UNCONSCIOUS THOUGHT

Unconscious is like the filaments of mycelium under this moss: crucial.

Recently there is great fuss about consciousness -- not just “thinking” but also speech and objectivity (as opposed to subjectivity).  It has been demonstrated again and again that one’s point of view (what one has at stake; one’s idea of one’s identity; notably gender assignment, training and education) all affect what one sees, thinks, assumes is reality.  It is clear that the very grammar of our sentences as well as our vocabularies and their trailing veils of association, are constructed and “national.”  We know that even scientists making every effort to be objective, “real”, statistical or instrument-proven, are vulnerable to fooling themselves in subtle ways so that decades later the work is challenged.

There is concern that if we admit consciousness is produced by our brains, that means we are robots or denying that we have souls.  All of this produces talk, even though our vocabulary doesn’t include words for the concepts we’re encountering, which makes it very difficult to talk about with others or even think about privately.  But we no longer worry about whether consciousness is present in animals.  Except that a few people are still trying to get gorillas to speak and claim Lassie understands words or even that porpoises recognize themselves in mirrors.  Animal: somewhere between robot and angel.  They can count low numbers, but they can’t do math.

A cell that perceives time.

Not much thought is given to the UNconscious though it is what controls our bodies, maintains the homeostasis of life, weaves the substrate of our identity and awareness.  A moment of reflection and attention can make us aware of our body’s state: contented or irritated or in a rage.  Those who take drugs -- legal or illegal -- can tell us how undependable and phantasmagorical the so-called conscious mind can be.   Athletes and musicians can tell us that their muscles know what to do and playing is unconscious once they have installed the movements and associations with the desire for them.  Desire lives in the unconscious, not the spoken conscious mind which struggles to express it but never quite succeeds in any final sense.

The unconscious is in the whole body: gut feelings, the clues that a lie detector records, posture, tension, staying upright, heart and breath which are powerful symbols for the conscious mind.  In fact, until the prefrontal cortex evolved, the brain was probably unconscious in the sense of being aware of itself and reflecting on decisions.  But both the conscious and the unconscious are complex, informing and controlling each other.  

Our capacity for empathy is considered the crown of evolution so far, carried by specific cells and accessed often through sight, but it is not necessarily conscious.  One sign is that two people sitting across a table for conversation will often show by their body language whether they are attuned.  Those in agreement often assume the same pose.  Those against may throw up a physical guard, like crossed arms, but may not realize they have done it.

The neuron connectome makes a cat’s cradle back and forth through ALL the neuron cells, reaching from over the eyes clear back to the top of the spine, moving from the muscle-connected neurons to the hormone-excreting organs to the autonomic system in the viscera, possibly changing the code slightly as the message moves through nerve nodes that sort and edit.  Neuron activity that is anchored in the "limbic system" -- which is in all animals though possibly not very well developed -- constitutes thought as much as conscious words in sentences and might have more to do with identity than anything the person could name when asked.  

“Felt concepts” is a category that interests me greatly.  These are the elements of the unconscious that show up in dreams, that make "Freudian" associations, that come to the surface in art work, stories, music, dance -- whole body concepts that a dancer can express with no words at all.  Felt concepts are what led me into the “religious” context, though it trapped me in the institution.  Felt concepts are “spiritual.”

One category of felt concepts may be quite concrete, the “haptic” objects we handle in our lives: food, weapons, each other, our pets, furniture, clothing, ornaments, plants.  These things we put our hands on daily become the source of metaphors, some of them deep enough in our assumptions that we’ve forgotten where they came from.  (“Chairing” is quite different from “tabling” and lately people talk about “plating” food.)

