BUDDHA: The Tapping Brain

Subject: BUDDHA: The Tapping Brain
Date: Wed, 08 May 1996 18:54:02 +1000



>Newsgroups: talk.bizarre
>From: gyges@bbs.cruzio.com
>Subject: The Tapping Brain
>Organization: Cruzio Community Networking System, Santa Cruz, CA
>Date: Mon, 18 Mar 1996 07:29:28 GMT


   Lately, late at night, when I lie wide-eyed in bed and stare up at
the water-stained ceiling, always alone, often lonely, I begin to imagine
that I can feel my brain swelling; the soft tissue delicately drawing
in the fluid around it, bumping at the surrounding bone the way
ornamental carp will break the water's surface with their mouths,
mottled backs bobbing like ghosts from the pool's murky green,
stalking drowning spiders, scattered crumbs, appetites misled by 
by stray sun-spots, circling, circling. In the same way my brain
nibbles at the edges of itself, stubbornly searching out the obscure 
and self-contained weakness which will someday kill it, darting and 
knocking in the dark, pushing at the intricate fissures of the
shallow globe which holds it. Tap-tap. Like a prisoner testing the 
concrete walls of his cell for flaws, for possible escape, for an 
answering tap from the cell next door. The durable pit of a
soft-fleshed fruit everted, carrying its minute charge of cyanide, 
waiting for the wasp which will drink from it and a few hours later 
sink its egg in the abdomen of a stung caterpillar, paralyzed but
still alive. Then the hatching of that egg, a shining larvae shaking 
itself loose from the living food as tentatively as a girl accepting 
her first dance. The fate of the discards: the fruit shrivels, wasp 
stiffens into death, the caterpillar collapses around its wound.

   Things emerging, sinking, breaking the skin. The ceiling swings
over me like a broad swathe of pale flesh, buckling with the pressure
of the rotting beams above it. Like everything here, it is beginning
to succumb to the rot which thickens the air under these trees, the
sky a distant quiver through branches. I swim through my life
underwater, steering from one obstacle to the next as languidly as
the carp, maneuvering myself towards a future I can't see through
a present I can't comprehend. No visions here. 

   Nothing but the sleepless tap-tap.

   

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