The Ceiling Outside: The Science and Experience of the Disrupted Mind by Noga Arikha

Author:Noga Arikha [Arikha, Noga]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781541600881
Google: 481CEAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1541600878
Barnesnoble: 1541600878
Goodreads: 58950966
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2022-05-03T00:00:00+00:00

8

Impostors

And now in age I bud again,

After so many deaths I live and write;

I once more smell the dew and rain,

And relish versing. Oh, my only light,

It cannot be

That I am he

On whom thy tempests fell all night.

George Herbert, from ‘The Flower’, in The Temple (1633)

My mother is mostly living within a pure present. It is as if she had achieved the goal of meditation: to counter the constant buzz of the embodied mind, to neutralize drives and desires, to free the self from the ego’s despotic rule, find serenity in the here and now, and arrive at pure being, pure consciousness. She is at that place where time stops, where thoughts about the temporal and spatial elsewhere are left to be, where thought itself is stilled. Anxiety is gone. Guilt is not even a distant memory, since there are so few memories. She always had lashings of the legendary Jewish guilt, of the earthy, psychological sort relating to other people – and a very different breed from Eric’s metaphysical, Christian one, which involved how he saw himself before God. She would often say that if she didn’t feel guilty, ‘something must be wrong’. Now she mostly feels gratitude, benevolence and appreciation. Everything and everyone is beautiful, and ‘just as it should be’. Life is simplified, like a return to childhood – which includes occasional caprices very like those that children can have, storms within an absolute present. It is the gradual unwinding of everything that is gradually wound up, of all the accumulated stuff that sums up a grown-up, lived, examined life full of thoughts, passions, representations, relations and interactions. The stuff that I still hold on to, the stuff that informs my wish to understand the mind, her mind, my mind, and to write these very pages – all that stuff has come away, but within this state, she feels alive and happy to be alive. Even as the unwinding continues, and despite the interruption in verbally mediated discourse, her sense of what it means to be alive is preserved. And so in some way, this condition is a blessing – for her, not for us of course, since we have to accept the loss of shared memories, and of a shared world.

There need not be dementia for the self’s integrity to be jeopardized, and for anasognosia to hold confusion in place. We are all multilayered, made of our projections into the past and the future, and it is hard for many of us to achieve what the dementia is allowing my mother to experience – that is, to live in the present. Our metacognitive, imaginative, and creative capacities are, precisely, the problem. Hence the popularity of meditation and related practices, particularly in our modern, fast world. Disturbances to the self’s integrity can reveal its fragility. These take many subtle, and not so subtle forms, from the momentary sense of alienation to a chronic condition, such as the dissociation that Janet had described – ‘an altered form of consciousness manifested in disrupted integration of psychological functions’.

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