in point of fact i am fairly disturbed about body worlds now that i've had some time to myself. as night is falling again i can't quite decide if i want to write about it or ignore my feelings of unease. the former means thinking through some images i'd much rather have fade away, but scaring yourself to death and not talking about it is equally awful. likely it bothers me far more than most people and despite the restriction that children under 12 must be accompanied by adults i don't think it's the children who are disturbed: my little cousins have all been and left again unperturbed. i think you need to be older and have a morbid and lurid imagination like ours to be uneasy about what we have seen. the fascination overcame the unease during the exhibition and afterwards, joining the gang for dinner at city hall, i was still urging everyone to go, but much later as i was going to bed certain images leapt up and i couldn't get to sleep eyes tightly shut and covers over the head and clutching mouse and bear and robert dudley the images still could not be banished. the next night i bundled up pillow and blanket and went off to camp out in my parents' room instead. i think being with minyin made the greatest difference, she was aloof and clinical and examined all the exhibits thoroughly, and by her example i think the intellectual drive superseded fear for a time. naturally her calmness exerted on me a steadying influence - if i had been with someone who was as susceptible as i was we might have frightened ourselves into getting out, or else i might have felt obliged to stay detached for the sake of the other, but there was little pressure here - whenever i decided i was getting uncomfortable i could tell her with no embarrassment that i was stepping away for a moment, and she would look for me when she was done. and before stepping into the anatomical closet (a collection of deformed foetus) it was she who cautioned me that i might not want to do so - and i passed on the section (much in the manner, i suppose, of our bio labs: "okay, you cut that eyeball and i won't watch") and waited for her to finish examining the specimens. at the same time i was allowing the need for knowledge to disguise the fear - i asked her questions nonstop - that was as much a kind of defence mechanism as curiousity, surrounding myself with the impression of scientific inquiry so that i don't let my imagination get ahead, and certainly i was seeking refuge in the words rather than the images - so that the mind was less attentive to the gruesomeness i would otherwise perceive - or did anyway - i was frequently averting my eyes - and i know i took more time reading the exhibit information than looking at the specimens - minyin says that if i were going to do that why pay so much to get into the exhibition, a textbook would do as well - and she is right - but in this case i am particularly aware of andrew welsh's formulation that to see is to know - it is precisely the knowledge pertaining to sight - the visual knowledge that bypasses thought - that can be frightening. the day before my cousin, who is a cell biologist, had explained the technique of plastination in microscopy, but even then i wasn't quite prepared for what i was going to see - the process she described merely seemed painstakingly tedious. and i had talked it over with minyin too, and i think we expected what you might see in a school science lab - plastic models of organs and bodies - only in this case preserved (and touched up) versions of real human bodies - what, i vaguely wondered, was the point then - except when we're looking at diseased specimens - otherwise wouldn't a plastic anatomical model designed without anomalies be more useful for general educational purposes? and of course i saw the large posters in the train stations at tampines and city hall - but i had thought that image was computer-generated - how can one remove the organs but leave the capillary system intact? - so in that sense that image didn't bother me either - it never existed as more than the work of a computer program. all in all then, i don't think i was prepared for the aggressively provocative nature of the exhibits - and i suppose that was why it could, and does bother me so much now - it may be billed as a scientific exhibition, but it deliberately rouses the emotion. well, not to mention that you're taken aback that what is depicted on the posters is exactly what you get. it's not that i don't still think it's worth seeing - i would still tell people they should go - but i don't think i could do so without reservations any longer. no, really, one ought to go - it is astonishing what has been done - and everything was done in the best of taste - except maybe for the one where a capillary man ponders a capillary skull - i especially thought the second exhibit - the discus thrower - possessed power and grace - no doubt the exhibition designer had in mind greek sculptures. it's hard to deny, even though the exhibitors do (i feel they protest too much) that on certain levels you register all of this as something akin to art. and because of that what you see penetrates the screen of scientific rationality that you try to put between yourself and it.