He had seen the future. He knew the darkness and the light. He always observed the world with no pulling back, in almost cruel honesty, he did not refrain from sharing his own failures. He understood that those very wounds we all carry inside of us, allowed for beauty.
Lately, he looked like a man preparing for death by getting rid of all his masks, one by one.
“It’s come to this time when we are really so old and our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon. Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine.” This he wrote just few months ago to Marianne Ihlen, the muse who had inspired him, and who was in those days approaching her own death.
Leonard Cohen’s itinerary was tormented, in a constant precarious balance between the two ends of the spectrum of experience: vice and exstasy, depression and mysticism, excesses and frugality, cynism and romanticism.
Yet it would be useless to search for any trace of self-indulgence or presumption in his words. Just take a look at any interview, and you will see an almost embarassed modesty (back in the day, his legendary shyness brought him much trouble with live performances), and the courtesy of someone who is well aware of the pain of being alive.
This was the focus of his poems, and his musica. The liturgic quality of many of his lyrics was perhaps to him the most natural register to confront the problem of suffering, but he didn’t hesitate to contaminate it with profane elements. In fact his research was always synthetic, an attempt to conciliate the opposites he had lived through: and it also resulted in a patient work of condensing words (five years to write Hallelujah, ten for Anthem). The goal was achieving, as much as possible, a perfection of simplicity.
It led to verses like this one, capable of summarizing in a brief touch the most authentic idea of love: “You go your way / I’ll go your way too“.
This hunger for transcendence brought the “little Jew” enamoured of the Kabbalah upon different spiritual paths, even locking him up in a Zen monastery — not as a “tourist”, but for six years. Until he realized, as he confessed in his last published single, that his demons had always been shamefully middle-class and boring.
Indeed, that last black jewel, You Want It Darker; a sort of testament or a preparation for the end.
A somber dialogue between the man-Cohen, the Man of every time and latitude, and a God with which no compromise is possible (“If you are the dealer, I’m out of the game / If you are the healer, it means I’m broken and lame / If thine is the glory then mine must be the shame”); a God who refuses to stretch out his hand towards man, leaving him lost in his arranged hell (“A million candles burning for the help that never came”).
A cold, enigmatic God, a mystery from which even the Evil seems to stem, so much so that all horror is likely a result of His inscrutable order: if God wants this Earth a little darker, we stand ready to “kill the flame“.
And it is in this desolate landscape that, as a final breath, as an extreme prayer, comes that heartwrenching hineni. “Here I am“, the word Abraham spoke before setting to sacrifice his own son on behalf of the Lord.
“I’m ready“, Leonard whispers.
Imagine living in a country whose government decided to block any scientific discovery coming from abroad.
Even worse: imagine living in this hypothetical country, at the exact time when the most radical revolution of human knowledge in history is taking place in the world, a major transformation bound to change the way Man looks at the Universe — of which you ignore every detail, since they are prohibited by law.
This was probably a scientist’s nightmare in Japan during sakoku, the protectionist policy adopted by the Tokugawa shogunate. Enacted around 1640, officially to stop the advance of Christianity after the Shimabara rebellion, this line of severe restrictions was actually devised to control commerce: in particular, what the Shogun did was to deny access and trade above all to the Portuguese and the Spanish, who were considered dangerous because of their colonial and missionary ambitions in the New World.
China, Korea and the Netherlands were granted the opportunity of buying and selling. Being the only Europeans who could carry on trading, in the enclave of Dejima, the Dutch established with the Land of the Rising Sun an important economic and cultural relationship which lasted for more than two centuries, until the sakoku policy was terminated officially in 1866.
As we were saying, Japan ran the risk of being cut off from scientific progress, which had begun just a century before, in that fateful year of our Lord 1543 when Copernicus published De revolutionibus orbium coelestium and Vesalius his Fabrica — two books which in one fell swoop dismantled everything that was believed was above and inside Man.
