Gautier D’Agoty’s Ecorchés

Anatomie des parties de la génération, Paris, 1773 What have they done to deserve this beauty? Did they, like Marsyas, invite some knife- wielding god with petty transgressions, the crime of a few tunes on Athena’s lost flute? Or were they simply too poor for deep graves, locked gates, and good husbands to watch over the mounds of new soil tossed toward them and their hunted unborn? Whoever they were, they’re still with us, posing demurely in suits of blood and muscle, the bruised shadows of what skin they do have, purpling like crushed petunias as they spread their legs and raise their meaty arms to show dissected breasts, unfinished infants, sundry viscera on the ground about their feet as if this were Thanksgiving and they cornucopias stuffed with squash and fruit. And who delivered their sentences? Surely not the muses who, at least, let them keep rococo faces. In 1773 the womb and the brain were the last outposts of the body to be mapped. D’Agoty bought the rights to Le Blon’s technique of printing mezzotints and gave these ladies homes in scientific texts, but anatomists believed D’Agoty’s prints too gorgeous to be accurate. Perhaps that’s why they open other wounds so easily in us. All so like the single rabbit I downed at twenty with a borrowed rifle, and then was obligated to see skinned, first scoring the length of the spine, then peeling the fur in one steaming piece, while the perverse uncle who clearly desired to touch me, instead held up a dripping pelt in one hand, and in the other, a flayed carcass still wrapped in its bundle of muscle like a gift.