Ethics and the stitching of skin

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Metaphors come to us, they seethe in the bubbling miasma of the biosphere lying in wait for an unlikely candidate for infection. Like Burroughs’ Virus 23 that carries language and physically changes the body it infects to give it the ability to use a language; sometimes it hurts a bit.

This was the packaging from a bit of suturing I had done on my knee in Cuba a few years back. I fished it out of the garbage pail in the emergency room at the Varadero hospital I got stitched up in. I remain amazed at the brand name of the suture thread; ethicon. It has a somewhat Sci-Fi feel to it. The images brought to mind when thinking of a gash being closed up with “ethicon” are multiple and political, yet another item in the long list of landguage art-i-facts.

4-0 Prolene, polypropalene suture, 13 stitches in my right knee

Mouvances

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Since moving to Newfoundland and Labrador, the idea of slow travel has been buzzing around my head like the floor plan of some great novel. Usually opting for the more “agonizing” of modes like the bus and the ferry to move across larger distances, it is often striking how much time is given to reflection. One is not constantly bustled about from one checkpoint to the next, from the security clearance to the gate and so on.

There are beautiful passages on speed and movement in Alessandro Baricco’s, “Cette Histoire-Là”. But a few passages form a recent read are creeping into the thinking pattern. More about destinations that speed, but at the same time needing a certain lingering of motion to process.

“S’il s’en va, au demeurant, ce n’est nullement qu’il n’a pas été séduit par ce qu’il quitte; au contraire, c’est qu’il a tant aimé ce qu’il tient de connaître qu’il aspire à des contrées qui soient cela avec encore plus de rigueur, plus de consistance, plus de force: des contrées dont le pays des lacs ne serait en somme qu’un avant-goût édulcoré, une île ou un massif annonciateurs, un missus dominicus, un modèle réduit. Il aspire à l’original.” R. Camus, Loin, p.289