On Seeing

Gonzalez-Crussi, F 2006, On Seeing: Things Seen, Unseen, and Obscene, Overlook Duckworth, New York. pg 63:

To look into the interior of the body will always be unsettling. The sight is a powerful reminder, gripping and implacable like no other, of our fragile and transient nature. But we have done much to attenuate the shock and disguise the violence of the message. We have plates, films, tracings, graphs, and other paraphernalia that purge the sight from the morbid references of yesteryear.

The harrowing spectacle of the offensive, bloody, putrescible innards is not confined to very few areas, such as anatomy laboratories in medical schools or autopsy suites. Most people no longer see the interior of the body as the sinister place where death lies in wait. The painful sight has become a "derivative" image that can be contemplated with equanimity, or even lovingly pressed against one's heart, and kissed...

The circle acts as scope through which we view the body: a body which oozes and leaks and is both site and metaphor for psychological or pathological trauma.

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