Animal Eye

Feel Like a Little Trepanning Today?

46 Feel like a little Trepanning Today? Imagine how much better we’d sleep without breathing. How perfect we might seem could we shake out human excess like flotsam from a purse, pare down the design from our mistakes: the gall stones, appendices all on display to indicate how what works remains enmeshed with what resolutely doesn’t. The intrinsic might be just what we don’t need, like consciousness, say, or childhood diabetes, all the pent-up energies of this thing we call the soul. Instead, how busily we play at erasing ourselves: the eye bags, the carnivals; scraping faces baby-smooth out of desire’s putative, feral needs. Here, a waft of memory goes up like a tossed scarf, like what someone once said was smoke— but no, not like smoke, not like smoke at all— I think the soul snuggles down with the cerebellum and rouses tired of itself. I think the soul, complete in its knowledge of the body, would prefer fewer things to imagine cut out, sewn up, perfected, dead. The seamlessness of a brain lain naked in blue cloud, cradled in its skull of wind— What we know is that the frivolities we depend on most can’t embed themselves; remain. But what we fear is another kind of change: that difference simmers in the very flesh, experience 47 curdled into thought that tears us, slowly, into selfaware parts. So tonight a woman thinks, What now? before the unflattering glass, while the one she loves, behind her, grins, and asks himself, Who else? ...