If the nightmare we previously mentioned never became true, it was because of the Rangaku movement, a group of researchers who set out to carefully study everything the Dutch brought to Japan.
Although for the first eighty years of “isolation” the majority of Western books were banned, ideas kept on circulating and little by little this quarantine of culture loosened up: the Japanese were allowed to translate some fundamental works on optics, chemistry, geography, mechanical and medical sciences.
In the first half of the XIX Century there were several Rangaku schools, translations of Western books were quite widespread and the interaction between japanese and foreign scientists was much more common.
Medical studies were recognized since the beginning as a field in which cultural exchange was essential.
In Japan at that time, physicians followed the Chinese tradition, based on religious/spiritual views of the body, where precise anatomical knowledge was not seen as necessary. Human dissections were prohibited, according to the principles of Confucianism, and those doctors who really wanted to know the inside of the human body had to infer any information by dissecting otters, dogs and monkeys.
The very first autopsy, on an executed criminal, took place in 1754 and was conducted by Yamawaki Tōyō. The dissection itself was carried out by an assistant, because it was still a taboo for higher classes to touch human remains.
All of a sudden, it appeared that the inside of a human body was much more similar to the Dutch illustrations than to those of traditional Chinese medicine books. The account of the autopsy signed by Yamawaki caused the uproar of the scientific community; in it, he strongly supported an empyrical approach, an unconceivable position at the time:
Theories may be overturned, but how can real material things deceive? When theories are esteemed over reality, even a man of great widsom cannot fail to err. When material things are investigated and theories are based on that, even a man of common intelligence can perform well.
In 1758, one of Yamawaki’s students, Kōan Kuriyama, conducted the second dissection in Japanese history, and was also the first physician to cut up a human body with his own hands, without resorting to an assistant.
Sugita Genpaku was another doctor who was shocked to find out that the illustrations of Western “barbarians” were more accurate than the usual Chinese diagrams. In his memoir Rangaku Koto Hajime (“Beginning of Dutch Studies”, 1869), he recounts the time when, together with other physicians, he dissected the body of a woman called Aochababa, hanged in Kyoto in the Kozukappara district (now Aeakawa) in 1771. Before starting the autopsy, they examined a Western anatomy book, the Ontleedkundige Tafelen by Johann Adam Kulmus:
Ryotaku opened the book and explained according to what he had learned in Nagasaki the various organs such as the lung called “long” in Dutch, the heart called “hart,” the stomach called “maag” and the spleen called “milt.” They looked so different from the pictures in the Chinese anatomical books that many of us felt rather dubious of their truths before we should actually observe the real organs. […] Comparing the things we saw with the pictures in the Dutch book Ryotaku and I had with us, we were amazed at their perfect agreement. There was no such divisions either as the six lobes and two auricles of the lungs or the three left lobes and two right lobes of the liver mentioned in old medical books. Also, the positions and the forms of the intestines and the stomach were very different from the traditional descriptions. [Even the bones] were nothing like those described in the old books, but were exactly as represented in the Dutch book. We were completely amazed.
Genpaku spent the following three years translating the Dutch textbook. The task had to be carried out without any knowledge of the language, nor dictionaries available for consultation, by means of constant interpretations, deductions, and discussions with other doctors who had been in contact with the Europeans in Nagasaki. Genpaku’s colossal effort, similar to an actual decryption, was eventually published in 1774.
The Kaitai Shinsho was the first Japanese illustrated book of modern anatomy.
As Chinese traditional medicine gradually began to pale in comparison to the effectiveness and precision of knowledge coming from Europe, in Japan the practice of dissection became widespread.
This was the context for the real masterpiece of the time, the Kaibo Zonshishu (1819), a scroll containing 83 anatomical illustrations created by Doctor Yasukazu Minagaki.
