General

[Addendum: les morts-vivants sur France-Culture]

There is a Jewish joke about someone prostrating himself on the floor during the holiday of Yom Kippur and being ridiculed by two observers muttering to themselves “Look who thinks he’s nobody!”

After “being nobody” by not being able to move, speak and communicate, there is no going back to the innocence – and the naivety – of a simple existence; the point of no return can turn most activity into just that, just an activity.

Most people imagine themselves in charge of their own lives and relegate questions about free-will to philosophers.

Rarely do we question what we take for granted, but here is
a brilliant article that does just that – in the New York Times.

It is by Ferris Jabr, a freelance writer and an associate editor at Scientific American.

Why Nothing Is Truly Alive

By FERRIS JABR
MARCH 12, 2014

On a windy day in Ypenburg, the Netherlands, you can sometimes see sculptures the size of buses scuttling across a sandy hill. Made mostly from intricately conjoined plastic tubes, wood and sails, the many-legged skeletons move so fluidly and autonomously that it’s tempting to think of them as alive. Their maker, the Dutch artist Theo Jansen, certainly does. “Since 1990, I have been occupied creating new forms of life,” he says on his website. He calls them Strandbeest. “Eventually I want to put these animals out in herds on the beaches, so they will live their own lives.”

Poetic, most would say, but Strandbeest are not alive. They are just machines — elaborate, beautiful ones, but inanimate contraptions nonetheless. A few months ago I would have agreed with this reasoning. But that was before I had a remarkable insight about the nature of life. Now, I would argue that Strandbeest are no more or less alive than animals, fungi and plants. In fact, nothing is truly alive.

What is life? Science cannot tell us. Since the time of Aristotle, philosophers and scientists have struggled and failed to produce a precise, universally accepted definition of life. To compensate, modern textbooks point to characteristics that supposedly distinguish the living from the inanimate, the most important of which are organization, growth, reproduction and evolution. But there are numerous exceptions: both living things that lack some of the ostensibly distinctive features of life and inanimate things that have properties of the living.

Crystals, for example, are highly organized; they grow; and they faithfully replicate their structures, but we do not think of them as alive. Similarly, certain computer programs known as “digital organisms” can reproduce, mate and evolve, but ushering such software through the gates to the kingdom of life makes many people uncomfortable. Conversely, some organisms — such as gummy bear-shaped microanimals called tardigrades and brine shrimp (whose eggs are sealed up in little packets like baker’s yeast under the brand name Sea Monkeys) — can enter a period of extreme dormancy during which they stop eating, growing and changing in any way for years at a time, yet are still regarded as living organisms.

In the 1990s, a group of scientists tasked with helping NASA find life on other planets devised a working definition of life: a self-sustaining system capable of Darwinian evolution. Even this phrase does not satisfactorily identify the fundamental difference between living things and nonliving things.

Consider a virus: a bit of DNA or RNA encased in protein that hijacks a cell to make copies of itself. Viruses are incredibly efficient reproducers and they certainly evolve — much faster than most creatures. Yet biologists have disagreed for centuries about whether viruses belong among the ranks of the living, the inanimate or in some kind of purgatory. Gerald Joyce, one of the scientists who helped devise NASA’s working definition of life, says that viruses do not satisfy the definition because they are not “self-sustaining” — that is, they can only evolve in the context of the cells they infect.

The same is true, though, of many larger parasites that everyone agrees are alive. Bloodthirsty intestinal worms, vines that suck the sap from other plants, fungi that extrude filamentous antlers of flame orange through the shells of spiders they have killed — all are just as dependent on their hosts to reproduce and evolve as is a virus.

About 10 years after serving on the NASA panel, Mr. Joyce embarked on experiments that further deflated the agency’s working definition of life. In the lab, he and his colleagues coaxed into existence two rather unique molecules of RNA that can indefinitely make copies of one another by stitching together sequences of nucleotides, their building blocks. Four billion years ago, in Earth’s primordial soup, similar self-replicating RNAs may have spontaneously formed from linkages of free-floating nucleotides. As naked pieces of RNA, they are even simpler than viruses and, because they can reproduce and evolve, Mr. Joyce admits that they, too, meet the working definition of life. Yet he hesitates to say they are alive.

