Feeling for a pulse

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Date: 17 Jun 2002 22:50:12 -0400

I

We were talking about a personal matter.  I was shy and frightened, you
were trying to reassure me.  Finally you took my hand and placed it on
your breast; staring into my face and naming me directly, you swore "by
this heartbeat" that your intentions were to my benefit.  I was convinced.

II

We were at a family reunion, including my immediate family and others I'd
never met before.  One of my distant relatives, I think my cousin and I will
call him that, was a book.  He may have always been, but I think he had once
had a human body that got sick, and his spirit or essence was transferred
into the book in order to save him.  He was still very sick.  I wasn't sure
whether all books in this world had spirits or essences in them, or if my
cousin was unique.  I was just a visitor and hadn't learned all the
patterns yet.

My cousin fell off a table or shelf onto the floor.  It was like a human
collapsing unconscious.  My mother, with her first aid background, took
charge of the situation.  She opened the book to a point near the beginning
and pressed her hand into the middle near the spine.  I saw that the pages
were a little rough and wrinkled there, as if they had been dampened and
dried.  I knew she was feeling for a pulse, to see if my cousin was dead. 
He was.

It was necessary for witnesses to sign and seal the front endpapers of the
book, to show that he was dead.  My father cheerfully did so, with a seal
improvised on the spot from a plastic film canister lid, but I wasn't
willing to do it without verifying the book's condition for myself.  I
couldn't perceive any change from when my cousin was alive until now.  
The worst thing I could do would be sign and seal the page with him still
alive; I had to be certain, and I had to certify it personally.  Taking
anyone else's word for it would be both dangerous and a discredit to my
duty.

My mother tried to convince me by showing me where to put my hand to feel
for his pulse; true, I couldn't feel anything, but I had never felt a
pulse in a book before anyway.  I had no way of knowing there was a
difference between alive and dead.  She flipped the pages of the book; it
was mostly printed, but had some scrapbook-like pages with black-and-white
photographs pasted into them.

One photograph showed my mother and her brother as children, and my mother
pointed to that as proof that my cousin was dead.  The photograph had been
taken long before she and my uncle had been born; it could only depict them
by virtue of my cousin's departure.  I didn't understand that; and I thought
later that the photograph's supposed date was not only before my mother's
generation had been born, but in fact before glossy photographic paper had
been invented also.  I didn't realise that consciously at the time, but
something did feel not right.  Maybe that is why I wasn't convinced.

III

During the Spiritualist era of the late 1800s there was a brief craze for
spirit photography, pictures of ghosts.  These images were all fakes, of
course, done with double exposures, cheesecloth, and the old reliable smoke
and mirrors.  All good clean fun.

The practice fell into disrepute as humanity realised that the camera
doesn't lie.  As soon as someone created a photograph of something, the
thing in the photograph would be forced into existence - so the picture
might have been meant as a fake, but after it passed through the developer,
it would be real.  And ghosts are a lot pleasanter in imagination than in
reality.  Some of the old photographers' studios remain haunted and
uninhabitable to this very day as a result of spirit photography.
-- 
Matthew Skala
mskala@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca                    Embrace and defend.
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/

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