Tonight while I ate my dinner (bad timing), I watched a documentary about an English taxi driver who allowed a team of Egyptologists, in tandem with forensics experts, to mummify him when he died.
The program was fascinating, of course, because it took a lot of time showing a dead body — that great taboo in our society (cartoonist Lucy Knisley did a great riff on that today in her Hallowe’en comic).
The scientists were pretty geeky, but the whole team treated the man’s corpse with a lot of dignity — which felt a little odd, as I got the impression from the pictures of his past and from his wife’s description that he didn’t take much care of his body (every photo showed him with a cigarette hanging from his bottom lip, and he died of lung cancer, so my automatic judgment motors whirred into action pretty quick at that).
My other impression is that about 70% of the narrative could have been cut out and no information would have been lost. (I kept thinking, “Yeah, I get it.”)
I’m having that thought a lot lately, that most of what’s said could be left unsaid. That’s a dangerous line of thinking for a copywriter, and it’s also keeping me pretty muzzled as an artist. Either life is so grand that I feel it’s beyond capturing (cf: today’s great waves), or there doesn’t seem to be a point in trying.
As I typed that, though, I was struck by the notion of sharing. I do get a lot of pleasure and insight from other people sharing their perceptions and ruminations about life.