Sickening Humiliation 2

The Master (ok, Freud) used the amoeba as a metaphor for illness and depression. In normal times, the amoeba moves by extending a part of itself; if everything is ok, the rest of the little fella catches up to the extension, called a pseudopod. And so it moves to get food, find a nice starter house, go to those peculiar amoeba family reunions.

But in bad times, if the amoeba is ill or injured, no pseudopods. Wait a while, regain strength, think about amoeba-type things, and then consider moving on.

When people get sick or hurt, same thing. No new risks, no new challenges; take care of the immediate, then hunker down to heal and rest. Not always the best strategy, but not so bad, either. Evolution and all.

Well, then. Back to 9/12/2001. We had just suffered a terrible injury. An amoeba would have hunkered down. The getting injured part was over, the damage to us was done. No more pseudopods for us, not for a while. The evolutionary wisdom of the amoeba, and just about any animal larger than an amoeba.

Instead, we went all over the world -- really ALL over the world -- and just killed a lot of people. And then, the very, very strange part: we barely noticed. It became the normal. The only question was where and when it would stop, and nobody cared very much. Of course we didn't. We threw a blanket over our injury, and did what was normalizing for us: just kill a lot of people.

During my lifetime, there has never been anything more normal. I was born in time for Hiroshima, spent early youth reading about the dead in Korea, put my head under the desk like everybody else. Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia. Salvador, Nicaragua, Lebanon. Even Granada, but, hey, Granada was a real threat. Now I'm channeling Billy Joel.

I could go on. Nothing is more normal to our country than killing people, so that is what we did when we were injured. A very strange, disturbing idea, and I believe it completely: we kill people not for revenge, not for defense, not out of rage. We kill to be normal again. Yipes.

As they would say in mind-brain land, there was a physical injury -- the towers were our damaged organ. We made it all normal, and tidied up around it, and, when a little too much blood leaked out (torture, say, or mass murder), gave out more normalizing justifications: we had to do it, blah, blah. After all, this is what anyone would do. All mind-stuff, all about what us normal tribal people do. And what a country does, after an injury. Whew. We may be injured, but we act normal, and talk normal, and do normal things.

Me, too. After my brain was injured, it was left to the mind to coat it all with a nice chrome plating of normalcy. I acted as I had before, talked as I had before. When people noticed a small limp, I said I had a sore knee, and that was that.

Until about four years later. The onset of the dreaded TLE -- Temporal Lobe Epilepsy, to you civilians out there. Hallucinatory smells, short episodes of humiliating despair, the odd jerky movement, some humming in my ears. No loss of consciousness. Tiny little baby-step seizures.

But, woo-hoo, personality changes. Episodes of barely controlled rage; writing at great length about random stuff (heh!), moodiness, asceticism about food and drink and sleep. Grand theories about everything, from time travel to cat genetics. And, my heavens, pressure of speech. Oh, such pressure of speech.

I see it this way: my brain damage was turning into mind damage, and I couldn't control what about me was public. I began to be talked about: "Oh, how's he doing now?" when I wasn't present -- which, incidentally, is about as bad as it gets for the Irish. This whole blog is an effort to persuade myself, and everybody else, that, hey, I'm still a member in full standing of the tribe, just like I used to be. I want to control the flow of information. What I need is an Office of Public Communication.

I'm also starting to think that the whole enterprise is not going to work. The amount of brain pathology is simply too great, and too much of my social behavior is too strange; I'm on the edge of the tribe, and moving toward the outside.

And outside is not a place you want to be. Outside means all the connections are broken. Outside is true psychosis, deep Alzheimer's, a few other things that can just make it all crash. Really, really not a place you want to be. Injury to the brain becoming the terminal disease of the mind. Hey, we see it all the time: damaged brains chugging along for years; and really, truly dead minds. See? Mind and brain are categorically different. Maybe I'm right about all this stuff after all, you doubting weasels. I'll start getting my Nobel speech ready tomorrow. The children will know how to behave at the celebratory dinner, even if I can't pull it off.

Now, where was I about all these wars and stuff? Oh, yeah, random murder as a normalizing strategy. Well, I need a new normalizing strategy, better mind-stuff. Random murder might work for the good old USA, but probably not for me. Not even in the short run. And, Miles the Cat would surely disapprove, as he does with most human behavior.

I think a lot about music as mind-stuff that can normalize me, talking without words, being part of the world; I think less about technical stuff, working without words, and even less about craft stuff, building without words. Money stuff, accumulating without words, would be fine, but I just don't know how to make it go.

Losing trust in my own words has been a pretty nasty blow, and now I need something else for mind-stuff, so that I'm still a full tribal member.

Enough!!

Alert Reader will not be surprised that I'll still find enough insightful prattle to continue to blog.