The Positive Interruption of the Organism

Duration | Illness and the subterranean | des Esseintes

THE FOLLOWING PIECE, is a continuation of “Open Letter to All and Sundry”.

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As we go along, traversing concrete time against its immanent background of everyday life, measured always apace by the machinery of timekeeping, which mercilessly divides time for the ordering of work, money, debt and repayment, we are also building up a reserve of durative time.

After a long night of moving through different tiers of ER waiting areas, like cubicles infinitely dividing up the first circle of Hell, I was given a room and told that I had an abscess larger than a golf ball embedded deep within my intestines.

It was in a tricky location, they said, meaning that they couldn’t get to it, even with a needle.

Later, one of the doctors in-training told me that he had never seen one so big. They usually burst inside of the abdominal cavity long before reaching that size. “What happens then?” I asked. “Well,” he thought for a moment. “You go septic right away, and the pain becomes so intense that you lose consciousness. And the mortality rate becomes very high.”

My hospital room had a nice bathroom, some chairs and a large window looking out over the Gothic Revival buildings of the University of Pennsylvania. It was snowing, and the steam coming from various chimneys and rooftop vents below lent a grim, neo-noir accent to everything.

I can’t help but think that there are, as Bergson thought, two kinds of time: concrete time, which we easily measure by means of space, and inner time, which he calls duration.