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| Foetus, 1911, Encyclopaedia Britannica |
I have no more idea of what the workspace is than you
do. The Cartesian stage with its
infinitely receding subject homunculus has vanished i’the air, into thin
air. Saint Daniel talks of multiple
drafts, and a virtual machine that hovers in the brain and shuffles these
drafts in and out. I am a simple man,
and know nothing of computers or, I often feel in the fastnesses of the night, much
else.
But enough of modesty.
Here’s what I think.
The problem of exactly what it is that does all this grandstanding at the centre of
our identity is huge and difficult, and I promised to go nowhere near
it. So I will just look at it from
afar. I talk only in my language. Things might be different for you. There is I, who does things, emotes, and am,
and there is me, which cannot am, but only is, and that only retrospectively. “Who’s
that?” “It’s me.” “Who’s next?”
“Me.”
“It’s me” suggests at
least two, and then there’s you. “You’re
lying.” I know that you is me, but me in
your ideoverse, not mine. Three, then,
at least. And then your name. Oi! Sether Albert! There, see what I mean. You know it’s you, we know its him, he knows
this him is me. And other forms of
reference. “That fucking git in a dress
who spouts garbage on the ringroad.”
Alas, I. And me.
No, sethren, language will get us nowhere. Sed in
machina sit deus. My Latin is a bit
rusty, but on this day of new leadership for a different and archaic faith, I
thought I should celebrate it in its own tongue.
Let us look elsewhere.
Let us look at the foetal brain, the brain before Culture. The thing to get hold of here is that we don’t
have brain as one thing, then all that goes on in and around the brain as another. We don’t have brain and then, in the old
philosophy, thought. From blastocyst to
neonate, the brain develops as a working process. The foetal brain forms along with light and
darkness, the noise of a mighty rushing wind and pipes gurgling, the sacred and
the profane, the thunder and jitter of drums, voices, the aching distance of a
bone flute, the flutter of fire, the rock and jiggle of kinesis, the stutter of
rap. And these don’t work on an inert
receiver. The foetal brain is not a
vinyl disc onto which the world engraves itself. The foetal brain, can you not remember it,
that dance of colour, not kaleidoscopic, as I recall, but dancing orientations
of colour and lines (yes, sether, colour does seem to be part of cognitive bias, where do you get these things?) a visual and aural synaesthesia, the kora
as it sweeps the heavens, that harpsichord bit in maybe the fourth Brandenburg,
the Madonna of the Rocks at the stratum of pure hue. That at some stage is what is going on in the
foetal brain.
And then suddenly, the child is born, and the hugest changes
we will ever feel take place, just like that.
And the energy of the universe rushes in, magnificent and
terrifying. Five seconds. Enough.
“Enough” is the beginning of what we might understand as the centre of
the neonate’s ideoverse, the top of the hierarchy of neurons and connections,
the meeting place, where things are decided.
Like “Enough”. The baby closes
down the portals to the world, and begins the infinite process of sorting out
that energy. Huge demons spin in the
neural substrate. Gradually they settle
and calm. For a moment the baby
sleeps. Then again it’s eyes open.
The process continues over hours and years. The demons increase in number geometrically,
have to be re-sorted, they drift together in alliances, alliances muscle in on
the processes of perception and organisation. Demons evolve an economy, they become smaller
and more differentiated. Alliances drift
up the taxonomy:
demon thing action concept map praxis Culture
This goes on for the rest of our lives, sethren, or as long
as we are properly alive. Elderliness is
not a neurological condition like dementia. It is the fading away of that thing
we are looking for, that which is not I or me or you, though I or me or you is
exactly what we call it.
But from neonate, even from foetus, to last conscious
breath, the meeting place where in the just new-born there fires “Enough”, and
the portals to the universe are closed down, and the brain does miraculous work
on what is there; and then in the meeting space there shouts “More”, and the
portals are opened again to more wonder; that meeting place is what we are
after, but it is nameless. The workspace
is hardly an elegant phrase for the unnameable.
What else can we properly call it?
Oh. Off they have
fucked, without my adjuration. And I have
no dinner money. Fuck.
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