Rechem

I love the phrase - to think with your gut.
This image reminds me how much our brain looks like a bundle of innards.
Like the colored pictures in my father’s surgical books which I stole from his library and poured over as a child.
The biblical word for mercy is stomach or womb.
Rechem in Hebrew, reham in Arabic. Compassion is something felt in the guts.
Divine and animal at once.
Top to bottom. Criss-crossing of offal and abstraction.
A double icon.
Image of death – a brain exposed for medical autopsy.
Image of birth – an embryo teeming with embryos.
Naked, coiled, gutted,
uncanny
Like a strange creature – alien and familiar, infantile and senile, natal and mortal. You want to touch, you dare not touch.
Our beginning and our end.