Another category is about motion which is change in both the position of the body and its orientation in space.  It is suggested that when the symbolism of sounds (speech) developed in the brain, it formed on the left half.  In other mammals the “grid” of knowing spatial placement and orientation is on both sides, as so many brain parts are, but now in humans it’s mostly on the left side, which controls the right side of the body, the “handedness” primary, thus tilted to the concrete. The “haptic” side and maybe the old “gps” grid have persisted in our grammar and our assumptions.  Nouns for objects, things we could put our hands on, are strong.  Verbs, when we move around, describe what we do.  So then are keyboards “hyperhaptic”?

hyperhaptic or hyperoptic?

Perhaps the idea of math being on the left side of the brain comes from the grid cells remaining.  Once I had ocular migraines that were expressed in lines, “graphs.”  I notice that some people who are capable of dissociation make art that is similar.  But it is the right half of the brain that is metaphorical.

Research is now telling us that memory is controlled by indexing sensations: smell, sight, taste and so on, which is why past moments are sometimes vividly triggered by a scrap of music or drift of fragrance.  The moment of recording and the moment of remembering are somehow connected -- they are telling us now that's probably by re-assembling the markers (not necessarily accurately and sometimes including things that weren’t originally recorded or dropping out other parts).  Also, they feel they have found cells capable of recording the time.  Both moments of memory (original and recalled) are conscious but where are they when in between?  In what state?

More than any other aspect, human bodies are governed by rhythms, those wavy lines we see in every medical story with patient's “brain waves” being recorded and presented on instruments.  Mostly we are only conscious of brain and heart rhythms, which are unconscious until we think of them but not necessarily controllable unless one is a yoga adept.  One researcher suggests that there is something like the sweep arm on a radar screen that keeps all this stuff more or less in sync.  If something ultra-brief happens quickly enough that the arm never hits it, it will not be perceptible.  Pretty arcane.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?x-yt-cl=84411374&x-yt-ts=1421828030&v=j_OPQgPIdKg#t=557 

This TED talk by John Searle is a big fav in a certain crowd.  Here’s this old white man who cusses and he seems to be taking down the idea that the “problem” of consciousness can be solved.  He’s defending rationality, the uniqueness of humans, and the superiority of those who “think.”  But this old white woman is here to tell you that he’s way behind the research.  We are NOT robots, we are NOT angels, but we ARE animals with a few evolved abilities that keep us VERY busy.  I remind you that computers don’t have gut feelings.  They have no guts.

Except in the movies.

OKI, NAPIKWAN!

Local poet with Sid's little brother

Sid’s response to my rather relentless review of his “Smallpox” story is so interesting that I thought I would write him a response as a post.  If you want to join the conversation, feel welcome.  Sid’s words are in blue.

Who knows why we write the stories we do. As you suggest, my writing is limbic.

Maybe all poetry is “limbic.”  Joe LeDoux claims that “limbic” isn’t accurate anymore, nor is “three brains theory” in which the modern prefrontal cortex is supposed to be mediated by the limbic middle “emotional” brain so it can communicate with the primal “lizard” brain.  But as a rough term for thinking about poetry, it works.  It turns out there are likely a hundred different brain parts, all interacting, and therefore there are certainly a hundred reasons and ways for poetry and narrative, both voluntary and unconscious.

Indians always fascinated me, their plight, their lost glory, their subjugation, and how they have persevered so beautifully. I never know what others are going to think of my stories, so I send them out there and see what happens. 

My little homestead economy is full of time, all day every day, which is why I’m “productive”: it is a deliberate decision and has meant clearing out a lot of other things like income and social events.  Now that the cost of sending a paper manuscript is gone, many publishers and agents require “reading fees.”  Always an angle.  I still cannot afford to send writing even as email.  Anyway they won’t accept anything that doesn’t arrive through an agent.  And the "slush pile" is incredibly big but doesn't even take up space, so no one cares.

As it turned out with this story, two different publishers latched on to it simultaneously.

I’m glad for that but suspicious of their motives.  So many publishers are pandering to what they think is public interest that they seize and control writing.  I’ve had enviro essays frankly changed by the editor because she wanted it to agree with her opinion rather than my reality.  

