Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Carnal Knowledge

2005; Lippincott Williams & Wilkins; Volume: 80; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1097/00001888-200502000-00011

1938-808X

Dannie Abse,

Medieval and Classical Philosophy

You, student, whistling those elusive bits of Schubert when phut, phut, phut, throbbed the sky of London. Listen: the servo-engine cut and the silence was not the desired silence between the two movements of music. Then Finale, the Aldwych echo of crunch and the urgent ambulances loaded with the fresh dead. You, young, whistled again, entered King's, climbing the stone-murky steps To the high and brilliant Dissecting Room where nameless others, naked on the slabs, reclined in disgraceful silences— twenty amazing sculptures waiting to be vandalised. You corpse, I pried into your bloodless meat Without the morbid curiosity of Versalius, Did not care that the great Galen was wrong, Avicenna mistaken, that they had described the approximate structure of pigs and monkeys rather than the human body. With scalpel I dug deep into your stale formaldehyde unaware of Pope Bonface's decree but, as instructed, violated you- the reek of you in my eyes, my nostrils, clothes, in the kisses of my girlfriends. You, anonymous. Who were you Mister? Your thin mouth could not reply, ‘Absent, Sir,’ Or utter with inquisitionary rage. Your neck exposed, muscles, nerves, vessels, a mere coloured plate in some Anatomy Book; your right hand, too, dissected, never belonged it seemed to someone once shockingly alive never held surely, another hand in greeting or tenderness, never clutched a fist in anger, never took up a pen to sign an authentic name. You, dead man, Thing, each day, each week, Each month, you slowly decreasing Thing visibly losing divine proportions, you residue, mere trunk of a man's body, you, X, legless, armless, headless Thing That I dissected so casually. Then went downstairs to drink wartime coffee. … … … … … Look, on gravestones many names. There should be only one. Yours. No, not even one since you have no name. In the newspapers’ memorial columns Many names. A joke. On the canvases of masterpieces The same figure always in disguise. Yours. Even in the portraits of the old anchorite fingering a dry skull you are half concealed lest onlookers should turn away half blinded. In certain music, too, with its sound of loss, in that Schubert Quintet, for instance, you are there in the Adagio, playing the third cello that cannot be heard. You are there and there and there, nameless, and here I am older by far and nearer, perplexed, trying to recall what you looked like before I dissected your face –you, threat, molesting presence, and I in a white coat your enemy, in a purple one, your nuncio, writing this while a winter twig, not you, scrapes, scrapes the windowpane. Soon I shall climb the stairs. Gratefully, I shall wind up the usual clock at bedtime (the steam vanishing from the bathroom mirror) with my hand, my living hand.