pataphor
2019-02-14 12:26:10 UTC
My attempts to find a way to check my writing for errors, like repeating
the same word multiple times closely together in the text, unnecessary
alliteration, quirky formulations or lack of proper rhythm and flow
have stalled for the time being, the reader will have to make do with
my limited grasp of English as a second language, and hope, just like
me, that some text to speech engine will become publicly available
soon, that is not dependent on the cooperation of gigantic search
engine corporations, so that hopefully this extra evaluation tool will
enable me to do a few more passes on my texts, that would help me weed
out a larger percentage of errors, or induce me to reconsider or
reformulate.
But as tempting as that technological vision might be for future
authors, this is not going to be what this post is about.
No, instead of talking about failures of production or generation, I
will be talking about access to the sources of imagination itself.
The thing is, sometime ago I was confronted with the results of my
stubbornness not to do anything about my slowly advancing wisdom teeth,
or maybe it was related to a crowned tooth not yielding to the normal
play of forces that keeps my other teeth in check, or maybe it was just
some other internal jaw infection that I did not go to a dentist for,
partly because I don't like putting my faith into overworked healthcare
professionals whose vision of society is often at right angles to my
own, and partly because when you're only visiting them when you're in
some kind of emergency it combines low situational awareness and agency
from my side with outrageous power on their side, combined with a lack
of empathy, since there was no time to familiarize, even if they were
planning to, to begin with, which I doubt in the first place.
Anyway, upon awakening one day in the morning, I noticed something was
seriously, seriously, wrong. A few days before I had had a small
bleeding in the upper side of my mouth and it somehow must have been
connected to, or was caused by, a swelling close to my inner ear, that
made it harder to move for that fluid that runs through some inner ear
capillaries, stimulating hair cells, and telling my brain what's up. Or
down. Or left. Or right. Or whatever that third direction is.
But in my case the other directions were relatively fine, in the
beginning, until they weren't, but for now it was only when I turned
from my right side to my left side that for a minute my vision was like
some film had run out of its spool, or I was very drunk. Just not up
and down drunk, but left right drunk.
Obviously this was scary in the extreme, I thought I had some internal
bleeding in my brain, and was soon to die or whatever, and feared I
wouldn't even have the time to call for help before I completely passed
out, more so because I don't have a telephone anymore.
But, assuming it was some brain hemorrhage, I decided to do some
meditation and balance exercises in order to prevent the blood to heap
up inside some place in my head where it would cause a lot of damage.
Curiously, this also helped me to calm down a little, and so I managed
to escape total panic.
Over the next few days I learned to live with the new situation, like,
before I turned completely to the left, I would stop the motion halfway
and make a small quick movement the other way, so as to jerk the fluids
towards coming to a full stop, after which I gave them the opportunity
to slowly settle into the new position. That way I managed to greatly
reduce the dizzy feeling, and the weird movements of my internal vision
even when I kept trying to look at the same point on purpose.
At some point I noticed that the other balance fluid channels were
affected too, for example while looking up while showering, or trying to
pick something up from the ground. The most scary episode was when I
was already somewhat recovered or acclimatized to the situation and
decided to go buy some groceries on my bike, and just when I thought
things had gone well, after leaving the supermarket, I suddenly was in
a complicated traffic situation and did not have time to make the
appropriate counter balancing movements.
But even that situation was overcome, partly because I had already
learned that even when being completely out of balance, with my eyes
swimming in another direction than where I was planning to look, it
still didn't have to mean I was out of balance, because I could still
rely on some other mechanism, proprioception of my skeletal muscles or
whatever, or some other mechanism that I was using without exactly
knowing what it was, to feel perfectly at ease and balanced even when
the world was turning in circles.
Luckily, all my fears about this being a permanent condition were
somewhat exaggerated, I have mostly returned to a normal situation,
except now I have some kind of heightened awareness of the different
functions that help me keep oriented in the world.
But there is some other thing that never completely got better, some
basic anxiety that I could once again end up in a fearful situation
like that, and start to panic, even though I think I really managed to
control myself very well this time, considering that in the beginning I
had no clue whatsoever about what was going on and feared the worst.
Which probably wasn't the case. I hope.
So now I started to closely pay attention to whatever happens in my
mind, and to how I react to it, in order to ward off a possible panic
attack.
