Thoughts of Departure

Senility must feel like a pretty bad trip. I sometimes wonder what it might be like. A complete lack of coherence in the Story that you inhabit.

Even now, thoughts come and go and their coming and going stresses me out. The fear of forgetting my own thoughts stresses me out. Not that they're such valuable insights, these thoughts, but their unruly coming and going stresses me out. Is why talking and writing are such boons. You can relax, because there is something or someone to collect, into half-coherent piles, the fluttering scraps of thinking which the minutes blow continually off the desktop of your conscious attention.

What was I thinking just now? It felt valuable. Valuable to me, at least. What was it that I was trying to remember?

Blank.

I think I was quite old when it first dawned on me that what I'd come to call my memory was evermorphing. I know that sounds stupid, but I really did think of myself as a static entity. An ego swimming in the same loch of thoughts, year in after year out. I guess I started reading more and reading was the sputtering stream of fresh imaginings.

But what is memory?

My flashbacks are like the remembrall in Harry Potter - cartoonish clips of myself telling myself to not forget something I've now clearly forgotten.

I think: memory is two things - the facts I observe and the story I tell about those facts.

So then past and future both are these strange fact-based stories, complex artifacts of the mind. Part reality, part invention. The facts remain fast, but the story is ever changing. The story has to change, because every new fact changes the meaning of the facts that you know already. Like the twist at the end of Usual Suspects. Of The Sixth Sense. I think: the facts - mercifully - remain fast. But walk down the multi-tunneled catacomb of memory and on every navigation you take a slightly different path: return with a slightly different story. Sometimes a different story from the very same set of facts. Facts like stars - steady and still. Stories like constellations - drawing facts together in orderly, coherent patterns.

The stories make all the difference.

I think: stories only exist because Time exists. I think: only conscious creatures are aware of Time. I think: stories are coherence unfolding over Time.

Frame after frame, the immersive illusion of consciousness. OK.

Q.v. Alain de Botton: "Happiness is the telling of a better story from the same set of facts".

Q.v. David Foster Wallace, when the story becomes unendurable, taking it one frame at a time:

Gately remembered some evil fucking personal detoxes. Broke in Malden. Bent with pleurisy in Salem.....Cold Turkey.....Feeling the edge of every second that went by. Taking it a second at a time. Drawing the time in around him real tight. Withdrawing. Any one second: he remembered: the thought of feeling like he'd be feeling like this second for 60 more of these seconds - he couldn't deal. He could not fucking deal. He had to build a wall around each second just to take it. The whole first two weeks of it are telescoped in his memory down into like one second - less: the space between two heartbeats. A breath and a second, the pause and gather between each cramp. An endless Now stretching its gull-wings out on either side of his heartbeat. And he'd never before or since felt so excruciatingly alive. Living in the Present between pulses.....:living completely In The Moment.....

He could do the dextral pain the same way: Abiding. No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering. And the projected future fear of....of a lifetime on the edge of this bunk....., remembering. It's too much to think about. To Abide there. But none of it's as of now real. What's real is the tube and the Noxzema and the pain. And this could be done just like the Old Cold Bird. He could just hunker down in the space between each heartbeat and make each heartbeat a wall and live in there. Not let his head look over.....

What's unendurable is what his own head could make of it all. What his head could report to him, looking over and ahead and reporting. But he could choose not to listen; he could treat his head like G. Day or R. Lenz: clueless noise. He hadn't quite gotten this before now, how it wasn't just the matter of riding out the cravings for a Substance: everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news you then somehow believed.

But though it's easy to forget everything else, one thing is ironically impossible to forget: Time. Awareness of it pulls you out of the present and out of the meditation. And again you start telling tales about the past, about the future. There's no getting away from it, if you want to be living. The only Life we know is this one, which exists inside Time.

I'm really not sure what is the meaning of Time independent of consciousness.

Age 3, a year of Time feels like eternity. Age 30, and you're in perpetual confusion at your own shifting perception of it. Q.v. special relativity. Time gets funnier and funnier and my head hurts more and more.

But the point of all of this is that these days I can't get away from this feeling: that I inhabit the story I'm in the process of creating. Every waking minute. And I can make the story go any which way I want. All I need to do is imagine.

Except, of course, imagining new things is very hard. Is something hardly any of us ever do.

And maybe story is the wrong metaphor. Maybe life is more like a house, because this story (of past and future, of who we are and who we might be) is one we actively inhabit. Like a house.

And if I look around it, I haven't been that original with it. I've cobble together a pastiche from whatever models of living were available. I cobble together still. I look around, see people in relationships, and fancy maybe getting into one myself. I see people in successful careers and try to emulate them. I get my likes and dislikes from the paper, my taste for food from restaurants I happen to visit, my interests from friends and role models and the books I happen to know about. I look around all the time, like a shopper in a furniture store, trying on in my imagination how these models of living might play out in my own house. I furnish my existence from what's available. It's never seriously occurred to me to question the fundamentals of experience and create my own life. Make my own clothes, build my own furniture. Because what do I know about furniture?

But then I see that you can connect these dots any which way and I feel this strange urge: I wonder what would happen if I did something different. Maybe bad things would happen, the story would go all haywire and all chaos would break loose. Then again, maybe trying it on now will make senility more endurable.

,

The Mater of Mater

I've been living near Victoria Park for close to two years. That's enough time to notice a change in yourself. But the question is - would I have noticed that change as much as had I moved elsewhere?

This park is teeming with flashbacks. Along my running route lie piles and piles of my past me's, discarded versions of potential selves like spare parts in a ghostly puppet-making workshop. Or a painter's studio. Everything that didn't work, that didn't make the cut, is scattered here.

But it's the park itself that holds the memories, like an external storage device. I never think about these things unless I'm here. And then I remember them the way that Robert M. Pirsig's schizophrenic character in Zen or the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance remembers the life of his alter ego: they are sudden, fragmentary flashbacks of how I used to feel.

I used to feel very very afraid. I felt weak, unsure that I'd manage to handle the overwhelming challenge of a full scale adult existence. Anxious to achieve some form of success and fearful that I would fail to achieve it. But I don't feel like that anymore. And it's not as simple as saying that I no longer feel anxious about achieving success.  It's more like that my categories of thought have shifted so much, mutated so that the old notion of "achieving success" simply no longer exists in the same format, the way an egg no longer exists in the same form, once you add it to the dough, knead and bake it in the oven.

Trying to empathise with your past self if an eerie exercise. It's sometimes as hard as trying to empathise with another person ("what was I thinking?!"), except that glimpses of what you were thinking will now and again flash through your mind. And they are alien-familiar. What mind reading would feel like, if it existed. Say, what it felt like to be in love with someone, or not to be in love with them. Alas, you can't unknow things.

So then space is important. Objects. People. Those elements outside of ourselves that store our thoughts, our memories, our sense of passing time, of who we are, of change. Is why I missed London during my long exile. Is why, in London, I miss travelling and the places in which I used to live. We're weird creatures, with weird selves that span spacetime in weird unexpected ways, like forests, like bacteria.