Oh—!
(in surprise)
Naturally, you might think, in surprise. Oh—! What else but surprise? But then you already imagine alternatives— the songsaid Oh— of a launching into ballad, or the delighted Oh— with which one greets a pup. (You are not surprised that you adore the pup; you adored it from forty metres and only now release your happy vowel* within earshot of your friend the pup’s owner.) Alright, reader. So you grant such counterexamples.
More relevant, though, and not yet considered by you, are simulations of surprise which we mistake for the thing itself. Frequent, very frequent, such sims., and it is precisely this ubiquity that renders the marine engineer’s Oh— (in surprise) just a little more remarkable than the Oh— (undefined) that truly you would have interpreted without any such parenthetical. How frequent? Where to begin...
[ I ] THOUGHT EXPERIMENT: town, daylight, weekend if you must. Populated, is the gist. You are purchasing whatever you care to purchase—make it normal, please—when bang!, to your left, a hard clatter which you shall shortly discover to be merely that of a man-carried desk very suddenly ceasing to be man-carried, for the man has fallen, and everything is quite alright—he has fallen in a good way and the desk is strong—too strong to be man-carried this far, evidently—quite alright, but for the noise. So you say: Oh—!
Is this surprise, this Oh—? It feels it. You would say so; none would disagree. You will even recall so, in a damning appropriation and contortion of the facts that in theme we will oft return! But in fact** this Oh— is post-surprise, and more the matter it is correlated and, yes, caused, but caused of your own volition—by which I mean that this Oh—! is not an essential winding down of surprise or the tail-end of its effect, but the first breath of an entirely new matter: the Signal.
What do you Signal? This, that. Your eyes betray you. Some look at the desk-laid man, or their scenario’s equivalent, the Oh— expressing their presence & pity & altruistic potentiality. (I say ‘potentiality', mind, for in this moment a firm desire to help has not yet taken root. One calculates: how far is the desk-laid man? Any bruise, blood, pain physical or other? One does not wish to half-trot over, too eager to be of assistance, and embarrass a man already recomposed.. or worse, make oneself seem foolish for having assessed the situation improperly, dramatically. Such an Oh—, then, is not altruism in itself but wanting the man to know that one is processing whether or not to help him, the implication being that this in itself constitutes virtue, of a sort, even if one decides to continue on with no aid rendered.)
Others will look around. A searching Oh—, this one... a placid Oh—, were you all frightened, too? for most, I assume, (I think fairly), though of late I have been of a certain si vis pacem, para bellum bent—conflict being in the news—and in this way or for such a generally dispositioned person, there is also of course the Oh— , were you (like I) also verifying whether the fallen desk constituted a threat? comradery and shared ironic relief. Male, almost always.
What I convince you of here is that such an Oh— in either case is neither in nor of nor resulting from surprise. It is but a separate social Signal that one is conditioned to emit as a consequence of surprise, and not the surprise itself, nor said in surprise for the surprise has perished and, safety having been reestablished, has given way to reputational and civilizational obligation. And this social Oh—, we might say, or I myself shall say at least, is a subcategory of what I will call the Not-Surprised Oh—, which is very frequent indeed.***
The marine engineer’s Oh— is not one such Not-Surprised Oh—.
Oh, no. It is very much, essentially, with heart!, a Surprised...
Oh—!
It is the Oh— of a man underground, not deeply but sufficiently so, in the burnished wet maintenance tunnels of Greenwich Spit; thirty-six miles of them thumbing the culverts and pumps round the isle, cheaply and crudely built by the Conglomerate all, costs cut, not so much unfit for purpose as never purposed to succeed...
And it is the Oh— of a man who, having read from his meter thrice and double-checked the implications each—a sextuple reckoning, in all— has come repeatedly to the conclusion that the tunnel walls will fail and the peninsula will sink—not by a touch, not by the 0.5m Worst Case Sink he’s seen (& dismissed) in the corner of his Likelihood vs Consequence risk matricies, but the whole thing gone, people too, and with its fatal sense of humour the Universe permits this man—one Burgess, M., mainland graduate—to comprehend this horror and futility in full**** for but a second before the dripped concrete at his eyeline gives out and Burgess, M. is claimed by sea, victim numero unum.
* for Ah— or Ee— or Ooh—, the last being a /u/ phonetic, would have sufficed just as well.
** I will shortly disabuse you of this notion also, that of ‘in fact’, and I indicate my foreknowledge of this to you here only so that upon reread of this text you remain unworried by, well, worries! of any inconsistency in approach. Rhetoric, here. Move along.
*** Or, if one prefers, the “Oh— (in not-surprise)”.
**** At least, as fully as one man may.
