morgannels

It seems that the summary judgment of 2009 is that it was wholly unsatisfactory, and there are many reasons to agree. And yet this was a very good year for me personally. I say that not to gloat, and I don’t believe that this makes up for the considerable misfortune that has befallen so many others, but I think it would be ungracious not to recognize and be grateful for my good fortune. Unlike most of the developed world, I had a great year at work (which was especially gratifying after the sanity-threatening year or two that preceded it), and am now in the midst of a company-wide, week plus holiday given as a reward for such a successful year. My ear finally healed, and I’ve had a chance to work my body back into shape, even managing to lose some weight through the holiday season. Our dog seems fully recovered and is thriving after surgery precipitated by a frightening brush with cancer. My nephew continues to grow more charming, and I’ve managed to maintain contact with him and his parents. As they say during Passover, that would have been enough, but there was more. There were so many little things that made me smile and say, “Cool.”

There are all sorts of summaries of the year in gadgets out there, but for me, there were two particular gadgets that made me happy this year, one of which I’ve had for twelve years. I had the watch that my wife gave me for my thirtieth birthday refurbished, and I’ve gone back to wearing it every day. It’s not flashy or remarkable, but it keeps very good time without a battery or winding. It is purely analog and mechanical. It’s an astonishing feat of craftsmanship, and I often find myself staring at it on my wrist in awe, trying and failing to imagine the precision of its inner workings.

Similarly precise and well-crafted, but not so purely analog and mechanical, is the new camera I got in October. Though a carpenter isn’t supposed to blame his tools, may I give credit to mine? It’s made me a much better photographer. I’m still amazed by the simultaneous sharpness and creaminess (for lack of a better word) of the images it produces, and its ability to work in limited light. And I don’t yet have the lens that’s supposed to make this camera so remarkable, though it’s on its way and should arrive early next week, suggesting still more wonders from this camera in 2010.

The more fully digital world of computers has offered its own pleasures, though for me, they’ve been almost exclusively software. I haven’t really gotten any new hardware this year (except for the Magic Mouse, which, meh), but the hardware I already had became far more useful, with impressive updates to Mac OS X, iPhone OS, and AppleTV. Even Windows 7, the release candidate of which I installed in VirtualBox (another fun discovery in 2009), is a clear improvement.

But the most significant advances by far have come from Google. The Web and mobile Web versions of Google Reader were already the way I consumed the vast majority of Web content, and the Google Mobile iPhone app had already proven handy. In 2009, they added the Chrome browser, Latitude, Google Voice, and Wave, and showed a preliminary version of the Chrome operating system. I’m very curious to see where these will converge in the coming year, but I expect an exponential increase in the usefulness of the Web–much of which is already provided for me by Google–to ensue.

I can’t tout the arrival of any great new literary voices in 2009, but I’ve still managed to find much that is new to me. On vacation in May, I picked up a used copy of Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater and read it through in a week. I had previously read only Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint and enjoyed them, but wasn’t moved to read any further. But mature Roth proved to be a different matter entirely–audacious not in the superficial way so commented upon in Portnoy’s Complaint, but in the profound way running from Dante and Cervantes through Beckett. I went back through the great mid-period Roth from Zuckerman Bound to Operation Shylock, and was impressed by the many achievements he managed in that short period, including especially The Ghost Writer, The Counterlife, and Operation Shylock. But they all still seem to be a sort of rehearsal or maybe extended sketches in preparation for the grim news of Sabbath’s Theater. And I still have the American Trilogy to look forward to.

And against all expectations, just as I was reconciling myself the likely reality that Against the Day would be Thomas Pynchon’s last novel, Inherent Vice appeared. It’s lighter and more accessible than most of his other novels, but it’s still great fun. It may prove to be an even more effective gateway to his writing than The Crying of Lot 49 has often been. Perhaps there will be yet another novel from Mr. Pynchon in the coming years.

Oh, and The Awl started publication.

These are among the many reasons I look back on 2009 fondly, while still looking forward to 2010. I know that many won’t remember this year happily, but I hope you all have something like the joy I’ve had this year in the coming year and those that follow.

