Engineer's Daughter

apostle

Otto Dix, The God of Confectioners, Germany, 1922

protean

LOADED FOR DUCK

"On top of the various discomforts that accompany lock-in syndrome, I suffer from a serious hearing disorder.  My right ear is completely blocked and my left ear amplifies and distorts all sounds farther than ten feet away.  When a plane tows an ad for the local theme park over the beach I could swear that a coffee-mill has been grafted on to my eardrum.  But that noise is only fleeting.  Much more disturbing is the permanent racket that assails me from the corridor whenever they forget to shut my door, despite all my efforts to alert people to my hearing problems.  Heels clatter on the linoleum, carts crash into one another, hospital workers hail one another with the voices of stockbrokers trying to liquidate, radios nobody listens to are turned on, and on top of everything else a floor-waxer sends out an auditory foretaste of hell.  There are also a few frightful patients.  I know some whose only pleasure is to listen to the same cassette over and over again.  I had a very young neighbour who was given a velveteen duck quipped with a sophisticated detection device.  It emitted a reedy, piercing quack whenever anyone entered the room, in other words twenty-five times a day.  Luckily the little patient went home before I could carry out my plan to exterminate the duck.  But I am keeping it in readiness: you never know what horrors tearful families may bestow on their young.  However, the first prize for eccentric neighbours goes to a woman patient who emerged demented from a coma.  She bit nurses, seized orderlies by their genitals, and was unable to request a glass of water without screaming 'Fire!'  At first these false alarms had everyone dashing to action stations; then, wearied by the struggle, they ended up letting her yell her fill at all hours of the day and night.  Her antics gave our neurology section a heady cuckoo's nest atmosphere, and I was almost sorry when they removed our friend to yell 'Help! Murder!' elsewhere.
    Far from such din, when blessed silence returns, I can listen to the butterflies that flutter inside my head.  To hear them, one must be calm and pay close attention, for their wingbeats are barely audible.  Loud breathing is enough to drown them out.  This is astonishing: my hearing does not improve, yet I hear them better and better.  I must have the ear of the butterfly."

--Jean-Dominique Bauby from The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly, France, 1997

ramify

Paul Iribe, from L'Assiette au Beurre, No. 108, France, 1903

mendacity

Eye test charts, Netherlands, 19th c.

fastidious

THE ODOR IMAGINATION TEST

In this test a blindfolded subject is given the following instructions:

I am going to let you smell various odors.  As I present each of them to you I want you to invent a short anecdote or episode suggested by the odor.  Please try to develop your story from the first association that comes to mind.

The following odors were presented: ginger, sage, soap and water, acetone, tobacco, art gum eraser, violet perfume, whiskey, sulphonaphthol, Worcestershire sauce, pine, spearmint, denatured alcohol, vinegar, germicide, sweet starch, benzoine, asafoetida, carbon tetrachloride, hydrogen sulphide gas, after-shave lotion, shellac, salad oil, sour milk, and oil of cloves.

No results of the use of this test have been published.

--From The Handbook of Projective Techniques, Bernard I. Murstein, USA, 1965

god's penny

THE INNER WORLD

I felt a funeral in my brain,
And mourners, to and fro,
Kept treading, treading, till it seemed
That sense was breaking through.

And when they all were seated,
A service like a drum
Kept beating, beating, till I thought
My mind was going numb.

And then I heard them lift a box,
A creak across my soul
With those same boots of lead,
Then space began to toll

As all the heavens were a bell,
And Being but an ear,
And I and silence some strange race,
Wrecked, solitary, here.

And then a plank in reason, broke,
And I dropped down and down--
And hit a world at every plunge,
And finished knowing--then--

--Emily Dickinson

lucriferous

John Dee, Enochian [the language of Angels], late 16th c.

naff

Visualizing music: a page from Charlotte Melchior's Picture Book by Hans Christian Andersen, Denmark, c.1874

ex officio

Bruno Munari: silence - the index finger is laid across the lips, as if to keep them shut.  From supplemento al dizionario italiano, Italy, 1963

froufrou

THISTLES

Against the rubber tongues of cows and the hoeing hands of men
Thistles spike the summer air
And crackle open under a blue-black pressure.

Every one a revengeful burst
Of resurrection, a grasped fistful
Of splintered weapons and Icelandic frost thrust up

From the underground stain of a decayed Viking.
They are like pale hair and the gutturals of dialects.
Every one manages a plume of blood.

Then they grow grey like men.
Mown down, it is a feud.  Their sons appear
Stiff with weapons, fighting back over the same ground.

--Ted Hughes