Invention of Dying, The. Brooke Biaz

zonings and committees, the issuing of contracts, island developments near and far (such as in Cloud Mountain, cloudily and Old Town, venerably, and Cape Constable), the digging of clay, the bringing of stone, the news stories, “Communion Islands Rise”, ‘Houses Built in the Hills”, “Young Future”, “Healthy Here in Shelton Valley”, the rising façades of our futures, the coral shell crusts for the seafront benches, pink and black and white, the peaked arch thropthorn doors of the rising hotels, the smoke of tree loggers, the seafront small against the now towering cococan marble of the Regional Council Offices, flaked gold and deep blue as it is, the white brick, the iron gates of and, the basalt foundation stone of a brand new elementary school.

      I could describe this languid, stumbling rising of a future, arriving day by day, week by week, month by awe-provoking month. But I best be reminded, as others have been reminded, that we are confronting Death.

      Figure 7.

      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.