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| The Unswept Floor mosaic by Herakleitos – in the decorative style known as asàrotos òikos – inspired by Sosus of Pergamon, 2nd century AD, Museum Gregoriano Profano, Vatican. Detail from a mosaic that once decorated the dining room floor of a villa on the Aventine Hill, Rome, at the time of the Emperor Hadrian. |
Instructions for Use of this Balm,
the label made plain :
‘Squeeze a quantity of lotion the size
of a walnut directly on to the skin.’
Were these words in Judaean Aramaic or Byzantine Greek
their meaning would endure as true as
any other fixed constant ; a cowrie shell, say, or
the way lapidaries
and bruisers make
a pigeon’s egg their
accustomed rule of thumb.
Hans Christian Andersen foresaw
innocency’s view :
for him, the polished walnut shell a crib
to conjure up the newborn’s thumb-sized virtue.
The Greeks heard more in karuon ; a neural echo since its kernel
bears a likeness to the brain’s whorled lobes.
So was it chance that serial-child-killer Straffen’s
first doomed crime was to rob
a market stall
of a cephalic
bag of walnuts? For
when, later examined, ‘Severe
and wide damage to
the cerebral cortex’ was discovered,
and the walnut thief was found to have the I.Q.
of a child with the mental age of ten – a variable measure,
which – like weighing rough diamonds – can lead
assayers to consult their barometers when they
appraise. ‘Sell,’ they once said,
‘when the pressure
is low.’ Whereas ‘Buy
when pressure is higher.’
How civilised, then, of the Comité
International
for Weights and Measures in Sèvres, frankly
to permit their metricationists to tell
us the standard prototype kilogram, sealed inside two bell jars
in 1879, has shrunk by
50 micrograms. Nonetheless (though datum corruptible),
when the brightest of the
Bright Young Things asked,
‘Has a rather tall
peer with a head the
size of a walnut passed this way?’ was it still
truly the measure of a man, after all?
•
Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence,
see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
and Listen Close to Me (2011)
and A Bad Case (2015)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html