Anyone writing anywhere is going to have to be a bit defensive, both against inflated praise and unjustified attacks.  But this is aggravated around the rez because there have been so many different stances over time and cultures.  Political consequences can be major.  Last night I was talking to someone (enrolled) about how Kipp and Cobell knew where all the "Baker Massacre" camps were -- not so much because they were army scouts, which they were, but because they were whisky peddlers and made regular rounds.  The soldiers were also drunk.  Baker was a notorious alcoholic.

In that novel I did explore drinking and some of the other tribulations encountered on the reservation. 

So far only Hugh Dempsey’s “Firewater” really confronts moonshine as an economic issue.  It supported the Glacier Park Hotels during Prohibition and saved many a ranch.  The rez ranchers who quietly ran illegal stills were known by locals who had no fondness for Fed anything.  The plutocrats who owned the resorts had no motive to discourage bootlegging.  It was an attractive asset, enhanced by the sense of privilege that's in secrecy. 
  

I’d like to see some enterprising journalist uncover the contemporary “alcohol flow” onto the rez, its sources and consequences.  It all comes from off-rez, which makes me think that maybe the tribe itself ought to go into the whisky or beer business, eliminating the gradient created by the rez boundary.  So far everyone has attributed Indian drunks to bad genomes and broken cultures, but maybe there are mercenary forces “enabling” the continuing addictions.  The profits at Town Pump alone must be huge and they are drained off the rez.   I see former drunks and even hard drug users who have kicked, dried out, found other lives.  It’s possible.  Is gambling any less addictive?  Is basketball?  Missionary do-goodery and moral scolding often triggers sin, defines it, makes it more attractive, esp. since in so much of the media it defines power and masculinity.  Always the cut crystal tumbler with the fine aged single malt.

Trouble is nothing new to me. Much of my writing, especially my New York Times horseracing journalism, has garnered its share of scorn. If one writes, and puts things out there, let the writer beware. 

The infamous "bute."

I admire what little I know about your crusade on behalf of race horses.  Most of the animal welfare national organizations that I know are corrupt money-making operations and, of course, there are people who will make horses suffer and die if it means money for them.  It’s good to know you are on-the-ground and speaking out with quite a bit of good results -- from the horse’s point of view.  Of course, they don’t write letters to the editor.  HSUS is relentless in its attacks on anyone who challenges them.  They have little to do with actual animals -- just atrocity stories that will raise money.

I still remember visiting you and Bob in his studio. My Dad, Rib, and I stopped by at my pleading. We entered the room and all the lights were off, and then you switched them on, and that was the scene in the story, and indeed, the boy was me.

Indians have always sheltered me from the white world I have been spit out of from time to time, and I will forever be grateful to the Blackfeet. Mary Mad Plume bestowed me with an iniskim for defending her children at a Two Medicine River party.  Billy Big Spring held me in a horseback trance for weeks, riding that the south fork of the Two Medicine where he was born. His skin was black.

Black skin down to his collar anyway.  Blackfeet are a sun-responding people who lived mostly outside and shirtless in the old days.  Kids lament that they are pale and I tell them that’s because they sit in front of the TV all day -- the light is turning them green!  Maybe a lot of addiction and diabetes is due to lack of Vitamin D.

Indigenous people and places have always been a refuge for the eccentric, the super-sensitive, the misfit, the hell-raiser, the bankrupt.  And many places like this rez have allowed outside people to at last find themselves and drop some of the energy-sapping defenses.  I include myself.  And yet the tribe itself has to find its own way and some intruders are Evil in their motives and their methods.

My strategy has been to widen out, go down deeper.  I listen to Blackfeet primarily -- both sides of the Canadian border -- but try to remain conscious of the other peoples like Cree/Metis, ex-patriot Sioux and Cherokee, wannabe and “born-here” whites, the people who bring in new skills, and increasingly South Americans.  I think about the Blackfeet in cities.  Most of all I try to see the underlying forces that have changed everyone over the last fifty years.  Like our friends, many have “gone on ahead”.  Their descendants are not the same and know it.  They ask you and I:  “What was my grandma like?”  Because often we knew her.  They no longer ask with Schultz "Why gone those times?" because they never knew them.

