Sublime | Shannon Eberhard

I recently bought a fascinating book called the “Anatomical Dictionary for Artists”. It weighs about four pounds and inside has illustrations of a wide variety of mammals and all their bones and muscles. I am an art major and have taken life drawing and anatomy. After taking that class, like any class, I have been looking at the world a little differently than before. When walking in the halls, I don’t only see the faces and clothes on people, but their proportions. I’ll see a guy with irregularly long arms that make him look almost apelike, while some random girls wide set eyes will remind me of a fishes. These are not critical observations mind you, but simply observations, and I think that my new book has recently heightened these observations.

While holding my friends newborn baby, I was looking at her little head and noticed under her delicate transparent skin the various blue veins. And on top, I saw her skull pulsating with her heartbeat, that soft spot on top where the skull has yet to finish growing. And while looking at her head, all I could see were the bones and the muscles and the veins, it was like I was looking at an object not a person. So you are probably asking, what is so sublime in seeing a sack of bones and veins while holding something as beautiful as a baby? Honestly it’s hard to explain. There is something very primal in seeing our ultimate fate, death, in the epitome of life, a baby. I felt like I was holding a little package, a bundle sent by both god and the devil, that would tell me the answer to life’s purpose. Only I couldn’t understand the language they wrote it in. Hard to understand as it is, it was a deeply sublime moment.