2 Hearts No Brain

Maybe you can help.  I found this in the street, not very far from here, if you know who it might belong to, can you let them know?  I was just on my was to town,  meet a friend for coffee, get a Gregg’s and buy some shampoo and eggs.  I was crossing the bridge.  Always bloody windy across here, dragging you one way or the other.  The smell and the grind of the motorway don’t help either.  I look down and a sheet of paper is flapping, pasted against my left shin.  I pick it up.  A second stuck to one of the railings.

It’s all a bit odd, if I’m going to be honest, but if I put it here, hopefully someone will claim it.  There’s a bit missing at the end, it seems.  It could be somebody’s coursework, maybe a script or a short story for something, I don’t know.

People always ask, “What is it like, having two brains but no heart? You must have some interesting ideas and amazing things happen to you”.  I try to explain to these people, but it is very difficult indeed.  Attempting to put so many overlapping thoughts into one cogent answer is impossible, so I put it here instead, with time to think.  I imagine that you would immediately think, ‘but with two brains, surely explaining this would be simple?’.

Unfortunately, the answer is no.  These two brains seem to cancel each other out most of the time.  They exist completely separate lives it seems. And they don’t trust each other.  I rarely feel the benefit of having two brains.  I certainly don’t spend all my time pondering philosophical questions or coming up with solutions to age-old mathematical problems.

The two brains confuse each other, either purposefully or not.  The best way to explain, I think, is that they speak different languages, or codes.  And are unable, or just refuse, to learn the others’ methods of communication. 

They tend to argue and fight a lot.  A lot of time and effort wasted in this process.  It makes me very tired.  I get so weary when they begin again.  They undo each others work without meaning it, or they work at the same thing at once.  Rushing to outdo the other, they slip up, make mistakes.

“do you feel lucky, having two brains?”  I get asked that question often.  Lucky?  I’m not sure I believe in the concept of luck, or even properly understand it.

You see, your standard human, having one brain and one heart, is able to dialectically decide.  Across the broad spectrum of experience, the correct decision [after endless environmental conditionings] can be made.  Left brain, right brain, left heart and right heart.  Romance and logic.  Assertiveness and passion.  Analysis and love.  Oppositions, acrossways and up and down, work in harmony.  Sometimes across these axes, with two standard poles, lives are lived, they often cross and are occasionally shared.

It is difficult, if not impossible then, for me to truly understand my situation, or that of others in relation. 

Someone once lived (or may still do), so I’ve heard, who had two hearts but lacked a brain.  (I read this on the Internet).  I’ve thought often of this individual, considering my own situation, how ironic it is.  I think that I would like to meet this individual, see if we could ever get on.

I would talk to them, if I could, and see what they were like.  Were he (or she or it) always crying?  Were they always laughing?  Did they want to commit suicide, or did they just want to have sex all the time?  I don’t know much about that person, or even if they definitely existed.  Where they were born, how or why they died, how long they lived?  Did these two hearts see 94 years of satisfied life, wizened and growing to understand?  Or did young eyes briefly see the angry, bitter, intolerant world; teared a small tear, then felt the snap of two hearts breaking?

Feelings.  I get asked about feelings a lot. “do you feel sensations of emotions?  Anger, pain, joy, sadness, happiness, contentment, love?”.  Whether I feel them or not, I don’t know.  A doctor did once say that feelings are chemical, and triggered by physical factors.  Without a heart though I cannot understand them.

Having 2 banks of memories is very strange indeed also, they are difficult to manipulate anyway.  Sometimes, ghost memories appear, about things that have never actually happened.  Sometimes things become memories as they happen, so that I think I have been doing this before when in fact I haven’t.  Often the most important ones (faces, places, good times) struggle in their eagerness to get to my eyes.  They tumble, disjoint or bounce back to storage far too quickly and I do not experience them properly.

These memories clash, their synthesis has odd effects.  Imagined futures, impossible presents or someone else’s pasts pop into view, clouding and confusing reality. An internal, abstract cinema.  I’m not sure what instigates these nrratives.  They may be just tricks or mistakes played by one or the other or both brains.  Some brain fluid leaking, perhaps, or juxtaposed synapses buzzing at each other too much or too little, the result of right brain and left brain in opposition, the front and back brains disputing the tiniest of things.

Sometimes, when one brain or the other is resting, things can work normally; can feel OK without the stresses of this internal duality.  This is oddly comfortable, but rarely lasts very long.

Sometimes, one left brain and the other right brain (or vice versa), find a common purpose and work in tandem.  I do feel a little taller, cleverer and quicker at these moments, happy (at least according to the dictionary).  This however does not last for very long.  They quickly begin to disagree, and to confuse each other again.  The vital translations get lost again (maybe when I sneeze?).  Then I return back to normal, or worse.

I was once asked whether I would like to have a heart, and I don’t know. I’m not sure.  From what I can deduce, from what I see around me and in other people, a heart seems to be a heavy burden indeed.

One question I am often asked is whether I “would like to experience

 

 And it ends there.   If you can shed any light, that would be great.

your conversations are like a powerplant, for fuck sake

My hand shakes a little, not to be melodramatic – it may just be the over-indulgence in caffeine or the lack of food today. I haven’t reached the level where I can honestly say that I’m grieving. It’s a strong term. I have suffered bereavement, but event that feels too weighty compared to what his family must be feeling. We all expected his death. The worst thing at the moment, as I potter around my room with music on, unpacking my things from work and getting changed, is that it hasn’t hit home yet. Whether losing somebody ever hits home, is another point. You get slowly used to the fact that you well never see that person again, and cry occasionally at the ever fading memories of that person – the smile, the laugh, the embrace, the 100 mile-an-hour conversations, the trumpet playing, the illness. I know that at some point, maybe tonight, drunkenly, maybe at some random point in the future in the middle of some completely unconnected task, tears and distress will come.

