Miraculous Momento mori take many forms. Statues of Mary which weep, and of Christ which drip blood from their palms. And now, a taxidermic crocodile which cries real tears from its glass bead eyes. Purchased as a cheap souvenir in Biloxi, Mississippi, by curiosity seekers on a trip to the deep bayou, this weeping keepsake stands out from the thousands of similar souvenirs sold yearly. Raised on farms for the sole purpose of slaughter, most of the shellacked juveniles live out their deaths as crude novelties, serving as ash trays or candy dishes, sooner or later relegated to the basement or sold out of the garage. Not so this specimen, for it performs a most curious feet: it sheds tears in the presence of audiences sympathetic to its death.

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Imperato's Wunderkammer with suspended crocodile.

It may come as a surprise that supernatural forces chose the taxidermic crocodile -- after all, a monstrous creature -- through which to manifest a compassionate reminder of the timeliness of living and the inevitability of death. But on further reflection, the miracle of the secular object begins to make perfect sense; indeed, it takes on an aura of absolute clarity, inevitability, naturalness, such that the viewer will come to ask, "Why have I never seen this pitifully divine creature?" Most simply, the stuffed souvenir crocodile, as take-home sliver of murky swamp life, makes for a sad object: since the advent of late capitalism, the miraculous tends to manifest itself in the ruined abject rather than the sublime object. Further, on a genealogical level, the crocodile once starred as miribilia, enshrined in 16th Century Gothic cathedrals. Miribilia -- uncanny objects which crossed boundaries and disrupted orders of creation ('The Great Chain of Being') -- were baptized by the Church, so appropriating their power as fascinating and horrifying things in the name of 'divine intervention.' These were brought back from the Middle East after the Crusades and hung in churches as a sort of side-show to the main attraction of saintly relics. The crocodile doubled as a gargoyle, a monstrous protector of the holy interior. As their wonder became secularized, they left the cathedrals and entered the private Wunderkammern ('wonder-cabinets') of aristocrats, approached from a nascent scientific perspective and organized according to similitude with other naturalia and artificialia.

Finally, with the industrial revolution, the taxidermied crocodile was further petrified, this time in the form of mass produced cast-iron fountains displayed in the 1851 Crystal Palace World's Fair. This last move entirely divorced the crocodile from its organic form while preserving the ghost of its uncanniness. But it is not the same move practiced in Biloxi, Mississippi, where the husk of the dead animal remains, a pathetic ruin marking the border between the creatureÕs life and death. The husk of the baby crocodile as taxidermy, its kitschy abjectness and the cruelty inherent in its death for remembrance, is played against the false sympathy of the 'crocodile tear' -- an anthropomorphicization through which the crocodile brings sympathetic viewers into a field of identification. If you do not cry for the murdered creature, it will cry for you.

Note: Inquire with curator if interested in purchasing vials of crocodile tears. The tears have been chemically analyzed, generating irrefutable evidence that the water is chemically identical to that which flows through the swamps of Biloxi; compounds and minerals in the tears in no way resemble human tears or tap water. Your curators have been drinking the tears for several months and have noticed remarkable gains in supervacaneous subcranial rhyparography. Likewise, the vial's contents may be poured into an alabaster bowl as scrying point in pegomancy.