Those flies I thought I saw in Christopher’s room. Were they ‘death receptors’?
Death receptors actually exist – they occupy the surfaces of living cells. The science of it I find impenetrable, but I was haunted at once by the imagery. Death receptors are ‘signalling pathways’ from a cytoplasmic region known as ‘the death domain’, and may be imagined as ghostly groundsmen and chambermaids: their mission is to prepare the body to accommodate its strange new guest.
The swarming vermin in the sickroom were death receptors, given flesh and blood and a smear of hair by my eyes.
‘She died instantly’. Oh no she didn’t. I have never believed for a moment that anyone dies instantly. It takes a while to die; even the wallshadows of Hiroshima and Nagasaki took a while to die. I have similar objections to ‘he died in his sleep’. Oh no he didn’t. He had to wake up first, just long enough to do the dying. Or maybe he had a certain kind of bad dream: the kind that under-anaesthetised patients are said to have during surgery…
The chapter heading above is the first line of Wilfred Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’ (1918). Our narrator, our warrior poet, has escaped from battle, but only by being killed on its field. He has passed from life to death, and the immense and solemn toil of the crossing, with all it asks of you, is beautifully and terrifyingly rendered by means of high technique. The combination of the stately pentameter and the grating half-rhymes or slant rhymes (or, in Owen’s virtuoso use of them, dissonant assonances):
It seemed that out of battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped,
Through granites which titanic wars had groined,
Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned…
Escaped, scooped, groined, groaned: the slant rhymes, the dissonant assonances that will roll through you when you do the dying.