Out of mind

My father's glass eye
December 20, 2002

I had never been much aware of my father's glass eye, just as I had never much noticed his foreign accent. We were swimming some distance from the shore. Fourteen years old, I was way ahead. He called and I turned to find him treading water, right hand covering the empty cave of his eye socket, good eye exploring the glimmering depths. The fugitive eye stared up at us from the seabed. I plunged like a pearl diver, following its gaze all the way down and snatched it up with a handful of sand. That evening, skimming stones into the sunset, I returned in imagination to the ocean floor. It was a cold and lonely place. Then it occurred to me that, deprived of an observing eye, the ocean was nothing. Such power! I closed my eyes and it was gone.

Years later I read Italo Calvino's Mr Palomar. It stirred memories. The eponymous hero goes for an evening swim. Looking back to the shore, Palomar sees the sun's reflection as a shining sword in the water. He swims towards it but the sword retreats with every stroke and he is never able to overtake it. Wherever he moves, he remains at the sword's tip. He realises that every bather experiences the same effects of the light. Sailboards change their appearance as they cross the reflection, colours are muted, bodies silhouetted. What if all the swimmers and sailboarders return to the shore, he wonders, where would the sword end? Palomar understands that nothing he sees exists in nature. Nature is a bundle of abstractions-invisible fields of force. The sun, the sea, the sword and the sailboarders are inside his head. He floats among phantoms.

The sword of the sun cleaves the universe in two: there is objective reality-remote abstractions without point of view-and there is Palomar's private universe, the mirage of human perception. "I am swimming in my mind; this sword of light exists only there." But what kind of thing is Palomar, the perceiver? No doubt, he would see himself, as I see myself, as a singular, unified being, continuous with his child-self as I am continuous with the boy diving for his father's eye, moving from fixed past to uncertain future. Like the sun's reflection, this is an illusion.

Now, in the angiography suite, I am the illusionist, playing my tricks. Centre stage, supine, the young woman floats among phantoms in surgical greens. She sees, too, the ghostly shapes of her insides on the X-ray monitors suspended overhead. She watches as the tube is inserted into the femoral artery and pushed up through her abdomen and chest towards the internal carotid, the pipeline to the brain. She knows what to expect. With a shot of Amytal, a fast-acting barbiturate, we are about to decommission the right side of her brain. Later, we will do the same to the left. In this way, we isolate and interrogate one hemisphere and then the other. It is a routine pre-operative assessment for certain forms of brain surgery. The aim is to establish which side carries speech and whether the supposedly healthy hemisphere is capable of sustaining basic memory functions. "OK?" I ask. "Fine," she says.

Our brain drug cleaves the woman in two. The left-brain version is different from the right. Ms Left-brain is talkative and cheerful. Ms Right-brain is unsettled, mute, morose. When the words finally break through, she hasn't a clue where she is. "What the fuck am I doing here?" she grumbles. I've never heard Ms Left-brain swear. Afterwards, when the drug has worn off, Ms Left-brain speaks for the whole person. It was a breeze, she says. There is no recollection of Ms Right-brain's discomfiture. It has been edited out of the story. One might think that the self is divided in such circumstances, but this would be to swallow the illusion of unity; to imagine in the first place that there is some "whole thing" to be fractionated. There isn't. From a neuroscience perspective, we are all divided and discontinuous. The cognitive processes underlying our sense of self-feelings, thoughts, memories-are scattered through different zones of the brain. There is no special point of convergence. No cockpit of the soul. No soul-pilot. They come together in a work of fiction. A human being is a tale-telling machine. The self is a story.

This is not to say that our lives are fictions. Unlike Robinson Crusoe or Emma Bovary, we are embedded in a universe with physical and moral dimensions where every thought and action splinters into a million consequences. Readers of Madame Bovary will vary in their reactions to Emma as she makes her way through the novel, but her life and thoughts are fixed. She will always marry Charles, fall prey to the abominable Rodolphe, and die her horrible death. It's different for us meat puppets. We don't know where our lives are going. What the fuck am I doing here? I often wonder.

Who tells the story of the self? That's like asking who thunders the thunder, or rains the rain. As the philosopher Daniel Dennett says, it is not so much a question of us weaving the story as the story weaving us.

Not so long ago I asked my dad if he remembered the time when I rescued his eye from the bottom of the sea. No, he said.