Lousy Sex: Creating Self in an Infectious World

12. Epilogue

173 Epilogue Leonardo, like most of his fellow men of science, believed mind and emotions throbbed inside the human heart. Vesalius maintained that human emotions and human intellect sparked inside human brains. Neither gave much thought to human thymuses, and neither imagined all the things they could not see or touch or hear or taste or smell beneath the stench of the preservatives. Regardless, each infused human bodies with human art and instilled in all of those to come a sense of something more than just the art, more than just the science. Even working with a small scientific pallet, they knew that the human whole was greater than the sum of human parts. That was their art. Vesalius gave vision and the optic chiasm to his brain. And even though he had no idea what happened inside the optic chiasm, his art clearly shows he suspected something twisted. Leonardo knew nothing about things like the S/A and A/V nodes that cause our wrists to throb and allow human fingers to probe inside of human chests. But to look at their art, it seems that lack of knowledge proved only a small l o u s y s e x 174 Leonardo’s center of being Vesalius’s thinking man obstacle. Each anatomist was there in the science and the art. Leonardo’s hearts held more than just atria and ventricles; they held human hope and Leonardo’s eyes. Vesalius’s skulls held more than human brains; they signaled an end to darkness and they held crystalline visions of the future. Ultimately, it seems to me, it isn’t as much about the absolute completeness of the science as it is about understanding what it means to be a human being in this world at this moment. In spite of their handicaps, Leonardo and Vesalius captured that. I feel certain we are still nearly as ignorant of our surroundings and our potentials and our biology as both of these anatomists were almost 600 years ago. There is so much that is still, and perhaps forever, beyond us—the light we see by, the very slow, the very small, the very large, our selves. But, just as it did with Leonardo and Vesalius, that puts only very small limits on us. Our greatest limits are self-imposed. E p i l o gu e 175 Artists and scientists seek the same knowledge, seek to attain the same grasp on an ungraspable universe. Poets ask the same questions as brain surgeons. Physicists perform the same experiments as playwrights. We all seek to know the world through human eyes—clearly an impossible task. Seemingly, even more foolishly, we seek within our selves for knowledge of our selves. The saying goes something like, “We are limited only by our own imaginations .” Sort of, that’s true. But our ignorance limits us as well. And not just ignorance of the things we don’t know or can never know, but the self-imposed ignorance of things we refuse to see. Perhaps if we try using the right eye of science and the left eye of art. ...