But the concept was there, evoked in a way that moved me to stillness. The idea of a dead man, spread out on black cloth and lit with museum light, crystalline and quiet. A person mapped out in pieces of jade, smooth and green as sand-smoothed glass. Jade feet. Jade shins. Jade knees. Jade buttocks, jade phallus, jade heart, jade hands. Two jade eyes, two jade ears, a jade nose, and a jade tongue, carved to look like a cicada. All thousands of years old, all taken from different tombs. Here, now, in unison, parts of a new whole. I imagined the pieces, long ago, being laid gently onto the body of the dead one. The coldness of the stone on the eyelids refreshing, a baptism. The gradual descent, as the body melted into decay, of the jade emblems, until eventually they touched bone. The blackness of the earth around them. The worms that could not bore them.
It left me with the strange desire to lie down on the museum floor, cold hands open, cold feet pointing skywards. To sleep until my body melted away and left only smooth green jade.
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