Up and tap-tap-tapping

Not sleeping too good tonight, hell, I never have slept too good, so I’m up and tap-tap-tapping, trying to make some sense out of this life of mine, of this world of ours. I’m not sure there’s any sense to be made of it, but at my age you delude yourself. I can compare it to a book I’m reading, A Universe Of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination by Gerald Edelman and Giulio Tononi: a couple of brain scientists hypothesizing about how consciousness happens, how we generate thought. A tall order, no? While they succeed in giving the reader a new and deeper respect for the complexities of our brains, they shed little new light on how the process happens, no more than say William James did a hundred years ago in his masterpiece Principles of Psychology. WelI, OK, maybe that’s unfair, but you get the feeling of two perplexed scientists fumbling around trying to be the first on their block to come up with an acceptable explanation of something that is essentially unexplainable—at least at this point in our development—because they’re using the brain to explain itself. Brain-generated language doesn’t suffice. Can thought fathom thought? Can language reveal its source? More to the point, can thinking extricate itself from the thought process in order to understand the thought process? Quien sabe, Kemo Sabe? But these dudes have the cred, bravado, and intellectual self-assurance to give it a shot. Unfortunately it comes out mostly as wishful thinking. Close, but no banana. Which, to return to where I started, is pretty much where I’m at at 2:00 in the morning trying to make sense out of life and the world: wishful thinking. I suppose this is what happens when you get to your mid-sixties and start looking across whatever number of years you have remaining and suddenly realize you don’t know shit and never did, and there’s this long lonely gulf where you fall away from life as you’ve known it and you’re faced with an image of a tiny pea rolling around in a vast, dark, unfathomable cosmos, unanchored, untethered, unprepared for what’s to come, so you start telling yourself stories that are guaranteed to keep you awake at night. Eventually you get out of bed, throw a log on the fire, eat some peanut butter toast and, like I said up top, try to make some sense of it all. I suspect I’ll have about as much success with this as Edelman and Tononi did with their self-consciously twisted image of the mind all doubling back on itself in the throes of thought-birth, or re-entrance, as the process is known to brain explorers: the idea that consciousness is a roaring flow of energy coursing through our neural nooks and crannies at the speed of thought, incessantly recirculated to new compartments of the brain for nourishment and inspiration, over, under, around and through the neural mass, until the un-thought thought train hits all required neuronic stations, is tinkered with, touched and retouched, adjusted and readjusted, until each of billions of participating nerves and sparking synapses has made its infinitesimal contribution. Thusly are thoughts--and consciousness itself--born and reborn like stories from nowhere, like shimmering fish from the white-hot volcanic depths of the seething cauldron we call mind. But what the heck. What else is there to do?