I Wish!

I wish my brain was working like it used to. Actually, I wish it were working better than it used to, but I had plenty already so I wouldn't want to be greedy.

I had an epiphany of sorts, or at least a synthesis—the closest thing my brain gets to as far as focus or direction these days—involving a handful of different pieces, one of which was a couple of famous lines from Shakepeare's Richard II:

Our lands, our lives and all are Bolingbroke's,
And nothing can we call our own but death
And that small model of the barren earth
Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.
For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;

“And tell sad stories of the death of kings”. That was one of the pieces.

And something about fear and madness and the themes running through Macbeth Mackers, and if fear can cause madness, or madness, inevitable, causes fear. Or the ad hoc fallacy (ad hoc, ergo propter hoc) obviates either/both.

Another was the soliloquy of Queen Gertrude in Hamlet where she reports on the suicide of Ophelia. (Just for the record, I'm no expert in Shakespearean text, just bits of jetsam stuck to my brain combined with a re-watching of a brilliant Canadian comedy-drama series called “Slings and Arrows”).

Yet another? Maps. Or globes, specifically, those globes with show more than just the mundane dotted lines which parcel “our lands” arbitrarily or report on the latitude and longitude of East Bumfuck, Midwest, USA. Such as the dark globe displayed on my television as my PS3 contributes its own still-rather-well-working brains to the Folding @ Home distributed computing initiative, that dark globe which is dotted with golden pinpricks of light showing where there are machines whose computing power has been donated to the medical research of discovering how linear chains of peptides translated from a linear chain of nucleotides (mRNA) transcribed from DNA then fold and bend and reoriented from that linear entity into a three-dimensional macromolecule known as a protein, many of which perform chemical reactions that are necessary for life to exist.

Globes that show carbon burden by country by distorting borders to show the relative instead of the absolute. That's a dotted line whose arbitrariness has been removed, eh?

Maps of the United States after the 2004 “election” showing not a massive red tumor with bits of blue tissue still clinging at the edges onto healthy living, but a smear of purple far more similar than different.

Add to all that...well, I forget. That's the problem: Those pieces I've outlined above along with some other piece or pieces (I also forget the count) gave me a flash of some insight on some thing which felt New. New as in it had never occurred to me. New, as in, I don't recall ever having known it to have occurred to anyone else, either.

And now it's probably gone. Gone “for good”, though I fail to see any good in its loss. It wasn't a cure for cancer or world hunger or the common cold; I doubt it was even a palliative in dealing with the immaturity and selfishness of people who should be past all that by now. Hell, it may have been a very bad thing, a personal insight that would have sent me further into despair and saddled me with that much more to carry on top of the relentless spherical ache (another globe!) in the base of my brain and the linear chain of pain that plays leapfrog back and forth between C2 and C7 in my neck.

Still, I wish I had recorded that flash somewhere so I could be sitting here in my Dutch cafe writing about that insight instead of the loss of it.

I wish for a lot of things these days, and when I get like that—which, blessedly, is rare—I just wish I could stop wishing.

Normally that's a self-obliterating thing and I'm left with mental peace. Not so these days; these days I'm left with the pain and the ache and a single remnant wish: I wish I had my life back.

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