He couldn’t even blame his labyrinthitis on student essays. In pre-pandemic days, before the process went online, marking always made him ill. He was convinced the pages carried viruses. Knowing what a hypochondriac he was, his friends thought he was bullshitting again. But since they’d all quarantined their Amazon packages for 72 hours (though few would admit it), he’d been proven right. Paper can transmit. Physical intimacy with student writing really was bad for your health.
Always in the break period, otherwise called marking /module preparation, he was battling one or another illness. He stopped teaching, became fallen soldier. He had been moving through his different body parts. Penis, bowels, eyes, tongue, fingers, toes. The location in his extremities was an obvious performance of his own character.
Yet this labyrinthitis had the temerity to return. Only the rerun was much worse. The vertigo was intense. Flat on his back, he was nauseous, dizzy. The ear pain and pressure headaches surpassed even his own exaggerations. He was impressed.
Accepting his excuses for absence from their online lesson, his Hebrew teacher, in her irritating pedagogic manner, couldn’t resist pointing out the creative etymology of the English term. And googling his condition to cookie overload, he’d been appalled by the labyrinthine structure, as if an insane Baroque artist had been let loose on the ear. Why the need for all those twist and turns, for what’s basically a channel?
He thought back to the myth. He wanted to be Theseus finding his way out. But really he felt exactly like the minotaur.
**
He lay in a stupor and read about the beliefs of his ancestors, the ancient Iraqis: the Mesopotamians.
‘Some ghosts entered the body through the ear. As Irving Finkel writes, one cuneiform sign combined the signs for “open” and “ear”, giving a literal reading of “ear-opener”. Ghosts, therefore, could cause roaring or ringing ears as well as all manner of medical misery.’
What, really, was to blame for his labyrinthitis? Had he been working too much on his current research project, a family memoir?
But before his self-obsession could get any more torturous, here was his Ariadne, come to rescue him. She’d even brought her knitting.
The Secret Professor 