Minagaki, born in Kyoto in 1785, attended public school and became a physician at a clinic in his hometown; but he also was a better and more gifted artist than his predecessors, so he decided to paint in a meticulous way the results of some forty autopsies he had witnessed. The scroll was part of a correspondence between Minagaki and the Dutch physician Philipp Franz von Siebold, who praised the admirable drawings of his Japanese collegue.
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There are several online articles on the Kaibo Zonshishu, and almost all of them claim Minagaki was obviously distant from the classicist European iconography of the écorchés — those flayed models showing their guts while standing in plastic, Greek poses. The cadavers dissected here, on the other hand, are depicted with stark realism, blood trickling down their mouth, their faces distorted in a grimace of agony.
But this idea is not entirely correct.
Already since the XVI Century, in Europe, the écorchés paired with illustrations of an often troubling realism: one just needs to look at the dissection of the head by Johann Dryander, pre-Vesalian even, but very similar to the one by Minagaki, or at the cruel anatomical plates by Dutch artist Bidloo in his Anatomia Hvmani Corporis (1685), or again at the corpses of pregnant women by William Hunter, which caused some controversy in 1774.
These Western predecessors inspired Minagaki, like they had already influenced the Kaitai Shinsho. One clear example:
The representation of tendons in the Kaibo Zonshishu…
…was inspired by this plate from the Kaitai Shinsho, which in turn…
…was taken from this illustration by Govand Bidloo (Ontleding des menschelyken lichaams, Amsterdam, 1690).
Anyway, aside from aesthethic considerations, the Kaibo Zonshishu was probably the most accurate and vividly realistic autoptic compendium ever painted in the Edo period (so much so that it was declared a national treasure in 2003).
When finally the borders were open, thanks to the translation work and cultural diffusion operated by the Rangaku community, Japan was able to quickly keep pace with the rest of the world.
And to become, in less than a hundred years, one of the leading countries in cutting-edge technology.
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You can take a look at the Kaitai Shinshohere, and read the incredible story of its translation here. On this page you can find several other beautiful pics on the evolution of anatomical illustration in Japan.
(Thanks, Marco!)
Esiste un gioco a cui giocano gli amanti, talvolta, quando vogliono cedere alla dolcezza della malinconia. È la sofferta partita del “chi di noi se ne andrà per primo”.
“Preferirei morire per ultimo, per farmi carico del dolore e non pensarti sola e senza più sorrisi.Anzi, preferirei morire per primo, perché anche senza di me forse il destino ti regalerebbe ancora qualche sorriso…”
“Preferirei morire per ultima, per tenerti la mano fino alla fine.Anzi, preferirei morire per prima, per puro egoismo…”
Melassa sentimentalistica? Forse. Certo è che quando teniamo davvero a una persona, è naturale immaginarsi il momento e il modo in cui potremmo finire per perderla. È a questo tipo di intimi e delicati pensieri che è dedicato il brano Naked As We Came del cantautore folk rock statunitense Iron & Wine (nome d’arte di Samuel Beam).
Gli esseri umani sono forse gli unici animali che anticipano, si pre-occupano e si pre-parano, “allenandosi” a provare l’inevitabile dolore che li attende.
Ma questa prefigurazione della morte non sembra affatto essere causa di angoscia, nel testo del cantautore americano: perfino il pensiero della dipartita è permeato dalla serenità che sta vivendo la coppia. Certo, uno dei due morirà “fra queste braccia”, in fondo è il mistero del mondo – si viene e si parte senza difese e senza comprensione, “nudi come siamo arrivati”. Per questo è essenziale “rubare” ogni istante. E l’autore non resta fermo, nel letto, respirando semplicemente il profumo della donna, ma respirando lei (breathing her). Questo tipo di simbiosi non verrà intaccata dalla morte. In questo senso, il gesto di disperdere le ceneri nel giardino di casa non è affatto un momento di separazione, ma di perpetua vicinanza. Chiunque partirà per primo, sarà sempre lì, parte di quella famiglia felice.
