A young man jogging down the street stopped and told me that his uncle lives in a house around the corner, while he lives in Santa Fe. Then he said, we have the post-Copernican dilemma of being a peripheral and insignificant inhabitant of a vast cosmos, and the post-Cartesian dilemma of being a conscious purposeful and personal subject confronting an unconscious purposeless and impersonal universe, with these compounded by "I need a new battery for my car, and don't have enough cash with me. Would you have..." I shook my head. "It's okay. My uncle should be home soon," and he jogged on.
Tibetan prayer flags flap over the head of a white bird found dead on the street. |
 |
crawling
through-- probably from an air gun or a .22. We carry him to the dumper, and pray for his spirit, rising above the rubbish and stink. |
A while later, there was a knock on my door. "My uncle gave me some money, but I'm still two dollars short. Could you loan it to me? I'll return it tomorrow." Exasperated, I gave him the money. He smiled, and blessed me. That's when I knew the extremely acute oneiric memory displayed by the Indians probably results to some extent from a broken sleep that is divided into a series of short snatches interrupted by a wailing child, a suspicious noise, the barking of a dog or an insistent sensation of discomfort when the dying fire no longer palliates the night chill. Upon surfacing the amygdala can house memories and response repertories that we enact without quite realizing why we do so because if one explores the microscopic network of synapses with electrodes to detect the results of electrical firing, the majority of synapses are not expressed, that is, they show no detectable firing activity. They are what have been called 'silent synapses.' But why are they silent, and how does their silence relate to the signals, codes, or messages that the shortcut from thalamus to amygdala completely bypasses the neocortex. This bypass seems to allow the amygdala to be a repository for emotional impressions and memories from each of these little excursions of the soul I'd never see him and the money again.
