Protoplasm

Sick agaid, goddabbit.
  February 5, 2004

All flesh is not grass; it is a vile, gelatinous concoction of protoplasmic muck that swells and deflates with the tides of disease.  Its frailty is matched only by the hubris of the spirit it shelters, which thinks itself immortal.  In reality, it is forever submerged in matter strung on a frame of bones like red sponge shot through with occluded vessels.  The mind contemplates things eternal, and therefore unattainable and inconsequential, while the moving, quivering mass of flesh heaves below: fibers flex and relax; limbs twitch; eyes secrete tears; saliva, thick and tasteless, pools under the sagging roof of the tongue.  Shells of skin—comely or homely—cover this waste pit, but they deceive the senses only for a time.  Slice the most beautiful breast, rip into the most chiselled stomach—all you’ll find underneath is slime and excrement.

I am sick, right at that marvelous peak of a cold when the insides of the head liquefy and flow out through nasal passages.  This makes me cranky.

I don’t suppose all infection is bad.  What is infection, after all?  A battle of conflicting accounts, be they in the realm of matter or ideas.  Our bodies are encoded in DNA; our thoughts, in constellations of neurons; our knowledge, in clusters of letters.  Right now there are strings of alien code exploding my cells from within.  The results are unseemly and unpleasant; they invoke horror in me and those who see my plight, but this horror is a response instilled by evolution.  There is nothing beyond its thin voice that says my body—scribbles of amino acids read into proteins—is a tale more truthful than the infectious stories of viruses trying to silence it.

Information is infectious.  Knowledge and music are infections.  Ideas are infectious.  New doctrines spread as old ones wither and die; gossip propagates and mutates; memes multiply.  Viruses creep into computers through internet connections and wreak havoc on hard drives.  If machines could feel, they would be repulsed by the ooze of melting programs just as we are repulsed by organic leakages of illness.

Even my reading matter melts.  I am halfway through Alain Robbe-Grillet’s La Maison de Rendez-vouz, a novel with a fluid plot that reminds me of a musical piece—a fugue, perhaps—rather than a work of literature.  The fraying scenes that bleed into one another, repeating with accumulating variations, constantly shifting points of view and even identities of the narrator reflect perfectly the confusion of my fevered brain.  I like it.

I have a yen to watch something by David Cronenberg.

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