Article: 261331 of talk.bizarre
From: filippi@hsc.usc.edu (David Filippi)
Newsgroups: talk.bizarre
Subject: lymph heart
Date: 1 Dec 1995 04:58:03 -0800
Organization: frolick and gambol, inc, city of industry division
Lines: 59
Sender: filippi@hsc.usc.edu
Message-ID: <49mu4r$nhb@hsc.usc.edu>
Status: O
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the cadaver's skin was pale white and pink.  the scarce fat smelled good
(by way of comparison, of course.  they'll tell you it's all relative.)
the paper said "congestive heart failure and pulmonary insufficiency." as
usual the paper soaked up truth with ink; on opening the chest wall
(its xiphoid hinge _mirabile visu_) the lungs were dark and stiff, crunchy
honeycomb inside and befouled with the tar of a million cigarettes.  her
heart was head-sized and provided a good model for detailed study.  jokes
were made.  her big heart.

everybody loved to see the great white growths, some alien seed grounded in
lung, in smooth muscle, in pleura and bone.  it was an undiagnosed cancer.
_mirabile visu_; and how quickly i tired of explaining it to the curious
lab wanderers in their white coats!  O decorum.

a german film, 'mesentery of the cat with circulation' showed translucent
lymph vessels in contractile action.  smooth muscle along these vessels
exhibits pulsatile contraction, only visible by the pathological red
blood cells they'd introduced into the clear or white fatty lymph chyle
(chyle: L., _chylus_, juice).  the great nodes also squeeze: the lymph
flows up the thoracic duct to dump into the left brachiocephalic vein.

never mind all that.  this cadaver's lymph vessels were dark, black.
["it's so dark in there."] and here, by her trachea, was one fist-sized node.
when i learned they squeeze -- well, how well hidden is futility?  the
cancerous cells would ride that lymph highway all around the body, putting
down their inscrutable rootlets wherever they found bleeders and drainers,
clogging the nodes which enlarge to compensate.  how strange, the lymph --
it "arises from dead ends," its capillaries blind alleys that absorb.

don't die with me yet.  this woman drained futility all through her, and
from the scars of its passage built this beautiful novel thing, her greatest
node, this lymph heart; while just anterior her old heart fought and raged
and grew against the brain that brought cigarettes and words and probably
anger down into her thorax; the brain that, probably, had already given up.

someday people will come equipped with lymph hearts, _alle menschen_, and
poets whose brain turns from meanings to "what could it be like?" and
"what about those things to come?" will know or hope to see soon: 
futility's mad race pressed down under the cornerstone; left under for
building, or pressed with stones like witches, or burnt.  until then they'll
growl and mumble (how hard we make their job) and keep searching for
new symbols, neon signs hung high over the teeming heart of the futile city,
beacons towards which, self-poisoned on Saturday night, some of us may be found
reaching, even through the grey dark fog (and yes virginia, it's thinner
every year.)

after that, there will be other problems of futility.  but first things
first: after Kitty Hawk, transatlantic commerce was just a matter of degree.

the family wants her remains back -- i suppose they'll put her dentures on
the mantel or something.  but i put her lymph heart into 'TISSUE SCRAPS'.
it will be burnt.


dave
this holiday season, support your local magician's guild
--
FISH APHRODISIAC -- and it's you they'll love.  filippi@hsc.usc.edu