Martin Grelle painting

When I tell people away from here about things and stories I know, they often frankly disbelieve me.  They have seen Indians wearing feathers on horseback all their lives and are not about to give that up.  Nor are even the Blackfeet going to let Harry Barnes wear his captured cavalry hat.  

I’m eager to read Vollmann’s book about the Nez Perce flight, interpreted as a war, since I have been to the hills where Joseph finally surrendered and have seen the depressions left from digging foxholes for the women and children, walked among the brass surveyor’s pins that show where each warrior’s body lay.  The reality of that cold wind, dry grass, sagey dirt, distant border hills -- seems vital to me.  And now, dammit, I’ve talked myself into buying another book!  It’s not supposed to be out until summer.  "The Dying Grass."

The Bear Paw Mountains where Joseph and Looking Glass finally surrendered.

My Netherlands poet and philosopher friend keeps telling me that I’ve absorbed French Algerian post-modern philosophy.  Indigenous people, embattled against cultural hegemony, claiming our own reality, sitting around a campfire telling stories.  A Blackfeet friend cautions me that the really dangerous ones shouldn’t be told until the fire is nearly burned out and faces are dark.  That’s when you can see the stars.

THE KALEIDOSCOPE OF MEMORY

We think of memory as a beam of light that reveals something real and actual, but now research reveals it is more like a kaleidoscope, so that when we put it to our eye, we see bits and pieces in patterns that change, mostly with the same pieces in different arrangements but possibly with some bits dropped out and possibly new bits added (perhaps bits of mirror) have fallen in.  

This is emotional for two reasons.  One is that the actual mechanism of memory which is at the interface between what it out of the skin and what is in-skin, is “filed” for retrieval according to the sensorium pattern of the moment being noted and its attached emotion.  We call this association, evocation, and sometimes flashback, re-living, maybe in an uncomfortable way, moments of intense fear, rage or possibly more positive feelings.  Since this function developed before we had evolved the ability to talk, which is associated with the pre-frontal forebrain, it is developed and held in the older, more “limbic”, parts of the brain.  Animals can do this.  It amounts to a whole “feeling” system that is pre-verbal concepts but particularly accessible in art and always going on under our conscious verbal lives.

Who me?

As time pushed on with its evolutions and mutations, memory became entangled with the idea of “truth,” which then -- like just about everything -- became a lever of authorities against lessers, which invented the categories of lies and fantasies.  These might be conscious, to escape punishment -- which is a kind of deviousness that chimpanzees can learn -- or it can be a sincere mis-remembering, at variance with the evidence or recordings of various kinds.  (I am drawing on Joseph LeDoux’s book, “Synaptic Self” and though I have it at hand with a lot of markers in it, I might not get all this quite right.)

By the time a human being is barely beginning to remember (which might or might not coincide with learning to talk) the culture is insisting on certain standards.  These things are formed in the pre-frontal cortex with the actual mechanics handled in places like the hippocampus over the ears, the nearby cortex cells, the thalamus, and the amygdala -- all maturing at slightly different times so under slightly different environmental circumstances like safety or nutrition or exercise. 

We used to consider this normal and effective discipline.

Then, of course, every culture and every mom has slightly different ideas about how to handle memory, particularly “truth.”  Controlling moms need to know what you’ve been up to so they can intervene if necessary.  “Where did you go?  Who were you with?” and even the intimate matters of excretion, so that “mom wants to know” gets entwined with toilet training.  “Did you do your duty?” 

