Sunday, April 22, 2007

I'd Walk A Mile To Be Bicameral




I always seem to self-correct myself, and I do not think it is from being bipolar. Here's the deal, friends. One of my major health problems is the fact that my head cannot be kept steady, it lolls to the right side, I think because it gives my good left eye a greater range. But my neck eventually goes wacky, the blood vessels constrict, and then I get all loopy. Well, loopier. Tomorrow I will get an anti-inflammatory injection in my neck with a needle that reaches to the bone, an inch or so from my carotid artery, and for a week or so, as with the injections in my back, I get to be part of the human race again. But by pure happenstance, I read about psychologist Julian James and his theory of the Bicameral mind. He postulated that up until about 3,000 years ago, humans did not have the thought process of a unicameral mind, i.e., instead of having a series of connective thoughts in one's brain, it was more like thinking was a series of visions or hallucinations. Some thought them religious visions, hence the Epic of Gilgamesh, writer still unknown. So why do I feel so dastardly one evening, wanting to get on that Greyhound to Portland and hang myself from the Willimantic Bridge, and then keep dog paddling with my head above the water when I know damn well I'll start sinking again and again. That's why all my stories, the good ones, are narratives. Maybe when my neck is the way it is, sometimes worse than it is now--watch videos of me at conventions, I turn my head and it looks like a bowling ball with ears dropping into the gutter--I just get these dark moments so that I can blurt them out onto paper. Or this inhumane computer thing. When I am this low, I could give a damn if I'm relegated to being a "writer unknown" like the person who envisioned Gilgamesh and his buddy Enkidu. Crazy person in residence, Wayne Allen Sallee AKA The Insane Unknown