We use paralytics in medicine sometimes. Their application saves lives, awarding the contrived airways of science to those unable to protect their own.
Rumor has it, however, that the administration of a paralytic without the accompaniment of rosey glassed forget-me drugs - the heavy sedatives and graceful amnesics - inducts the recipient into the tiny cohort of humans who can or could describe the phenomen of a live burial. Every sensation remains intact, the voices of your invaders and the steel and drift of their tools fully familiar. But for the life of the paralytic, some as merciful as twelve minutes others as pernicious as a full hour, the patient forfeits defense, objection, and conscious dignity.
The possibility humbles the caregivers charged with wielding such pharmaceuticals and a reverence for the imperiled bodies on stilled beds before them comes forth.
One is forced to wonder, standing at the foot of the great red woods, if they do not also know such a paralysis. Is their two-hundred year old silence, baring the chain teeth of man's saws and the choking fog of his mechanical children, a merciless half-life of Nature's apothecary? Looking at their skin and their arms numbering in the hundreds, the towering testament to their long lives and the community by which they're surrounded, I fear their useless awareness of their live dissection and their neighbors'.
They swallow lost spirits and reground them, a vocation both they and the monks have found best accomplished in silence. As caregivers it would suit our want for wisdom to mind the tapered egdes of our tools, our presence in the proximity of lives that notice and witness and feel but do not reach out to us to applaud or curse our craft.
Rumor has it, however, that the administration of a paralytic without the accompaniment of rosey glassed forget-me drugs - the heavy sedatives and graceful amnesics - inducts the recipient into the tiny cohort of humans who can or could describe the phenomen of a live burial. Every sensation remains intact, the voices of your invaders and the steel and drift of their tools fully familiar. But for the life of the paralytic, some as merciful as twelve minutes others as pernicious as a full hour, the patient forfeits defense, objection, and conscious dignity.
The possibility humbles the caregivers charged with wielding such pharmaceuticals and a reverence for the imperiled bodies on stilled beds before them comes forth.
One is forced to wonder, standing at the foot of the great red woods, if they do not also know such a paralysis. Is their two-hundred year old silence, baring the chain teeth of man's saws and the choking fog of his mechanical children, a merciless half-life of Nature's apothecary? Looking at their skin and their arms numbering in the hundreds, the towering testament to their long lives and the community by which they're surrounded, I fear their useless awareness of their live dissection and their neighbors'.
They swallow lost spirits and reground them, a vocation both they and the monks have found best accomplished in silence. As caregivers it would suit our want for wisdom to mind the tapered egdes of our tools, our presence in the proximity of lives that notice and witness and feel but do not reach out to us to applaud or curse our craft.