Scalping is the first step. Carefully sucking blood with a plastic suction, I guide the neurosurgeon’s scalpel. After the crescent-shaped incision, he cuts the skin off the skull and hangs it with hooks on the sterile cloths.
My last internship is in neurosurgery and I am allowed to sit at the table. Experienced and skilled as an intern, I remain standing at the edges of the neurosurgeon’s field of vision with my piston in pen position.
He drills three circular holes in the skull, which are connected with a saw. The bone flap is lifted from the meninges, the meninges are cut open, and voilà: gray, pulsating, naked brain.
The neurosurgeon orients himself by the grooves and the direction of the convolutions of the cerebral cortex with the wonderful ease of an old sailor who orients himself at sea using the stars of the Little Dipper. In the center of the operating field he points to the Sylvian fissure, a gap between two lobes of the brain.
It continues the fissure to the dorsal side of the head, where it ends and allows the brain tissue of the two lobes to mingle, like the coast of Cape Horn the great bodies of water of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. “Approximately here is the language center, which is essential for language understanding. I have to stay away from that.”
The language center is undefined: one and a half cubic centimeters, longer than wide and wider than deep, I estimate. I imagine it schematically, as I learned from the textbooks: a perfect oval area across the fissure. But I have no idea exactly how the language area works. The microscope is wheeled in, the surgeon leaves the language center aside and continues his expedition to the deeper island of Reil.
In the meantime, I continue to marvel at the meditatively pulsating piece of gray. That language, physically solidified in brain tissue, led to the ingenuity of Dostoyevsky, Shakespeare and Brouwers.
It is like ambergris, a seemingly insignificant lump of gray indigestible sperm whale vomit, which is one of the ingredients of the most special and rare perfumes.
Just as sperm whale vomit must have a sour bile stench, language can also be bitter and poisonous. It dawns on me that these days it’s the sour bile stench that drives out the sweet ambergris scent. It is bile that floods the newspapers, the sports clubs, the living rooms, the whole of the Netherlands.
The bile: press are scum from the ledge. Refugees are fortune seekers. Refugee flows are asylum tsunamis. Voting Muslims are Islamic voting cattle. Headscarfed women are zombies. Etcetera.
I think of a story by Toon Tellegen, about a lonely sperm whale who lives far away in the ocean, at the bottom of a trench, and one day receives a letter.
Dear sperm whale,
I’m not sure if you exist, but I’ll invite you to my party. Tomorrow on the beach. If you exist, will you come?
The Seagull
He rushes to the shore. There the seagull and the sperm whale dance together on the moonlit beach, to the sounds of the slow surf.
Am I the seagull then? If only I were the seagull, willing to reach out to the lonely sperm whale, naive, loving and inviting. No, I too am the sperm whale, shrouded in the rocks of my trough.
Suddenly a hook appears in my field of vision. The hook is inserted into the brain tissue with its soft bulge to broaden the neurosurgeon’s view, exactly in line with the language center. He applies it very carefully, and then lets it loosen as much as possible. “We must ensure that we pull as little as possible on the language center to prevent damage.” He looks at me intently. “Language is very important.”
Dino Gacevic is an emergency room doctor.
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