LJ Idol 12 - Moments of Devastating Beauty
I.
It was the loudest noise I had ever heard, like being in the middle of a thunderclap with the attendant standing-on-end of every hair on my body. A shudder and glass sherds glittered and twinkled through the air like a rain of deadly diamonds. The walls of the building breathed in and out as if it had come pleasingly alive, its moment to escape its bonds and become. All of this before the collapse and the dust, the black, choking dust which obscured so much beauty.
One moment of abstracted, dissociated appreciation of the scene, a split second, a nanosecond of wondering detachment before understanding began. There were the sounds of emergency sirens and car alarms, the sight of the building's innards - cables, insulation, joists - bulging obscenely out into the street. If it had been a tree which had fallen, if we had been in a forest instead of a city street, it would have been birds flying past me in panic, not people. There would have been the smell of sap and wood dust instead of gas and stale, burned concrete.
A bomb? Whose?
Had anyone been killed or injured? I didn't know then. I hadn't run and my concerns had been as unintellectual as those of a wild creature which had chosen or been compelled to stand.
Empirically, it had been beautiful. II.
A gorgeous contrivance, an intricate interweaving and layering of tubes and flesh and matter which housed the ghost in the machine. No human hand or mind could build or design something so complex, the organic computer which sat within my skull. It never slept, yet directed all, making me me, showing me rainbows and worlds beyond as well as governing movement, respiration, so much more.
Here it was in its textbook and workaday depiction, one brain framed and made plain as if for a passport photograph, represented in banal grey, black and white. Yet I am a creature, an animal, and in my native arrogance and moon.-calf awe, I could see a Marduk, a Yahweh, a Great Spirit taking clay and breathing life into mankind when I saw this. Why not? I am nothing and no-one remarkable, yet still I function in my way, grown from cell after multiplying cell.
Dispassionate detachment and fascination, admiration perhaps. It can be summoned for a time, used and enjoyed.
Here is where the marvellous machine has malfunctioned. Here is the evidence circled and highlighted here, here and here. It's like seeing starlight, cast so many years before it reaches our eyes. Perhaps it's like the uncovering of an archaeological site where some past battle has been fought, the glorious battle of the majestic cerebellum, out along the neuron trenches.
An MRI scan. Mine.
Past devastation with present and future consequences yet, empirically, beautiful. This week for therealljidol we have partners. My partner is twistersflower and the link is here.