Fragile Chips

She'd always been delicate.  Even from the start, her parents handled her with utmost care lest their tiny child might break if not swaddled in three times her weight in blankets.  They watched her closely, held her hand at all times when outside the house, eschewed the parks and playgrounds where rougher children would play, only let their anxious care relax when convinced she soundly slept and even then they would lean their heads down over her small pink lips to listen to her breathe.  She flourished with the beauty of a hothouse flower, translucent to the sun, its petals soft and unblemished even from the windblown scrape of one against another.  She became a constant fixture in the drawing room, among her books and the small upright piano whose keys tinkled lightly to the merest brush of her fingers.  Her tutors changed frequently, college students who would spend a morning or evening with her laying out the lessons for the week.  Her progress, always steady and diligent, was never remarkable, and after a term or so, her tutors would move on to a more compelling interest or promising position. 

As she grew, her doctors had to concede that her condition was not as dire as initially suspected.  Her small heart continued to pump, her lungs drew in the still air of their own accord, while her thin legs held her straight and, under the tutelage of a ballet mistress, learned a certain etheric grace.  Gradually the rounds of acceptable outings expanded beyond the library and museums to include the theater and the shopping galleria.  Her eyes widened at the displays, but it was the bustle of people in all their robust carelessness that captivated her most.  She envied their confident strides, the loudness of their voices, the solidity of their commonplace purchases, their wide feet and easy ownership of space.  In the silent inner reaches of her heart, she determined that she must learn how to become one of them.

She knew nothing of rebelliousness.  Tantrums only confused her ingrained docility.  Any risk held an unspeakable threat, and her foremost concern was not to increase her parents' vigilant anxiety.  As with the rest of her education, she took on the challenge methodically.  "How do you do that?"  she asked one tutor when they passed the ice-skating rink.  "Please show me how to cook," she entreated another.  She began to assert her independence in small ways, choosing her own clothes, painting her nails, preparing her lunch, opting for a different route for her daily walks.  Her tutors noticed the change in her and began to encourage her to try new things.  They invited her onto the campus and took pleasure in her wonder at the laundromat and cafeteria.  Once on their own ground, removed from the confines of the drawing room, they teased and played with her, ruffled her hair, and chased her down to tickle her.

Bit by bit, she sloughed off the habits of her fragility.  With every experience and skill she gained, she cracked anew the porcelain of her doll-like existence.  She could see the chips of her former self scattered on the floor of the drawing room and her old fears tucked into the pages of her favorite stories.  As she moved through the room, the cast-off shards clinked together like the plink of the piano keys.  They no longer had place or meaning to her, and in a final act of emergence, she swept her fragile chips into a pile and boxed them up to set out at the curb for the trash collectors.

The Promise of Spring

It creeps up slowly, hauntingly, heard first as a voice  just before waking.  It is a kind of knowing before recognition, a sensation bubbling up from a hidden source, a trophic change following the angle of the sun.   It answers the sleepy questioning of half-lidded eyes with its own arcana, an age-old charm to release Persephone from the Stygian night.  Her venture to the surface brings a rising sap and swells the barren branches with new bud.  The throat of every bird in the neighborhood warbles an acknowledgement of her arrival and stakes a claim on some piece of her promise.  Even after all these years, I have built no immunity to her seduction and my heart trembles at her radiance.  Darkness falls off me like peeling chips of paint, and my pale white arms show bare underneath.  I can't help but forgive again the perfidy of a changing light, my relief and gladness too real to admit resentment, and welcome in my embrace the return of spring.

This is, Therefore, I am

"I cannot admit it," said Sergey Ivanovitch, with his habitual clearness, precision of expression, and elegance of phrase. "I cannot in any case agree with Keiss that my whole conception of the external world has been derived from perceptions. The most fundamental idea, the idea of existence, has not been received by me through sensation; indeed, there is no special sense-organ for the transmission of such an idea."

"Yes, but they--Wurt, and Knaust, and Pripasov--would answer that your conscousness of existence is derived from the conjunction of all your sensations, that that consciousness of existence is the result of your sensations. Wurt, indeed, says plainly that, assuming there are no sensations, it follows that there is no idea of existence."

"I maintain the contrary," began Sergey Ivanovitch.

But here it seemed to Levin that just as they were close upon the real point of the matter, they were again retreating, and he made up his mind to put a question to the professor.

"According to that, if my senses are annihilated, if my body is dead, I can have no existence of any sort?" he queried.

