So Fantastic

Here's the problem with an active imagination: sometimes it goes places that you never wanted it to go. In a sense, this goes back to my last post about weird fears, but there's more to it than that.

A couple of days ago I got this week's New Yorker - a big victory for me since it means that the post office is effectively recognizing the correct address for me after all my moving around. I'm always fascinated by their Annals of Medicine - ever since I started reading Atul Gawande (or perhaps ever since I developed a morbid fascination with the defective human body) I've been hooked. They tend to follow modern literature in their choice of diseases to focus on: autism, dementia, schizophrenia, and in one case a truly spectacular piece of strangeness called Lesch-Nyhan Disease in which the mostly-male victims are constantly impelled by a dark force to chew off their own fingers. If that doesn't make you shiver with fear, I don't know what will.

This week the spotlight was on the scannable brain activity of patients in vegetative states. As discussed by specialists in the article, many patients in persistent vegetative states are refused treatment by insurance companies (big surprise there!) and generally left be, under the assumption that they are thoroughly unaware, and that little improvement is to be expected.

The article stuck with me, and not simply because the neurologists quoted throughout were indeed able to find normal brain activity in several of the patients they visited. Instead, this got me thinking about the black hole that is a human hopeless case. The vegetative patients in the article were referred to as zombies. As zombies. That's not just funny or weird; in a psychological-defense kind of a way, I think that it is accurate.

If we look at a patient with brain damage, we see a slowly decaying and barely living thing; a creature more helpless than a baby, breathing through science. And in most healthy human beings, this invokes deep fear. Pity yes, anger maybe. But fear. Here is a fate that may be worse than death in several different ways. Way 1: Your mental life is incapacitated, suggesting that the soul either does not exist or is trapped in uncomfortable limbo between life and death. Way 2: You are buried alive in your own body, and no one will ever know.

And so on. To me, recognizing the existence of such a human condition seems almost like a talisman, drawing them towards me. A goose walking over my grave if you will. This is what makes a vegetative patient like a zombie in some sense: they bring their emptiness to you and (through no fault of their own) breathe it slowly into the space that you occupy. It's eerie, uncomfortable, and completely unfair, but there it is.

That's the trouble with imagination: it's morbid and it's absolutely free, living a life of daunting flight among grounded creatures. It makes us fear that our lives have been dreams had while dying, that everything is the blink of an eye.

Of course some of the worlds it builds are made of gingerbread instead of garbage. But for example, is this a good dream, or bad?

(credit to Keith):

"I have this recurring dream where I find this book I've written and it's really really brilliant. Eventually I realize that it's a dream and the book will be gone when I wake up, so I sit down and transcribe the whole thing out and put it in a secret pocket in order to slip it past Dream-customs at the Border but somehow they find it every fucking time."

And when my imagination is stronger than reality, causing my mental image of things to take precedence over actual fact (ex.: yes, but I can imagine him being a crack addict. Yes, but I can imagine that that's the kind of bitchy thing s/he would do), is that a good thing?

(I guess it is when the statement goes: Yes, but I can imagine that I got the manuscript past Dream Customs. I can imagine that there is a race of invisible people who occasionally watch us, occasionally place a hand on our arm, a chin on our shoulder. Gently, gently). It could be.





*** Image credit: wimpers on flickr.com