The Mind Abuzz

   The other night found me quite restless, the clock silently moving past midnight (the digital figures at such times are just as irritating as the ticking of the old electric and battery clocks).  We've all been there, our mind's chatter just whirring away for whatever reason, perhaps things to do the next day or some worrisome news that had come earlier and now just won't leave.  At those moments, the chatter can seem constant, your body's position or trying to think of something else proving as difficult as getting rid of that throbbing in a joint that suddenly appeared out of nowhere; it can seem as if your body has let some rascal side of it escape and tonight is its day to play.  Come on, you say, I need to get to sleep; I've got a lot to do tomorrow.  Alas, sleep aids target much of this chatter, those Ambien-type drugs meant not to knock you out but primarily to let your already-tired body fall asleep on its own by not having any background chatter or thoughts (and in some cases, leaving you feeling a bit worse off in the morning as if you did sleep but not really...airplane sleep).  But on some of these types of nights I become fascinated by the chatter going on, as if I am a fly on the wall secretly listening in on a boardroom meeting, the random thoughts and ideas and songs I'm hearing all sounding fully finished and my fly brain trying desperately to keep track of it all.  At those moments, the thoughts jump back and forth in no set order, pinging away from parts unknown and heading to who knows where.  And in the end, I'm left to make sense of it all.  It is a lighter version of what Sharon Butala once wrote about on reading an article on a conversation Sam Keen had with Ernest Becker, author of The Denial of Death which Butala says was "probably the single most significant book I'd ever read."  Author Butala goes on to write: The dying Becker talks about how each of us constructs a "character armor in a vain effort to deny the fundamental fact of our animality," (That is, our inability to do anything about the human condition, the fact that we will all die no matter what we do, and our fundamental terror of the condition.)  He goes on to talk about the need for heroism in a broad sense in all our lives, and the need of some of us (but not everyone) to break down that character armor, to go beyond it to full awareness.  Then, in a passage that riveted me, he talks about his own "intellectual house-cleaning" in order "to make room for the higher virtues."  

    Some of these thoughts may have emerged due to my mother now transitioning to a level of more stimulation as her mind and mobility begin to rapidly match her approaching 92nd year.  Generally each move --from independence to assisted living in a care facility to a more hands-on memory care section to eventually a skilled nursing unit or to hospice-- is a one way journey as if you somehow know, even in a diminished mental state, that the doors are shutting behind you and your hopes of passing the way you want to pass (at home, in your sleep, doing what you love) are now out of reach...for many, these likely aren't even thoughts because of course, they want to keep living (who doesn't?).  So that was probably one event from earlier in the day, filed and ready for my mental rascal to play with.  Then I was also about through with the book by Gerda Saunders, Memory's Last Breath, a book similar to that by journalist Christopher Hitchens who rather professionally tracked his slow descent in dementia (one difference being that the majority of Saunders' book is about her personal history and less about her dementia).  As with Hitchens, author Gerda heroically pounds out the words, her struggle to make sense and record the order of the facts and thoughts likely being as scattered and as random as my chatter at night and likely disappearing equally quickly.  For both authors the finished books are a testament to a struggle far greater than an athlete finishing a triathalon for theirs is a Pyrrhic victory, the awards and praises and the finished books themselves likely mere bits of information that will soon appear unrelated and possibly bear no meaning.   As author Gerda writes: ...there is nothing like a death sentence --in my case, the premature death of my mind-- to provoke questions about life.  What, actually, is memory, personality, identity?  What is a self?  Will I still be (have) a self when my reason is gone?

   Add to all of that, my viewing of the excellent review of A Cultural History of Mortal Remains by Thomas Laqueur which appeared in both the London Review of Books and the BBC Daily podcast.  And lest you think my interests a bit too morbid, the book does appear to be filled with such cultural oddities as cemeteries being only introduced rather late in our human history, reviewer Marina Warner noting the questioning of Diogenes on our burial and funeral practices: ...if you believe in a soul, why should the husk matter?  And conversely, if you believe that there is nothing more, then the corpse is not a person either.  But every instinct, every human feeling in the cultural world Laqueur writes about goes against Diogenes.  My, my...no wonder I was awake.  So I got out of bed, jotted down a bunch of notes (a technique practitioners recommend to take the swirling thoughts out of your head and put them down on paper thus freeing up the cyclone of chatter) and popped a valerian pill (the root of the plant allegedly helps you sleep and it has proved beneficial for me, even if it's been nearly 10 years since I last took such a pill; ironically, my vet tells me that valerian is not recommended for animals because it disrupts their enzymes).   So okay, here are some of the notes I jotted...