Why so much ambivalence? Why is it so difficult for scientists to cleanly separate the living and nonliving and make a final decision about ambiguously animate viruses? Because they have been trying to define something that never existed in the first place. Here is my conclusion: Life is a concept, not a reality.

To better understand this argument, it’s helpful to distinguish between mental models and pure concepts. Sometimes the brain creates a representation of a thing: light bounces off a pine tree and into our eyes; molecules waft from its needles and ping neurons in our nose; the brain instantly weaves together these sensations with our memories to create a mental model of that tree. Other times the brain develops a pure concept based on observations — a useful way of thinking about the world. Our idealized notion of “a tree” is a pure concept. There is no such thing as “a tree” in the world outside the mind. Rather, there are billions of individual plants we have collectively named trees. You might think botanists have a precise unfailing definition of a tree — they don’t. Sometimes it’s really difficult to say whether a plant is a tree or shrub because “tree” and “shrub” are not properties intrinsic to plants — they are ideas we impinged on them.

Likewise, “life” is an idea. We find it useful to think of some things as alive and others as inanimate, but this division exists only in our heads.

Not only is defining life futile, but it is also unnecessary to understanding how living things work. All observable matter is, at its most fundamental level, an arrangement of atoms and their constituent particles. These associations range in complexity from something as simple as, say, a single molecule of water to something as astonishingly intricate as an ant colony. All the proposed features of life — metabolism, reproduction, evolution — are in fact processes that appear at many different regions of this great spectrum of matter. There is no precise threshold.

Some things we regard as inanimate are capable of some of the processes we want to make exclusive to life. And some things we say are alive get along just fine without some of those processes. Yet we have insisted that all matter naturally segregates into two categories — life and nonlife — and have searched in vain for the dividing line.

It’s not there. We must accept that the concept of life sometimes has its pragmatic value for our particular human purposes, but it does not reflect the reality of the universe outside the mind.

Theo Jansen and his Strandbeests/BeachBeasts
(Music by Khachaturian’s Spartacus)


Video by Theo Jansen

Recognizing life as a concept is, in many ways, liberating. We no longer need to recoil from our impulse to endow Mr. Jansen’s sculptures with “life” because they move on their own. The real reason Strandbeest enchant us is the same reason that any so-called “living thing” fascinates us: not because it is “alive,” but because it is so complex and, in its complexity, beautiful.

Watch a Strandbeest’s sail undulate in the wind, its gears begin to turn, its legs bend and extend in sync over and over — so dauntless, so determined. It does not matter whether this magnificent entity is alive or not. Just look at it go.
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Strong parallels with Cymatics:

The introduction, and the link to the text…

La vie est âpre, mais belle/Life is harsh, but beautiful. A.K. (a friend)

It seems that most humans are still very much excited to exchange thrills with each other (the best translation for the French “frisson”?). Is that enough to keep us going further, from image to image, or artwork to artwork? Could all cultural production stand at a standstill, just for a while? Maybe only then will we, as Cocteau pleaded for mirrors to do, finally have a chance for a little reflection?

The following short text – which characteristically seems to inspire no response – was written after my brain surgery and the loss of my mother, both of which are not mentioned in the text and totally irrelevant to it. To pay attention to this would be a reductionist way to avoid the content of the text. Life is not digestible, so why lie through writing and why lie to each other?

