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| ISBN-13: | 9781847775726 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Carcanet Press, Limited |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 144 |
| File size: | 212 KB |
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Life, End of
By Christine Brooke-Rose
Carcanet Press Ltd
Copyright © 2006 Christine Brooke-RoseAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84777-572-6
CHAPTER 1
The head top leans against the bathroom mirror so that the looking glass becomes a feeling glass. But what does it feel? This position is for body-balance during the brushing of teeth and the washing of face neck arms and torso. Below is for the biddy, and the feet, if sitting on a stool. But especially the torso. For in fact the teeth can also be brushed if the loins touch the washbasin however cold, or the hand grips the edge, on condition neither is wet.
And then the drying of the body-parts, one hand on the tall towel-radiator, the other on the lower part of the towel to dry the lower body. Dressing means sitting on the bed, entering pants, rising, legs in calf-love with the bedside, to slide the pants then trousers past the bottom before swiftly sitting again. The feet feel where the entrances are, whether of pants or slippers.
Standing, on its own, without support somewhere, causes a tidal wave of nothingness in the head and a limping rush to the nearest armchair or bed. That means that nothing, nothing at all, no action or gesture, can now be done with two hands, if standing. That's a lot of gestures to unlearn.
But one contact is enough for minimum stability, one touch anywhere, from headtop to hip to hand or even one fingernail on the wall as the blood pressure is measured first sitting then standing, orthostatic as they say, when the tension drops by several degrees in a few seconds. Or sometimes rises, for no reason unless euphoric, or falls systolically and rises diastolically or vice versa. It staggers and lurches, like the body unless contact is made through headtop hand finger thigh calf with the ground the earth the planet the galaxy the universe. But then the universal is what is wrong with humanity.
The tidal wave of nothingness is not vertigo, from the inner ear dipping like a builder's plumb rule, for which there is a cure with turning lights, undergone. It is at unlucky times a faintingness due to the latest change of pill prescribed by the cardio, cancelled by the doctor after heartbeat drop, represcribed by the cardio, recancelled by the doctor, the process repeated with three different pills until a pacemaker is put in.
Besides, many seek vertigo, addicts of all kinds including mountain climbers vertigo all that trouble for a moment of spurious hegemony above all that beauty and now, like everywhere over-populous, leaving their human garbage all the way up, all the way down.
No, it's an imbalance from the brain's wrong messages to the inside of the feet and legs, their nerve fibres slowly withering and reversing their tasks, so that where there should be feeling there isn't and vice versa. Just like love of all kinds. At first the feet on the car-pedals feel like two blocks of ice, then can't feel the pedals at all, but steadily burn and braise where they shouldn't feel more than the normal fatigue of a long walk, which, like the car, slowly becomes a thing of the past.
But who feels what? A looking glass is for looking in, not looking out. The fingernail of contact feels nothing. Is it the feet that feel or their boss the brain? Nous no use. Mirrors, once polished steel or later crystal to flatter more, are soon called glace from Latin for ice, or miroir from Latin for looking, however icy the image. Both get borrowed as ever by the English élite, the first fused with native glass, the second just chic, then disdainfully discarded when picked up by the then-called lower orders and shattered down to become a class-labelling code, replaced higher by two native words, looking, plus glass. Looking becomes a window-pane or a drink, not frost. Grammatically, it's the glass that looks, as in blinding light (for who can blind a light?). Or at least ambiguous, like running-board, dressing-gown, drawing-room, frying-pan (who fries, man or pan?), driving-wheel. But then the so-called higher orders are never hot on grammar, any more than the so called lower. Similarly serviette is replaced by napkin. The tain foil behind the glass causes the so-called upper to look at the so-called lower and vice versa, as in distorting mirrors, until eventually the upstairs doors are opened to all and that particular élite learns domestic chores, at once therefore made fashionable and easier for them by the new labour-saving devices, and the social code shatters again.
Does steel or glass or napkin or ground or earth or universe feel? Humans invent gods of various kinds to think so.
The legs now burn permanently, hot charcoal in the feet creeping up the shins and knees and growing tall, two burning bushes, two pillars of fire for frail support. At every step they flinch wince jerk shirk lapse collapse give way stagger like language when it can't present the exact word needed, the exact spot where to put the foot.
But no, it's not the top of the head either, leaning against the glass, but the top of the forehead, where top ideas nestle and suddenly soar. So why is it called the hypothalamus? Maybe because top means shallow?
Why does the West always prefer widening to deepening, while the East likes the opposite? Will Europe survive by widening before deepening? Is 'wider is wiser' wiser? Is 'deeper is steeper' steeper?
The thalamus and hypothalamus are in the forebrain under the cerebral hemispheres. The thalamus is the main relay between the medulla in the hindbrain and the cerebrum in the forebrain.
