Decline and Fall

October 6, 2011

An Arm and a Leg

It is not so much a matter of decline as coming unhinged, unable to hold the various parts of my body together: my right foot falls off the end of my right leg, leaving an ugly bruise of a stump; my left arm detaches at the elbow leaving an empty sleeve I have to pin up; my entrails are rotting, like wood soured by fungus; my skin is drying up and blowing away in flakes.

          My brain coughs, gags, deflates.  I can’t remember from one minute to the next where I am and what I am doing.  So mostly I do nothing; still, someone must be. Newspapers and magazines, file folders and books, cellophane and pop cans pile up around me.  There are loose papers everywhere – on my desk, my chair, on the floor; but when I pick one up I can't see where it can have come from – the characters shimmer and change form, now Roman, now Cyrillic, now pictograms.

I think: I’ll put my body back together by putting my "house" in order, as if I’ll find my missing foot – in its black sock and Timberland boot – among the scattered papers and cans.  Perhaps, I’ve used my dead arm as a bookmark.  But the search turns up nothing, except the smell of swamp gas where the desk is uncovered.   

          There’s a knock on the door: “Ted?”

This is what happens when we turn physics over to metaphysicists.  But doing the reverse creates an even worse disaster.

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