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"It not only gets the steel ball rolling onto the intestines, but also activates the senses, setting them to the frequencies at which the signals of new dangers can be received. Those signals appear as noise to the previous -- pre-war -- mind, as a breakdown in communication."

— Hemon, Aleksandr (b. 1964)

Author

Hemon, Aleksandr (b. 1964)

Work Title

Stop Making Sense, or How to Write in the Age of Trump

Date

January 17, 2017

Metaphor

"It not only gets the steel ball rolling onto the intestines, but also activates the senses, setting them to the frequencies at which the signals of new dangers can be received. Those signals appear as noise to the previous -- pre-war -- mind, as a breakdown in communication."

Metaphor in Context

But the body knows the score, recognizes the crisis before the mind. It not only gets the steel ball rolling onto the intestines, but also activates the senses, setting them to the frequencies at which the signals of new dangers can be received. Those signals appear as noise to the previous -- pre-war -- mind, as a breakdown in communication. The new mind, which the body floods with adrenaline, begins -- like a rabbit in a forest of foxes -- to decode all the signals, even if it's not capable of fitting them into any narrative. The unified, ontologically comfortable mind splits: On the one hand, the pre-war mind refuses the possibility of catastrophe; on the other, the war mind perceives everything as the signal that the end of the world is nigh. I trust my fears while struggling to ignore them. We become of two minds, which cannot agree on what is real. The world looks strange and unreliable, fragile and dangerous. It is itself and not itself. I am myself and someone else.