I got a new camera a few weekends ago–the most serious camera I’ve ever owned. I didn’t get a chance to put it through its paces right away (though I’ve since found that I’m pleased so far with its compact, solid feel and its performance in low light, and after a whole day with it, I’ve found it a significant upgrade from my previous camera). As I often do with a new pursuit, especially if I have some free time but limited access to that pursuit, I read a lot about this new camera, the Micro Four Thirds system, lenses I might get, and anything else that might help orient me. In the course of my lexical wanderings, I came across this in the review of a lens of interest, discussing the notion that software correction of lens aberrations might be “cheating”:

…film camera lenses were always properly corrected optically, so surely the use of software to achieve the same effect is simply cost-cutting, and therefore somehow “cheating.”

We think this is fundamentally the wrong way to look at it. In photography, what ultimately counts is the final image – the means to get there is relatively unimportant.

To assess a photograph based on the different ways in which a camera might generate the same image rather than based on the image itself is to mistake the map for the territory, as is seeking satisfaction in reading about camera equipment rather than taking pictures. I first encountered the phrase “mistaking the map for the territory” in an academic setting, most likely graduate school, but I’ve come across it in other contexts as well, most recently in discussions of Buddhism, where it’s sometimes used as a trope suggesting the difference between generally characterized and specifically characterized phenomena. It’s based on the recognition that a map is a distortion of the territory it describes, in that it abbreviates and excludes. If it didn’t, it would be the territory itself. The map may be used to determine how best to navigate the territory, but the navigation actually occurs in the territory. A map is judged relative to the territory; the territory isn’t found complete or deficient based on the map.

This doesn’t mean that maps aren’t incredibly useful. Their compression makes them far more suitable for carrying around in a jacket pocket or glove compartment than the city of Venice of the U.S. interstate highway system would be. Yet their limitations must be understood if they’re to be used properly. We must know that one inch on the map is a mile in the territory, and that we won’t be able to see on the map what the gas station at which we’re to turn will look like. But precisely because they’re so useful and, given their abstraction, so much easier to manage, maps often come to replace in our experience the territory they’re meant to represent. If our map is good enough that the dissonance we experience as a result of treating it as the territory it represents is manageable, we may cease to engage with the territory entirely. This could lead to us following the directions provided by our GPS navigation system into a lake. Or it may lead to the worst sorts of fundamentalism.

Schools of thought, belief systems, and the like are more sophisticated maps of less tangible, but no less real, territories. Isaac Newton provided one map of the world that was suffcient to get us through the industrial revolution and to the moon. Albert Einstein provided another that proved more accurate on a smaller scale, which is taking us through and beyond the information revolution; and scientists are seeking still more precise maps. But that process will never lead to the truth, in the sense of getting beyond the map to the territory. As long as these efforts yield descriptions, they cannot be that which is described. Maps do not become the territory, so science will only ever be able to approach the truth asymptotically.

I’ve recently been reading several of Philip Roth’s books, including the Zuckerman Bound trilogy and epilogue, The Counterlife, and The Facts. It has been fascinating to read those books in chronological order and watch Roth create Nathan Zuckerman, develop him as a character, and, at the point when he becomes more real to the author than Roth himself, flail at (and even toy with killing) him and then try to flee from him into autobiography. You can see Roth discover and revel in his power of creation, much as Cervantes did in the second half of Don Quixote, but you can also see him recoil from the abyss just beyond that creativity, of which Hamlet could have told us, had he but time. At the end of The Counterlife, Zuckerman claims, in essence, that there are only maps, or that maps are all that we might know of one another and ourselves, which for him, comes to the same thing. Roth begins his next book, the autobiographical The Facts, with a letter to Zuckerman speculating about the causes of the breakdown (or “crack-up,” as he puts it) that Roth suffered after he finished writing The Counterlife. News of that breakdown came as no surprise to me, having just finished reading it. In the course of The Facts, he fails to find a satisfying grip on himself in the allegedly straightforward realm of autobiography. He seems only to find a map of the territory of himself, leaving us with a fairly uninteresting and un-Roth-like tale. And in the letter to Roth from Zuckerman that serves as the book’s afterword, Zuckerman tells Roth as much, and it seems that Roth is hopelessly lost in his maps. I look forward to reading on through his oeuvre to find out where this leads.