The professor, in annoyance, and, as it were, mental suffering at the interruption, looked round at the strange inquirer, more like a bargeman than a philosopher, and turned his eyes upon Sergey Ivanovitch, as though to ask: What's one to say to him? But Sergey Ivanovitch, who had been talking with far less heat and one-sidedness than the professor, and who had sufficient breadth of mind to answer the professor, and at the same time to comprehend the simple and natural point of view from which the question was put, smiled and said:

"That question we have no right to answer as yet."  (Leo Tolstoy, in Anna Karenina)

This conversation appears in a novel that was written over 130 years ago.  Those questions are still being asked by those neuroscientists who study consciousness.  In The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, Antonio Damasio argues that such a structure exists in the basal ganglia and the hypothalamus as it organizes information from the brain stem and the neocortex.  He suggests that the awareness of an existing self is a result of an ongoing comparison of an existing bodymap with bodymaps constantly created in response to internal and external stimuli.  (I can't do justice to his well-reasoned and insightful prose, so I won't try to regurgitate his material.  Read the book if you really want to know what he said. Better yet, read all his books.)

By that definition of consciousness, I maintain awareness of myself because of the barrage of images that continue to change my organism.  The arrangement of seaweed on the beach sends a pulse of photons onto my retina, a chemical rush from my amygdala where that pattern recalls other associations pre-coded with emotion, a dance of directives from my sensory-motor cortex, a film of proprioceptive relationships that orient my body to the seaweed, and countless other images racing through my brain.  Each neuron in the process works as a binary system that either fires or doesn't according to how it integrates the flow of excitatory and inhibitory stimuli coming into its dendrites.  That way there are thousands upon thousands of organs to transmit the idea of existence.

One can even question the what the meaning of 'is' is (preferably at one's leisure rather than when on trial for perjury).  The organization of stimuli into discrete items, such as a feather, a piece of seaweed, sand, an ocean, my body, and not into an abstract pattern of interference between electromagnetic waves is part of our typical way of thinking.  When we interrupt that thought pattern with psychotropic drugs, meditation, sleep deprivation, or other state altering methods, we can also lose the ability to identify with a self.  In the extremes, those kinds of interruptions do lead to a variety of unconscious states up to and including death.  On the other hand, such experiences can expand our recognition of identity to include the totality of the energy field we call the known universe.

We may have no right to answer the question of what existence we will have when we no longer can sense through our bodies.  The best we can do is recognize that while we do live what we sense is integral to who we feel ourselves to be.  Our choices and our filters define what we know of existence.  Death remains the ultimate mystery, an unparalleled shift of being that we can't know until we try.  The comfort we can take is that if there is no existence after death, there is no one there to notice.   If that doesn't strike you as a comforting thought, then you might consider meditation.  It is a practice designed not just to reduce the stress in life but also to change the attachment to self in existence.  In other words, it's not necessarily a preparation for death itself or for a ticket to a better afterlife, but it's a practice for a peaceful passage into whatever change of consciousness death entails.

Universal Donor

The cuff is tight on my upper arm
and as I clench my fist,
my vein lifts blue and bulging
to offer what I have to share.
The needle prick, a sudden sharp intrusion,
drops me into dizziness.
I sink with immediate lightheaded,
visceral response to an open vein.
My life pours down a plastic tube
into a sealed pouch rocking in its cradle.

I see my puce purple liquid pulse
slosh in the bag and know
it is only a small part of me,
one eighth what my body metabolizes every day
from food, and breath, and being.
What lights my eyes and whispers with my soul
oxygenates in my lungs, and forced
by steady heart compressions
through my miles of capillaries,
gushes out in little jets
to make a nicely packaged gift
to fill another's veins.
Each corpuscle encapsulates
my unique identity until in sharing
I become universal.
Another needle stick and gravity's flow
conjoins my strength
to another's fading body.

I do not know when I look at the faces

of those who walk the streets around me
which ones teetered on death's edge
until a paramedic on the scene
delivered my transfusions.
My one pint may give
a holiday from oncology,
a neonate survival in its incubator womb,
or sew hope into bullet torn flesh.
I recline on the faux leather chair,
my arm extended and inner elbow exposed
in a prolonged offertory gesture.
I lose only time in the process
of buying time to heal.

It is a small thing for me to do
on a Saturday afternoon
to send my cells on a journey
into a lifepool of beating hearts
and in that swim
erase the thought boundaries
of who I am and who I am not.