The iconic beauty of a smoke-induced sunset

    --The body as a husk, a different term but somehow sounding softer and more malleable than describing it as a shell.  --A note that many more people seem to have passed on in their 60s, both famous (Walter Becker, I used to listen to him!) and people I once knew or worked with; of course this might simply be because one pays attention to one's age group sort of like reading a book on rashes and their implications and suddenly finding that you're much more worried about that rash on your back.  --My mother moving to memory care, successfully done physically but emotionally and mentally, who knows.  --The beautiful orange sunsets now decorating our skies, much of it caused due to the smoke particulates from all the forest fires scattered throughout several states (well over a hundred going on).  --The strange satisfaction --still-- of finding something on sale when so many others have lost everything in the recent hurricanes and getting anything, much less waiting for something on sale, would be welcome and life-changing at this moment; how guilt-inducing and puzzling is that??  --Not remembering a name like Christopher Walken and suddenly getting a jab of panic that my genetics are arriving a bit too early (re: memory loss) or that I should have my vitamin-B levels checked (having just had this discussion with a friend who mentioned that both B & D are difficult to absorb through the gut or by taking a pill so that we all tend to sometimes get deficient and that sometimes a lack of B can lead to memory loss...lions and tigers and bears, oh my!).  --How fortunate I am to have made it this far in life and how lucky my life has been and still is.  --Watching Roger Federer, as amazing as he is to still be on top at the ripe "old" age of 36, feel the effects of being older and make some simple mistakes and to be almost puzzled by the effects of physical exhaustion (some of my friends don't accept that such changes happen, which is fine, but even our dogs accept life as it happens and part of that is that what one did at 30 is no longer as easy when one is sailing past 50).  --To relax in bed and feel so rested and free of thoughts and aches and yet have one's brain go into "active" mode (okay mind, you're repairing, I think, but do I really need to be here?).  --The song The Way We Were suddenly popping out of nowhere (what's that about other than perhaps Barbara Streisand is maybe now thinking about that time period more than me).

    Phew, I don't usually get such melancholy thoughts and by the next day, they were gone...back to the present.  And then I flip open the New Yorker and there's a cartoon with the hooded sickle-carrying caricature of death playing hide and seek and counting down behind a tree, all with old folks on canes and such at a retirement facility in the background; ready or not here I come.  Yikes, such morbid humor...but sort of true, at least right in line with all that was swirling in my head that night before.  Time is indeed fleeting,  Add to that the words to the song: Can it be that it was all so simple then?  Or has time re-written every line?  If we had the chance to do it all again tell me, would we? Could we?  Mem'ries, may be beautiful and yet what's too painful to remember we simply choose to forget.  Author Saunders writes that: Once a pathway for long-term memory has been laid down, there is no guarantee that it will survive.  It may end up being only a mid-term memory unless it is constantly maintained.  Since typical neuron proteins start breaking down within as little as two weeks after being formed, "every long-term memory is always on the verge of vanishing."  The continuous repair of disintegrating neurons is known as reconsolidation...The discovery that "memories are not formed and then pristinely maintained," as neuroscientists used to think, but rather "formed and then rebuilt every time they're accessed" has far-reaching implications: every time we think about the past "we are delicately transforming its cellular representation in the brain, changing its underlying neural circuitry."  So, a memory is changed every time it is remembered.

    My nights of chatter don't happen all that often, but I find now that I rather enjoy them, as if I'm being given a chance to view this nightly repair, a special guest pass to tour the factory and witnessed just how things happen in the background.  Part of this is likely just being older as well, having the time to watch and witness, to leave the quiet and order of the everyday and enter the busy production line of sleep, the chaos of my mind making rapid decisions of what to keep or what not to keep, and even then what version of that which it would keep.  Christopher Walken, Roger Federer, Barbara Streisand, my mom...it was a giant pot of stew being stirred and mixed, prior to this all unbeknownst to me.  My brain was just, as Ernest Becker wrote, doing a bit of intellectual house cleaning.  I was indeed, still quite lucky.