Every now and then your head swims.

June 16, 2008 in Stuff
Tags: නාම රුප, Hypnic Jerk, Myoclonic Twitch, Self Is Metonymy

Every now and then your head swims. Doesn’t it? It’s like the way your body sometimes shudders, that involuntary myoclonic twitch when you come awake from being half-asleep -it’s called the hypnic jerk, though it amuses me to call it the hylic jerk instead. Some say it happens because something in your brain thinks you’re a monkey falling out of a tree. Some say it means your soul is returning from wandering and bumped its shin on the catflap on its way back in -that would make it a pneumatic jerk as well as a hylic one. Heh. Both of those things are about a dislocation, a mis-fitting, a readjustment of perspective.

There is a corresponding dislocation of mind, when you suddenly look up and for no reason see your life from the outside, as if it were a play, and a distant play. It is most startling when it happens mid-sentence, because it breaks the illusion of self. Your head swims, as you try to reorient yourself. Something in you is out of time. Or perhaps it is the other way around, and something that is out of time is what you are. It is not an effort to return to being something that is in time -no, it’s a lot like falling, though not like falling from a great height. More like falling off the first step of a ladder. A breathless moment and a thud as you drop and hold your balance.

When we say “I”, this is metonymy.

This is the dislocation, the psychic jerk: suddenly through our own eyes to remember our face and our name. That despite the space we feel about us -or that we felt, when we were not ourself, or a self at all- a space of possibility, of contiguity, or both -we are not free of everything that we have done, or not done; and all these things are what bind us into one name, one face, out of the many, many. Out of the endless space, falling off the first step, not losing your balance, reclaiming the right and obligation to a name.

And no, I don’t believe in pneuma, and no I don’t make such a sharp distinction between hyle and psyche as the people who first used these words, but then nobody makes that distinction any more, because it long ago became obvious that if we were any thing at all, we were continuum. A myoclonic twitch, a psychological segmentation fault, a second of terror, fear of the fall.

I tell you: we are not free.