The writing most susceptible to this sort of misreading is allegory. Not only is allegory, like all writing, a map, but it’s a map of a map, a generalization of a generalization. It seeks not just to compress one set of events into a tale, but to compress the common events of a whole set of possible tales into a single tale. Only gross misunderstanding and considerable suffering can come from a literal reading of something so distorted, as is demonstrated by all of the fundamentalisms with which we’re beset. I don’t know that anything beyond simple instructions can be read literally, but I’m certain that scripture, from Abrahamic to Darwinian to Freudian, cannot be. I know of no better measure of intellectual maturity than the ability to realize that insight.

As Jack Kerouac tells it in Wake Up: A Life of the Buddha, Gautama Shakyamuni went forth from a life of luxury to discover the cause and cessation of suffering, attaining enlightenment and becoming the Buddha, one of the most respected and influential figures in human history, and subsequently returned to his father’s palace:

Followed by his Men of Saintship, yet advancing with the grave mysterious loneliness of the elephant, he came within several miles of Kapilavastu where the sumptuous palace of his youth still stood, as unreal now, in his enlightened mirror-like reflection, as an indicated castle in a child’s tale told solely to make children believe in its existence. The King heard of his arrival and came at once, eagerly concerned.

On seeing him he uttered these mournful words: “Thus, now I see my son, his well known features as of old; but how estranged his heart! There are no grateful outflowings of soul; cold and vacant there he sits.”

There was a dull crack. The plane bounced as though it had gone over a speed bump a little too quickly, and then it started to descend. The oxygen masks dropped down from their overhead compartments, and one of the flight attendants instructed the passengers to place the nearest mask over their mouth and nose, reminding those with children or others needing assistance to put their own mask on first and then to help others. His mother, seated between him and his brother, had been through this as a child. Then her father had efficiently put a mask over his own face and, with the same lack of ceremony and without any attempt to soothe or comfort, put another over her face. She was frightened, and the mask was uncomfortable. It dug into the bridge of her nose and the sides of her chin. She resented it, but her father wouldn’t let her move it. She survived to repeat the experience as a parent. Perhaps she was rebelling because of that resentment, but whatever the reason, she now put the mask on her head like a child’s party hat and told him and his brother to do the same, allowing them to do it for themselves. When she became short of breath, she would put the mask over her mouth and nose for a moment and then replace it on the top of her head. Watching her do that, he figured out that he should do the same, but his brother didn’t.

Eventually, he realized that he was more comfortable if he just left the mask over his mouth and nose. His mother noticed and commented that he was “just like Them.” He was seated on the aisle, and looked around to see that, yes, everyone else was wearing the mask over their mouths and noses, and though anxious and frightened, They looked much better off than his brother. His brother, fading in his corner against the window from the lack of oxygen, couldn’t see what anyone else was doing. His mother was doing better than his brother, but she seemed to be moving more slowly and taking longer between breaths from the mask that she occasionally remembered to pull down from the top of her head. He looked around the cabin again, saw how much better off everyone else was, and thought, “This is absurd.”

He pointed to his brother and asked his mother to help him to put on his mask correctly. She sleepily waved him away and asked who he thought he was to tell anyone what the correct way to wear the mask was. He tried to reach across her to help his brother with his mask, but she pushed him away. Animated by the effort, she pulled her mask over her mouth and nose, took a deep breath, and scolded him.

“Stop trying to control your brother. Respect his decision to wear his mask that way.”

“But look at everyone else. Look at us. The masks worn correctly are giving us the oxygen we all need. There isn’t enough oxygen in here without the mask.”

“Why are you so sure that you know the correct way to wear the mask? There is more to life than cold facts and logic. There is deeper wisdom; warm outflowings of soul. I once read of a man in a similar situation who wore the mask over his forehead and saw God.”

“Look at him. He’s turning blue. He’s going to die.”

“Are you sure that isn’t your own fear of death speaking? Your ideas about what your brother should and shouldn’t do are just projections of your own emotions.”