Nonostante Iron&Wine sia stato paragonato a Nick Drake o Neil Young, Naked As We Came si distingue per il tono dimesso e per l’assenza totale di accenti tenebrosi o maudit, che sarebbe facile aspettarsi da una ballata incentrata sulla morte. Una coppia che scherza, ma non troppo, e i bambini che dormono nell’altra stanza… tutto il contrario dello stereotipo rock. Eppure la canzone cattura in modo stupefacente la poesia di un attimo sospeso, e riesce ad esprimere alcune fra le emozioni più difficili da verbalizzare. L’accettazione del fluire delle cose, la pace interiore, la speciale comunione avvertita da due spiriti affini, anche di fronte alla morte.
La canzone proposta in questa puntata della nostra rubrica non è incentrata direttamente sulla morte, quanto piuttosto su una personale visione del passare del tempo. Si tratta della splendida Who Knows Where The Time Goes? di Sandy Denny.
La cantante ed autrice inglese la incise una prima volta con gli Strawbs nel 1967; preferiamo questa versione, più intimista e dall’arrangiamento minimale, rispetto a quella più conosciuta che verrà registrata due anni più tardi con i Fairport Convention per il loro classico album Unhalfbricking. Questo gruppo, com’è risaputo, diede l’avvio alla corrente folk rock inglese, realizzando (in contemporanea con i meno noti Pentangle) un’originale fusione di musica tradizionale e sonorità rock. L’inconfondibile voce di Sandy Denny, dolce ma a tratti ombrosa ed evocativa, giocò un ruolo fondamentale nel successo della band; e non è un caso che sia stata anche l’unica interprete femminile a collaborare con i Led Zeppelin, nella celebre The Battle od Evermore. Scomparsa prematuramente nel 1978 a causa di un banale incidente domestico, la fama postuma di Sandy crescerà negli anni, tanto che oggi le è riconosciuto un posto di rilievo nella storia della musica inglese.
La meditazione sull’inevitabile scorrere del tempo trova avvio dalla contemplazione di una spiaggia deserta e degli stormi di uccelli che stanno prendendo il largo, iniziando l’annuale migrazione. Sostenuta dalla delicata progressione di accordi della chitarra, l’autrice si stupisce dell’enigmatica ed innata conoscenza che gli animali sembrano possedere delle stagioni; eppure tutto, nel quadro dipinto dalle parole della canzone, è immerso nello stesso senso di meraviglia e di sospeso incanto. Perfino la costa solitaria pare a suo modo vivere e respirare, tanto che l’autrice si rivolge direttamente ad essa, per confortarla; e su tutto domina il tempo, che scandisce i mutamenti della natura in modo inconoscibile.
Eppure il tempo, questa strana entità invisibile, non è foriero di angosce, come in altri casi, bensì di una peculiare pace interiore. In questo senso, il testo ricorda da vicino questa poesia di Jacques Prévert:
Quel jour sommes-nous? Nous sommes tous les jours Mon amie Nous sommes toute la vie Mon amour Nous nous aimons et nous vivons Nous vivons et nous nous aimons Et nous ne savons pas ce que c’est que la vie Et nous ne savons pas ce que c’est que le jour Et nous ne savons pas ce que c’est que l’amour.
Che giorno siamo?
Siamo tutti i giorni
Amica mia
Siamo tutta la vita
Amore mio
Noi ci amiamo e viviamo
Viviamo e ci amiamo
E non sappiamo cosa sia la vita
E non sappiamo cosa sia il giorno
E non sappiamo cosa sia l’amore.
Anche per Sandy Denny siamo circondati da misteri più grandi di noi che ci governano, ma sono misteri colmi di bellezza e, suggerisce il testo, di amore: perché ostinarsi a volerli controllare?
Il segreto è sotto gli occhi di tutti, sembra dire l’autrice. È nella resa e nell’abbandono all’incessante fluire delle cose. Si tratta di accordarsi in modo semplice e istintivo al ritmo universale, che dissolve ogni dubbio, qualsiasi timore e tutte le nostre sterili domande sul futuro e sull’inevitabile fine: la morte è simile alla partenza degli stormi di uccelli, un movimento naturale che avviene quando deve avvenire (until it’s time to go); non vi è più angoscia, soltanto un commosso e sognante abbandono.
