Within the Edge of Meaning
This story is about changes in my identity--what I and others think of myself--as it travels along a path through life toward greater consciousness. I grew up as a machinist in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. At the age of seventeen, I began my first career by forming some of the hardest metals known into exact shapes. I led, what seemed to me a very mechanical life, as if I were merely an extension of the machines that stood between the engineer's blueprint and the finished product. I cried on many occasions while waiting for the clock to end my shift. I searched for ways to change the feeling of being trapped in a trade. I read much about consciousness in the Collected Works of the psychiatrist Carl G. Jung during my 20s but the conscious change that may occur to a person who reads of the benefits of religious or psychological virtue and who then incorporates those virtues into their life was never my way. I am much better at forming exotic metals into meaningful shapes than I am at having my conscious awareness go through a process of individuation; to form my identity. Although I changed my occupation later in life, I had to repeatedly encounter first hand the very serious reasons for the existence of the virtues before my identity changed.
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Certainly, nothing registered as memory while a cascade of electrochemical impulses shot randomly; short-circuiting their way through my brain in search of their next energy source (blood sugar). Afterward, according to Kate, I griddled like bacon in frying pan so hot that I broke my teeth while biting my tongue as I proceeded to bash the back of my head on the floor until it carried me four feet up against the wall. She said, “I made the mistake of putting my thumb in your mouth to keep you from biting your tongue off, and you bit my thumb to the bone.” There was blood all over the walls and some on the ceiling. She later told me after researching generalized tonic-clonic seizures on the Internet and even researching them in movies that what she saw and experienced wasn’t anything like what they show. I said, "I wouldn’t know; I never saw one." And, I didn’t want to see one either. I guess that I didn’t want to see myself as that. At one moment I existed in a world as an identity to others and myself and then within three minutes from the time I realized I had a problem I did not exist. When I returned seven minutes later from the sugar that I consumed, I was different.
But not different enough because after the tonic-clonic seizure I proceeded into a complex partial seizure as my wife kept asking me “Do you know who I am? Do you know where you are? Do you know your name?” and things like that. For a moment I recognized her and with teary eyes said “You are my wife. My beautiful wife.” But, something was still seriously wrong. I, the me, what registers as me to me was only partially there, and something inside of my head was making me disappear. I was very conscious of this sensation; the sensation of the end of everything; of everything disappearing forever; solid conceptualized memories of fighting against the approaching void in my head; disinformation at the end of a billion synaptic connections. Kate called 911, and when the ambulance and police arrived, she later told me that the sounds must have sent me into a flight or fight panic because I just began screaming. The neighbor, an actor on a TV detective program, came over with the police and the paramedics. I tried fighting with the police to get away from them but they tackled me to the floor, and the paramedics and my neighbor held my legs down. The one paramedic injected me with a hefty dose of glucose while they held me to the ground and within a minute I returned to normal.
I signed a waiver not to go to the hospital because it happened twice before, but never like that. About seven years from the time with Kate, I was walking along Abbot Kinney to go videotape a birthday party with a group of musicians and actors, and I yelled out when I noticed I was about to go into a seizure “I’m a diabetic, I need sugar.” The next thing I knew I woke up in the ambulance near a hospital. They checked me out for about a half an hour, and I was OK, so I called a cab and went and videotaped the birthday party. I was only a little late. The first time, which was somewhat significant, happened 13 years earlier. I was a foreman at a CNC production machine shop, and I went into a seizure in the inspection room hallway. It took me a day to remember who it was on my driver license and after three days my amnesia completely went away.
Was I the same person that returned after the seizures, or was I unconsciously allowing life to form me into something horrific but avoidable? At least I looked like the same person after a seizure, but what changed in each of the instances was my identity to the outside world: in the minds of those that saw what happened. After the first seizure, the CA Department of Motor Vehicles revoked my identity as a driver, and although I had my driver's license restored, the incident caused me to think of myself as a member of the disabled. After my last seizure, I didn't consider much about my identity, but the breakdown in my relationship with my wife seemed to be related to her conception of me. I was unpredictable to her and without prior notice and within a few minutes or less I could be gone forever. She had to assume the identity of a wife who shared the deadly complications of another's diabetes. To myself the incidents were a scarlet letter that appeared to only those that knew. The last seizure was severe enough to persuade me to take action, to chose to believe that I am as normal as most, and despite Kate leaving me or maybe because of that too, I made the conscious decision to avoid going down life's path into yet another one.
