Andrew Statum

Ralph Messenger's attempt to record his consciousness on tape (or on voice-recognition software) seems to me to be doomed from the outset. He is attempting to funnel an incredibly multifarious phenomenon through one conduit, language, which necessarily limits the extent to which consciousness can be represented. We think in image and word AND sound, who knows, maybe even smell and touch. When we speak, the spoken word carries with it a whole host of images and ideas. Word cannot be divorced from image, nor can image be divorced from word. And words don't always come out of one's mind shaped into a well-shaped narrative like the one we get of Ralph's first sexual experience in chapter six. If Ralph were being honest with himself, he would, more often than not, speak in a series of loosely associated words and grunts.

3:09. I feel awful. Dried out. Heavy. Tired. Dizzy. Walking wounded. A "bog monster" I think is how Kerouac put it. Waste of a day. Got up at 10. Had a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios. Though what I really wanted was a sausage egg and cheese sandwich dripping in grease. But I blew my cash last night and there's not an ATM in throwing distance and nobody takes credit cards in this godforsaken part of Kings County.

I was going for Borges, specifically, a story called "The Library of Babylon," which I thought would be perfect for the Chinese answer thought experiment, but I may have missed the mark.

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The Ministry of Answers (which others call the Universe) is housed in a single building that rises anachronistically from the barren, uninhabited countryside. The top of the Ministry soars to unimaginable heights, fading from view above the clouds and dissolving into a blue point somewhere in the upper atmosphere. Nobody knows how many floors the building has. It is believed that the building is still growing and that it has been continually built since the time when the ancients discovered masonry. Thus, the Ministry is infinite. The architecture of its facade supports this assertion: the first few stories are made of stone, changing to red brick at the fifteenth story, cheerless cinderblocks at the forty third, polished granite at the ninety sixth, steel at the hundred fifty first, lightweight polycarbonate I-beams and opaque Plexiglas at the two hundredth, and so on. There are no windows.

On page 29 in our edition of "A Stream of Illusion," Carter talks briefly about sensory information coming into the brain and how it is processed. "Sensory signals coming from the sense organs," she writes, "travel to the cortex along very fast pathways that pass (with the exception of olfactory signals) through the thalamus." From here, in the thalamus, they are dispatched to wherever it is they're supposed to go. So what of the sense of smell?

I am stuffed with sushi. A small reward after a good evening run. The weather was perfect for it. My whites are in the laundry in preparation for Natasha's arrival tomorrow. One's clothing and one's bed linens can't be too scrubbed when one's significant other flies in from out-of-town. There's nothing like the love of a good woman for the cleaning-up of one's act. Otherwise I would have happily spent another night on soiled sheets. I am deliciously heavy with postprandial drowse and there's a good chance I'll get to see Springsteen and the E Street Band at the Garden in October (even if "Radio Nowhere" blows ass, I'll still pump my fist to "Badlands" and weep with the Jersey meatheads on "Thunder Road"). I am content. Everything is right. It could not be otherwise. I am a Zen master at peace with the world.

Rita Carter, towards the end of our selection from Exploring Consciousness, discusses, briefly, almost as a throwaway, the levels of awareness our minds seem capable, upon introspection, of attaining (forgive me my weak Jamesian mimicry!). "The human mind," she says, "can lift itself by its bootstraps to higher and higher levels of self-reflection in the process known as introspection," which occurs, "when the contents of one's consciousness itself becomes the subject of attention" (43). Essentially, I take this to mean, and I think we more or less agreed on this as a class, that our minds are capable of not only perceiving qualia, but also knowing we perceive that qualia, and knowing we know we perceive the qualia, and so on a so forth, upwards of four or five levels, after which it all kind of falls apart. I think this model of introspection is useful in attempting to understand James' construction of The Turn of the Screw.

It’s Friday night and I have no life. Might as well blog.

This last Wednesday I went and saw Steve Earle at Town Hall and for thirty minutes or so, it was incredible. He opened up with a Dylan cover and moved smoothly through his not insubstantial set of hits and everyone was happy. But then (By the way, a bunch of Mennonite women wearing Mets jerseys in the upper deck at Shea just found out they’re on TV and they’re going ape shit. One of them’s on a cell phone – I’m assuming whomever she’s talking to is telling her she’s on TV – and then she starts hollering at the others and then they go nuts, bouncing around and pointing at a camera somewhere. Man, what a country.) he starts playing all this weird stuff from his new album that involves him with his guitar and harmonica and some guy pushing the buttons on a synthesized drum kit. So its basically him and a computer on stage. What?