Читать книгу Invention of Dying, The - Brooke Biaz - Страница 22

2b. Certain Sounds

(named with regard to that denied human sound: gurgling)

Within the ears of a young clerk’s family a world of futures opened up, much as a newly growing town in The Communion Islands begins to extend the boundaries out from a front door or its vibrant new future emerges from the opening of a freshly sealed window. The young clerk was, by genetic heritage, a good listener. Death would soon have her attentive audience.

Some ear researchers (I’ve heard!) say that there is an initial surge, like electricity, as you enter the auditory realm, and then a cusping, or clasping. Some [Drs Manning and Morton, 1971, apparently] have compared this to the effect of leaving The Earth, to the attitude of space travel: the first lift, the push through the atmosphere, the heat as you move through one layer of air after another, the moment of resistance, that almost visible steel of enclosure that arcs over progress, contains and cares, carelessly contains one substance while preventing another, the push against this, the searing push, emblating alight and now falling, in slices, spinning.

The human ear is a place, and like places it has moments, its times, its seasons, its relationship with epoch and episode. But time in the young clerk’s ear was reversed, so that its duration was in the opposite aspect to our own. The reason for this, Death discovered, was simplicity itself.

As you might know, we human beings are medical complexities, our zones and operations founded on a system of impromptu performances and prestidigital balances. Observe: at one point we each appear to be in constant motion, at another as still as the granite on a hillside. When spooked, we move one way while our muscular complexions move another, like we’re involved in a type of stupefied waltz. Bone, rock-like, naturally shapes us; while the lymphatic system, the system of choice and termination (I can go in, technically, for pages!), flows around this rock and down into valleys as deep as the liver and as hollow, though some do not know this, as the feet. In all this, there is infinite possibility for collapse, as one element fights against another for control (the path, as the ancients realized, for disease, detriment, death).

To prevent this, levels of performance and balance operate. “Timetables”, to use a crude term. Counterweights. Organizational tools. Methods of relating, one aspect of our crazed humanscape to another, our internal personal bodification, to another; the same way the eye (for which this is a metaphor, incidentally, should you be wondering, and forms the basis of its own internal ocular world) captures the most significant aspects, and sends these for processing, while other aspects, just as seen, equally as available, are recorded in sight only slightly, sliding away behind the rest, for now at least.