All this information is great for sibs who are tattletales or blackmailers.  In my childhood there wasn’t much money so after we three became fascinated by toilet paper and enjoyed creating great bouquets of it, the rule was made that you couldn’t use a piece longer than your arm.  Since I was female and my arms were short, my two brothers were happy to inform my mother that I was a paper-waster.  Thus the truth gets to be an element of crime and testimony, but also a source of guilt, so I’ve remembered and resented this all these years, though now it’s pretty funny, a petty crime indeed.  Still, it linked the earliest back-of-the-brain feelings of infancy with all today's little Miss Manners niceties of polite society.

LeDoux points out that though we’ve insisted for centuries that the brain is once-and-for-all the same, now we know that it is constantly growing and withdrawing.  It is a process, a dance, and the result of time-arts, so that the brain we use to record what happens and to thereby guide the modification of our neuron protocols is not the same as the brain we use after decades to re-assemble and reflect upon our memories.  Our problem is not quite the same as that of the music lover who begins with 78’s and must update through 33-1/2 to reel-to-reel to cassette to MP3 -- but that sequence is suggestive.  Some songs can't be played anymore.

Remember the little cylinder you had to put over the turntable spindle?

The “machinery” or “software” of the brain is far more complex than we thought, so that’s the reason there are so many margin notes, high-lights and stickies in this book.  It’s a used book, so I also have the previous reader’s marks.  I’m working on a little glossary because some of these tiny instant phenomena have never been detected before and have names invented by scientists with their Latinesque prefixes-and-suffixes way of thinking.  But then they discover that they were wrong about whatever, so it gets a new name, and then they call it by initials or use lab nicknames.  It’s like reading a Russian novel.  

The actual structures, the channeling of the electrochemical impulses that come from the basic sensorium touching the out-skin world, the necessary molecules on hand (hopefully you’re not starving or missing a basic element), the limbic emotional attachments, the moral censoring from the pre-frontal cortex or perhaps the adding of fantasy shadows from a movie, the genetic instructions that argue among themselves (they can intensify or mute), the accumulation of endogenomes that (we are shocked to discover) can cross generations, the interfering chemicals from mind-altering substances like alcohol -- all this stuff makes a difference in what gets recorded.  And then what can play back.

Tentatively, my understanding is that the pristine bit of impulse from hearing a sound goes through a series of steps beginning with a little dashboard close to the perceiving cells.  Then it is filtered and annotated by half a dozen structures who pass it on as short-term memory, which again sorts and passes it on to another structure where it is prepared for long-term storage by dissecting it and classifying it, tagging it with the emotions of the moment.  There is a “master dashboard” or “working consciousness” that can only handle seven or eight concepts at once, so it chooses some and drops out some.  We don’t know a whole lot more than that.

Since memory is a major component of consciousness and since we think of consciousness as defining identity and since “felt-concepts” are not very conscious but those pinned down in words are certainly more conscious -- though choice of vocabulary (skinny or slim, naughty or nice) will not be value-free -- and those enshrined on paper whether as direct journal notes or as highly analyzed and distilled into written words acquire a kind of aura of valuable truth.  

Until now.  Words in code are now “set free” -- easily altered, transmitted out of context, contradicted by witnesses who would formerly have been suppressed.  You can't rubber stamp "for eyes only" on computer code.  You can't even really delete it.  The truth and memory are now hydra-headed chimeras that politics and advertising (is there a difference?) try to collar -- to no avail.  The point of God used to be that at least he/she (like mom) knew what was real and what was enduring.  But now that God (Deus Absconditus is a formal theological term) and possibly Mom have left (it’s no longer just Dad who elopes with the secretary) we wonder whether the category is even useful.  Do we need new words?  Probably.

Halfway between writing and drawing.

And what does this do to a system of justice that depends upon testimony?  Will it reveal new realities about people unlike ourselves?  Will it uncover a final solipsism in the world that paralyzes us between trust and fear?  Yes.  We embark on the trial of the Boston Bomber with deep misgivings.  Can we handle the truth?  Are there elephants hiding in the trees?

Writing on water -- FROM the water.