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47 cicatrice & sclerosis: on hardening I. Bone In 1939, a boy was diagnosed with fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva , a rare and progressive bone disease. Bodies of people with this condition “repair” damage oddly. White blood cells, instead of attacking foreign invaders, tackle the body’s muscle or connective tissue. They carry with them bone morphogenetic proteins which trigger the formation of bone. Any bruise, cut, or tear to connective tissue is remedied with ossification. The boy’s body slowly grew sheets of new bone. It sheathed his muscles and locked the vertebrae in his back. His body armored itself in invasive bone tissue, living and uncontrollable. It slowly fossilized. Imagine the weight of a step, a movement, with all that bone to carry around. Bone turrets and breastplates, a coral reef of bone building upon itself beneath his skin. 48 We think of bone as dead and stony, but we are wrong. Bone is very much alive. * * * There are two types of bone in the human skeleton. Cortical bone makes up nearly 80 percent of our skeletal selves. The task given this bone is strength: to stubbornly resist bending or torsion. Cortical bone is a bronze dip, a protective coat, an armoring around every bone in our bodies. A crosscut of this bone reveals the intricacy of Teredo petrified wood, filled with rings and patterned. Osteons like tiny eyes in side-view. The second type of bone in our bodies is cancellous bone. Less dense, and somewhat more elastic, this bone is a rigid sponge, a delicate latticework. It grows inside the armor: in all our short bones, and in the broad, knobby ends of longer bones. And in our body’s axis: skull, spine, ribs. To picture it, think of wood that has been gorgeously tunneled out by carpenter ants: an osseous trellis, an intricate, porous coral. Inside our bones, in the spaces around the latticework, is the marrow, a body of thickening, gelled lava. Glowing foundry for our blood. * * * Our bones are more fluid than we’ve ever imagined. A tide of calcium and phosphate washes in and out each day, remodeling them along their outer or inner surface. 49 They adapt to the mechanical demands we place on them, the tug of increased muscle mass. They store and mobilize our calcium rapidly. They are the art studios, the forging houses for our red blood, and the white-blood cells so vital to our immunities. Rather than the dried skeletal mass we so often picture, our bones surge and flow with blood. Not only a clothes hanger for skin and organs—they are vitally interconnected tissue, entwined with all the rest of our constant sparking and flashing, feeding and fermentation, mitosis and metabolizing. Our ever-dynamic, our synthesize and demolish, our flux. * * * Ten years ago in central Taiwan, the earth shuddered and heaved in restless spasms. Its trembling measured 7.6 on the Richter scale. I awoke in Taipei in the middle of the night wondering why I felt drunk. Why the room seemed to be tilting and shaking. Gradually I woke more, enough to think of an earthquake. I grabbed my blanket around me and ran for the stairs, out of the building, into a misty-rain parking lot already full of people. Over the next two weeks, the earth seemed to move almost constantly . Every hour, or more, there was more trembling, quivering, heaving. Unpredictable. Sometimes nearly as strong as the first. It was the duration of the heave that left its mark: every sense of solidity dissolved. Shattered anchor, what was once fixed, firm, steady. Safe. One afternoon I filled a glass with water, set it on my desk, and kept it there: my own little gauge to the earth’s movement . Were we shaking again? Or was it just another queasy flash of vertigo. My body lost its sense of balance. I lost trust in the ground beneath me. 50 The National Information Service for Earthquake Engineering reports that nine-thousand aftershocks followed that first September quake. In Taipei, we were lucky; there were few severe consequences, only a few buildings split at the seams. Photos from the center of the island reveal far greater devastation: bridge girders thrown, and their spans grotesquely twisted. Shear cracks, fissures, and weak-story collapses. The earth shrugged itself restively, tossed off our structures, as though they were light as bread. To think of our bone as alive—constantly eroding and rebuilding, microcracking and repairing, as responsive to the...

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