Thalamus means inner chamber, or cavity, or the receptacle of a flower, a ventricle in the brain, and so, surely, a cerebral womb. Yet like a phallus it takes over the medulla's transmission from the spinal cord to the cerebellum, still in the hindbrain, and sends it all to the cerebrum, the top brain, that convoluted glory as developed in the higher mammals and more especially humans. There the transmitted sparks clash into motor neurons inside a synaptic cleft and create impulses.
Hypo means under, lesser, for the hypothalamus is a lower or downstairs inner chamber (a kitchen? a pantry? a scullery?), controlling pleasure, pain, hunger, thirst, blood pressure, body temperature, the sex-drive and the hormones governing the phlegm secretions of the front pituitary gland, not to be confused with the pineal gland, called epiphysus cerebri meaning a growth upon the cerebrum, a parasite which, structured as an eye in the lower vertebrates, is not organised as an eye in the higher, where it functions as a light-receptor, its endocrine job being to elaborate the hormone melatonin, causing the concentration of melanin, the black or brown pigment cells called melanophores. To act perhaps as the tain foil of a looking glass? The eye-shape but not the eye as mirror of the soul? Seemingly endless, like that sentence. At any rate this gland is where Descartes places the soul, thus putting de cart before dehors.
But the hypothalamus does not control balance and coordination. That, in the division of labour, is the task of the cerebellum (the war of Ceres?), back in the hindbrain, receiving the signals from the spinal cord.
The floor the ground the earth are for walking on feet, the world the universe for walking in the head. A walking illness keeps the universe for the head but leaves, for the feet, only the floor. How long will the head last? The few remaining pleasures are not the sex-drive, nor body-temperature hunger thirst or blood pressure but pleasures in the head so rich and devious, and, also, pain as the dubious pleasure of a constant companion, sometimes intolerable, and now vanishing only in the just reachable armchair or bed. And only insofar as the cardiovasco de gamma network still functions, more or less. Pain is from Old French pener, to punish. For what? Nulla poena sine lege.
You must walk, says the physiotherapist, for your legs. Of course, walking is a joy. But slowly the rest of the body prevents it, with flailing anginal pains and breathlessness, demanding sit-downs on low walls or electricity meters, first at the end of the walk, shorter and shorter, now even before leaving. Just moving from one room to another, from the bed to the bathroom, the bathroom to the revolving armchair, the armchair to the kitchen, the kitchen back to the table or preferably the armchair with a tray held between hand and bosom to keep the other hand for support from passing walls and slow-flowing furniture. And sometimes not so. Sometimes the whole tray clatters, shatters to the floor (the earth the universe). Then comes the collapse into the revolving armchair in order not to crouch, and the picking up of the food, the broken plate and glass. For the hardest is the rising after crouching. Hence the resurrection myths, all gods rise so easily. Whereas the rising of the human blood pressure signals a fall. Did Eve have high blood pressure?
Objects also have trouble being picked up.
You mustn't fall, says the doctor, on account of anti-coag. treatment, yet not thinking of the flinching legs. The doctor knows all the six ailments but can't do much to make them go away, as doctors can and do when patients are younger: cure versus maintenance. Maintenance for what?
The vicious circles are endless.
Do this for that ailment but another prevents it.
And the astonished surprise, when the doctor, after three months of violent nauseas in the morning, gives a medicine that actually cures them. Presumably to avoid the birth of a very elderly baby.
So life becomes a gradual learning of new physical impossibilities and a slow reorganisation of every daily movement around them. The shrinking of all activity to such movements is step by step accepted, as is the swift dismantling of a lifetime's independence. The small activities left become trebly precious. And astonishingly those ailments are not accompanied by clinical depression. Serenity remains. All the more so for joyful solitude. Closing in on oneself, it's called, and foolish, wicked, unhealthy, weak-minded, self-centred. But how to avoid that if others do the enclosing? That withdrawal is then the last tiny freedom, the last small piece of autonomy.
For the biggest problem, as one study of the disabled says, is not the handicap – here the growing lameness and the pounding Vasco the Harmer, constant pain, the constant falls during the constant low-grade work of the pining Ceres in the hindbrain, pining for Proserpine. The biggest problem is Other People.
And the body, though it may cause laughter, has no sense of humour of its own, no small sparks of slow but planetary motion, no fleeting stars of word-play, only the mind has those. But then, what is the mind but body, the corn-goddess at war with the gleaning cerebroom that sweeps up for a little peace and order and doubtful cleanliness. The mind without the body couldn't laugh nor murmur nor shriek nor have tears in the eyes. It couldn't play nor run nor stumble with words, it couldn't read.
