Swallow the Ghost

You had to fade into the landscape, or like the writer of the thistle chronicles, you had to pretend it wasn’t there for as long as possible. To acknowledge it, to try to name it, might be a way of letting it in. (For the same reason, I suppose, I have continued to refer to the changes in me as a “brightness,” because to examine this condition too

It was as if I had become the thought and there was nothing I could do to escape.

When memories make themselves manifest, they alight like butterflies—fleeting, momentary, ineffable, seemingly uncapturable. The task of the writer then, having had the epiphany embedded within memory, is to relate not only the message from the dream embedded within the memory, but to also articulate, in language, that nebulous nature of the memory

Nobody could reach my true self—my mind—which resided elsewhere. My true self was the brain that consumed books in bed each morning with an absorption so deep I often forgot to eat. And yet this “real” self was so ephemeral. It existed in perfect isolation, without witness, and seemed to change from one day to the next.

There are several ways this temporary rewiring of the brain may affect mental experience. When the memory and emotion centers are allowed to communicate directly with the visual processing centers, it’s possible our wishes and fears, prejudices and emotions, begin to inform what we see—a hallmark of primary consciousness and a recipe for magical th

I am sitting under a bankside sycamore; my mind is a slope. Arthur Koestler wrote, “In his review of the literature on the psychological present, Woodrow found that its maximum span is estimated to lie between 2.3 and 12 seconds.” How did anyone measure that slide? As soon as you are conscious of it, it is gone. I repeat a phrase: the thin tops of