I am not quite so sure whether this new internal situational awareness
is a gain or a loss. I mean how many people have the opportunity to
closely watch the malfunctioning of parts of their brains in this way,
and coming back from it this well, and having had time to develop fall
back routines? And now I also have learned how certain common failures,
like failures to remember a word for something, or a failure to do some
complex arithmetic in my head, or a failure to swallow, that last thing
is from some other disease that I developed earlier but that seems also
to have gone since I adapted my diet, or a failure to mentally visualize
a route to some place, or to bring back some eidetic memory of a street
combined with an attempt to plan a route, especially if I don't have a
specific memory of that route in my head and have to stitch it together
from different partial routes and some kind of mental helicopter view
to help me arrange it into a map of the territory, how failures like
this cause me to have some kind of sinking feeling where the best
option seems to be to let go of the plan for now, and wait for things
to settle before I try again, very carefully.
It suddenly dawned on me that experiences like this closely resembled
the panic attacks that I experienced when my balance system was
temporarily out of order, but, unlike before, I now approached them in
a completely different way, as failures of my hardware, but not
reacting to them in some kind of instinctive avoidance anymore, like I
used to do.
Up to now I am still uncertain whether I am just now noticing these
failures, and that I never had to notice them before, because my brain
was always tip top in order, or that my new awareness is actually a
huge improvement because now I can design countermeasures to stuff I
used to ignore, like that time I precisely measured the sensitivity of
both my ears so that I could create balanced and equalized input to my
headphones, or that time I found out exactly which eye needed exactly
what optical correction for which task or seeing distance.
And there is also some other thing, which I have internally called the
Tesla temptation, which is a bit like completely ignoring the panic
that comes with ignoring one's sensory limits and that could result in
some kind of over stimulation of the brain, because letting it try and
try again, to surround the missing memory or malfunction, would cause
the whole complex to activate to a point where it starts to react a bit
like a musical ear worm, that one has to consciously tame and cool down
again, lest it keeps bothering one for days, restarting from the depths
seemingly without reason, and slowly finding its way into one's
consciousness until forcefully shut down.
Another weird, seemingly schizophrenic effect seems to be that I can
possibly communicate with my brain indirectly, by making up some visual
sign language, as if the parts of my brain, that are under or
over performing, can be simply asked to reconsider their actions with
respect to the functioning of the organism that I am as a whole.
But the most maddening question is, now that I see all this, am I
better off than before, or on my way down to insanity, or maybe now,
for the first time in my life, able to go the way towards opening
the doors of perception?
P.
'vale'
the same word multiple times closely together in the text, unnecessary
alliteration, quirky formulations or lack of proper rhythm and flow
have stalled for the time being, the reader will have to make do with
my limited grasp of English as a second language, and hope, just like
me, that some text to speech engine will become publicly available
soon, that is not dependent on the cooperation of gigantic search
engine corporations, so that hopefully this extra evaluation tool will
enable me to do a few more passes on my texts, that would help me weed
out a larger percentage of errors, or induce me to reconsider or
reformulate.
But as tempting as that technological vision might be for future
authors, this is not going to be what this post is about.
No, instead of talking about failures of production or generation, I
will be talking about access to the sources of imagination itself.
The thing is, sometime ago I was confronted with the results of my
stubbornness not to do anything about my slowly advancing wisdom teeth,
or maybe it was related to a crowned tooth not yielding to the normal
play of forces that keeps my other teeth in check, or maybe it was just
some other internal jaw infection that I did not go to a dentist for,
partly because I don't like putting my faith into overworked healthcare
professionals whose vision of society is often at right angles to my
own, and partly because when you're only visiting them when you're in
some kind of emergency it combines low situational awareness and agency
from my side with outrageous power on their side, combined with a lack
of empathy, since there was no time to familiarize, even if they were
planning to, to begin with, which I doubt in the first place.
Anyway, upon awakening one day in the morning, I noticed something was
seriously, seriously, wrong. A few days before I had had a small
bleeding in the upper side of my mouth and it somehow must have been
connected to, or was caused by, a swelling close to my inner ear, that
made it harder to move for that fluid that runs through some inner ear
capillaries, stimulating hair cells, and telling my brain what's up. Or
down. Or left. Or right. Or whatever that third direction is.
But in my case the other directions were relatively fine, in the
beginning, until they weren't, but for now it was only when I turned
from my right side to my left side that for a minute my vision was like
some film had run out of its spool, or I was very drunk. Just not up
and down drunk, but left right drunk.
Obviously this was scary in the extreme, I thought I had some internal
bleeding in my brain, and was soon to die or whatever, and feared I
wouldn't even have the time to call for help before I completely passed
out, more so because I don't have a telephone anymore.
