LifeBefore

One writes to make a difference, or simply to try to distinguish, not extinguish…
As each moment passes, one attempts to leave one trace, so each moment, in its particular uniqueness, is noticed — “I bore witness to myself.”

As much as the miracle of healing can take place – and we cannot take credit for that – there are points of no return.
What happened is what happened.
Overall though, I am where I am and you are where you are.
In that sense, we do not really communicate. As Artaud said: “we are (only) making signals through the flames.”
That difference is paramount. And unbridgeable: tears are not enough.
In this culture of denial, the dictatorship of positivity reigns; nobody has actually any room for what is conveniently summarized as “negativity” & real difference.

Brother David Steindl-Rast, A Network of Grateful Living (ANG*L) and his many books!

Br. Steindl-Rast, against solidification:
The religions start from mysticism. There is no other way to start a religion. But, I compare this to a volcano that gushes forth …and then …the magma flows down the sides of the mountain and cools off. And when it reaches the bottom, it’s just rocks. You’d never guess that there was fire in it. So after a couple of hundred years, or two thousand years or more, what was once alive is dead rock. Doctrine becomes doctrinaire. Morals become moralistic. Ritual becomes ritualistic. What do we do with it? We have to push through this crust and go to the fire that’s within it. — During Link TV’s Lunch With Bokara 2005 episode The Monk and the Rabbi.

[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:

What U.G. Krishnamurti (not the famous one) said over and over in his books already made a lot of sense before my surgery.

Now, would anyone be able to hear what he said, it would save a lot of my efforts in explaining the particular distance I started describing in my earlier posts (Brecht, Herzog…).

If you are willing to enter his realm – not a matter of arguing with him – there are many texts/sites that could challenge your self.
U.G.
The two main sites:

U.G.Krishnamurti.org
&
U.G.Krishnamurti.Net

And books (composed primarily of interviews):

My teaching, if that is the word you want to use, has no copyright. You are free to reproduce, distribute, interpret, misinterpret, distort, garble, do what you like, even claim authorship, without my consent or the permission of anybody.
–U.G.


I lead a so-called “normal life” except that my father, one day around 6 or 7 in the morning, had died of a brain hemorrhage at the age of 55.
I had wondered whether it had been an earlier trip to the mountains that had precipitated it (or some imagined sexual activity); we did not know nor did any doctor we had spoken to. His blood pressure had not seemed an issue.

With that kind of history a radiologist friend had recommended that I get an MRI of my brain, and I did: an AVM was present, like a knot of small vessels.

The neurosurgeon wanted to operate – either the regular way or with gamma knife. All of it sounded scary – I wanted to leave my brain alone. A neurologist friend had told me that if it were asymptomatic, not to touch it. The AVM could have been present all of my life and may have remained stable until old age.
And I kept thinking of how surgeons may think of surgery the way butchers think of cuts…

Later, I found out that one of my paternal grandfather or great-grandfather had died of a brain hemorrhage and so had one of my father’s sisters.

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.