Denied both logical argument and emotional appeals, he had no idea how to proceed. But just then, the plane leveled off and began to climb, and the cabin pressure returned. It took his mother some minutes to return to full lucidity, but his brother never did. He suffered permanent brain damage from his partial asphyxia, though his mother refuted both the diagnosis and its cause until the day she died.

Two weeks into the initial course of the Lexapro, things are generally going well. I haven’t noticed any side effects so far, and I feel a bit better. The last time I did this, with Celexa five years ago, it worked well, but I experienced weight gain as a side effect. Given the lack of side effects this time and the fact that I still don’t feel quite as well as I’d like to (though I’m pretty uncomfortable trying to decide how well I should feel–it certainly seems unnatural), my psychopharmacologist and I have decided to increase the dosage to the minimum average dose, which is twice what I had been taking. I’m feeling pretty optimistic about this, which I would guess is a good sign in itself.

The most profound effect I’ve noticed so far has been on my dreams. Not on the dreams themselves, but on my relationship to them. It started with me remembering more and more of my dreams; seeming hours worth of clear, calm, vivid narrative, evolving over the course of a night from image to image and situation to situation. And as clear as they were, they were strangely impersonal, as though I were watching a movie. I wasn’t confused or disoriented, and it wasn’t as though I was trying to solve a puzzle or fulfill any particular responsibility. I was just watching events–events that I was in the midst of but that didn’t involve me, or with which there was no me to be involved–unfold with a sense of gentle curiosity and a vague awareness that it was just a dream. As this experience has become less exotic, the boundary between my dreams and my waking thoughts has become less clear. I’ve been lying in bed following a particular train of thought, with my eyes closed picturing all of the associations and implications of those thoughts, and been awakened by a noise or a movement, only to realize that I had fallen asleep and the train of thought I had started while still awake simply continued uninterrupted as a dream. And if I wake more gently, I find that the dream can also continue uninterrupted as a waking train of thought.

As I said, I don’t think this is a change in the dreams themselves. I think it’s just a change in my relationship to them. Having gone back and forth in an unmediated way between dreams and waking thought, I’m struck more by their similarities than their differences. Waking thought is more driven by associative leaps and the tangled, non-linear connections and dreams are more bound by logical connections and recent experience than we usually realize. The only real difference between my waking thoughts and my dreams seems to be that when I’m awake, external events or my own conscious intentions shape and focus my train of thought. Asleep, the dreams wander based on their own internal logic. Having experienced those deeper similarities, I can, for the few minutes I’m waking up each morning, hold a different relationship to my thoughts about the day to come. As I’ve gone on at great length about elsewhere, this relationship to our waking life, this sense that we’re dreaming it as it happens, is one way to analogize enlightenment. We’re dreaming, and in becoming enlightened, we wake up but maintain that relationship to our experience, which continues uninterrupted as the train of our waking life. It’s not that dreams aren’t real and waking life is real; it’s just that we relate to the experiences differently, even though they’re both just the manifestation of mind.

And speaking of manifestations of undirected trains of thought, I’ve joined Facebook. If you have too, spray paint something on my wall.

…Lexapro.

Yesterday’s snow postponed my discussion with my psychopharmacologist, so the manner in which I’ll be treating my mood henceforth is still undecided

In the summer of 2000, in the midst of the bike trip that began the ongoing negotiation with emotional health in which I am still embroiled, I found myself in Århus, Denmark in the rain. Though it was early July, the rain had followed us all through Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany, and continued to dog us across Denmark. This didn’t help my fragile emotional state. I had somewhat bizarrely chosen to carry the 768 pages of Gravity’s Rainbow with me in the very limited panniers in which I also had to carry two weeks of clothing and toiletries. Though I did get an odd pleasure from reading about the flights of V-2 rockets from the Low Countries toward London as I flew the opposite direction through that same airspace, it wasn’t a practical decision. The book was bulky, and it also left me with only a single option for reading, a sort of reading that demanded more attention than I generally had available (though I do fondly remember reading a section while sitting by myself in an outdoor restaurant on Ærø on one of our few sunny days). And thus in the rain in Århus, I went into an English-language bookstore looking for options. There I found editions of The Tempest and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and other poems. I skimmed “The Waste Land” and then set it aside in favor of The Tempest, and hadn’t picked it up since.