The body has disabilities but so has the mind. Here pain, mere burning or falling or shattering are trivial compared to blindness, deafness or the slow swift murder of neuronic cells in the memory. Not to mention famine poverty torture landmine legloss suicide bombs and demolitions from O.P., from the world, the universe, that is to say from man. Mere diswalking and disstanding may create some unknown presence or other to thank for the retained use of eyes, even if merely confronted with instant alien war in ultra-green, or is it infra, like the hypothalamus? Well in fact it can't be either since green comes in the middle of the spectrum and can't jump beyond the ends. It doesn't look like emerald green or leaf green or go-green or pea-green or ecologreen. Or envy-green. Or Big Apple-green. More like death-green. While the blind may thank that same presence for the use of legs. It is the brain, it is the brain endures, yet even the pain from that misquote of Empson floods the mind. Which also shrinks and dies. As Eve falls.
The immediate environment always shrinks, from house to flat to room to bed to coffin to earthworm-tums then grows again to compost to earth to planet to universe.
Even languages die, like species, thousands per century. All those colonised people lose theirs to the stronger power, while those overlooked by the colonisers shrink back through isolation into a tribe, a clan, a family. Whichever is our own language we can hear the grammatical and phonetic changes, the lapse that may grow into an unimagined transformation during one lifetime, but can we spot the slow death-symptoms?
It is the brain, it is the brain endures.
But is it? Or the pillars of fire? All these streaking snippets of facts occur only because of long familiarity, long love of language and its bones and flesh, and how it grows from Primitive Human to Old High Human to Middle High Human to Modern Low Inhuman. The world in other words. Nobody else is interested.
And now, in any case, new information, from the still retained and enjoyed passion for reading, is quickly lost. So are proper names, even of well-known politicians, reporters, writers, sudden black holes although the names of stars familiar and loved from youth are remembered, and pang slightly when they die, after a longish spell of vanishment so as not to advertise their old age. And holes for what has just been seen, the original place of a word in a huge puzzle after looking up to think, or the reason for grindingly moving into one room from another, to fetch what, a black hole. The only access now to the world, the universe, is made through bits and pieces, clung to as small heroes battling against withdrawal.
A scientist on some learning programme says black holes can hide renewed creativity.
Painfully jerking, like a babe learning to walk, stagger, jerk, plonk, old age a mirror of childhood but childhood not for one second reflected in the present-bound, floor-bound eyes. The child trips towards its mother, the old towards Mother Nature, looking into a glass darkly.
CHAPTER 2But who is O.P.?
The measurer of blood pressure is fixed on the wall behind the patient.
How much, Doctor?
Very high.
Yes, but how much?
Very high.
She smiles a purse-lipped smile. Very high.
Doctor, come off it. You yourself told me to buy an instrument and I can take my blood pressure ten times a day, if mad enough.
She sees the point. And tells.
She is young, slim and pretty, with two protruding teeth, for cussedness perhaps. But she is conscientious. To an ignorant but intelligent patient she seems to make quite a few diagnostic errors. And whatever her medical qualities she has a real communication problem, almost worthy of Molière's satire: don't tell the patient. Even though it's long been recognised that if the patient understands what's going on in his body that's often half the therapy. This seems to be her first practice. She has come here from Ambulance Urgencies, someone in the village says. If true, and despite tele-series, a doctor in urgencies does not inform, but reassures.
Her voice is indeed soothing, so that the atmosphere remains smooth and smiling.
May I ask you, why did you cancel the Vitamin B12 leaving only the B1 and B6? You said Vitamin B is the only treatment for polyneuritis of the legs, well, yes I know, not to cure but to keep hold. (For what? Silently.)
It's temporary.
What do you mean, temporary?
Temporary means provisional.
New burst of laughter.
Thank you doctor. I mean, of course, what do you mean medically, in this particular instance?
Does her face upcolour? No. She has her rank to rest on, in a way a doctor in mere Language and Literature does not. And as it turns out, the suppression is not provisional at all but permanent. Because, this time explained, the body has enough B12 according to the monthly analysis. So why not mention the analysis in the first place?
Slowly she learns to be less evasive and distant, but it's a conscious effort on both sides, on the one to be more open, on the other less mocking, but also less demanding of information, not because less curious, but to avoid ruffling her. She has three ways of not answering: one, not answering, as with the blood pressure; two, pseudo-answering, as with the provisional; three, answering but in jargon. Hence fewer questions. And not caring.
Is the doctor O.P.? Not treating her patient as an individual?
No. For at least they both learn. Without saying so. She cannot turn her patient into a non-patient, but can make her less impatient.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Life, End of by Christine Brooke-Rose. Copyright © 2006 Christine Brooke-Rose. Excerpted by permission of Carcanet Press Ltd.
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