Can’t force a moment, can’t create the divine

(9/10/21)

A few weeks ago my dad told me that cows only face north or south when grazing. We were talking about which direction you’re supposed to sleep, like which way the head of your bed is supposed to point. I was pretty sure it was south but he insisted it was north. If we follow the lead of cows, I guess it could be either.

The way they figured out that cows only face north or south is by using Google Earth. Originally the scientist wanted to see if human campgrounds all faced a particular direction (after studying naked mole rats, who always build their sleeping nests in the south side of their homes) but that was hard, so instead they focused on cows and deer. And that’s how they found out that cows, and also deer, align themselves with Earth’s magnetic poles when they sleep. But also apparently, “in humans, the time it takes to drift into REM sleep and the electrical activity in the brain differs depending on whether we’re facing a north-south direction or an east-west one,” according to something I read in NatGeo.

Also, to make sure that the cows are actually truly sensing earth’s magnetic field, the scientist suggested putting magnets on the heads of cows and deer to see if that would confuse them. I want to see a magnet strapped to the head of a cow. 

Also, “It’s possible for creatures to have the capacity to detect magnetic fields (“magnetoreception”) without consciously sensing them (“magnetoperception”).” Maybe we do that too, and we just don’t know. Also, the subconscious is pretty powerful and I guess so is our relation to the Earth and its magnetism, more than I thought. And it’s probably like that with other things.

It’s like with those experiments in psychology and things that your unconscious sees but your conscious mind doesn’t process. Like when someone’s visual cortex doesn’t work, so they can’t consciously see, but they can still navigate around obstacles. Or when the corpus callosum in somebody’s brain is severed to deal with their epilepsy and they can’t verbalize certain actions their body takes, since the center for speech is in the brain’s left hemisphere, and their brain is divided down the middle. So, the right hemisphere of the brain, which controls the left side of the body, can’t verbalize what’s going on on its side. So like, one study that was done was they put an object in a patient’s right hand, and they could describe what it felt like, but they couldn’t do that if it was in their left hand. But the subject could later match it when looking at several similar objects, indicating that they did, in fact, perceive the object. They just couldn’t verbalize it.

And so also the left side of the brain in these subjects would try and come up with reasons for things the left side of the body would do. I think this is from Wikipedia: “Many of the studies and experiments build on the initial approach of Gazzaniga in which the right hemisphere is instructed to do things that the left hemisphere is unaware of, e.g. by providing the instructions within the visual field that is only accessible to the right brain. The left-brain interpreter will nonetheless construct a contrived explanation for the action, unaware of the instruction the right brain had received.”

And so the left side of the brain is trying to apply conscious reasoning to the subconscious actions of the body, but it’s just guessing. That’s called the left-brain interpreter, and it doesn’t only apply to split-brain people. Also from Wikipedia, because I don’t feel like rephrasing it and this isn’t like some essay I’m gonna be graded on: “The drive to seek explanations and provide interpretations is a general human trait, and the left-brain interpreter can be seen as the glue that attempts to hold the story together, in order to provide a sense of coherence to the mind. In reconciling the past and the present, the left-brain interpreter may confer a sense of comfort to a person, by providing a feeling of consistency and continuity in the world. This may in turn produce feelings of security that the person knows how ‘things will turn out’ in the future.”

So there are probably things we sense that we don’t know we sense. Like I’m sure cows wouldn’t know why they’re facing a particular direction if you asked them. So there are parts of ourselves we don’t and can’t consciously understand. Especially with words.

Usually I tell myself I believe what intuition allows me to understand, in the here and now. But that makes me think of the difference between intuition and superstition. Like, intuition is something you feel without conscious reasoning, like instinct or something. And like superstition is basically the same, except it’s untrue. But it’s hard to know what’s what, and what’s coincidence, if coincidence is a thing–Carl Jung and synchronicity and everything that happens is meant to happen. There’s a line drawn here somewhere. 

So like, breaking through the manufactured stuff of your conscious brain and relying on yourself, the part of you that you can’t consciously know, makes for some good things. I mean it’s a risk. You have to rely on a part of yourself that is unknowable to your inner monologue.

A lot of things can happen when you’re willing to take risks. Like, not exactly risk your life, but just push yourself into the unfamiliar. Uncharted space. Where you truly have no expectations or assumptions or precedential experiences to anchor to. Weird things can happen to you there. 

I read Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, which is a pretty short read. He talks about his experience with mescaline and the things he saw and stuff. And he described the ‘expanded consciousness’ of taking mescaline to be like going through a door in the wall, and he says, “the man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less cocksure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable Mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.”

Well later, according to Wikipedia, “Huxley had an experience while on mescaline that he considered more profound than those detailed in The Doors of Perception. He decided his previous experiments, the ones detailed in Doors and Heaven and Hell, had been ‘temptations to escape from the central reality into false, or at least imperfect and partial Nirvanas of beauty and mere knowledge.’…he experienced ‘the direct, total awareness, from the inside, so to say, of Love as the primary and fundamental cosmic fact. … I was this fact; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that this fact occupied the place where I had been.’”

I also started collecting guitar picks. Usually they’re all over the stage or sometimes they don’t get swept up at the end of the night so they’re just on the floor. I collected discarded guitar picks like they’re seashells—that’s what it reminds me of, collecting seashells on the beach. I really enjoy collecting seashells. And the feeling is the same. The same joy of finding a really interesting one–ooh look, this one has a pentagram on it and says Goatwhore–or like,–wow this seashell is a pretty color. I’ve been wanting to go the beach—and listening to a lot of reggae in my car—but I’m pretty sure I brought the beach to myself. I really like the Bumpin Uglies, and Sublime with Rome, and Ballyhoo.

Why do we collect things?

In The Guardian, it says, “One psychoanalytical explanation for collecting is that unloved children learn to seek comfort in accumulating belongings; another is that collecting is motivated by existential anxieties–the collection, an extension of our identity, lives on, even though we do not. More recently, evolutionary theorists suggested that a collection was a way for a man to attract potential mates by signalling his ability to accumulate resources.” These are all so fucking weird to me.

I’m in the middle of reading the Electric Kool Aid Acid Test right now and do you ever get that feeling that you never want to finish a book, that it’s too good and you feel like it deserves your fullest attention and it’s such a good book you don’t ever want to finish it, you always want to be in the middle of it, in the middle of a good book, it’s always the middle. No one wants to be at the end or the beginning of a book. Or at least, when they want other people to see them reading it.

I think that’s most things. The middle is the best part. And you never want to begin and you never want to end. The middle is all we know, most of the time. We’re living in media res or whatever the Latin is, it just sounds cooler than saying “the middle.” I guess the middle is where comfort is, too? But discomfort is important for growth or something. 

Someone told me I look like a young Chloe Sevigny yesterday. I had to look that one up. 

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