I quit drinking any alcohol entirely because even small amounts made it difficult to sense my blood sugar levels. I began running for physical exercise, and I started back to college to study English as a means to get my mind back into shape. My experience with non-meaning sent me in search of how meaning arises through the words and symbols of the most excellent writers and thinkers. Everybody is surrounded by non-meaning through either not learning what is known, having never thought about things, or because most meaning is beyond the scope of human consciousness. Not knowing isn’t typically an emergency until it gets up close: inside a person’s head where the border of consciousness meets the void in a seizure for knowledge. Consciousness itself may be likened to a slow-motion complex partial seizure that realizes the ever-present proximity to the void about which it seeks knowledge. The fears and pains of our daily learning experiences are a drawn-out less pronounced fight or flight phenomenon. The neuroscientist Professor Stanislas Dehaene says that a bottleneck in information processing exists at the point of concentration where things outside of that focal area aren't consciously taken in. By consciously working within an area of focus, I am spared the experience of seizure and loss of identity. Maybe it is a focal point that I seek when I run marathons--a place as far as possible away from the void. I like the feeling of being entirely concentrated on the sensations experienced as I run, and I love the feel of the runner's high: a kind of oneness with life. Both graduate studies and running keep my mind and my body exercised and healthy.
Explicating on how the decision to go back to college changed my identity over time helps me remember what I had to endure, what was necessary, for the change to alter who I was to who I am now. Going back to college at 57 years of age presented me over and over again with feelings of doubt as to my identity. I am old enough to be my colleague's grandparent. More often than not my professors are younger than I. I had to think to myself "I'm here to learn and not to startle anyone." I mean, the students are younger than my car. When I'd be in seminar settings with some of the brightest most confident 20-22-year-olds from all over the world at UCLA, I imagined myself as the rest of my peers until I began to doubt and kick myself for being there; as old as I am. And many times, I thought that I was odd and stupid too. I kicked myself a lot back then. But, amazingly after the first year, and after I knew colleagues by performing projects with them, I got over it. Perhaps I had kicked myself in the head long enough that the neuroplasticity of my brain changed the way that my brain works and who I think I am to myself. I realized that on the outside I might look different but the true identity of myself, the electrochemical state produced by my connectome at any particular moment in time, was very similar to others. My father who died of Alzheimer's disease used to say while looking in the mirror, "I look like I always have." Without memories associated to a particular time we appear to ourselves as always. The truth of the matter seems to be that identity to oneself is timeless, and its neural function within the mind is similar to everyone else's. To ourselves we sense that we are the same as we have always been.
Anatomical differences in age, gender, race, and appearances of the body make little difference in the neural functioning that is the basis of identity. I reached the breaking point of identity during the complex partial seizure and brought back memories of a time when what I consider myself to be was being extinguished by millions of misfiring neurons beyond which I could not locate the rest of me needed to interpret the world around me. At that moment, in a crisis of identity which may befall any person, at that moment of truth, we are all alike. It is from that point, from that
confrontation with the unknown, beyond which nothing exists--at that edge where synaptic information is not recognized, where an instinctual fight-or-flight impulse gets triggered, within the edge of meaning where existence electrochemically confronts non-existence--that I’ll not go gentle into that good night. I'll trap my thoughts--the electrochemical potentialities that arise out of matter--in words and broadcast them onto the Internet for all the other electrochemical states of all the other connectomes to absorb such that the light of their meaning may forever travel, mix and change as it passes through the void. So let it be that consciousness and knowledgeable change resides everywhere within the edge of meaning.
ekila era ew
we are alike
confrontation with the unknown, beyond which nothing exists--at that edge where synaptic information is not recognized, where an instinctual fight-or-flight impulse gets triggered, within the edge of meaning where existence electrochemically confronts non-existence--that I’ll not go gentle into that good night. I'll trap my thoughts--the electrochemical potentialities that arise out of matter--in words and broadcast them onto the Internet for all the other electrochemical states of all the other connectomes to absorb such that the light of their meaning may forever travel, mix and change as it passes through the void. So let it be that consciousness and knowledgeable change resides everywhere within the edge of meaning.
