April 26, 2012
I assume, probably safely, that most of you have experienced
moments in life in which its principal character—you—seems to be detached from
the reality of that moment. We are
familiar with this sensation from our dreams—the disconnect, our selves
behaving abnormally, our thoughts the thoughts of lunatics or heroes, calm in
the face of madness or calm in the face of villainy.
But waking life has the same potential to catch us unaware,
else how could our subconscious produce the phantasms of our dreams. For all of our efforts to tap reality
throughout a given day, we are prone to illusions. So I am not overly surprised when I find
myself outside of myself, floating cloud-like or falling anvil-like.
In fact, it would appear that those vertiginous moments of surreality (whether experienced while
asleep or awake) might be just as actual
as the rest of our experiences. Which
is to say, if at any given moment I could just as well see myself from the
inside as watch myself from the outside, then the sensation of detached
identity is an illusion—there is no duality of mind, no two beings occupying
the same space, there is simply a switch in perception, a toggle between the
typical and the occasional.
This is not meant to sound like hocus-pocus or some
drug-induced hippy notion; it is just a statement of conceivable fact. And to my understanding, conceivability is an
aspect of the imagination; imagination does not create (don’t tell the artists),
it unearths clay from possibility and fashions something lovely or gruesome or
something more subtle. It is conceivable that I am actually floating like a cloud but it is
inconceivable that I am floating like
an hurangamatang. (I did not create that word, I invented it for the nonce from
a pre-existing lexicon.)
Anyway, if we take the above-mentioned suggestions to be
accurate, then our highly esteemed “reality” is little more than a ramshackle
construction of our perceptions—our five senses in cahoots with our Five-Star
Conceiver, the brain.
[Note: I leave the metaphysical and idealistic to the Eleventy-Star
Conceivers. My aptitude for the
unnatural is embarrassingly slim.]
***
Sorry about that. My
stream of consciousness often finds an alcove and eddies for awhile. Let’s leave the “actual” to its eccentricity
and proceed to the practical. Let dreams
be goofy and waking life be normal and out of body sensations be anomalous.
Above all, let Jonathan be sensible.
Back to the disconnect.
That harrowing moment or string of moments when you find it hard to
believe that the life you’re living is the life you’re living. This can be a good feeling—a dramatic change
in your circumstances for the better, be it a lottery won, or a sublime view of
the ocean. Or a bad feeling—a dramatic
change in your circumstances for the worse, be it a fortune lost, or an
impending tsunami. Or it can also be an
ambivalent feeling—for good or for bad, that real “you” is left to its own devices
and this other “you” is AWOL.
OK, let Jonathan be pertinent.
Sensible eludes him.
I often find myself in a state of good health. A brief inspection would prove the state
false, but for whatever reason, it does not occur to me that I am limited. For instance, I can be stretched out on the
sofa, watching TV, eating Pringles and meanwhile lapse into a semblance of
tumorlessness. Like anybody else so
engaged, I’m being lazy, becoming desensitized, and growing fatter. I’m the sort of person who could, at a
moment’s notice, get up, get decently dressed, and walk to the 7-11 for more
Pringles. Or, I can be outside in the
fresh air, watching the birds fly in and out of the swaying gum tree boughs,
attuned to nature—her small delights and massive powers—and reckon myself
boundless—the hiking poet of my youth, the rock-scaling, cliff-jumper.
But for practical purposes, no, that is not me. My state of mind does not match my state of
brain. And without fail, this realization
returns with jarring force. Of a sudden,
I am weak. As if this was the first I’d
heard of it. Me, hobbled? Maybe that blond, bearded man sitting exactly
where I’m sitting, but not me.
Yes, me.
Though I go weeks or months without a seizure, I am, in
reality, just one shock away from one.
Though I go years with a static tumor, I am ever wary of its sudden
growth.
Today I am tired but feeling alright. Feeling well enough to skip chemo next week. But no, the sensation and the truth are out
of alignment. The fact is, I am tired because of the chemo and I feel alright
because its last dosage is three weeks behind me. In either case, it is
relative to the chemo and the chemo is relative to the tumor and the tumor is a
matter of fact.
Nonetheless, next week in the misery of incessant nausea, I
will have moments of eerie transcendence.
Cloud-like, I’ll hover above me, pity the blond, bearded man, but
disbelieve his condition as my own. In
the throes of my next seizure (though I wouldn’t complain if there was no “next”),
the agony will be all consuming, the only reality; but as my brain relaxes and
the spasms subside, I will as I almost always do, disbelieve that that lump of
recovering flesh is me.
I wonder what I’m driving at here. My eddying stream of consciousness has become
a stagnant pool. I think maybe I’m just
commiserating with the whole lot of us who find ourselves unconvinced at times
of our foothold in reality. Those for
whom the lines between waking and dreaming occasionally blur and the surreal is
as impressive of a possibility as the factually real.
Sometimes a pleasant reprieve from crappiness, sometimes an
ominous burden of crappiness, the sensation, with respect to crap, can go
either way.
Sometimes I am well, other times sick as hell. But at all times, I’m only an illusion away
from the opposite sensation. And I
think I’m fine with that. At least, I
can be reasonably assured when my sickness is center-stage that there is a
well-being in the wings waiting for its cue.
It’s imaginable. It’s
conceivable. It’s a lovely, clay-made
possibility. It’s hurangamatangtabulous.
