GOD’S BONES.
God’s Bones. Of course God is not a big human so he/she doesn’t really have bones, but it was a favorite curse in medieval times.
My fondness for murder mystery procedurals, even the real life ones, is not about the violence but about the many tiny clues that unravel what happened. We keep adding more and more kinds and more submicroscopic info, esp. now that computer evidence is included. (“Unit 42” is a Belgium computer crime-solving series.) I follow John Hawkes, paleontologist, on Twitter to keep track of hominin fossils, though I don’t know what I’m looking at in his illustrations. I keep trying while I appreciate the explanations.
Now I’ve found “Bone Detectives” on Acorn.TV, which is English and therefore features more recent bones dug up in England. This is not fiction, but rather analysis of skeletons in a context of history. One spine had been cut down the center back of the whole column, evidently the first known medical dissection in England. Some cemeteries held bodies with separated heads, thrown in at the feet, possibly once displayed on pikes as criminals or traitors.
Traditional Blackfeet would be scandalized, since they feel bones are sacred and should be left alone. DRK used to ask, “How would you feel if we dug up your grandmother and studied her bones?” Now we know. It makes a difference if we knew the person by name and we are all scandalized by the event of the Inuit boy who came around a corner in the museum and discovered the skeleton of his father in a glass case, named. Hugh Dempsey tells us one famous Blackfeet warrior was removed from where he fell, but the position of the body was commemoratively outlined with stones as though with chalk at a modern crime scene. That was back before whites came. Notoriously, one chief was annoyed by a white enemy US officer who kept coming back to life, so he cut the man’s bones out of his body and threw them in a river. It worked. Of course, bits of enemies were always strung as jewelry and then, after Christians got into it, the story put about that no soul could go to heaven without being complete.
A while ago an effort was made to bring the shelves and drawers of indigenous bones back to their home reservations. So many had been collected because in the pre-white days dead people were wrapped and left in trees or on high points, easy to collect. When authorities forbade that, bodies were put in coffins that were piled up in little houses. Once those were breached, no body was left with a head.
When NA politics were hot, indigenous skeletons that had been hoarded in institutions like the Smithsonian were treated like artifacts, folded into square boxes, carefully wrapped in blankets, and brought back to known burial places on the rez. The response was mixed. Some of the old people felt that the spirits of the original people would be angry and vengeful, so they stayed away. To others, it was the return of family members, so they wept and kissed the boxes. They sang and remembered. But there are still many more skeletons in storage back East, many more skulls in private places.
All our consciousnesses were challenged by the skeleton found at the edge of the Columbia. Named “Kennewick Man” in the geographic style of using the nearest place, his controversy expanded even as his bones disintegrated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennewick_Man
“The Bone Detectives” proceeds by weaving the evidence of the bones into the written evidence of history in order to find out how it was that these people — always remembering that these actually WERE people — died and were buried in this place, in these positions, with these clues. The discipline is called “osteopaleontology”. It is not literary. It does not seek metaphor. But it boldly imagines circumstances and human motives in religious or criminal contexts. The art has advanced to determining sex with a bit of dust scraped from teeth and to mapping the isotopes of the chemicals stored in bones. Progress is slower with skeletons still living.
“Avascular necrosis (AVN), also called osteonecrosis or bone infarction, is death of bone tissue due to interruption of the blood supply. Early on, there may be no symptoms. Gradually joint pain may develop which may limit the ability to move.”
Triggered when certain medicines, like steroids, are used for serious pneumonia, anything that interrupts blood supply can cause the damage, including diabetes or drinking alcohol. People infected with HIV may be more vulnerable. Most commonly afflicting the ends of long bones like knees and hips, AN may cause disintegration in other joints. Thus joint replacement may keep people out of wheelchairs. Pain is always present except at the beginning when it might helpfully have provided a clue. So far there is no cure, but various pain relieving substances, including those in marijuana, may work. Active research is on-going.
https://rarediseases.org/rare-diseases/osteonecrosis/
“The earliest skeletons were not built by animals at all, but by microorganisms. The oldest fossil skeletons found so far date back more than 700 million years.”
“A skeletal system is necessary to support the body, protect internal organs, and allow for the movement of an organism. There are three different skeleton designs that provide organisms these functions: hydrostatic skeleton, exoskeleton, and endoskeleton.”
All three are stable structures that muscles can work against like levers or hinges. The one least discussed is the thorax compartment that moves food and fluid with rhythm of squeezing and releasing or the lungs moving the rib cage. Metaphors of the body are infinite, personal, and often sexy — we speak of “boning” or having a “boner” though the phenomena are about soft tissue, vascular, hydrostatic. Though there are autobiographical books, so far I’ve not found a poem about avascular necrosis. Guess I’ll have to write one:
Soft or hard, you must keep breathing.
Every articulation is a hinge between what was
and what might happen next.
Moving,
wheeled or limping,
or up against a young back,
both on metal
moving fast,
the world goes by at top speed,
noted with music and words,
pulsing with life,
pushing against time.
The human pattern of your bones
inspires my breath.
