Is That All There Is?

What was all the fuss about? TGA for the curious.....

In 1969, jazzy chanteuse Peggy Lee, without aid of a time machine and therefore unaware of the unpalatable fact that the song would go on many years later to become (apparently) the favourite song of widely despised NYC businessman Donald J Trump, asked, courtesy of renowned songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller...is that all there is? Ennobled by the melancholic yet defiant arrangement on that recording, reminiscent of yer Kurt Weill Weimar era cabaret music, it's the only worthwhile question, maybe, that can ever be asked, even without realistic hope of a cogent answer from whoever it was to whom the question was nominally addressed. Presumably, of course, yourself. Or God, whoever that might be. Whatever, as observed by Bill Shatner some 40 or so years later, there'll be time for you, and I, to reflect on how we wasted our time, our one and only chance to construct a coherent narrative from the detritus of our experience of this life. Or of this AI construct, if that's your preferred cup of poisoned elixir.

Observers of the work of celebrated surrealist film maker David Lynch will be familiar with the main thematic terroir of his later work, namely the frangibility of identity and the extreme psychic spaces to which the fractured ego tends to or is compelled to retreat under duress. At the end of The Lost Highway, for instance, the main character, played by Bill Pullman, who has for the latter part of the film been so traumatised that he has literally become someone else, played by Balthazar Getty, returns to the reality that he is being executed by electrocution (it's heavily suggested) for the brutal murder of his wife, the event which caused his identity to fracture in the first place. Which was itself based on Lynch's fascination with the case of OJ Simpson, whose ability to construct a fictional alternate reality in which he hadn't brutally murdered his wife and her lover (allegedly) he found profoundly troubling, or awesome. Or at least, that's the literal explanation of the narrative of the movie, widely agreed upon by virtually everyone who's ever seen it or thought about in detail or read the detailed analyses thereon by critics and theorists alike.

Similarly, the Hollywood ingenue (Betty) played by Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive, revealed in the second half of that film to be an idealised avatar dreamed up by the sleazy and disillusioned failed starlet (Diane) who's resorted to hiring a hit man to off her idealised movie star lover, who may or may not in reality exist except as an expression of the polar opposite of her own abject failure to make it as a Hollywood star (*), exists solely as an expression of Diane's dream identity. So far so good. Of course, with Inland Empire, Lynch took it all too far and stretched to breaking point the patience even of his most ardent fans, substantially admitting in this case to that which his most avid critics had always accused him of - namely, making it up as he went along. There was, literally, no script, he admitted, and the project only came to fruition due to the undying loyalty of his many trusted collaborators, chief among them Laura Dern as the fractured film star with dissolving personality but no coherent narrative arc onto which to cling. Abstract and abstruse as The Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive may have been, each had had an underlying narrative integrity wholly lacking in Inland Empire. 

Like those lost Lynchian souls, none of us in what we like to call the real world know, or can even imagine, how it feels to be a fictional construct, or an entity whose reality is contingent on the imagination or the agency of an extrinsic force. Or can really begin to process the question posed in 1969 by Peggy Lee. Is this really all there is? Even adherents of the major or minor world religions, whose existence is predicated on the influence of a 3rd party (ie: a deity) are hard pushed, when push comes to shove, to really bring themselves to believe that which is, to all empirical appearances, a load of old nonsense. But believe it they do, to their infinite credit. As an unbeliever, one can only look on, as did David Lynch in contemplating the hyper-fictionalised OJ narrative, with awe, or some fictional construct thereof.

But did you or anybody like you ever stop to wonder, when wondering if this was all there is, what it might actually be like to really be dead? To come face to face with your maker? Which might, if recent experience and the decline in religious belief in the western cultural hegemon is anything to go by, be the same thing. God may indeed be dead, as Nietzche emphatically declared, but what if you are too? And what if this really, really is all that there is? 

No, me neither. Not me either, for there's a special level of hell reserved for those who say "me either", isn't there? Obviously there is. Well, be that here or be that there, I didn't stop to wonder on Monday as much as find myself stopped in my tracks while wondering, if I really were still alive, still me, if I still embodied what I understand as my essence. Well, I say wondering, but I don't really know if I was wondering much of anything at all, actually, as I'd temporarily taken leave of my senses. 

One of the defining characteristics of Transient Global Amnesia is that you literally and simply take leave of, in the sense of take a realtime break from, your senses, rather than in the melodramatic way usually suggested by that phrase. The brain, during a TGA attack, for reasons best known to itself and kept a closely guarded secret, especially from medical researchers who have been labouring without success for the better part of 50 years to arrive at some kind of conclusion as to it's causes, simply stops registering experiential data, failing to record said data as memory, but keeps it's wits about it sufficiently for the victim to appear to carry on functionally as though nothing untoward were happening. 

