The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [39]
Alongside the historical anecdotes were medical recommendations, refutations, preventative treatments.
If a child was deemed viral, he was salted. This by the Jews, I read. What kind of Jews, it was not clear. Circa sometime that was not mentioned. Salted in the deepest sense. A cake of it rubbed over the limbs, salt poured down their mouths, into their cavities.
It is possible, I thought, that these were stories. Fancies. But if so, they were not good ones or even whole ones, but facts made wrong, broken open and remolded into lies. Someone reaching back into history and rearranging the parts, but with a filthy hand. Which would be to what end? The urge to falsify such details was without any purpose I could name. There was too much, additionally, that I knew to be true.
In a section related to materials I read of pariahs and salt, lepers and salt, the use of salt when it comes to lunatics. Salt as a detoxifier. From Jews comes the idea of salt as the residue of an ancient language, which I’d heard at the hut. Such salts were dissolved in water and dispensed to mutes, to the deaf, to infants on the threshold of speech. Acoustical decomposition, the powder left over from sounds. What this proved went unsaid.
In The Proofs a pattern of cryptic evasions became clear, of failing to deduce.
From recorded language, broadcast in a controlled environment and subjected to freezing temperatures, is collected trace amounts of salt. Whorf and Sapir perform this work with some graduate students. A salt deficiency lowers language comprehension in children.
The practice of language smoking originates in Bolivia but quickly travels north. In Mexico City it is perfected. Words and sentences tested by a delegate in a smoke-filled tube, at the end of which is stationed a sacrificial listener called, for unknown reasons, the bell.
The bell’s brain, when he dies, is pulled and separated into loaves. The loaves are tagged and named. Only drawings survive.
More instances of rot in the brain from those who have exceeded the threshold of listening.
In 1834 a family of five in Rotterdam are discovered expired in their home, parents and children blanketed in hives. That same year, farther north, a series of rashes observed in children, rashes with what is inexplicably called “a tonal element.” Rashes, hives, welts: of inordinate concern in The Proofs. And the connection is, I wondered.
In the island of Port Barre the citizens employed expired animals for soundproofing. Walls of pelts on stilts over fault lines. The typical strategy of shielding with organic matter. Usage of animals for such purposes not being the point, apparently, but rather the unanswered question, from what were they soundproofing? What was so loud that needed quieting? Autopsies show a nonmedical diagnosis. Blackened cortex, they call it.
Perkins refers to the “person allergy,” a toxicity to others. Uses the phrase as if it’s an accepted disorder. He fails at developing any effective shielding. Scoffs at the use of animals for such work. Meat is in fact an amplifier, he will say.
The young Albert Kugler has a superstition against the utterance of certain words. Proper names are volatile, likewise imperatives.
A section, mostly inscrutable, written perhaps in code, or in an eroded language, on which words are volatile. A volatility index?
None of them not, the conclusion?
A tribe from Bolivia rations their use of spoken language by appointing a delegate. Again this term, delegate, who uses language so others don’t have to. A language martyr. These tribe members speak and write on behalf of the entire community. They die young, their hands bloated, hearts enlarged, goes the claim. No asterisk, no footnote. How the others die goes unmentioned.
Hiram of Monterby