It is slightly peculiar how Joss Whedon's television series seem to give me what I need to work through times of unexpected crisis....
The Buffy book, edited by Vanessa and I at first, with Janet getting it over the hump in the last two years, is finally coming out at the end of this month. Both Vanessa and I agreed years ago, when discussing why we liked the show, that the grimmer disasters of the final two seasons (which annoyed many viewers, who wanted to be more amusingly entertained) were actually comforting for both of us, as they seemed to help in explaining danger, fear, and the vertigo of expecting to die soon and/or horribly. (In our case, not by vampires, but by illness.)
Dear Vanessa, of course, died on March 10, 2007.
She thus never saw Dollhouse, about which I've already gone on and on here... despite a weak start and a somewhat rushed end to the two years of the series, an amazing set of ideas in twenty-six episodes.
And, as I may also have mentioned, a series that was weirdly timed around my stroke... although the show started four months before the stroke, I didn't see it until afterwards; while lying around my apartment recovering in July of last year, I'd downloaded the back episodes to go through them, at first casually. And then was, as I've already said, deeply struck, and somewhat disturbed: the whole problem of the self versus the mind, modifiable neural architecture opposed to the illusion (?) that we are in there somewhere, is central to the series. Which is kind of what having a stroke is all about....
So, watching the final episodes has been even more, well, sort of disturbing, and at the same time sort of perfect. As changes and exchanges of minds and mind components get more complicated, there are also a number of instances of damage to the physical brain, corruption or deterioration of the data that makes up the 'mind', overlap between original and modified minds, etc. Most of the characters have reason to be concerned about the stuff they're carrying around in their heads – it may have been damaged and retrieved in a peculiar way that might have changed things invisibly, there may have been 'enhancements', and so on. And so on, and so on – it's remarkable how the increasingly intricate disasters of the second season, as the fictional (I hope) technology becomes all too manageable and portable (and the writers pack in ideas that they may have planned to unfold over several years), open out an entire spectrum of problems and solutions to the apparent link between a given brain and a 'person'.
As I may also have mentioned, I did have an actual PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) dream that used material from the savagely disorienting episode 13 of season 1 – a dream that my analyst pointed out had a ridiculously easy explanation: as is expected in PTSD, I didn't have time to be frightened or to panic when I had my stroke – I stored that panic for just over two months until August 18, when I could afford to be frozen in appallingly raw terror for a few hours, because I was actually safe at home in bed.
And now that series two has had most of the main characters, the ones we experienced as whole people, either mentally damaged, enhanced or at least copied, I am also coming out of the other end of a tunnel of treatment – for me a gratifyingly short tunnel, only about eight months. (Unusual, of course: but most stroke victims (such as my mother), being older and with more unstable blood pressure, apparently have more fragile tissues and suffer more extensive damage – which is why they end up taking these medications for the rest of their lives. And there is apparently also a great big dollop of blessed, inexplicable, absolutely sheer and incalculable luck in my recovery.)
But it is still weird – and almost excessively familiar – that as, for instance, Ballard comes to terms the possible limitations of his reconstructed brain, which replaces an original that is gone forever; and as Priya/Sierra and Anthony/Victor enjoy using their original minds again – with alterations, some asked for and some unavoidable; as Mellie/Madeleine, before her (their?) death, at least experiences a happy mind in her body, even if it isn't her own mind; and as the minds of Whisky/Claire, Alpha, and of course Caroline/Echo crash through their chaotically intricate histories, as well as a host of other figures and, ultimately, the minds of practically everyone that exists in the world postulated by the show... that as we watch all of that tangled, intricate mess of mind alterations, I can sit here and blithely tell people that I've recovered, almost completely, from my stroke.
Oh sure, I had to re-learn the name of my bus stop, but everything else works.
And, yes, I do forget names with what I suspect is a bit more frequency... but then I can't entirely tell if it's more frequent, can I?
And of course, at the back of – well, one can only say 'my mind' here – I can't help but wonder: this mass of neurons I'm using to type, to read, to watch television, to mark exam papers, to stand up in front of a crowd of undergraduates and confidently explain Adorno and Derrida – is that the same as it was? Is it, indeed, just as much me as it ever was?
And... how would I know?
Or, perhaps, one can't help but repunctuate: How would "I" know?...
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