A TGA fugue lasts, in my experience (and this last episode is my 4th, the pattern so far appearing to be, like the World Cup, once every 4 years), around 6 - 8 hours. And if you were lucky or unlucky enough to be in my company at onset, the giveaway would be that I'd say something, but then repeat that same something. Over and over again. Or if I called you by phone, I'd call you repeatedly. 7 or 8 times, at short intervals, saying exactly the same thing each time you picked up. Except I'd have no idea that I was repeating the same thing over and over again. If you didn't know me, or my TGA history, you wouldn't necessarily recognise the signs, and you'd assume, in all probability, that I was just taking the piss. And probably, if you were the over-sensitive type, take it personally and punch me in the face. Or if on the phone, tell me to fuck off, and slam down the receiver.

The fugue-state brain, though, wouldn't register the verbal repetition at all. And would keep on issuing the order to say whatever it was it thought worth saying until someone intervened. The recording apparatus of the brain quite literally gets stuck. If you did know me, you'd recognise the signs and drive me straight to the nearest A & E department. In fact, the only time the owner of the TGA-afflicted brain would become aware of any of this would be hours later, in hospital, after said owner had been inducted into A & E after a lengthy wait in the waiting room among the drunks, assault and traumatised accident victims, been examined by a harassed and overworked junior doctor, admitted to the overnight ward for observation and subjected to a CT scan to rule out the possibility of stroke activity/brain trauma. Then, hours after the onset, you'd tell me, if you'd stuck around, all about how it had all unfolded. And I'd be none then wiser, my brain having failed to record any of it as retrievable memory data. But I'd recognise the architecture of the experience, it having happened to me 3 times previously. So far, I've always been at home at the onset of each episode. I don't like to contemplate the outcome if I weren't at home but were, as it were, free range and unaware.

Earlier episodes resulted in subsequent referral to Neurology Departments where additional, and more detailed, scans (MRI) were conducted. This being to check for evidence of dementia as well as stroke activity. In fact, the only real positive aspect of the whole experience is that you get to learn that you haven't suffered a stroke, are not at immediate risk of myocardial infarction and that dementia isn't among the chips on the diagnostic table. The downside is that you get to learn that TGA isn't even really yet a diagnosed condition, but merely a description of a collection of symptoms for which medical science hasn't yet formulated any empirical diagnostic definition. And that, though unlikely, it's possible that it will re-occur. This was what I was told after the first episode of TGA I experienced, 13 years ago. 4 episodes later, the hollowness of the laughter at that initial prognosis is only slightly more predictable than that I should set my internal alarm clock for sometime in 2029/30. It's like I'm becoming an old hand at the TGA routine. 

An interesting immediate psychological, or possibly existential, effect of the first episode I suffered, in 2012, was that when I became self aware, returning to my senses in hospital some 8 hours after I'd initially apparently exhibited signs that all was not well, I assumed that I was dead. And I really did find myself thinking, is this all there is? My hospital surroundings, unfamiliar of course yet obviously (dis)comforting, I took to be the version of heaven (or hell) to which I'd been assigned. I remember now the oddly disappointed sense of unreasonable grievance I felt when I realised I was still alive. Or was I? For I also recall that when I recounted this impression of the experience to an acquaintance years later, that acquaintance said......how do you know you aren't actually dead? Maybe you did die, and that everything that's happened to you since then, including this conversation, in fact constitutes your own personal afterlife? And of course, there's something in that. Like those who speculate, erroneously as it turns out (or is it?), that the tangible world is in fact merely a computer simulation set up by disinterested and diasembodied aliens for their own entertainment, how indeed do I know, like the putative inhabitants of that theoretical gigantic AI construct unaware that they're just constructs, that I'm really not simply already dead? That this is all there is? And that this, this strange half-life, for what it's worth, is the afterlife that we've all made such a fuss about these past couple of millennia? I've had time, as Bill Shatner said I would, to reflect on the melancholy notion that if only I'd tasted it, if only I hadn't wasted it, it wouldn't now appear to be so difficult to accept. As a thought, it's oddly comforting and discomforting, all at the same time. And like those latter period Lynch characters unable to process the trauma they've either perpetrated or experienced, perhaps after all a fictional version of reality is the one to which it makes more sense to adhere. Either way, onwards, till the next time.....

(*) As with any and all questions arising from watching the films of David Lynch, other interpretations are not only available but also inevitable and wholly necessary. Obviously.