Category Archives: Assess

Thoughts on Waking

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I do not want to wake. There is a strong wish to continue with the sleep state. Today, I lack any memory of my dreams. When I do remember dream content, it always concerns aspects of an active past, those periods in which I had no injury. My thoughts on waking this morning are that I have a powerful wish to resume an uninjured state. The only way I can easily facilitate that return is via a dream state.

I realize also that my time horizon has shrunk. It is now so compressed it includes only the immediate present. Before the injury, I had a long term outlook. I was planning for a future retirement, I was actively engaged in developing activities that I might pursue as enjoyable interests, and as sources of supplemental income.

Since the injury, my time horizon has contracted to the few hours of the immediate day. In fact it has shrunk to an even smaller dimension. My focus is not just on getting through today, my focus is on the project that confronts me in the immediate now. This is part of the fixation on the blog. I sit here writing this draft post and my sole goal is to reach the end of this sentence, to arrive at the end of the paragraph, to complete a reasonably interesting post.

Beyond this writing activity, there is a dim awareness of major events such as my next scheduled visit to my doctor. I am enclosed within the immediacy of an endless today,  an all encompassing now, punctured only by next week’s doctor visit. Beyond this lies nothing. I once conceived of a future that I should strive to achieve, or to protect. I organized my daily affairs around this vision. It would inform all undertakings, described a set of goals which shaped my day to day activity.

Today, I lack any conception of the future. My chief goal is to get through the day without screwing up, messing up, loosing the car, or performing some other involuntary act of stupid forgetfulness.

I had other thoughts on waking. I realized that I had been involved in a wide variety of projects, and activities. None of these interests appear to have survived the injury. These are the few I can remember this morning:

Thoughts on Waking  – Adventure Cooking

I eat. Therefore I have had a long term interest in good cuisine; Mediterranean food, Asian food, Mexican food, Norman food, the food of Emilia Romagna, Scot’s oatcakes, Wakame, sourdough, hummus, and everything in between. Before the injury, I would spice up the menu by opening a cookbook at random, searching for an interesting dish, making a list of the required ingredients, and then searching them out. Then, as my form of a special Sunday dinner, I would cook and enjoy the meal.

The recipe typically called for ingredients enough for four or five persons. I would take the leftovers, parcel them out among single serve ceramic food containers and freeze them. One of these portions then became my 2:00 AM meal at the information factory.

This interest ceased with the accident. I was not even aware that it had come to an end. This insight has been triggered by last week’s discovery of a fridge chock full of exotic condiments and ingredients, all of them left untouched since the date of the accident. I am now in the process of disposing of these stale, spoiled, antique food items.

I have also recently become aware of my trove of cookbooks. There are several shelves full of them, a collection started when at university (a very tattered copy of one of Elizabeth David’s books. A hefty copy of How to Cook a Wolf. A well stained introduction to Lebanese food). None of these have been touched since the injury.

Thoughts on Waking  – Income Supplements

In order to stay active in retirement, and contemplating the possibility of generating a supplemental income, I had embarked on the creation of a set of photo books. I had plans for a small publishing business, and did a great deal of work on potential revenue streams, and the type of books I wished to produce. Break even points, pro-forma financials, profit margin calculations  —  all of these issues were addressed in a series of digital files, files I have not encountered since the accident. I have no idea where they are.

I had gathered images for use in the creation of a set of sample books. This work was underway prior to the accident and I attempted to continue with it. It quickly became problematic as I failed to remember the required processing steps and the various actions I needed to perform. I tried to manage these deficits by keeping incredibly detailed notes on every action taken, but gave this up when I realized that I was constantly introducing transposition errors. These rendered the documentation useless as a performance guide. The book projects withered on the vine. I did manage to complete a few samples and I gave these to one of my doctors as a small token of my immense gratitude for her assistance.

Thoughts on Waking  –  Art Projects

Prior to the injury, I had reactivated an early interest in drawing and painting. I purchased art materials, and brushes, and spent considerable time experimenting with different techniques and media. This came to a complete stop with the accident. I continue to come across residual evidence of this activity. I throw it out.

I have been up now for a few hours and have spent most of that time writing these notes. When I woke this morning I had a series of insights. The fresh perspective of these thoughts on waking motivated me to exit the bed and complete a record before the thoughts vanished back into the dark silence from whence they came.

It has now been more than three uninterrupted hours at the keyboard. I am encountering difficulties as, in writing these words, I have come to recognize the enormity of the change that has taken place. I had no real sense of this until now. This moment.

 

 

 

 

Constant Unease

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I have a sense of constant unease. This arises from a profound distrust of myself. I am overwhelmed by the sense that I cannot trust me, cannot trust my sense perceptions, that I am enclosed by a world of epiphenomena that may, or may not, be congruent with physical reality. I have no clear way of distinguishing the two, or of identifying my mis-perceptions.

The truth comes later, always later. And it is this constant delay, this continual discovery of my inability to perform normal, accepted tasks, that I find so unsettling.

And it is this sense of being unsettled, of being disconnected from both the world and myself, of somehow being suspended in an ethereal and confusing space between the two, that propels me to write. I write to pacify and calm my worries. I write out of the unspoken belief that I will obtain clarity, that through the act of writing I will achieve a union of the two worlds that now appear to be drifting so far apart.

