Thu, 19 May 2005

unpopular mechanics
He was old enough to know that certain words weren’t meant to be taken literally, they were figures of speech, but there was still a connection which always warranted investigation. He had heard, somewhere on the television, that the heart is a knot of muscle, and this had stuck with him, as he was fascinated by knots, so that at night he dreamt that when one dies, the doctor cuts through the heart-knot with a scalpel, and all the skin and sinew and fat falls off the body like so much Christmas ribbon, until the immortal spirit which hid in each of us fell up to heaven. Other figures of speech hinted at the truth of this theory: shake off this mortal coil being a phrase he heard on ER once, coil as in rope, like the ropey biceps of a basketball player he had seen at the park once, sitting on the grass, waiting for his mom to pick him up. This meant each person had a single point of weakness, a blow to which would unspool them, unprepared immortal spirits caught in the trees like kites. It had to be a serious blow, he considered, as people (even people shot in the chest, like on television) rarely unspooled in public, which is too noisy and distracting a place for ascension, so that the surgeon is both a butcher and a priest, in the same way that the astronaut is also an angel. He pondered this notion over and over, until he felt satisfied, having finally understood how death worked.
(12:26.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #