by Roger B. Rueda
The scientific mind is an insatiable
beast, always gnawing at the fringes of the unknown, clawing through the
barriers of morality in pursuit of knowledge. It is said that curiosity killed
the cat, but in this case, curiosity has dissected the cat, frozen it, and
displayed its remains in a temperature-controlled chamber for academic
scrutiny. In Zenaida French’s Notes on a Theme of Horror by Science, we
are confronted with the grotesque aftermath of this pursuit—the bodies of a man
and a woman, frozen, sliced laterally with a power saw, and put on display like
grotesque cuts of prime rib in a supermarket freezer.
This is science at its most macabre:
detached, methodical, and chillingly efficient. It is the price of progress, we
are told. But at what cost to our humanity? The anatomical dissection of human
remains is no longer the realm of grave-robbing anatomists but of cold-blooded
laboratories where even God, it seems, has turned His face away in disgust.
From
Rational Inquiry to Ritual Sacrifice
It is one thing to conduct medical
research for the betterment of humankind. It is quite another to dehumanize the
subject in the process. The frozen carcasses in French’s essay do not merely
represent the triumph of scientific inquiry; they expose the moral rot that
festers beneath the microscope.
Here, man is no longer the divine
creation, half-angel and half-devil, but a mere biological specimen—an object
to be studied, cataloged, and eventually discarded. The promise of
enlightenment through science has, instead, led to a perverse form of ritual
sacrifice, where knowledge is extracted at the expense of dignity. This is not
the Promethean fire that advances civilization. This is the cannibalistic
self-destruction of a species that seeks to know itself by tearing itself
apart.
The
Poverty of Man’s Curiosity
French paints a bleak picture: a
world where science has stripped man of his soul, reducing him to a series of
bloodless cross-sections, a skeleton in a jar, an empty shell of matter. We
once believed ourselves to be divinely ordained, separate from the beasts,
destined for greatness. And yet, in our desperate search for meaning, we have
only found our kinship with all things mortal and mundane.
Is this the peak of human
achievement? To freeze our own dead, carve them up like holiday roast, and peer
into their inner workings only to confirm that, at our core, we are nothing but
organized meat? If so, then God, as French suggests, has long since abandoned
this horror show, fleeing to some distant corner of the universe where man’s
arrogance cannot follow.
The
Faustian Bargain of Science
Mankind,
in its mad dash for progress, struts around like a peacock, oblivious to the
sinkhole it’s stomping into. We throw ourselves victory parties for every
gadget, every discovery, every breakthrough—congratulating ourselves as if
we’ve outwitted the universe. But let’s not kid ourselves. Knowledge without wisdom
is like giving a bazooka to a toddler—disaster is not a matter of if, but when. What good is intelligence when it is used to strip away
the very essence of what makes us human?
We are not merely organisms to be
dissected, nor are we divine beings immune to decay. We exist in the tension
between the two—a precarious balance between beast and god. The horror is not
in the frozen remains behind the glass. The horror is in the fact that we
placed them there in the first place.
Science, when divorced from ethics,
becomes nothing more than a power saw in the hands of a madman. And if we
continue down this path, we may soon find that, in the grand autopsy of human
civilization, we were the cause of our own demise.
Here’s the poem—read it alone, savor it, or wrestle with it. No hand-holding required.
a poem by Zenaida B. French
froze the bodies of a man and a woman
killed in an accident and cut the bodies
laterally with a power saw.'
~ Ripley’s Believe It or Not
in liquid behind the barrier of glass:
bones, muscle, head, jaw, teeth -
bizarre conglomeration of merciless
Science and blood- thirsty Art, they
look like sections of meat in
the meat section of the supermart.
Is this the quintessence of dust,
half- angel and half- devil, who
walks with his head in the clouds
even as his feet dig deep into the
muck? He is quintessence of
nothing but his own capacity for horror,
mock- hero who slashes his own belly
so he can lay his entrails
on the table, to examine inch
for inch the length of his humanity, and
coming down to the center of his
being, the core of his beastliness
and godhood, discovers there
the link to which the human line
attaches in the downward slide that
is the heritage of Man.
no soul in man, not where you can
see into the atoms of his bones,
muscle, eye, teeth and all the parts
that make a man a man. Quintessence
of existence, his secret parts only
affirm his union with the rest of
God’s creations - and God’s mortality.
slice of eye peering out of
sliced cheek through the frozen glass?
You only see the hollow cells
conjoined by a sinister collusion
of chemistry and magic manmade
and undivine. You only see the
poverty of man’s jaded curiosity, his
celebrated creativity turning ‘round
to gobble up its naked tail.
No doubt God saw this gory exhibition
of ingenious inhumanity and fled,
appalled, taking with Him to far-
flung corners of His universe all
the human brilliance and whatever
spark divine.
.
