convertedinto blood by the liver. He suggested instead â somewhat scandalously at the time â that blood was pumped from the heart throughout the body and then returned and recirculated. Harvey stood back from his gory investigative procedures, covered with the controversial stuff-of-life that had once passed inside a human heart, and knew for certain the function of valves and veins, and that his esteemed mentor, Hieronymus Fabricius, was wrong in supposing that arteries were the origin of the pulse. His theory was published in 1628.
The heart-pump identification did not change the minds of anyone but physicians. The rest of the world continued to attribute capacities and functions, generally bizarre and mostly wide-ranging. Half-truths and one-and-a-half-truths, garbled theories and romantic miscalculations â all contributed to swell the heart to abnormal size, pumped up by symbolism. By the nineteenth century, scientists began again to attend to its physical properties: two British physiologists, having recorded, with modest purpose, the electrical currents of a frogâs heart, decided immodestly to apply this technology to humans. The electrocardiogram, as it was named in 1887, recorded the heartâs phases, beats and delays. It noted atrial stimulation and ventricular depolarisation. It monitored, let us be frank, inner secrets. Tamed by electricity, it was only a matter of time before pacemakers, batteries and artificial hearts together intervened to heal and control. But this paradox persists: although the heart has succumbed to exposure and regulation, to electromechanical jiggery-pokery, it continues stubbornly to accretenonmaterial accessories. Deforming meanings enlarge and empower it. It pounds on, as it were, at 100,000 beats a day, 100,000 lub Dub, lub Dub, lub Dub, lub Dub, but it is still a site of the greatest obscurity. Lost or found, sometimes torn or broken, sometimes wholly unknowable.
William Harvey, bless his soul, had the faith of the lover. He saw the chestnut-haired Elizabeth Browne, daughter of one of the Queenâs physicians, reading a book beneath a shady tree. Light fell on the side of her face and across the open pages of her book. He felt his heart leap within him, stir, and strike more boldly. When they married it was still thus. He was overexcited. His heart was crazy â boom-boom â struck by love.
With Stephen gone, Alice was calmer and better able to work. She spent her days inward-turned, reading and writing. The weather gradually became warmer, and with it her antipodean self seemed to revive: she took long walks across bridges and along the banks of the river; she visited and left churches, a tourist, merely; she eavesdropped on conversations and sat alone in blustery parks reading flapping English newspapers. She was entering a state of dematerialisation. The rowdy city that had first seemed so pressurising and insistent, now withdrew, faded, as if she too were faded and had no solid body to press upon. There was static in the air, a kind of quivering charge. Radio waves, microwaves, the Big Bang resounding. Alice felt she had been parachuted in, but not quite landed, so that she hung above the earth, an inflated dome shadowing her, recording and surveying with cunning intent. Below, the world of children, lapdogs, men havingarguments, roller skaters, wanderers and lovers on Pont Neuf, continued with its own intrinsic purpose and animation. Camus had said in his Carnets that the lives of others appear always, from the outside, to have a completion our own dismally lacks. Only when we understand this as a projection â that other lives, too, are unclosed and contingent â do we approach maturity. Alice felt immature. She felt that she was a spy in the cold.
One day Alice fell asleep during an afternoon organ concert at Notre-Dame, and woke from the remnants of an erotic dream, spliced and impersonal as pornography. The friction of thighs, a
The heart-pump identification did not change the minds of anyone but physicians. The rest of the world continued to attribute capacities and functions, generally bizarre and mostly wide-ranging. Half-truths and one-and-a-half-truths, garbled theories and romantic miscalculations â all contributed to swell the heart to abnormal size, pumped up by symbolism. By the nineteenth century, scientists began again to attend to its physical properties: two British physiologists, having recorded, with modest purpose, the electrical currents of a frogâs heart, decided immodestly to apply this technology to humans. The electrocardiogram, as it was named in 1887, recorded the heartâs phases, beats and delays. It noted atrial stimulation and ventricular depolarisation. It monitored, let us be frank, inner secrets. Tamed by electricity, it was only a matter of time before pacemakers, batteries and artificial hearts together intervened to heal and control. But this paradox persists: although the heart has succumbed to exposure and regulation, to electromechanical jiggery-pokery, it continues stubbornly to accretenonmaterial accessories. Deforming meanings enlarge and empower it. It pounds on, as it were, at 100,000 beats a day, 100,000 lub Dub, lub Dub, lub Dub, lub Dub, but it is still a site of the greatest obscurity. Lost or found, sometimes torn or broken, sometimes wholly unknowable.
William Harvey, bless his soul, had the faith of the lover. He saw the chestnut-haired Elizabeth Browne, daughter of one of the Queenâs physicians, reading a book beneath a shady tree. Light fell on the side of her face and across the open pages of her book. He felt his heart leap within him, stir, and strike more boldly. When they married it was still thus. He was overexcited. His heart was crazy â boom-boom â struck by love.
With Stephen gone, Alice was calmer and better able to work. She spent her days inward-turned, reading and writing. The weather gradually became warmer, and with it her antipodean self seemed to revive: she took long walks across bridges and along the banks of the river; she visited and left churches, a tourist, merely; she eavesdropped on conversations and sat alone in blustery parks reading flapping English newspapers. She was entering a state of dematerialisation. The rowdy city that had first seemed so pressurising and insistent, now withdrew, faded, as if she too were faded and had no solid body to press upon. There was static in the air, a kind of quivering charge. Radio waves, microwaves, the Big Bang resounding. Alice felt she had been parachuted in, but not quite landed, so that she hung above the earth, an inflated dome shadowing her, recording and surveying with cunning intent. Below, the world of children, lapdogs, men havingarguments, roller skaters, wanderers and lovers on Pont Neuf, continued with its own intrinsic purpose and animation. Camus had said in his Carnets that the lives of others appear always, from the outside, to have a completion our own dismally lacks. Only when we understand this as a projection â that other lives, too, are unclosed and contingent â do we approach maturity. Alice felt immature. She felt that she was a spy in the cold.
One day Alice fell asleep during an afternoon organ concert at Notre-Dame, and woke from the remnants of an erotic dream, spliced and impersonal as pornography. The friction of thighs, a
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