It’s been a while since I’ve been around here. I left because I simply had too much to do. I love testing, I love reporting. But I am a student, not only of university, but of the world and the circle of all things it contains. And I found that I could not keep up with all of these things that drew me in, fascinated me, waltzed with me. The tempo was too fast, the beat too fat; the spins whirling and dizzying left me huddled in a corner weeping at my own inability to consume the entire world at once, waiting for the nausea to pass.
I was Icarus and the sun was everywhere at once. But when I finally fell to Earth, and had a chance to rest, I found that I was not destroyed, and my wings were no longer paraffin, but gossamer, silk, steel.
Still, I wasn’t ready to return. There was too much to do, but I did it. I took firmer reign of the reins of my bewildered brain and orchestrated a blitzkrieg. I have accomplished only the smallest fraction of what I one day hope to do, but it is a start, and I have a direction, a plan, or I am content with my lack of a plan and know that everything will fall into place in my growth. “I have destroyed the ring of the horizon and escaped from the circle of things.”
I am a student of the mind and of the brain, and in one sense, I mean this quite literally. I am studying neuroscience. I spend several hours each day in a class where I extract nerves from a body which once contained a person, a beating heart and a churning mind. I tried to eat a bite of a steak a friend of mine ordered at a nice restaurant last night. My stomach turned. The texture was too similar to the calf I had cut into that morning to extract thin bundles of fibers, the axons of nerves descending from the brain into the spinal cord into every extremity of the human body, every crevice. I don’t mean to say that I have become a vegetarian, or that I won’t enjoy the taste of a good hamburger from now on, but I was suddenly very aware of the fact that we too are made of meat. We are made of meat, but there is so much more to us than meat. There is yearning, aspiration, the deepest love, hatred, rage, a cold bitterness, lust, tender warmth. But we are still made of meat.
I noticed also in that moment a strange fact. If one looks at the skeleton, one still sees very clearly the shape of a human. It is obvious that this towering collection of calcium originated from something of the same mold as yourself. Look at the muscular system. Once again, the source is readily apparent. Just flex your arm and you will see the tendons tensing, imparting movement and force to your frame.
Now look at the nervous system. Look at a diagram of the human nervous system. Or better yet, find a detailed photograph from a dissection. What is this? A tangled web of off-white fibers. A brain. Where did they come from? Who knows? But these strange strands are you. They are more you than any bone, any muscle tissue. The system in the body that least resembles a human being is the system that makes you a person. You are a spiderweb of crackling electric impulses, synapses, chemical cascades. And that is so strange, and it is beautiful.
So, that’s a little bit of what I’ve been up to.
Seems like a tricky extraction and there are very few resources out there, but it would be interesting, challenging, and particularly relevant here.
