soul singularity

Sometimes I wake up and don’t know where I am.

This is, of course, a regular phenomenon for fraternity members, but my own amnesia needs no assistance from a bottle. Some days I jolt upright from a nap and scan my bedroom with an intense bewilderment. The low broad dresser, the ceiling fan, the oval mirror and pale yellow walls are familiar, but also foreign. What is this place? Although I recognize the bedroom, somehow I can’t grasp its connection to me. Perhaps it’s not a matter of understanding where I am so much as why: why this room, this house? Or broader – why are there walls? Why a ceiling? Why texture and color and dimension?

These moments seem as if I’ve fallen out of more than a nap – I’ve popped out of a lifelong dream, with existence itself a groggy illusion. Gradually the whirling clouds within my mind dissipate, allowing the arbitrariness of the world to weigh in with a groan. Oh yes, I remember – my life has particulars. I live in Maryland. I’m a teacher. I enjoy frisbee, computers, the great outdoors. I love ideas. Although these things describe me, they descend upon me like a cast-iron mold, custom-fit but tired and disappointing as a rerun.

Once, waking from a nap, I was convinced that my entire four-year marriage to my wife had been only a dream. It was a bittersweet realization: “Gosh, she was nice,” my heart yearned, “what a sweet dream.” I regretted that she was not real, and felt that my heart had been enriched simply by dreaming her.

Where do I go when I’m asleep, if even the most basic aspects of my life and personality must catch up with me when I return?

When I was a teenager I caught my brother once leaning over the side of his bed, only partially awake, staring at the telephone ringing just two feet away. “Go on, pick it up,” I coaxed from his doorway, but he didn’t seem to recognize the words as speech. He just lay there, eyes wide, baffled, staring at this piece of plastic shrilling at him.

Where was he, at that moment? Where do any of us go?

Wherever it is, it’s a nice place to be. There’s an odd comfort in sloughing off memory, wiping life clean, peeling away our layers down to the core. It’s rare that we slow ourselves and the multifarious buzzings of our minds – even our five insistent senses poke and prod at us relentlessly.

I had a unique opportunity to witness the stripping away of my senses, one by one, on an inexorably cold January morning in Beijing. I’d crept out of bed at five a.m., sans breakfast, to meet some friends coming in on an overnight train from a nearby city. The bus to the station was standing room only, even at that hour, and as I planted my feet and gripped the rail above me, a distinct boundary of numbness began creeping down my arm. Its frigid movement was methodical, distinct, like a slow x-ray. Soon it was joined by others – from each of my hands and feet an icy band was inching towards my torso.

I checked the other passengers’ expressions – could they see in my face any sign of what was happening to me? – and noticed a pulsing grayness gathering before my eyes. Then the roar of the bus became small, tinny, as if two styrofoam cups were closing around my ears, and I realized, “Oh, I’m passing out!” I hadn’t been eating well that winter, and that, combined with the cold and my five a.m. exhaustion, was causing my body to shut itself down. My next thought followed immediately: “No way am I going to pass out in front of all these Chinese people!” (The Chinese aren’t shy about staring. I wasn’t about to give them the chance to say to each other, “Hey, look at the white guy on the floor of the bus!”)

So I gripped the rail firmly and resolved not to fall. The more my vision blacked out, the more my hearing closed down, the tighter I clenched my fist. Within minutes I could see, hear, and feel nothing but the pitching floor as it jostled my balance to and fro. Then that, too, vanished, leaving me floating in womb-like darkness, simple and warm and free. I found myself still standing when the bus arrived at the subway station. The thirty-minute ride had taken only a few minutes, or so it seemed – apparently I’d lost my sense of time, as well as every other conscious thought except the sole belief that, in some other world, a body that looked like mine was about to crumple to the floor of a bus to be gawked at, and I could prevent it by sheer willpower.

Where had I gone, wrapped in that sincere contentment, that darkness displacing as death and yet so perfectly welcoming, closer than any home?

In a way we float in darkness constantly. We spend our lives walking in the nulling bliss of ignorance as our gray matter drops something like ninety-nine percent of all sensory data. Far from sponges, our brains are sieves, each second allowing to drain from our awareness the hum of the refrigerator, the nosetip between our eyes, the denim rubbing the backs of our knees. Little manages to command our attention; whatever does is only a thin residue of all that our experiences contain.

As if senses aren’t enough, our brains drop an even greater amount of our memories. I can’t recall a single experience from before the age of five, and remember only flickering details from my early school years. A conservative estimate makes that thirty thousand hours wiped clean – a veritable iceberg of experience, critical in my formation, yet hidden beneath a flat, featureless sea of forgetfulness. And the problem compounds – the older I become, the more the days and weeks blend into one another. Now my mind drops not only names, but sometimes faces; not only conversations, but entire events. It makes me wonder if, eventually, the iceberg of my past will sink entirely beneath the surface, leaving me living solely on the single tip of the present.

We take vacations to clear our minds, get away from it all — perhaps living in the present will be the ultimate vacation, a true and perfect clearing of the mind. If so, one of my vacations gave me, I suspect, a foretaste of this feeling. Back in 1997 I took four high school students and two chaperones up to Ontario for a canoeing and camping trip in a wilderness preserve practically devoid of people. For seven days we had absolutely no contact with the civilized world, which would have been relaxing had I not been distracted by the incessant needling fear that something would go wrong.

By the end of the fifth day, however – a day in which we portaged three canoes, a kayak and a week’s worth of food and gear over two hilly kilometers – something in me settled. No disasters had struck, the group was cooperating well, the weather was fine, and the week was nearly over. Utterly spent, I laid my head down on a stone beneath the purpling sky, my fears subsiding. The trip was going to be a success, and this welcome realization drew from me a deep, rounded sigh of satisfaction.

Six hours of paddling and a seventeen-hour drive still separated us from Maryland. Nevertheless, despite the damp ground and chilling air, that stone beneath my head was all the home I needed, and would ever need – I was content to stay there forever. The particulars of my life had been shucked clean; only I was left, a soul singularity, alone, attuned to my surroundings, aware – a transparent eyeball, as Emerson wrote, with the currents of the Universal Being circulating through me.

I wonder if old age will be like that. I wonder how it will feel as the relentless years cause my brain to rust through until even the residue of my personality rinses away and simply I remain, inhaling and exhaling, in the persistent wash of the present.

That happened to my grandmother. Ridden with Parkinson’s, she spent her few final years in a nursing home room with beeping machines and a huge TV blaring baseball at her. She called the hallway the “street,” the room her “house,” and confused me with my father. Kindly, her mind also shed the scars of a painful life, her fierce and bitter pride giving way to a sweet dependence on the nursing home staff, with whom she developed almost girlish teasing friendships. Little of the grandmother I knew remained – only the occasional platitude (“Well, you never can tell,”) that was more neurological reflex than actual constructive response. She herself was no longer there, save for the barest essence still to be shrugged away.

The day is coming when we will no longer be here. Already I can see hints of the path ahead, as the gap between all I am and all I have forgotten narrows. In time that gap will close completely. Whatever of me lingers will then exhale in a final, consummating sigh, letting loose the last thin ligaments connecting me to this world … and simply I will emerge, singular, solitary and pure.

How strange it will be, stripping clean of the sum of everything – and yet, strangely, how welcome and familiar, like home.