Lia Purpura’s “Autopsy Report” paints a vivid picture of the dead. The opening of the bodies presented familiarity comparable to a “dialect spoken only in childhood” where “meanings hung on” (Purpura 7). The language spoken by Purpura creates an intimacy of the dead and at the same time a normalcy to idea of death and corpses. The description of the organs is saturated with the lives of the dead. From the bullet riddled body to the young businessman riddled with heroin induced death, the dead are brought to life with language. The reader can picture their lives before and after death through that language.
Purpura’s words bring to me the closest fear of dying: being just another body on the table, an object, a dissected creature whose life ceases as the scalpel pin points the present. That death is so normal that it is calming, even when the “scalp [is being] folded up and over the face like a towel, like a compress draped over sore eyes” is eerie (6). Perhaps the report touches on our biggest fears, our lives being regulated to paper descriptions. We live with what we imagine to be a life of grandeur and when we part we expect it to be even more grandiose. But if the reality is that we are just another “folded scalp,” what makes our lives unique or even memorable? By creating the illusion of calmness surrounding the bodies, Purpura reiterates the importance of the close intimacy of the essay.
Bliss’ visual essay opens with the jarring phrase, “I’m thinking about three boys from my high-school who died from the pursuit of pleasure” with the fading of the playground and the three swings (Bliss 2012,0:09). The tone is a mixture of calm and haunting and it fits the opening. The calmness of death and the horror around its circumstances is reminiscent of Purpura’s “Autopsy Report.” Here the visual is used to create the calmness along with the voice, and the horror is mirrored by language, that “familiar dialect.”
What’s absent from the visual is the boys, showing that the visual does not have to be literal. The visuals helps to create the mood, to capture the words and the tone. It’s separated into 3 scenes, 3 scenes of death in that pursuit of happiness. The first tale of Theo who inhales propellant at school. I call it a tale, because the narrator voice is calm and almost cynical. The type of bedtime story you read to bratty children to warn them of the consequences of disobedience mixed with the soothing calmness to make them eventually fall asleep. The narrator speaks of the way that the propellant lingers in the lungs and in the visual, we see the fleeting snow, everywhere, the chaos of the wind lingering close like the body of Theo on the ground. A shift in scenes is marked with a changing sky, a purple sky followed by the rising of the sun (2:30). The description of Kurt’s speeding ambition is met with a shooting airplane (3:15) that continues to rise to its great heights as the narrator reaches the heights of Kurt’s life coming to a close. Another reminder that the visual need not be so literal, the implicit meaning behind what we see and what we envision is at the center. The third and final scene links Elijah’s desire for orgasmic pleasure to the pulsing of jellyfishes. The end of the essay is marked by the return to the beginning with the three swings in the snowy playground, but at this time, a different angle is shown, showing a closer proximity, and a slight movement of the swings and the jarring piano keys that marked the beginning.
From both pieces, we see death closer. We envision lifeless bodies that once lived behind eyes on the page and behind eyes on the screen through Purpura and Bliss’ work.
