Something has been bothering me about Survivors Song, the novel I've just finished reading, and it's not primarily the zombies (who are not really zombies), the human flesh eating scenes, the desperate journey undertaken by the main characters in search of help--it's none of that at all, and I'm sorry if my blog seems to have taken on a zombie theme of late, but what has been bothering me, as I was able this morning to suddenly determine, is the description of a mind in incremental collapse, because I am sensing day by day that my own mind is sailing a uncomfortably similar course.
In the novel, the two central characters, Ramola, a young pediatrics doctor, and her long time friend, Natalie, who has just been bitten by a rabid man, find themselves caught up in increasingly desperate circumstances as they attempt to get swift treatment for Natalie, both aware that this particularly virulent version of rabies progresses within just a few hours to violent madness and death. It is an awareness that progresses from what is merely detached acknowledgment to grave reality, from aloof observation to painful experience.
What seeded itself in my mind, finding a point of personal reference, was not the horror of being bitten or the continual threat of being even further bitten or even of going rabid oneself, but the horror of one's mind slipping away, the irrepressible piece by piece subtraction of one's mental acuity, one's very sense of self until he is left only as a biological aggregate of functioning organic systems without discernable soulfulness.
What presses itself upon me is a daily awareness of a growing fogginess of mind, an increasingly common habit of having to grasp for simple things, a stubborn retreat of common language production. I've seen all this happen before in my mother, in the rather swift progression of Alzheimer's disease which overtook her and overcame her. The feeling of being able to only helplessly observe was horrible enough. The feeling of having fallen oneself into that relentless torrent is sheer terror. Disbelief, then denial, then terror.
Am I suffering from the early onset of Alzheimer's? Or is this all part of MS--just brain fog, no worries? Or am I merely insufficiently engaged, my mind lacking exercise? And yet look what happens when I try to exercise it--staring at the screen, consulting the thesaurus, chasing ghosts within a fog, producing gibberish. None of this, as I have said, but none of this, is what I meant to say.
I remember a little spiral notebook my mother kept in a bedside drawer. In it she had written numbers, numbers and numbers--telephone numbers, I think--and she had written her own name, again and again, in various renditions, various styles of penmanship, various spellings. Desperately clinging to herself.
Do you know how many things I myself have written down? My address. My phone number. Multiple passwords. And which of these, I wonder, is correct, if any? And which, however carefully recorded, can hope to maintain anything of essential meaning? One tries to save the pieces as if they might reconstitute the vessel.
Well, maybe I'm just tired, I say. We say. A good night's sleep is sure to do me a world of good, and all will be clear in the morning.
In the novel, the two central characters, Ramola, a young pediatrics doctor, and her long time friend, Natalie, who has just been bitten by a rabid man, find themselves caught up in increasingly desperate circumstances as they attempt to get swift treatment for Natalie, both aware that this particularly virulent version of rabies progresses within just a few hours to violent madness and death. It is an awareness that progresses from what is merely detached acknowledgment to grave reality, from aloof observation to painful experience.
What seeded itself in my mind, finding a point of personal reference, was not the horror of being bitten or the continual threat of being even further bitten or even of going rabid oneself, but the horror of one's mind slipping away, the irrepressible piece by piece subtraction of one's mental acuity, one's very sense of self until he is left only as a biological aggregate of functioning organic systems without discernable soulfulness.
What presses itself upon me is a daily awareness of a growing fogginess of mind, an increasingly common habit of having to grasp for simple things, a stubborn retreat of common language production. I've seen all this happen before in my mother, in the rather swift progression of Alzheimer's disease which overtook her and overcame her. The feeling of being able to only helplessly observe was horrible enough. The feeling of having fallen oneself into that relentless torrent is sheer terror. Disbelief, then denial, then terror.
Am I suffering from the early onset of Alzheimer's? Or is this all part of MS--just brain fog, no worries? Or am I merely insufficiently engaged, my mind lacking exercise? And yet look what happens when I try to exercise it--staring at the screen, consulting the thesaurus, chasing ghosts within a fog, producing gibberish. None of this, as I have said, but none of this, is what I meant to say.
I remember a little spiral notebook my mother kept in a bedside drawer. In it she had written numbers, numbers and numbers--telephone numbers, I think--and she had written her own name, again and again, in various renditions, various styles of penmanship, various spellings. Desperately clinging to herself.
Do you know how many things I myself have written down? My address. My phone number. Multiple passwords. And which of these, I wonder, is correct, if any? And which, however carefully recorded, can hope to maintain anything of essential meaning? One tries to save the pieces as if they might reconstitute the vessel.
Well, maybe I'm just tired, I say. We say. A good night's sleep is sure to do me a world of good, and all will be clear in the morning.
No comments:
Post a Comment