The New Sense

Thursday, August 22, 2002

Just time to write a bit while it's quiet in the bar. The ultrasound was an amazing experience. We took a cab to the clinic up on Guy. Dr. Khoury, who Dr. Stavrianos recommended, was hilarious. Totally straight-faced he says, "Well, the baby is growing on the left side, so it will be a communist." I swear for half a second B— and I were both like, "Oh…okay. I guess it's a communist then."
It's so mind-blowing, to see that alien beany thing flipping around and moving inside me. I can't believe I can't feel it. Dr. Khoury measured it from head to toe, then the diameter of the skull and afterwards they gave us a printout of some kind of statistical calculations which show the chances of the baby having Downs syndrome. Luckily everything seems fine.
And the other great thing is the Diclectin prescription. I wish I'd asked earlier. Hopefully no more morning sickness now.
I've got the pictures in my bag and it's incredibly tempting to show them to complete strangers. I'm so proud. The cool thing is that B— was obviously very emotional about the whole thing. He had tears in his eyes when he was watching the screen. In the cab on the way back he kept staring at the photos with a big grin on his face. Now I think about it though, I guess he already knew what it looked like. Not 'look', but feel. Oh, here's Olga's cab pulling up. Time to pretend to work.

Just found out that Chrétien has finally decided to quit. Except that he hasn't. This brings a new dimension to the term 'lame duck', according to Dan. More of a lame albatross, apparently.

So this has been swirling around in the back of my mind ever since I wrote this morning's bit: what's an ultrasound anyway? It's not a photo or a video. Not in the usual sense. There aren't any light waves or photons or anything. It's just sound. But then the machine translates the sound into pictures and we act as though there was a little camera inside my uterus.
And I know what's bothering me about this. Or not bothering, but preoccupying me. It's that this is a perfect example of the tyranny of sight. B— uses his sense to do something a bit like the ultrasound machine, except that now it's suddenly become very clear to me what the difference is. He doesn't need the machine to do the 'translating' to be able to understand what's going on. The sound waves from the machine are converted into electrical signals, which are then converted into pixels on the screen (or at least something like that happens, I guess). Our brains need to able to be fed visual information to make sense of it all. I bet they could just play the sound waves and we would hear noise and not relate it to 'baby' or 'fetus'. But a bat might not hear noise, or, I don't know, a dolphin or something. A bat might 'understand' what was there because ultrasound is the way bats understand the world. There's no colour to a bat (I assume). Who knows, maybe there's no texture either. But maybe there are other things that mean something to a bat that we can't even imagine. And that's how B— interprets reality. His sense makes him (god — I want to say 'see' or 'form an image of' the world — it really is tyrannical!) understand what's around him, and there could be all kinds of other dimensions like colour or texture that we simply don't know about because our senses won't let us. Not only that, but he's kind of 'bilingual'. He has sight too. And it's just like when you can only express something in French because they have a better word or phrase for it than in English. He has that times a thousand or a million. No wonder Sean wants a piece of it. Even a glimpse into B— 's world might give all kinds of unforeseen insight. Good grief! Look at that last sentence: 'glimpse', 'unforeseen', 'insight'. All 'sight' words. Now I know exactly what he's been talking about with his tyranny of sight crap all this time. And it isn't crap.
Holy fuck, I feel like I just smoked a big one. Is this all going to sound stupid when I read it tomorrow like it always does when I have one of those stoner revelations? Like when I was up the mountain with Polly and Molly last summer — "Why don't they run all the rides at La Ronde with power from the river, like a series of water wheels along the edge of the island? Hey — why don't they get all the electricity for the city from the river? They could have these water wheel turbine things on both shores. No, wait — there are four shores in all. No, six if you count Laval." Yes, Sara, and what about when the river freezes in the winter? I said to myself the next morning, though I'm pretty sure Molly would have gone on thinking it was a great scheme if I hadn't mentioned the ice problem to her a week later.
Anyway, this is amazing. I know what B— 's problem is — the way he understands the world is untranslatable. Our whole language is built upon sight. Our brains are programmed that way, so we're stuck with it. But he has grown up with this other sense. And yet he only speaks the language of sight. How weird is that? If I was in outer Mongolia and found a piece of scrap metal in a ditch which had written on it in English, "United States Time Travel Vessel Voyager 1. 3064 AD." I wouldn't be able to explain to any of the locals what an amazing thing I'd discovered and how as a result the world is so different from what they imagine. If none of them could speak English I'd be in the exact same situation as B— is. No-one else speaks his language. But the weird thing is, even he doesn't speak his language. Okay, okay, it's like this — if I was in the same situation in outer Mongolia, but I had a speech impediment or brain disease that left me unable to speak. That would be B— 's situation. Yes, that's it — he understands, and he's the only one who has access to this special understanding, but he can't express that understanding even in his own terms. And even if he could, nobody else could understand those terms.
I can't wait till he gets back so I can talk to him about all this. I'm almost as excited as I was this morning.

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posted by Sara