The Heart

According to movies, pop songs, poems, novels, plays, the heart is an organ that can ache to the point of breaking. See Ophelia. See Romeo and Juliet. It can also be an index of excitement, elation. At the nearness of the beloved, the heart starts to race, the heartbeat increasing dramatically. When I first encountered courtly lyric poetry of the European middle ages, I was amused to find that the symptoms of desire and infatuation were as physical back in the 1200’s as they were in the 1990’s. The male poet might speak of a great physical discomfort in the left side, sometimes even to the point of trembling violently when he is in the presence of the invariably perfect and unattainable beloved.

The heart was wordplay until a time in my mid-twenties when my first significant romantic relationship ended. In the middle of an uncontrollable crying fit in my bedroom, I suddenly felt a twinge in the left side of my chest. I got up and drew the curtains. It was summer and the light was golden. I could hear laughter and voices, probably my neighbours and their children enjoying the sun in their back garden. But I was consumed first by my pain and then by this sudden physical manifestation of the emotional tumult inside of me. It astonished me, the sharpness of the jab and where I felt it. It surprised me to learn that that the love songs and love poems I had studied were not figurative: unhappiness can cause the heart such strain and duress.

 
After Boon’s collapse, all this trafficking in metaphors and analogies seemed to be irrelevant and useless when placed next to the analyses of the heart, its functions and its ailments furnished by the medical professionals who spoke to me or that I searched and found on the internet. Translated into my layperson’s understanding, this is what I learnt:
 

The heart is a pump, the engine that gets blood to move around the body, powering the work of the other organs. When the heart stops pumping, oxygen can’t be transported via the bloodstream; without oxygen, other parts of the body cannot function.

 

The brain is the main command centre. When the brain can’t function properly, even if the ears can hear a simple instruction like “Move your fingers if you can hear me,” the fingers will not move. Nothing will happen because the command centre has shut down. Brain damage sets in 3 minutes after the heart has stopped.

 

After an attack, the heart can be resuscitated using CPR (Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation). To prevent damage to the other organs, CPR has to be immediately rendered. Without CPR or other forms of intervention, the stopping of the heart leads to death within 10 minutes.

I searched for diagrams of the heart on the internet and I learnt that the average size of an adult human heart is the size of a fist. The average weight is 300g. There are four chambers inside the heart. The ones upstairs are called atria and they receive the blood that flows back into the heart. The ones downstairs are called ventricles and they move the blood out of the heart to other parts of the body.

The images that came to mind:

 
Chambers are rooms. A fist is a hand that is closed, a fist formed when the fingers are curled into a ball. Clench and unclench the fist and there is movement in the hand and wrist. A heart that has stopped is a frozen fist. A heart that has stopped is a building where the light has gone out in some or all of the rooms.

The questions that also came:

Why would the heart of a healthy person suddenly stop? Was it too laden with care? Too weary to continue with the tiresome tiring business of living?  Was the person, in spite of all appearances, heartbroken in some deep irreparable way?

So it was back to psychological hypothesizing, a spiral of why’s and what if’s.

For the answers that medical science could be relied upon to provide talked about Boon as a physiological entity, not the whole person who had a personality with lovable and annoying traits, someone with his own unique laundry list of likes and peeves, his talents, his strengths and weaknesses, his propensity to nag and whine, his kindness, his experiences of hope, loss, rejection, disappointment, love.

In the map of Boon that the doctors drew, there was an organ that had stopped, other organs that began to fail, a body that was beginning to fail. But I had a different map of Boon. Where was his soul in their map? The soul that could not be registered on the screens of the machines that surrounded the island of his bed in the ICU. The soul that could not be drawn like the blood and sent for tests.

What happens to the soul when the body begins to become uninhabitable? Is the soul not connected to the heart? The medieval poets who wrote about the physical violent symptoms of love and desire were not writing about bodily malfunctions; they were writing about the soul’s distress that is manifest in the wild palpitations of the heart.

We are our bodies – and more. So when the body begins to break down, how does the soul cope? When the heart stops, what happens to the soul?  

(to be continued)