WAY OUT IN THE WATER, SEE IT SWIMMING

From a story in today's Guardian: "Anyone who is concerned about a relative whose body underwent a postmortem should call the retained organ commission helpline on 0800 838 909". The question, of course, is what about that postmortem should concern you? Apparently, the possibility that your relative's brain was sold for �10 to Manchester University. To view the full report in hairy PDF format, click here.

THE WORLD IS UGLY, AND DEATH IS WELL-ORGANIZED

In my last entry I talked about how ugly landscapes can be. The Lotus thought that I sounded down on nature. I'm not - really, I'm not. I'm down on neoliberalism and neoconservatives and sometimes neoprene (Neoprene vs. Anteprene! The sartorial fight for might!), but not on nature. I don't think that all of nature is ugly, or even that ugliness is an undesired quality - don't forget Freud and the Freudettes' swinging doo-wop hit "Desire Lies on the Other Side of Repugnance". I believe that the notion of the scenic, as handed to us through the windows of our cars, has only a little to do with nature and everything to do with us. Nature has no need of being pretty, unless you attribute some kind of aesthetic sense to the lily that puts forth the flower. And if you point to the bee's attraction to the petal as proof of an aesthetic nestled in nature's roots, you're close to arguing that the pattern recognition in a bee's nervous system is the same thing as human aesthetic response. You may see it as a subtle variation on those atavistic impulses (an atavistic impulse towards beauty?), and all of our art as a complex but highly determined clockwork unspooling from the interplay of proboscis and pistil.

Or perhaps you see God's loving hand in cloudbanks broken by beams of light, anchoring Heaven itself to the horizon. In which case I will bring you a cup of hot chocolate and a Safeway bag stuffed with all the inspirational pamphlets ever handed to me by those streetcorner Christians, the pop-eyed and loony, the lonely, lost and typographically stymied prophets of grace and damnation. I'm a big fan of their basic philosophy: that random bolding and a few line drawings will shake people's souls awake to the Lord. They must sit in their parents' basements at night and wonder why more people have not reached out for grace, since they've made it so damn simple.

But I digress. I was talking about nature. Most of the natural world, with the exception of pets, has nothing to do with us, no need for us, and if we vanished tomorrow, whatever functions we fulfill as part of the inderdependent web of nature would be replaced by any number of restless organisms. Only the pets would starve. And those bacteria that grow inside jet engines. And I'm willing to bet that there are strains of bacteria uniquely suited to growing inside Tupperware, and they'd be out of luck too. Pigeons would be thrown for a loop, and that vole I saw one day outside of my favourite bar probably makes his home and most of his meals at the restaurant next door. He'd be on Death's dark list as well, clipped smartly to Death's dark clipboard (a PSA: Beware Death's dark clipboard, with His vile pen attached by a dark dreary length of string. Avoid the hideous cartridge refills for His dark pen, and do not patronize the obscene Staples outlet where Death purchases His hollow mockery of office supplies.). And maybe a million years after our extinction, the plants would grow eyes and look at the land.

parode - exode