Until last week, when the BBC’s In Our Time did a program (or programme) on “The Waste Land and Modernity.” I picked the poem up again, and read quickly through it. Except for the section alluding to Dante’s Inferno, which reminded me of nothing so much as The Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset,” and the opening images of the comforts of winter and the pains of spring, which I suspected were meant more ironically than I took them, I couldn’t make much of it. So I consulted Harold Bloom as I often do on these matters. He first has this to say of Eliot:

I set aside Eliot’s verse plays, which are scarcely stageable or readable, and his criticism, despite its historical importance. As for what would now be called his cultural criticism, I grimace and pass by. There remains his anti-Semitism, which is very winning, if you happen to be an anti-Semite; if not, not.

Having disposed of so much of Eliot’s oeuvre, he makes the helpful suggestion that Eliot’s poetry might be most profitably read as anxiously influenced by Whitman, with “The Waste Land” being particularly influenced by “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” I read the Whitman poem, re-read “The Waste Land,” and I’m now listening to the BBC program (which two-thirds of the way through, hasn’t yet mentioned Whitman), and I suggest that you do the same. ‘Tis a profitable expenditure of an hour or two, and it’s all free.

More than five weeks after I last put any medicine in my left ear–with the whole of that ear canal, including the ear drum, seamlessly lined with healthy dry skin that thickens with each passing day–I’m moving from problems with my hearing back to the problem of hearing. Having survived the ordeal of my ear, I’ve returned to my ordinary unhappiness, which I continue to explore. When last we left this scintillating drama, I had tentatively described the erotic, eternalist drive to assert my self behind the depressed half of my cyclothymia and the thanatotic, nihilist drive to withdraw my self behind the cyclothymia’s anxious half, with a particular emphasis on the difficulty of achieving that quiescent withdrawal with respect to sound and the anxiety that stems from that ongoing struggle.

Since then, I’ve become more acutely aware of that self (which has emerged and evolved through my interactions with reality) and its moods as something adventitious. I’m learning more about the effort taken to define and sustain that self, about the effects that self has on other selves in the world, and about its transient, dependent nature. This sense is still preliminary, coming only with careful awareness and going when that awareness passes. I still suffer a great deal on behalf of that self, and I imagine I cause quite a bit of suffering through it. This increased mindfulness places that suffering more fully in my attention, and I find myself unhappy more often. I wake in the morning with a sense of dread and any undertaking outside of my well-worn daily patterns is an occasion for anticipatory angst. But experiencing the self that’s the basis of all of that suffering as something adventitious, I find that I’m more able to abide the unhappiness. And I’m also becoming at least indirectly aware of some deeper agent that experiences all of this, and yet goes ahead and gets out of bed and moves beyond my daily patterns where necessary. Whatever this is, it has a broader awareness and greater motivation than that narrow self. It isn’t depressed or anxious.

This experience corresponds to the progress described in Buddhist tradition. The expectation is that more careful mindfulness of our mundane experience will lead us to develop a healthy disgust toward our deluded engagement with the world, samsara being that manner of engagement. “Revulsion is the foot of meditation,” as one Tibetan chant puts it. And that disgust or revulsion will motivate us to cultivate the Buddha nature that is capable of realization and bliss beyond our narrow, habitual sense of self and the samsara that arises from it. This sounds plausible, and as I’ve described, my experience seems to be bearing that out thus far. But I seem to have reached a tricky transitional stage in this process. I’ve begun to develop revulsion toward samsara, as evidenced by my deeply felt visceral–as opposed to cognitive–disgust with my habitual conduct, but I haven’t yet developed the blissful realization that lies beyond that. I’ve started to see evidence of that possibility in that, despite my dread and angst, I still proceed with what must be done and function in my life, even managing to interact positively and helpfully with those around me. But I’m still unhappy–either sad or anxious–often.