Yes indeed, the text may appear nihilistic, but as all die, that perspective is neither positive nor negative, just a form of realism…

More to the point, tabula rasa was something I grew up with: I was born a Jew in post-war Europe. My non-existent grandparents had not survived the Shoah. Whether praising peace or culture, all speeches seemed greatly farcical. My father who had fought in a Communist Resistance unit in France (cf. “L’Affiche Rouge”) died around May 68. Most of those who remember that period recall a celebration of freedom, but for me it was also the shock of witnessing the unfurled violence of the status quo – comparable to the military apparatus displayed around any presidential debate in the US.
Fortunately, I was not alone in perceiving most of the pretense around me. I was reading A.S. Neill, Reich and Artaud, Daumal, Michaux, Debord. Later Beckett, Porchia, and U. G. Krishnamurti (not the famous one) verified my perception of the surrounding vacuum.

Can insights be transmitted? Probably another delusion like the one that, through some kind of social pressure, has me explain myself and alert others.
I distrust words, I would have preferred not to speak, and a movie like L’Amour à Mort/Love Unto Death by Alain Resnais would point in the right direction.
For those who won’t find that film easily, I have to resort to the text below.

When asked to contribute to a 2010 conference on Media Literacy, I decided to address the topic of Cultural Literacy…

I speak of this elsewhere, but it was clear from the ICU on that what was considered normal was a complete aberration. Being surrounded in rehab by many brain surgery survivors who could only mutter vague sounds to express themselves, regular activities like speaking, holding a pen or defecating have to be considered miracles, amazing victories!

Nothing can be taken for granted.

We are born disabled, and most of our lives are probably disabled in one way or another (but deny it)… and we will most likely die disabled.

Another one of those “beams in the eye” – so prevalent it is one more omnipresent blind spot.

… the good and the bad.
You are in charge, even if you are dying.
(to be remembered, if possible, till the end)

Samuel Beckett
” Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
“I can’t go on, I will go on.”

Don Miguel
“Don’t Take Anything Personally. Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream.
When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won’t be the victim of needless suffering.”

As Ajahn Sumedho calls one of his books:
Don’t Take Your Life Personally

As time permits, I will try to create each bubble, each phase that connects with surviving a brain bleed, but anyone is welcome to engage with them on their own…

I had not known about this site… am I re-inventing the wheel? We will see whether this parallel effort can complement that great site…
FYI, AVM stands for Arteriovenous Malformation -as per their website – it is a deficiency in the cardiovascular system characterized by abnormalities between the arteries and veins. The affected areas usually lack cell nutrients and become filled with Carbon Dioxide, causing blood to tangle and form malformations. Malformations can occur in different parts of the body, and can cause fatal strokes when the tangled blood ruptures.

They have some good guidelines that I would think would be just right here too:

Let’s Keep it Nice & Clean
1. No Spam
2. No Personal attacks
3. No Offensive content (profanity, sexual references, illegal activity subject matter, pornographic material or photos)
4. No Profanity, sexual references and illegal activity subject matter are not allowed in the Chat Room.
5. Specific doctor or hospital names mentioned in a negative context, for legal reasons.    
Specific doctor or hospital names in a positive context are welcome.
Thanks for your cooperation.

After my brain hemorrhage, I looked for websites to guide me along. Short of that rare meeting when I could compare notes with another survivor, there was no place on the web to consult. So… Brain Bleed!

To summarize, I went from “hell” (how inadequate a word!) through “wild rides” to a present and constant knowledge of what I call “the arrogance of normalcy” – in other words like with many other disabilities,  I am not “normal” but most people are unaware of that.

So while I am neither a doctor nor a health professional (PLEASE do consult them if you are looking for more than just support – this blog nor its participants are liable for any misinformation), I am starting this site because “someone needs to do this.” This site may re-appear in a different format at a later point.

As the creator of “Brain Bleed” I reserve the right to edit or block any contribution/contributor that I deem not to be contributing to a supportive environment. Disagreement is allowed but, please no flaming, rants or insults. Yes there is uneven care out there but this is not the place to bad-mouth any medical staff.

Below is a mind map I created that may guide me along as I create, time permitting, the various categories to help us all navigate better this rough terrain.

Brain Bleed/Hemorrhage Mind Map ©Marton 2011

Please feel free to comment so I can tweak the mind-map to reflect the community of brain bleed survivors.