A Question of Being

Brain injury throws the question of "Who am I?" into chaos. According to Madeleine L'Engle, the self is becoming. Not static but ever changing. Brain injury both reverses and accelerates this process.

A friend recommended Madeleine L’Engle’s 1972 memoir A Circle of Quiet. The ebook version is very popular, and the library released the hold a few days ago. I’m 20% of the way through and have already highlighted several parts about being a writer, about becoming, about being. It speaks to Philosophy of Mind in that, for me, mind produces the self. And so I wanted to interrupt my Revelation study with my thoughts and questions so far.

Writing Success

“What matters is the book itself. If it is as good a book as you can write at this moment in time, that is what counts. Success is pleasant; of course you want it; but it isn’t what makes you write.”

I’ve written before that writing for me is breathing. L’Engle writes about writing in a similar way. She had a decade of failure, of rejection after rejection. But I note that she had an agent and the rejecting editors gave her reasons. My rejections were something like, “It’s good but not for us.” What the ever-loving-fuck does that mean? Would I’d had rejections that gave specifics — eg, you need to develop character x or we don’t publish time travel anymore. But nope.

At one point, L’Engle covered up her typewriter; no more would she write! But after pacing her tower — her writing office — a story began to form in her head, and she knew writing was more than being published. Even if she was never published, even if she never earned a dime, she’d have to write. Fortunately for her, she did achieve success. As she said, a writer wants to be published, dammit! We want readers, for readers speak back to us about our writing. It’s a kind of conversation. As I’ve said before, the reader completes the book.

This idea of writing as breathing, as intrinsic to self, does that emerge out of our spirit? Is it an intrinsic part of our mind? Mind being one substance; each person’s mind having their own unique properties?

What do you think?

Meaning

“The friends of my right hand, like Tallis, those who have made me know who I am.”

L’Engle writes about how she sees her inner self in the mirror of her family and friends’ eyes. You have to be careful whose eyes act like mirrors, for some are malicious and will reflect what they want you to believe about yourself so as to keep you down and discouraged about yourself, your work, your place in the world.

She finds meaning in the good mirrors that reflect to her, her own inner self. These people tell her, her meaning.

“my husband, my family, my friends give me my meaning and, in a sense, my being, so that I know that I, like the burning bush, or the oak tree, am ontological: essential: real.”

I struggle with this because brain injury taught me that my meaning is wrapped up in how well my brain functions; even before my injury, my brain was my essential self; my meaning became overtly what others wanted me to say about my physical self and rejected me when I didn’t comply. What kind of meaning do I have then if I’m acceptable only when I was who I was and injury has shot me onto a different becoming? Will writing about brain injury perspectives and research give me meaning?

Brain injury separated my mind from my brain. My mind guided my brain to act out mundane tasks like pouring cereal into the bowl or how to navigate the TTC (public transit) so that I wouldn’t fall down and would arrive at my health/rehab/medical appointment safely and on time.

My mind was telling me that my body had value, and it was important to heal my brain so that my mind and brain could once more work in united harmony. Hmmm, I’ve only just perceived that.

My meaning came from my mind’s guidance.

Joy

“Joy is what has made the pain bearable and, in the end, creative rather than destructive.”

Of all that I’ve read about joy, this definition makes sense. I’ve read much about love and joy not being feelings — and L’Engle later writes about how she’s not happy with love not being a feeling yet accepts it isn’t — and how when you have faith in God, follow Jesus, you have joy. I’d feel like I’d missed the plot. I don’t feel joy. Neither do I feel I have it. I have bouts of laughter — more from what I read or watch than any interaction with human beings in real life — sad, that, but there it is, life after brain injury when others would rather get sour and angry and avoidant than partner with you in the funny moments and the healing struggle.

But I don’t have joy.

Or at least I thought I didn’t until I read L’Engle’s definition. My novels have exploded or seeped out of the muck and mire of pain. Characters tip-toed or charged into my mind’s premises, entreating or commanding me to write their painful stories, so much of which mirrored or grew out of my own brain injury grief.

Many opine that writing heals. I didn’t find it healed for me, except my last book Brain Injury, Trauma, and Grief: How to Heal When You Are Alone. Synthesizing my own personal experiences with research on grief and creating action plans, soothed my own brain injury grief, and my psychic pain began to ease.

Yet the idea that it doesn’t matter if writing heals or not inheres L’Engle’s assertion that joy emerges when pain leads to creation.

Her definition released the hangman’s noose of expectation from my neck. Now I know that in creating novels out of pain I have joy. Joy, then, is about knowing not feeling.

Icon versus Self-Image

We are made in the image of God. My Pastor told me many years ago that an image is like a marker.

L’Engle relates how she queried educators what is self-image when they asked her how to give a child one. Before they could give a child a self-image, they needed to know what it is, she asserted.

“In the moment of failure I knew that the idea of Madeleine, who had to write in order to be, was not image….A photograph can be a simile, an image; it can seldom be a metaphor, an icon.”

She believes we all have icons. Do you?

Her icon, the metaphor of herself, was a white china laughing Buddha which sat on her desk, reminding her not to take herself too seriously.

I raised my head up to the sky and wrinkled my brow but no icon appeared to me.

Perhaps an image from one spiritual mentor and words from God via another, both pinned above my computer, are combined my icon, my metaphor of self? Would an icon help me explore mind?

Your icon is the metaphor of your self.

The image shows a clay hand cradling a girl child carved out of the same clay, her head in the curve of the fingers, her hand and body resting against the palm, compassion in the hand evident in the rough flowing of the hand into but separate from the girl. The words: You are in my care, fear not! leans crookedly beside it. The Lord spoke to me those words via my mentor on 25 September 2005 as I embarked on the scary expensive unknowingness of healing my brain with brain biofeedback. At that moment, money flowed out as I fought sleep during the brain training.

Would this work?!

We cannot predict the future; I could not have predicted the many scary moments of embarking on another experiment that radically altered my becoming.

Twenty-four years after two drivers fractured my mind from my brain, my mind and brain are once again one. Yet I remain locked in the struggle of knowing myself. What is mind? What are my mind’s unique properties?