I’ve discussed this with my therapist, and she wonders whether I need to feel that way so much of the time. She points out that there are medications available that can address this, as I’ve seen for myself. But unlike the last time I went on a long-term antidepressant, the issues this time are less clear, the problems are more subtle. I’m fully functional, I sleep at night, and I engage fully and effectively with others. I read less than I used to, and I do less for the sheer pleasure of it. I spend more time slackly watching soccer and Arrested Development, and I don’t get out of the apartment much on weekends. And perhaps most ominous, I’m increasingly upset by noises from outside my apartment. But I’m not going days at a time without sleeping, and I haven’t yet found myself curled in a fetal position, uncommunicative, and hiding under a blanket on the couch. I’m unhappy and passive, but I can handle it. So the questions my therapist and I are considering include: How often should a person be unhappy? And if unhappiness serves as a means of understanding the causes of suffering, should it be suppressed?

In the midst of this discussion, Buddhadharma has published an article with results from a study on the balance and interaction between Buddhist practice and antidepressants. It’s a preliminary study, with only nineteen participants and no control group, and the participants suffer from major depression (which I don’t think describes me), but the results might help frame my discussion with my therapist. I think the article clearly lays out the issues to be considered and the ways in which they would most constructively be considered. It’s not as explicit as I would have liked about the distinction between the goals of meditation and those of psychotherapeutic treatment, but that distinction does ultimately seem to be reflected in the conclusion:

Being willing to face the unavoidable pains of life is often a sign of courage and wisdom. Nonetheless, being unwilling to use effective therapies to relieve unnecessary pains may be a sign of misunderstanding, and of a spiritual superego run amuck. After all, Buddhist psychology regards happiness and joy as healthy, beneficial, spiritual qualities, and discourages subjecting oneself to unnecessary pain as a spiritual path.

To put it another way, becoming attached to a dogmatic and misunderstood notion of Buddhist practice, or any other spiritual practice, is likely to interfere with my vow to end the suffering of all sentient beings, which would include myself. That is, I won’t be able to practice well if I don’t take care of myself. The participants in this study reported as much:

Clearly, the large majority of these meditators felt that they, and their spiritual practice, benefited significantly from taking antidepressants. The changes they described bear this out. In fact, whether looked at from either a classical contemplative or a contemporary psychological perspective, the multiple benefits they describe suggest greater psychological and spiritual well-being.

Several subjects reported that the antidepressants enabled them to recommence or significantly improve their meditation and spiritual practice. In addition, two subjects spontaneously reported that antidepressants gave them a lift that they were subsequently able to maintain with meditation alone.

Tomorrow I’ll discuss all of this with my therapist and my psychopharmacologist, and we’ll see where we go from here.

Today is the first day in many, many weeks that I won’t put any medicine in my left ear, and the first time in the last couple of years that I’m not doing so because all is presumably as it should be in the ear. The hearing is not what it was prior to the surgeries, there’s probably a little further correction that needs to be done in the TMJ on that side, and I still need to keep the ear dry for now (that no longer being necessary will be an enormous milestone), but I’m getting a little more comfortable thinking of myself as healed. All through this, I’ve been meaning to go back and describe some of what I’ve learned about how the process of hearing actually works. I figured it would be a nice change from the fretting and complaining that has so far been the bulk of what I’ve had to say about this experience, but I’ve been hesitant to do so, mostly out of a sense of superstition. Telling the story of my ear surgeries and the subsequent healing process before that healing was done felt a bit like writing an autobiography while still in my twenties–it seemed the sort of hubris that invites catastrophe. But now I’m willing to take a chance.

When I came home from the first surgery, the ear packed with antibiotic jelly and my head wrapped in gauze, I had no external hearing in my left ear (though I could hear a wet squishing in the ear itself whenever anything on that side of my head moved). At first, my brain, receiving external aural stimulus only from the right ear, located the sources of all sounds directly to my right. In its experience to that point, the only time that it would receive aural stimulus associated with a specific sound that much stronger from the right ear than the left ear would be when the source of that sound would be straight to off to my right, in much the same way that most people’s brains would interpret the sound from a stereo with the balance turned all the way to the right. That evening, I was sitting in front of my computer, and my wife passed behind me from my right to my left, touching me on the way past. She was standing ten or fifteen feet to my left, and I could just see her out of the corner of my left eye. She called out to me, and despite all of the information I had telling me she was to my left, I heard the sound as coming from my right and I reflexively turned my head that way.

