the body, perhaps the nerve endings, is still alive. My partner and I had always discussed wanting to be cremated. He, The Artist, yearned for his ashes to be transformed into ink. I, The Poet, cried upon hearing this. (What could be more poetic than his wish?) I, The Naturalist, wanted my ashes to settle into a national park. But the more I thought about these resurrecting corpses, the more it terrified me. Plus, cremation is bad for the environment. The mushrooms suddenly started sounding like a more desirable route. As I one day lay decomposing into the ground — as the lord intended — I will be ghastly. I will be gorgeous. A Body Horror Masterpiece.
In a totally casual tone, Cat Girl said she would like her body to be eaten. But only by an apex predator. A Siberian Tiger. A lioness. A jaguar. Something like that. She wanted a big cat at the top of its game to lavishly enjoy her corpse. My first reaction was: oh, how very macabre. I had never once thought about letting a live animal devour my dead body. It was such a messy concept. Bloody, gory, violent. I wondered about my friend; about what kind of person would want this.
Was Cat Girl deeply submissive? Like she wanted to embody prey animal and get eaten by the ultimate predators in this most submissive of acts. One of devotion, perhaps. Or was she secretly dominant, because she yearned for a part of herself to live on in this predator. Or was she neither — totally neutral — and just an animal lover through and through. She adored her cat so much. Maybe she would become the kind of old lady who wouldn’t mind if her cat ate her face when she finally perished in her home one day.
This conservation was somehow not too heavy to be had over gooey, hot pizza after a Spirit of the Beehive show, late in DTLA. It was, in fact, amusing — even comical. We were suddenly children, nonchalantly chattering about the edgiest topic we could think of at the moment, telling ghost stories around a campfire. We are not our bodies, even though in that moment our bodies were very much part of us. And will continue to be for a while. Hopefully a long while. We played it safe because we didn’t talk about how we’d die. Dying itself was just a vague, blurry concept in this pizza-fueled conversation.
After hearing from Cat Girl, I suddenly understood Werner Herzog’s “Grizzly Man” a little better. The only way he wanted to die was by bear. He wouldn’t have had it any other way. I told my friend that it would be (pun intended) grisly for a giant cat to maul her body to death, with its oversized claws and sharp teeth, in a grotesque showdown. She exclaimed, “No, no! I’d have to already be dead. Somebody would have to fly my body in a chopper out to the Amazon or something,” as if this were obvious. She wasn’t into the getting mauled alive part. That made a lot more sense.
Grizzly Man, on the other hand, knew he’d be fully alive when the Big Attack happened — and accepted it. What would it be like to know so definitively what you want to happen to your body both during and after you die? To not know when you’re going to die, but to lean into it, because immersing yourself with a sleuth of bears is a specific kind of guaranteed danger. Did Grizzly Man just really love danger? Did he love it more than he loved the bears, even? Maybe the danger was a shield. I bet there’s a lot of comfort in knowing your fate. Despite our musings, our bodies don’t actually matter much after that.