A friend told me she had lost her mind again. I told her that I keep misplacing mine as well, over and over, and am glad then to keep finding it again, as seems to happen if I'll just agree to take my turn waiting for it to show up once more.
However, there has been a new awareness of late. As I've lost and rediscovered my mind on recurring occasions over recent weeks, I have been remarking a note of lingering puzzlement -- this is a note that may have always sounded in the past, but that I haven't really bothered to pay attention to. The puzzlement is that, having refound my mind enough times after sinking into confusion and sometimes despair, I am no longer sure that it's my mind that I've found. Am I this happy and engaged one, or am I the despairing one? Am I the one engaged in this way, or in one of the other ways? Is it my "mind" that I am occupying? Or perhaps it's that I have several minds that I take up in alternation. It's all rather confusing. Then I start to ask myself, how do I know that any of these minds I occupy is mine?
Oliver Sacks wrote about the man who mistook his wife for a hat. I am the man who mistakes or takes -- I'm not sure which -- my minds for hats. I wonder which hat most suits me? I certainly look better in some than others. I would say that I change minds like hats, except that on further reflection it seems to be the minds that do the changing, not me. I don't take up my mind, it takes me up. I don't find it, it finds me. I simply seem to suffer the consequences of looking differently. (Whether "looking" is here active or passive seems to be part of the question).
Now I wonder: either this means that I'm a hat being tried by different minds, or it means that the hats are the ones in control.
Goodness me. Look at this. I don't know if I'm a mind or a hat, or whether any one of one belongs properly to any one of the others, or whether this is all a wondrous game of shapes and colors at play.
Friday, June 20, 2008
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