Thankfully, that only lasted a couple of days. Somehow, whatever apparatus in my brain interprets sounds realized that it was receiving input from only one side and adjusted accordingly. This meant that I was now hearing sounds as though they were coming from a single monaural speaker rather than from a right-sided stereo speaker. Though this was a less distorted interpretation of my experience, I was no longer able to locate the sources of sounds based solely on my sense of hearing. If, while walking in the street, I heard a horn blown or a person yell, I would turn around and around trying to figure out where the sound came from. I would do the same in the elevator lobby of my office when the bell announcing the arrival of one of the elevators rang, spinning around until I could find the light signaling up or down for the elevator that had just arrived. This had further unexpected implications, especially in the office.

What we understand to be a collection of separate sounds are together contributing to a complex pattern of vibration of our eardrums. Our brain uses several mechanisms to reverse the process of aggregation that happens as these diverse vibrations in the air enter our ear canal, and to allow us to experience simultaneous sounds as distinct. I imagine that the calculation behind this process is staggering, but it seems to happen instantaneously and seamlessly. It feels effortless to sit in the middle of a room with our eyes closed and independently identify and locate the sounds of the air conditioner to our right, the television in front of us, and the person speaking to our left. However, with one ear, all of those sounds seem to be coming from the same place. We can separate them to the extent that the sounds are qualitatively different, but if they’re of similar frequency and timbre, they’re virtually impossible to separate. With our eyes open, it gets easier because we can connect visual cues to parts of the noise surrounding us and make intelligible sounds of those parts (by, say, reading lips). So for weeks after the first surgery, if I was in a meeting and more than one person was speaking, it was almost impossible to understand any of what was being said. And ambient noises outside or in crowded places had the same effect.

The effects on my ability to properly interpret my experience were mitigated as the hearing in my left ear gradually returned. After the second surgery, I returned directly to the monaural state, without going through the interim broken stereo state. Whatever had made the adjustment after the first surgery remembered it and made it again immediately after the second surgery. I’d be curious to see brain scans showing if and how the physical structure of my brain and the patterns of my neurological activity changed as these adjustments were made and then gradually became unnecessary. And the fact that it all happened outside of my conscious awareness makes it seem less like a subjective process in which I participated and more like an objective process to which I was subjected. The change from hearing everything to my right to hearing without direction wasn’t a change about which I had any choice, but it also wasn’t genetic. It was an adaptive and, in some abstract sense at least, reasoned response by a mechanism that would have to be considered part of me, but over which I have no conscious control. This disruption of the normally invisible process of interpretation that mediates all of our experience made that process, or at least its effects, temporarily apparent, and highlighted how far from bare awareness and how thoroughly conceptual conventional conscious experience actually is.

…and just like that, the graft in my left ear has healed, at least for now. Like so many said yesterday, I thought this day would never come. But of course, though it has come, it hasn’t come simply. Yes, the surgery in my left ear is now fully healed. A thin layer of translucent dry skin now covers the last of the granulation tissue, and there’s no evidence of eczema in the left ear. This is still delicate and must be protected. There’s no eczema in the right ear, either, yet the condition of the ear canal is no better than it was ten days ago. And I suppose if I were to look at this rationally, I would be fairly concerned about that, as it could be construed as a threat to the one ear that really works at this point.

We’re going to protect the gains we’ve made in the left ear. I’ll use the drops for the rest of this week and continue to keep the ear dry. In the right ear, we’ll try something different, at least different for that ear, and that means resorting to the power of the powder once again. And I’ll have to continue to keep that ear dry as well. Keeping both ears dry is actually more than twice as difficult as keeping one ear dry, so I haven’t worked out in ten days and I feel it in my back. At some point I’ll get everything working properly all at the same time, but I’m not quite there yet. I probably haven’t been this close in eighteen months, though.