This unease extends to the act of writing itself, a growing doubt over the ability of words to stitch my world back together. There is a budding sense of the futility of my efforts. I step back and wonder what in the heck am I doing? What is it I seek to accomplish with my manifold lists and these thousands of words?

The quick reply is that I am working diligently to become “better.” A more reasoned response forces the acknowledgement that there is no “better.” There exists only what I presently am and that it is imperative that I learn to accommodate myself to this diminished sense of me. I must teach myself to be senile and incompetent. This I refuse to do.

This year I will start my 63rd year on this planet. Sixty three years of forcing air into my lungs, of peering around corners, of sniffing the air. Sixty three years of learning about life and what it means to experience a conscious mind encased in a frail human form riven with a thousand combustible animal appetites.

If there is any one element that might serve to define what it is to be human, it must be found in our sense of aspiration, our wanton hunger for something more, slightly better, improved, new.

After 63 years of aspiration how does one learn to “lie down, accept being whacked in the head, and contemplate your new found imbecility?”

How does one do that?

 

 

 

 

Agency

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When I commenced drafting the text that ended up as a four part post ( see  Laughing with Dr. D  –  The Shock of Unknowing –  Dendritic Forest –  Clouseau and the Maggots ), I experienced a shift in mood. The act of writing generated a sense of calm. I also felt motivated. I wanted to investigate my behaviour, examine it thoroughly, understand it completely. The intensity of my response, and the degree to which I worked to spotlight the issues, struck me as borderline symptomatic of OCD, or some other form of quiet mania. What follows is the result of my investigation.

Sense of self is intimately connected to an awareness of one’s personal ability to influence the surrounding environment. If it is possible for the individual to manifest a change in the external environment then there must exist an actor capable of initiating the observed change.

Conventional wisdom has it that René Descartes asserted “I think therefore I am.” I am not a big fan of Descartes and have not read deeply in his works. My memory of my studies suggests Descartes actually asserted “I doubt therefore I am.”

We are connected to the physical world through various sense mechanisms. We know from experience that these mechanisms are fallible, that it is possible for us to confuse a coil of rope with the form of a snake, and envisage a threat were none exists. We fool ourselves all the time. It may be argued that mutual self deception is required for relationships to work, for organizations to function, for civilizational processes to proceed. It is not difficult to go on the web and find people casting doubt on everything from the work of Darwin, the scientific study of climate change, free trade, contemporary monetary policy, or the facts surrounding the events of 9/11. It is possible to cast doubt on every aspect of our experience. We have institutionalized this skepticism in the form of science.

The one aspect of life that we cannot doubt is the existence of doubt itself. For doubt to be present there must exist some capacity to experience the world in different ways, to envisage an alternate construction of the facts. If this alternate facticity exists, it must reside in some entity, it must spring from somewhere. Descartes proposed that thought processes were contained within something we call “mind,” an entity responsible for the generation of meta-data concerning sensory epiphenomena. Something flashes by us in a blur of colour and sound, our senses perceive it, our mind processes the sense data, catalogues it, and labels it, and we become conscious of having just seen a bird.

Of course, it may not have been a bird. It may have been a kite falling from the sky. That same kite which now lays at our feet in a tangle of wreck.

If our mental processes were fully congruent with the facts of our environment then there would be no room for doubt, no opportunity to second guess. We should never mistake a coil of rope for a snake. Or a falling kite for a bird. We would be at one with our world, in perfect union with our surroundings. From the perspective of Descartes, our world, every aspect of it, was the creation of a munificent God, a transcendent being who not only created all that stands before us, he also endowed us with the sensory capacity to perceive his prefect creation in order that we might give thanks for his generosity.

The fact of our ability to doubt, to question our own sense perceptions, to generate alternate conceptions of reality (God is truly a She) serves to support the assertion that there exists an “I,” an autonomous individual capable of performing the required thought operations. However this same capacity for reason compels us to the possibility that our entire deductive chain is in error and we have mistakenly given credence to entities which do not in fact exist. There may be no “mind,” and there may be no “I.” Gilbert Ryle, in The Concept of Mind, affords the best means to unpack the first assertion. Any valid Buddhist text will quickly unpack the second.

A closer approximation of what occurs in the creation of the self is likely to be found in the assertion “I initiate change therefore there must exist an actor to be recognized as me.” I cannot remember my studies of Piaget and infant psychology but I believe that an infant will, at an early age, come to recognize his / her agency and this constitutes a seminal event in provoking the self awareness which is later identified as the self.

In the case of my injury, the most debilitating effects are due to the impaired exercise of agency which results in a deprecated sense of the self.

This thesis serves to explain why my acknowledgement of my deficits was found to be so crippling. I was no longer as capable as I once was. I was forced to acknowledge this impairment. As the deficits made themselves manifest they served to undermine the sense of self which had been established over the prior 60 odd years.

I continued to rely on sensory evidence exactly as I had learned to do from infancy. But, subsequent to the accident, this sensory evidence was frequently wrong, or incorrect, or failed in some way to remain congruent with physical reality. I have absolute certainty I parked my car at this exact location. But, when I return to the same precise spot, I find the car has vanished. This disappearance posed a philosophical problem that I was then forced to solve. It was extremely disquieting to learn that my innate life-long capacity to process sensory evidence was no longer to be trusted. That I was no longer to be trusted.