The Care and Keeping of a Brain

Ok, even a literary novice like myself realizes that the worst possible ending sentence for a book is “It was all just a dream… or was it?” Which makes me fantasize about a prank appending this sentence to, say, every work in the Penguin Classics series. Watch, I’ll never get a job copyediting now.

Still, I’ve realized that one of my on-going themes is distrust of my own brain… It’s been coming up a lot lately in terms of self-doubt, and the odd circuitousness of knowing how your own head works and trying to out-think it, making a habit of filing doubts away right now because they are not useful to the process of making words come out. The funny thing is how doubts don’t like being filed away, and fight back with meta-doubts about the process, generate stories about people who dismissed as doubts their own intuition and good old common sense and came to terrible ends.

I am sure some of it is defensive, my brain having decided ages ago that should it whisper the most devastating things to me it could imagine it would act as an inocculation or homeopathic against the inevitable criticism coming from elsewhere, and yet when I listen to that I become mistrustful of real flesh-and-blood people saying actual nice things to me. Which is not a good direction to go in.

And it is a double-edged sword, how something can seem diamond-brilliant in the evening, and the next morning you re-read it and are embarrassed to have been seen parading about in such cheap costume jewelry, or can seem a bit tawdry at first and then you understand that there is a deeper glint to it. So, you conclude you have no judgement as far as your writing (and perhaps many other things!) are concerned, and that leaves you with the choice between scribbling in journals that you want burnt upon your demise, trying to find safety in reclusiveness, or at least as much conformity as you can muster, or taking a risk and putting it out there.

Sometimes I wonder if my approach to self-doubt and mistrusting my brain would be something more therapeutic or pragmatic or perhaps hypochondriacal had I been a psychology major instead of a philosophy major. Because I tend to look rather skeptically at the premise of certainty, in the end, after all, that it is not just judgement I am not sure of, but the foundation of knowledge itself (foundations themselve?). Or I wonder if I had been a literature major if I would have taken this as the natural unfoldment of story, our understanding of a situation changes, so instead of pathologizing it or taking it as the crack that admits persistent and pervasive doubt, I might instead have learned to appreciate the way it keeps things from getting too static, heightens the drama, keeps things interesting.

But hey, it was all just a dream… or was it?