Deefferented

There is a medical condition called the Locked-In Syndrome. The patient is conscious but is unable to move any muscle of his body, excepting sometimes an eye. He is unable to make his wishes known; he is unable to make a mark on the world. If he is fortunate, a doctor, or more likely a family member, will catch a glimpse of an eye movement, and then will begin the dance to interpret the movements of his eyes, the windows to his soul (as the proverb has it), to determine the depth of his understanding of how his condition overcame him, and hear his desires of how to be treated, and taught, and interacted with in future.  

We are all Locked-In today. We have no physical presence in the outside world – the world we assumed was THE world only three weeks ago.  If we are to have an effect, we must find the window and make our tiny, weak eyeball efforts to shift the course of the larger universe from the inside.  

From my lock-in, I’m looking at a window. A Window. A Word Window in Windows. At the top, a Title Bar (26March.docx), and below it a Menu Bar (File, Home, Menu, Insert, Design – you know the drill). Vertically at the side, there’s the Scroll Bar. No-one can see my eyes; this is the only Microsoft Window to my soul.  It’s up to me to make that work and persuade the others on the outside of my Lock-In to understand my needs and to hear what I have to offer.

Behind me, facing my screen, is a window. A glass pane, the word ‘window’ coming from the Old Norse Vindr, meaning wind and Auga, meaning eye. (It’s not known why it is not called a fenester, which most other European languages use.) Behind it, the wind still moves. The wind eye behind me reflects on the glass of the screen so that as I write, I see the outside world behind me as if it were in front of me. There are broadleafed trees, now bare but in bud, an avenue of asymmetrical Queen Palms, a car dusted with yellow spring pollen and a series of purple sprinkler valve covers. There is no-one there, in the window reflected in my window. The people are all indoors, locked inside.

(Written for my creative writing group)