Excerpt from Crust (news)
The crust was there when I woke up. Such was its insistence that it seemed I’d never known one before. It was large and dense and high in my right nostril, attached to the septum as well as the upper lateral cartilage, thus perfectly situated to activate the trigeminal nerve through which, as most research confirms, the chaos of sensation it generated was being transmitted to anterior cells in my hippocampus[1] or, if you prefer (as I do) Robert Fawck’s contrarian view of this neurology, the dorsal cells of my frontal insula.[2] Lucille Bloch’s classification scale (Appendix A)[3] was still two years away from publication, and I’d not yet discovered the website on which she was already publishing data, but had I been familiar with her work, I’d have recognized this crust at once as an 8 or an 8.5, with the potential to become a 9 or even a 10 since the radiators in our bedroom were, as usual, generating too much heat and we’d yet to purchase the humidifier we’d promised ourselves for years.[4] Like any 8, it was in all probability more than .2 but less than .6 millimeters in diameter and between 2 and 3 cubic centimeters in volume. The effects of extraction are always hard to predict, of course (even Bloch is reticent here), but it was more than likely that, in the immediate aftermath of its emergence, its shape and color would be similar to, though not identical with, Plate 43 in the recent collection of Ellen Bernstein photographs exhibited in the winter of 2017 at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.[5] In terms of dehydration and viscosity, I’d guess it to have been (see Bloch again), somewhere between +3 and +2.8, which is to say it clearly leaned in the direction of the former, but not so much as to be totally encapsulated or to compromise the liquid-solid ambiguity which Alexander Crespin, in the June 2007 issue of Tricycle, The Buddhist Review, called “the form-emptiness paradox at the heart of Nasalism.”[6] The sensations it produced were almost exactly those which Bloch has called characteristic of an 8 - “insistent but not maddening irritation,”[7] slight pressure against the skin but no “piercing,”[8] “nasal edema,” or “respiratory distress”[9] - but in retrospect, there was nothing about it which explains the astonishing effect it was about to have on me.
[1] Karshman, Anselm. Nasal Neurology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009) 12-67.
[2] Fawck, Robert. “Essential Nasalism,” Scientific American June 2010: 58-73.
[3] Bloch, Lucille. Nasal Classification (New York: Murgate, 2012). See also Bloch’s blog, Crustclassification.com, which was already fourteen months old at this point in time. Appendix A.
[4] See Humidifier.com or G.E./humidifier.net for a summary of recent research on the interrelationship of nasal obstruction and humidity.
[5] Bernstein, Ellen. Catalog (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2017); Aperture July 2017: 24-29.
[6] Crespin, Alexander. “The Dharma of Nasalism,” Tricycle, The Buddhist Review June 2007: 28-32.
[7] Bloch, op. cit., 134-135. Figure 1.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
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