GENETIC SCRIBBLERS

Thinking of my Grandpa Thomas.... He used to keep something of a journal on brown butcher paper all through his life. Every summer and spring day, he recorded the box scores of all the major league baseball teams and local weather reports. When I was living with them, I recall his sitting at the huge mahogany dinner table in the dining room, writing down these scores on rolls of butcher paper. I suppose it was all he could afford to keep his records on. Perhaps he was doing it in order to make better bets on pro baseball. I don’t know why he kept those figures or where those records went after his death.

Now, here am I, the man who tried to “make it” as a writer, a scribbler, but who now finds himself keeping a different kind of journal, a more personal journal, yet also one which impersonally records my reading and thoughts too, and which I now use as a source for my BLOG entries. My journals also keep a record of the movies I want to see and the books I want to read. Both lists are getting so long and the movies are so outdated that I don’t think I’ll get to all of them.

There’s something comforting in scribbling down my thoughts on paper and into computers even though I don’t know that my records will go anywhere or be read by anyone. That’s why I think my scribbling is a genetic tic of some sort, a comforting control over or release of my restless thoughts. The repetition comforts me. That’s genetic, and I feel closer to my grandfather for noting it down in this BLOG entry.


CONSCIOUSNESS: SCRIBBLING AND EJACULATIONS

Consciousness is the I being aware of the I, the “I am that I am” in the Bible. How does that fit in? The I being aware of the I in the other, and therefore, being aware of the I in the self? The I recognizing the I in the pool of water? The I becoming aware of the me in the mirror? Because I observe your consciousness of me, I am conscious of myself? What are the physical brain’s modules which allow this? There needs nothing more except to recognize that consciousness is no more than a material phenomena. According to Donald’s A MIND SO RARE, and in opposition to Steven Pinker, “The only modular element in language appears to have been the vocal apparatus.” (p. 294)

Perhaps consciousness does have something to do with the awareness of the other outside myself, of my becoming aware that the other is speaking to me. Our primitive, prehistoric jabbering back and forth leading to an awareness of our individual selves. Everything I am is represented in that other. He’s a feedback loop to my self, outside myself. He feeds back to me my sense of self.

What do epic poetry and writing and, later, novels have to do with making us imagine that consciousness is a steady stream of unbroken information, even though we know that consciousness is a fragmented view of reality, cut into bits and pieces with no real continuity at all? Novels eventually emerged from time-locked verbal narratives and allow us to see consciousness as physicality, spread onto a series of pages with a page one and ending on page three-hundred thirty-three. Reading novels, telling tales gave us a sense of continuity of consciousness. Writing concretized consciousness. Language led to writing and writing concretized consciousness onto material pages. We are no different than stones except we talk. We are talking stones. We are moving water and bending flowers which talk.

The very fact I can observe a book is a concrete representation of the result of someone else’s thought processes. When I read, I internalize the other’s thought process and recognize it as the thoughts that flow through my own mind. Therefore, I can call thoughts sifting through the narrow window of my consciousness, “consciousness”.

Wow! That certainly was a bunch of scribbling, eh?


ANXIETY. ANOTHER, MORE SCIENTIFIC, DEFINITION

According to Joseph LaDoux in the SYNAPTIC SELF (p. 288) anxiety is a “cognitive state” in which “working memory is monopolized by fretful, worrying thoughts.”


DEPRESSION

In another post, I mentioned that taking antidepressants might disrupt a human’s chance to disengage from life and to heal and might allow humans to engage in self-destructive behavior. This take on the subject was according to Peggy La Cerra who thought that perhaps depression oughtn’t to be treated but it ought to be accepted as a good thing. Though they both agree that depression is a way to escape world pressure for awhile, Joseph LaDoux looks at this from another, more positive, point of view. On page 281 of SYNAPTIC SELF, he writes, “Depression... is no longer simply viewed as a monoamine imbalance. It is instead believed to involve altered circuits that lock one into a state of neural and psychological withdrawal in which the brain’s ability to attend to, engage, and learn about the world is reduced. Any treatment that can reengage a person with the world is likely to help.” Further, he says, “A brain on antidepressants can be brought back from its state of isolation from the outside world and encouraged, even forced, to learn. The brain, in other words, is duped into being plastic by these treatments.”
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“A Canadian is someone who knows how to make love in a canoe.” —Pierre Berton