#Vincent’s Ear
I do not suggest the same arc — only a kinship to the frantic zeal of those last seventy-five days. The deformation of his madness, open to anyone able or willing to see him, was a collapse of the left. In the mirror it became the right, and the world believed the mirror.
My madness resides in the heart I keep wound and wounding. The damage only a pacemaker can manage. From the outside I have become a quiet, thoughtful man. Anger, rage, fierce emotion; a wrong bias in the genes; attachments strong enough to sit at every meal I ever ate — all of it merged into a heart only the pathologist will read, and a life no one will see except as a mirror pointing right. No one, that is, but those willing to listen.
The heart keeps its own laterality, and it is not the one you would guess. The native rhythm begins on the right — the sinoatrial node, upper right chamber, the small clock the body wound before I was born. The wound is on the left. The device, when they set it, they set on the left. So the counting starts on one side and the failing on the other, and between them runs the wave.
the wound, fibrotic
the clock the body wound keeps
wound time, chaotic
And the word will not hold still. The clock the body wound is the heart I keep wounding — one spelling, two breaths, and the whole life between them. What was wound tight in the dark before my name went to scar in the light after it. Fibrosis does not conduct; it circles. The current meets the dead tissue and turns on itself, re-enters, loops where it should have crossed — a wound clock keeping wound time. The pacemaker does not heal the wound. It keeps it wound.
A healthy wave crosses the septum left to right — the first stroke of every beat, too fast to feel, older than any thought I have ever had about myself. When the left conduction fails, the stroke reverses. The wall that should fire toward the right now receives the current backward, right to left, late, out of order. On the tracing the vector leans where a sound heart’s never leans. The instrument agrees with the mirror. It, too, points right, and it, too, calls the reversal a truth. My own cardiology will testify against the left and no one in the room will hear the lie in it.
The pacemaker does not heal this. It orients it. It lays a borrowed direction over a muscle that, left to its wound, would not stop — it would loosen into a wave with no front and no side at all, every cell firing at once, no left, no right, no orientation to grasp. Medicine has a word for that state and the word is lethal. But notice what the terror actually is: not that the heart dies, but that for one instant it has no side. We implant a small machine to give the heart back its handedness, the way the mirror gives a face its handedness, the way I have spent a life giving the “quiet man” his.
So there are two lateralities and they do not agree. At one magnification the wound is real and the wound is left — the body privileges a side, the way the weak force privileges a side, the way Chien-Shiung Wu found the world itself will not run its mirror image. And at another magnification there is no side to privilege: a surface where the wave that leaves toward the left arrives from the right without ever crossing an edge, where interior and exterior, mad man and quiet man, pathologist’s heart and stranger’s mirror are one field read twice and mistaken for two. The partition into sides is the whole of the deficiency. The listener is not seeing my truer half. The listener is seeing that I have no half — that the left I keep wounding and the right the world assigns me are the same unbroken traversal, and the wounding was only ever my hand insisting on an edge that the surface does not carry.
wu li master dance
endless letters arranging
oil brush frantic hand
And here is the misstep, the one beneath all the others. The quiet man and the quiet ear are both unquieted. Cutting the ear did not still the buzz; the buzz was never in the ear. The pacemaker did not still the heart; it lent the heart a handedness and left the chaos beating under the borrowed count. The composure did not still me; it gave the world a face to believe and left the rage running behind it. Every quiet I have made is a quiet imposed from outside, onto a thing that was never loud in the way I took it to be.
Because the buzz is not an object with an edge, no edge can be cut around it. Because the chaos is not a thing in the muscle, no lead can pace it into line. Because the rage is not the man, no man laid over it can silence it. Each instrument — the knife, the lead, the mask, and yes, this essay, this frenzy of composition, this artist’s constant distraction — reaches for the placeless and closes on nothing, and the placeless goes on ringing exactly as before. The misstep is not in which instrument. The misstep is the reaching. To quiet the ground is to grasp it, and to grasp it is to precipitate the very noise you meant to still — one more partition laid across what has no sides, one more support propped beneath what needs no support and will not bear one.
The quiet was never a thing to be made. It was the ground the making stood on. Vincent reached for it with a razor and a canvas; I reach for it with a pacemaker and a page. Neither of us was ever going to cut our way to silence — because the silence was already there, ringing, before either of us raised a hand.
my heart lay hidden
injury not exposing pain
his ear bandaged
---
Colophon
The work is personal. The material here is original arising directly from my sitting contemplation. It is protected under Any Note Press. It’s publication here permits no commercial use. All rights are reserved. It is offered for the benefit of one’s practice and nothing else.