The Gift of Body Parts

a short confession

When I found myself stroking the hair of a dead poet in front of new colleagues, I understood all my professional credibility had vanished. But I couldn’t help myself. We had spent the last week together reading and discussing literature at the East Asian Center at Indiana University Bloomington. Home to the Kinsey Institute and an extensive library of artifacts, it’s a gold mine for scholars, garbologists, necromancers. And as a pilgrim looking to commune with her saint’s relics, I considered myself all three. 

Along with manuscripts, letters, school papers, drawings, Sylvia Plath’s mother, Aurelia, had such unabashed belief in her daughter’s genius as to tuck Sylvia’s adolescent ponytail into the box she gifted to IU’s Lilly Library. 

And I am just about in ecstasy running my fingers through her auburn teenage hair, especially impressed by its thickness.

As an unapologetic lover of the confessional poets, here’s a confession of my own: it’s not just about the owner of the objects. I’m fascinated by the gifts we make to others, the gifts of parts of ourselves. When everyone was sticking tongues out at Angelina Jolie’s necklace of Billy Bob Thornton’s blood, I quietly kind of dug it. It seems to me a sort of plea: what more can I give you than a part of me to symbolize the all of me? 

History is laden with gifts of parts. Those given in love– or lust. Victor Hugo, delighted by his short-term lover Sarah Bernhardt’s performance in his historical drama Hernania, gifted her a human skull. Later, when she became the first woman to play Hamlet, she used the skull in the play’s graveyard scene.

Victor Hugo’s gift to Sarah Bernhardt, inscribed with a verse about the sadness of a body once a soul has left it. Now at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

 

In a moment that trumps all crazy ex-girlfriends ever to come, when Lord Byron tried to break it off with her, Lady Caroline Lamb sent the playboy poet a lock of her bloodied pubic hair. Imagine Rebecca Bunch singing about that. 

My fifth-grade teacher had a collection of body parts in formaldehyde. She handled them lovingly, and somehow the nuns let her keep them, the jars lined up like so many preserves on the windowsill. Every seating arrangement, I hoped to be close to the windows, to look at the toes, the heart valves, the way the sun’s light made them come alive. I wondered who they’d belonged to, what they had done on a moody Saturday afternoon. The items in those jars, their purpose finished, glowed with possibility, to me. 

In Autumn, a personal encyclopedia of the world addressed to his unborn fourth child, Karl Ove Knausgaard writes a meditation on baby teeth: “Teeth don’t age in the same way as the rest of the body, they are impervious even to time; in this tooth she will stay 10 years old for ever. I open the cupboard under the sink and drop the tooth into the waste bin, where it lands on top of a damp coffee filter, turned grey by the black coffee grounds still inside it. I take a crumpled muesli bag and place it on top, so that the tooth is no longer visible.”

But I still see the tooth he’s buried, and I think Knausgaard does, too. I’m startled by the audacity of throwing it away. So much of us will be lost, is lost, every day, why intentionally trash it?

My mother-in-law recently gifted my husband a box of his baby teeth. He was disgusted; I was enchanted. That I could touch this piece of him, 20-some years before I even knew he existed. 

Bernhardt’s gifted skull is now at the V&A, Sylvia in a box in the Lilly Library, Lady Lamb’s pubes lost to time, Billy Bob’s blood is anyone’s guess.  But I have this fantasy of creating a home for all these lost parts, all these strange gifts of history. I’d spend my time assembling the room, giving each its shelf and moment. Curating with love these parts given in love. 

Perhaps it’s my refusal to see the end of things as the end. The desire to rebirth the world. Futile, I know, but how beautiful that we can give gifts of ourselves to others even when the rest of us is gone?