Grazie al cinema e alla televisione, oggi tutti possono vantare una certa familiarità con le tecniche di medicina forense: sulla scena del crimine gli esperti si avvalgono di avanzate tecnologie, e le indagini coprono settori interdisciplinari quali la balistica, la chimica, la biologia, l’entomologia, la dattiloscopia, la tossicologia, e via dicendo.
La medicina forense nacque verso la metà dell’800 fra Austria e Germania, quando alcuni medici compresero l’importanza degli studi criminologici e si impegnarono affinché la disciplina adottasse scrupolosamente il metodo scientifico. Eduard von Hoffmann, medico praghese, fu uno dei padri di questa moderna tendenza. Le sue opere fondamentali sono Lehrbuch für gerichtliche Medizin (“Manuale di Medicina Legale”, 1878) e Atlas der gerichtlichen Medizin (“Atlante di Medicina Legale”, 1898).
Quest’ultimo volume, in particolare, è arricchito da 193 fotografie e 56 illustrazioni a colori, per venire incontro alla sempre più pressante richiesta di riferimenti e materiali visivi.
La cromolitografia, tecnica artistica nata a metà secolo, permetteva di rendere con particolare realismo il colorito, la texture e le ombreggiature dei soggetti ritratti, e questo risultava di fondamentale importanza per insegnare agli studenti e ai colleghi le recenti scoperte e i nuovi metodi di analisi.
Le splendide tavole contenute nel libro sono opera di un certo A. Schmitson: nella prefazione Hoffmann loda l’artista, del tutto “digiuno” del tema trattato, per l’abilità esecutiva e l’accuratezza della comprensione. (Per quanto profano, secondo le nostre ricerche Schmitson ha illustrato almeno altri due atlanti medici, in particolare di anatomia patologica e ginecologia).
Ecco dunque una selezione di alcune fra le migliori illustrazioni dell’Atlante.
Neonato. Soffocamento da porzione di membrana.
Omicidio a causa di varie ferite inferte con strumenti differenti (ferro da stiro, coltello, calci, pressione del petto).
Suicidio per sgozzamento.
Suicidio per accoltellamento multiplo.
Ferita circolare da pistola (il proiettile è stato deviato dalla calotta cranica, girando attorno al cervello).
Suicidio per impiccagione; sospensione del corpo per diversi giorni; distribuzione peculiare dell’ipostasi cadaverica.
Suicidio per impiccagione con doppia corda. Posizione asimmetrica del nodo.
Suicidio per impiccagione con vecchia corda arrotolata per cinque volte attorno al collo.
Formazione di Fungo (alga) su un cadavere trovato in acqua. (Stadio iniziale, il neonato è rimasto per 14 giorni nell’acqua corrente).
Lo stesso bambino dell’immagine precedente, rimasto nell’acqua per quattro settimane.
Cauterizzazione delle labbra e della regione attorno alla bocca per ingestione di Lysol.
Avvelenamento da fumi di carbone.
Traumi da caduta al momento della morte.
Situazione anormale del livor mortis come risultato della posizione del corpo.
Estremità inferiore di un neonato rimasto per diversi mesi nell’acqua corrente; formazione di adipocera.
Cadavere mummificato di suicida (scoperto 10 anni dopo la morte).
L’Atlante di Eduard von Hoffmann è consultabile gratuitamente online nella sua traduzione inglese a questo indirizzo. L’analisi forense svolta dall’autore su questi, ed altri, casi è altrettanto interessante delle illustrazioni, e non soltanto dal punto di vista criminologico: vengono infatti svelati diversi dettagli, talvolta terribili e commoventi, delle vicende umane che hanno portato a queste morti violente.
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