That occasional moment of reflection, of picturing your connection with that person, then snipping that little cord, as the scene fades to grey. The mental images of my parents are now only those from photos that I have, happy photos, smiling, hugging and posing. The memories of the bad times float around, intangible and harder to relate with.

It’s a relief, selfishly, that he has passed. He isn’t ill anymore. Every morning waking in the limbo that this may or may not be his last day. These last weeks my thoughts of him have been of his yellow, gaunt, tired frame. I can picture his now smiling, sitting opposite crouched together discussing. He isn’t tired anymore.

A relief for his mother too, a fortnight in a foreign city sleeping at the bedside of her dying son, no one close enough to share her experience or feelings or emotions with. Playing the host to the stream of well-wishers, and now alone here. With only our earnest attempts of consolation.

I feel guilty, I am only one of a thousand people who hold him close to their hearts. I am not emotional, but my threshold has been effected somewhat by the passing of years and certain events. I am just happy I guess that I was lucky enough to have memories of time with the man, however short-lived and unfair. I am glad I knew the man Jerry Hope.

closure report

I had a meeting this morning, at the Police Divisional Headquarters, a huge rectangle of a building, big and ugly. The interior was no different. Whitewashed walls. All furniture, all fittings were pine effect. A loudspeaker in every corridor and in every room called out ‘PC this’ and ‘DC that’ intrusively and often. We could not turn it off. We settled at the table, with notebook, a paper cup of machine tea and a plastic cup of water.

We proceeded to discuss the subject of the meeting; well, everyone else discussed and I took notes. My manager continued incessantly with her David Brent-isms. Using jargon erringly, failing to ever give a useful suggestion or to assert herself without error. Now that I have noticed this once, every example, even the smallest, makes me snigger. Whenever giving a hypothetic situation, the child in question is always called ‘little Johnny’. This annoys more than I can convey here. I think that I may show my disdain to her too openly in the office. Any of her attempts to show managerial assertion are quickly mopped up with my cynicism and sneering looks over my shoulder to colleagues.

The meeting continues. I write down words and phrases like, ‘partnership working’, ‘feedback’ and ‘standing agenda items’. Some light jokes are shared, and everyone, including myself, ‘umm’ and ‘ahhh’ in the correct places in agreement or understanding. I feel a lingering anxiety in this building. A poor attention span often stares into mid-distance, losing track of the conversation and having to catch up. I feel lost in this brutish building. Discussing things I care about, but in strange ways – the young people in question seem a long way away from this level of hierarchy. It seems to me that me attention lets me down and gives me away to the rest of the meeting. But the group, looking around, stare into the distance momentarily also. Glance out of the window, toy with a pen, sip from a plastic cup a little too ponderously.

We finish and leave. She again manages to patronise me without really trying. Any attempts at a reasonable conversation from me, as the car toodles through this fair city, stops abruptly. We return, and I proceed to pretend to work for he remaining 5 hours.

The sun shines at my back all afternoon. The romantic idea of the sun I have in winter, and how it sits here now make even the possibility of depression seem distant. I know the issues still reside, but they sit hidden elsewhere, and sunshine pierces my skull. How to explain this? Even the sadness that comes with sunshine feels manageable – the self-loathing and hopelessness dissipate and are replaced by insignificance. A feeling that although things probably will not get better, at least things are ok right now. The prettiest blue is there, just out of reach. Lots of midges are trying to fly in through this open window.

My diary is a mess. Attempts at organisation have not yet collapsed into reticence and denial (though according to the usual scale, this should occur some time in the next 48 hours). I woke up at 4, bouts of anxiety about the girl displaced with small a few small OCD pinches – those jumpers put on that shelf; the contents of that box in their place; those books in the desk there; the scrap of paper next to it; a small sub-list of things that need to be done.

I think for a moment about colour-coding different life strands differently in the diary – one colour for every day personal items, black perhaps. Things work-related in another colour, a green possibly, and a red connoting social or creative items. I displace and distract so well, and all subconsciously. The self-learnt, quickly practiced techniques of hiding this away replacing the simple, writing ideas with pseudo-self organisation and tidying, and irrelevant orders.

The day passes. The first walk home in this calendar year in one layer, sleeves rolled up. Heavy coat in the rucksack remind me of walking home after school as a young teenager. I get home, put on two jumpers, some stained shorts and begin my old jog route. All goes well, though I cannot see much, as the spectacles stayed at home. The sun soothes, the jostle and bounce of the ululating paths seem far removed from the irrational anxiety triggers about the girl and the dysfunction and the paranoia. An elderly woman, carrying only a package of gammon or colleague’s shrug and facial expression sets me off with worry and disgust.

Admittedly there is a little break two thirds of the way around the park, but pleased with my performance. Upon arrival I, quite unwisely, almost immediately begin to eat some reheated nachos with a variety of topping (refried beans, sour cream, cheese, salsa, jalapenos). I won’t eat again these evening. I sit outside in just shorts, and read some more ‘Crime and Punishment’, some dark escapism. Chris comes and goes, Gemma irons. I feel at peace for the first time in a long time. The effect of the weather? The influence of exercise? I sit hear then, bounce in between 3 or four half ideas, then settle on this here page.

The darkening blue of the evening sky, Woody’s tones soothe somewhere in between the speakers, though I cannot quite hear the jokes. I haven’t smoked yet today.