I wrote a long, detailed e-mail to my department at work, explaining what happened, etc. I tend to be pretty open about medical concerns (which may be one reason I don't seem to get job interviews, who knows). Then I thought I should do the same for my family, and tried to re-use parts of the first e-mail – which is definitely the clumsy way to do it, but oh well, I'd rather talk to them on the phone anyway.
But somehow that made me think of clarity, precision... of how much we get things exactly right, and more importantly how much people are or are not paying attention to exactly what we say.... I may worry about the various e-mails and whether I said anything clearly; but then at the other end, the receiving end, everyone is busy or thinking of something else, and for heaven's sake who really reads a long e-mail in any case. Scan it and react to it, or more accurately respond to bits of it, to what you thought it said.
Because I still want to study with the Jungians – which I'm worried about now, of course; is it plausible to enter such a study program with several disparate medical concerns? – I think of this in terms of waking and dreams, consciousness and clarity, appearance and illusion. All the things we mean to say – but there are also all the shades and shadows, the screens over things, that seem to change their shapes and meanings: everything is always pregnant with time and personal history, resonant with the experiences that lie in us like sediment, many of which are dreamed or imagined, elusive fragments that grow into other shapes, other fields and forests.
It's sort of thrilling to try to be conscious of such density, of such multi-faceted variability, of all the things we really mean – but it's also a bit unnerving: to really register the density and multi-layeredness of existence, of thinking, of communication....
Of course it is also a relief, not to worry too much about any messages I send, because people may not concern themselves with every detail of those messages.
And then in another direction is thinking about: what do I understand, how do I understand it or remember it? Having had a stroke, and having recovered generally; but at the same time knowing that the stroke happened across several parts of my brain, and knowing the struggle to remember in the first few days after that crisis; am I really thinking in exactly the same way that I was before?
Which sharpens my understanding that I am never understanding or remembering in exactly the way I was on the day before, or even really the minute before: that it is all a complex, multi-layered dreamscape, changing shape and meaning, especially if you look closely at anything in it.
Sort of frightening: but also sort of wonderful – the sheer rich, changing density of what is happening to us, of what we are experiencing, all the time....
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