A visit to Necromance

Today I went to Necromance, a store on Melrose that sells death – the bones of various animals, specimens in formaldehyde, taxidermy. The prices are affordable. The beauty produced by the natural world so challenges human craft that you would expect it to be priceless, but of course the biological methods of reproduction cost nothing so it isn’t. For $20 I bought a turtle shell, a bee in lucite, two small fish, and a pair of human teeth.

The teeth were $4, and honestly, I’m on the verge of taking them back because I feel like buying them is the worst thing I’ve ever done. In my private language teeth are an overdetermined signature of life – power – and it makes me incredibly sad that some are scattered as carelessly as dice. I am willing to keepsake these teeth, only: are they male or female? Were they pulled while they were living, or dead? What was the person like? Could they have been a killer, in war? I really don’t know if I can take it.

Taking it is the reason I went in the first place. I’m afraid of death – my coping mechanisms against it grow more tender as I age – but the way to subduct fear is exposure. You can’t expose yourself directly to the close-ended nullity of death, but you can take on its physical traces. And start eating meat again.

I’d stop there, but there are two other necessary items to note about the store. They say that nothing they sell is killed for sale – the bones and skeletons are byproducts of our carnivorous/corrupt world, and some of the other pieces are antiques, previously traded. My turtle, for example, was probably made into soup.

The second thing is that in a small corner of a single glass-fronted cabinet they sell a few pieces of Nazi paraphernalia – stamps, an ivory hairbrush with a swastika. This disturbed an otherwise pleasant visit. I spoke to the girl behind the counter and she said they had lots of complaints (she shrugged) but they dealt in the grotesque and that was part of it. I was more sad than angry, and I didn’t want to argue, but I didn’t care for the explanation. Besides a few medical instruments and butterflies mounted in standard English cases, nothing else they carried was specifically historical in the way of this Nazi tat. A dead bat has a special beauty; a stamp with Hitler’s face does not. The girl behind the counter was a pretty goth, with carefully black hair; I suppose the currency of those items was settled for her, but not for me…