under-the-observatory replied to your post “Sorry I’m not done w aquamation…”
Yes! It’s unsettling for at least two reasons: 1. It is basically what I do when I make chicken stock, but human stock, and 2. There’s something more horrifying about the idea of a dead body in water than a charred corpse, I think due to notions of contamination? A body in a pond = bloated, smells, can’t drink the water. Charred body is horrific, but less connected with disease
Absolutely, I’ve been thinking about this too! The way water bloats the corpse, distorts it to a sort-of-recognizable mockery of what it was in life, and then yes, the corpse contaminates the entirety of the water it inhabits. The awful image of a body you knew and loved becoming a seed of contamination. (Bc this is tumblr yes, water can be lustrative and is often used ritualistically to cleanse corpses, but prolonged submersion is different!) I’m thinking of the predominance of water in Asian horror specifically, how repulsive that scene in The Ring is when she cradles the decaying corpse in the well, the obvious metaphor of the community’s water supply being “poisoned” by improper treatment of this child, and that contamination radiating outwards until the remains are removed from the water and commemorated properly. Miasma.
A lot of body horror has to do with liminality, the violation of corporeal boundaries, and water literally dissolves the boundaries between your body and not-your-body. Where you start and end is no longer clear. It’s annihilation. Being slowly dissembled/transformed by water feels like cosmic horror in a way that other methods don’t! Nothing of him that doth fade / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange.
Meanwhile, re: cremation, beyond Stoicism I’m thinking immediately of Greek sacrifice, the gods enjoying the fat transmuted into “sweet savor,” sacrifice being a communal celebration, the theme of identifying positively with the sacrificial victim being cemented by Christianity, the cleansing fires of Purgatory. All that combined with the historical power of fire to purge plague, imagery of people in hazmat suits using flamethrowers on zombies, there’s so much more but this is already too long!
Again, this has almost nothing to do with the reality that a dead body, in any form, involves unpleasantness. There’s just a million reasons to feel on some visceral, hard-to-articulate level that fire cleanses and even exalts and water must be kept separate from the dead!
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