Lemon-eating Melanie Blanchard was an unusual girl. Docile, intelligent, and hardworking, it was impossible not to consider her a star pupil: "And yet she drew attention to herself [...] by ridiculous inventions and strange behaviour." [1]
Her joyful curiosity about suicide, torture, and execution went far deeper and was far more complex than a simple fascination with horror. Like many children of her age, she was enchanted by the mystery of death, which, in her experience, had two opposing aspects:
"The animal corpses she had seen were usually swollen and decomposed, and exuded sanious secretions. Such beings, reduced to their last extremities, crudely avowed their basically putrid nature. Whereas dead insects became lighter, spiritual, and spontaneously attained the pure, delicate eternity of mummies. And this did not only apply to insects for, ferreting around in the attic, Melanie had found a mouse and a little bird that were equally desiccated, purified, reduced to their own distinctive essence." [2]
I couldn't help recalling this passage from Michel Tournier's short story 'Death and the Maiden' when viewing images from Nick Brandt's haunting collection of photographs entitled The Calcified (2013); a collection in which the petrified bodies of animals that have drowned in the ultra-salty waters of Lake Natron, Tanzania, are displayed for our morbid delight [3].
Melanie would have loved these pictures - and would doubtless describe the fate of the animals so perfectly preserved as a good death.
Notes
[1] Michel Tournier, 'Death and the Maiden', in The Fetishist, trans. Barbara Wright, (Minerva, 1992), p. 109.
[2] Ibid., pp. 112-113.
[3] For an interesting feature on Brandt's work see Joseph Stromberg, 'This Alkaline African Lake Turns Animals into Stone', in the Smithsonain Magazine (Oct 2, 2013): click here to read online.
I am grateful to the artist Heide Hatry for bringing these photos by Brandt to my attention via her Icons in Ash Instagram account: click here.
