I don’t know about you guys but if I were Jon during the apocalypse I’d literally just make everyone into avatars. Not because I wanna save them or anything, I’d just like to see what’d happen!
I don’t know about you guys but if I were Jon during the apocalypse I’d literally just make everyone into avatars. Not because I wanna save them or anything, I’d just like to see what’d happen!
Specsavers is definitely a hub of immense power for the ceaseless watcher.
Like many of you, I am fascinated with the state of Jonathan Sims head archivist of the magnus institute London… In particular, his ribs! Many focus only on his missing two, but there are many more things to consider!
Jon’s a fragile guy, I mean it’s pretty much his whole canon appearance! For a man like him to be thrown around like a ragdoll for pretty much his entire time as archivist, he’d certainly have suffered more than a few broken ribs!
To contribute even more to the damage, after the unknowing, Jon was found with no pulse and not breathing, meaning he would have undergone CPR for at least 20 minutes. And trust me, THAT BREAKS RIBS.
Aside from bones, I can’t imagine Jon’s lungs are in the best state either. He’s a long time smoker, was exposed to dangerous amounts of CO2, and survived a massive explosion followed by a collapsing building. Needless to say, these sort of things make it hard to keep lungs healthy!
Despite all the pain and horror, I like to think that Jon managed to stay looking at least relatively put together, so picture this:
A polite, slightly awkward office worker comes into your clinic. You decide that to diagnose properly, you’ll need to do a chest X-ray! He’s distracted, but readily agrees. After the brief wait, you get the images back, and see THE MOST FUCKED UP CHEST YOU HAVE EVER SEEN. A horrifying amount of healed fractures, warped and re-broken; two ribs are just straight up gone, both lungs scarred beyond survivability, and somehow this guy is just sitting there. Alive, as far as you can tell.
The man remains composed, and smiles politely as you stare at the X-rays, and you begin to think that maybe those aren’t acne scars across his face.
Cassette tapes are such a painfully beautiful display of human life, both in form and in metaphor. To make matters worse, they seem to have a tendancy to outlive their owners.
One of the first tapes I ever owned was a collection of love songs from 50’s films. It was delicate, clearly well used, and old. I adored it. It was only when the tape snapped after very light use that it dawned on me.
That tape belonged to someone, and they heard it, it had significance, it had meaning. Maybe they’d danced to it with a lover, maybe they played it at picnics like I did. Or maybe they sat by themself in their room playing it, and yearning for something they couldn’t have.
That was a prerecorded tape of songs and it meant so much, but self recorded cassettes? They’re a whole different thing. The very sound waves we communicate with, captured in a physical object. A surviving piece of a soul, one might say.
You could argue that any form of recording is the same, but there’s something about the cassette tape that CD and audio files don’t have. Something otherworldly, easier to hold, to quantify, to relate to.
Hearing your own voice on tape is strange. However uncomfortable hearing your voice recorded digitally makes you feel, I’m certain you’d feel different with if it was played on tape . And to hear the voice of someone else? A friend, a stranger, anyone trying to communicate? It’s oddly haunting.
Many of these personal tapes put me in mind of The Cave Of Hands; it’s us reaching out, saying ‘I was here’, leaving a physical reminder, but one so dependant on tape players existing on into the future. It’s a foolish, sentimental, self centered act, and it’s so filled with humanity, honest desperation.
Nobody wants to become another mystery.
As much as you could view the ‘oh hello…’ recording as a clear divide between Martin and Jon, I like to think it could be less simple than that.
Wherever they are, whatever happened to them, they went through that process together, joined at the heart. Whatever journey it was that they traveled, I have no doubt that it was a difficult one.
One that could leave a mark. A mark so deep perhaps that it comes down even to the lowest frequencies, something a tape recorder could just barely pick up. Something deep in the wells of a soul.
Could it be that they have their somewhere else? Their peace? Everything is as it should be, except for that building, static-y pit their stomachs; like the rumbling of the wheels on a cassette, a radio struggling to find a channel.
An unidentified reaching, from the eye, or the Web, or some other residual fear left inside, reaching and clawing to be fed, growing and changing and morphing to become something new entirely, something that needs what remains…
And what if that feeling built to a crescendo as Martin found his hand laid against a previously unseen tape recorder.
It’d be rude not to say hello.