It’s interesting: I came up with this idea on my own, of clothes which never needed to be washed, and which never wore out, and Doris Lessing dealt with the same topic in Mara and Dann. There, her protagonist Mara found your singlet inhuman, and horrible, since it was the same year after year, and apparently century after century, in apparent contradiction to the way of the world. The same people built indestructible metal houses, and cans and other implements that likewise never wore out.
In a morbid segue that just popped in my head, what about human bodies that never decay? As most will have seen in some ad in some magazine, human bodies can now be made into “art” through a plasticizing process that halts the normal process of material decay. I find it revolting. Based on a conversation I had with a woman in a plane, these displays also feature babies, from the fetus stage, up to fully developed babies.
Is this wrong? First off, I wonder where they get the bodies. All of these people had names, and lives. The woman I talked with commented they all looked Asian. Is North Korea selling bodies, I wonder? With as much death as has happened there, I see no ethical objection to it which would arise within their particular cultural milieu.
It then occurred to me: how far does this go? Do we place bodies as permanent fixtures in art museums? They have them in the Museum of Science and Industry, as anatomical displays. Could we have “Human head in blue, number 7?” Can collectors install them in their living rooms? Does a trade develop, as it apparently has, in body parts, the provenance of which no one knows?
There is something sick about this, reminiscent of that scene in Brave New World, where they run the bodies by the children, to inoculate them from the fear of death.
What is it these “artists” are trying to accomplish? What positive good?
It would seem at a minimum if we are to allow these displays–and they are hugely sucessful wherever they go–we should know who the people on display are, and that they granted the use of their bodies as “art”.
It has long seemed to me that many of our most creative artistic minds have been deranged by ethical relativism, and moral pessimism and nihilism. This was what Ginsburg was “Howl”-ing about in his poem.
How do we make this turn back towards decency and purpose? This is a critical question. Science cannot speak to cultural formations. It can describe, but not prescribe. That is what our reason and our passions are for.
What comes, goes. What was, will one day be no more. It was the violation of this truth that Lessing seems authentically, in her imagination, to have found so abominable. Plastic bodies seem, to me, to exist in the same space, to which we can add numerous other objections.