Beyond the Planck Barrier: Dinner with Proust, Cyrano and Hannibal

" I was indeed like an Angel, who fallen from the inebriating bliss of Paradise, subsides into the most humdrum reality. And, just as certain creatures are the last surviving testimony to a form of life which nature has discarded, I asked myself if music were not the the unique example of what might have been -if there had not come the invention of language, the formation of words, the analysis of ideas- the means of communication between one spirit and another? It is like the possibility which has ended in nothing. Humanity has developed along other lines, those of spoken and written language. - Marcel Proust

This was written after watching a double feature, "Cyrano" with Gerard Depardieu, followed by the premiere of "Silence of the Lambs" NYC

Skin

It's only skin. Inside the skin, meat, consumable flesh. Skin encasing heart and marrow, bone and blood. Words, skin, language, meat. The skin of word, pare it away. A small scalpel and in minute, precise strips flay its pimpled, bruised flesh, the pock-marked past we glory, the shell, calcified we hide behind. Small strips, tiny fissures that let breath, blood out, light in.

This delicate sliver, that one word said too late; the next, that twist that sent your life askew. The point pierces the skin of that word and quick like the scalpel, no blood, barely an indication of entry and your heart simply stops.

So now you've pared away the surface of those words and they sit before your scrutiny more than naked. The eloquence, elegance that encased them cannot sleight of hand your attention any longer. The tongue, that mercurial magician cannot flatter, it can no longer blend flavors, syllables that mesmerize, but not sustain you.

My mother ate sandwiches of tongue. She'd take a long lavender slab and slowly, knife in hand, pare away hundreds of taste buds. This sliver salt, that sweet, I'd watch her from the catbird seat while she pared down taste to suit hers. Two slices of Wonder bread lovingly slathered with Miracle Whip waited for the ritual's end. Her mother had taught her, her mother's mother's legacy as well; delicacy, precision and a taste for the exotic and profane . Nothing could be wasted, flesh as sustenance was precious. as precious as words, the tongue. That tongue, now relieved of all but its essential meat lay there on the plate. A larger knife, the carver, and slice by thin slice, she made her sandwich.