But, assuming it was some brain hemorrhage, I decided to do some
meditation and balance exercises in order to prevent the blood to heap
up inside some place in my head where it would cause a lot of damage.
Curiously, this also helped me to calm down a little, and so I managed
to escape total panic.
Over the next few days I learned to live with the new situation, like,
before I turned completely to the left, I would stop the motion halfway
and make a small quick movement the other way, so as to jerk the fluids
towards coming to a full stop, after which I gave them the opportunity
to slowly settle into the new position. That way I managed to greatly
reduce the dizzy feeling, and the weird movements of my internal vision
even when I kept trying to look at the same point on purpose.
At some point I noticed that the other balance fluid channels were
affected too, for example while looking up while showering, or trying to
pick something up from the ground. The most scary episode was when I
was already somewhat recovered or acclimatized to the situation and
decided to go buy some groceries on my bike, and just when I thought
things had gone well, after leaving the supermarket, I suddenly was in
a complicated traffic situation and did not have time to make the
appropriate counter balancing movements.
But even that situation was overcome, partly because I had already
learned that even when being completely out of balance, with my eyes
swimming in another direction than where I was planning to look, it
still didn't have to mean I was out of balance, because I could still
rely on some other mechanism, proprioception of my skeletal muscles or
whatever, or some other mechanism that I was using without exactly
knowing what it was, to feel perfectly at ease and balanced even when
the world was turning in circles.
Luckily, all my fears about this being a permanent condition were
somewhat exaggerated, I have mostly returned to a normal situation,
except now I have some kind of heightened awareness of the different
functions that help me keep oriented in the world.
But there is some other thing that never completely got better, some
basic anxiety that I could once again end up in a fearful situation
like that, and start to panic, even though I think I really managed to
control myself very well this time, considering that in the beginning I
had no clue whatsoever about what was going on and feared the worst.
Which probably wasn't the case. I hope.
So now I started to closely pay attention to whatever happens in my
mind, and to how I react to it, in order to ward off a possible panic
attack.
I am not quite so sure whether this new internal situational awareness
is a gain or a loss. I mean how many people have the opportunity to
closely watch the malfunctioning of parts of their brains in this way,
and coming back from it this well, and having had time to develop fall
back routines? And now I also have learned how certain common failures,
like failures to remember a word for something, or a failure to do some
complex arithmetic in my head, or a failure to swallow, that last thing
is from some other disease that I developed earlier but that seems also
to have gone since I adapted my diet, or a failure to mentally visualize
a route to some place, or to bring back some eidetic memory of a street
combined with an attempt to plan a route, especially if I don't have a
specific memory of that route in my head and have to stitch it together
from different partial routes and some kind of mental helicopter view
to help me arrange it into a map of the territory, how failures like
this cause me to have some kind of sinking feeling where the best
option seems to be to let go of the plan for now, and wait for things
to settle before I try again, very carefully.
It suddenly dawned on me that experiences like this closely resembled
the panic attacks that I experienced when my balance system was
temporarily out of order, but, unlike before, I now approached them in
a completely different way, as failures of my hardware, but not
reacting to them in some kind of instinctive avoidance anymore, like I
used to do.
Up to now I am still uncertain whether I am just now noticing these
failures, and that I never had to notice them before, because my brain
was always tip top in order, or that my new awareness is actually a
huge improvement because now I can design countermeasures to stuff I
used to ignore, like that time I precisely measured the sensitivity of
both my ears so that I could create balanced and equalized input to my
headphones, or that time I found out exactly which eye needed exactly
what optical correction for which task or seeing distance.
And there is also some other thing, which I have internally called the
Tesla temptation, which is a bit like completely ignoring the panic
that comes with ignoring one's sensory limits and that could result in
some kind of over stimulation of the brain, because letting it try and
try again, to surround the missing memory or malfunction, would cause
the whole complex to activate to a point where it starts to react a bit
like a musical ear worm, that one has to consciously tame and cool down
again, lest it keeps bothering one for days, restarting from the depths
seemingly without reason, and slowly finding its way into one's
consciousness until forcefully shut down.
Another weird, seemingly schizophrenic effect seems to be that I can
possibly communicate with my brain indirectly, by making up some visual
sign language, as if the parts of my brain, that are under or
over performing, can be simply asked to reconsider their actions with
respect to the functioning of the organism that I am as a whole.
But the most maddening question is, now that I see all this, am I
better off than before, or on my way down to insanity, or maybe now,
for the first time in my life, able to go the way towards opening
the doors of perception?
P.
'vale'