MY DOUBLE SELF
It is almost as if I am two people. One is what I awere of as the human person who attempts to understand what is going on around him as he faces the mystery of his own confusion, a conscious, rational person. But then there is another person, an animal person, the animal I was through all of the long, chance, random genetic mutations that led to being human. My animal side (don’t reminde me that I am all animal) is reflected in the eyes of my son’s dog Maggie, who stays with me from time to time. Maggie is not conscious in the same way as I am, but she is certainly alert and conscious. But she is impelled along almost entirely by feelings, by something within her that responds to affection, delights in walks, yowls when disturbed, responds to different dogs in friendly or apparently violent ways. Maggie doesn’t sit and reflect on her day as I am doing. She doesn’t marvel at ironies and inconsistencies, she can communicate but in primitive ways and mainly by body language.
But it isn’t Maggie that I am trying to understand, it is myself. Maggie is able to feel her way through life driven by deep emotional responses which she doesn’t question or wonder about. But embedded in her genes is a driving life force which serves her well. She gathers a great deal of information as we walk through the woods by sniffing and is always curious and wary and exuberant and lively. Something is driving her along.
What I am interested in since very little separates me from Maggie: the same organs, the same four legs, the same eyeballs and sight, the same sniffer although hers is more powerful. Maggie and I developed through the same process of evolution and only relatively late in the earth’s history separated slightly. She is dropped on earth with all the senses and drive to make her way through in an intuitive way, and I am dropped here with the same though slightly different drives, intuitively driven to eat and sleep and mate and nurture and protect. We are both social animals.
It is this intuitive drive which is much more central to who I am than the cognitive, rational consciousness side which has appeared at the very end of my evolution.
That is what I am wondering about. Because I sense that blind inner driving force all of the time, often seemingly overridden by my conscious choices. One of the things I wonder about is my dreams and how they link me to my inner visceral drive. They almost always make no sense rationally and are easy to dismiss or to mock. I don’t put much stock in my dreams. But I have noticed that on some mornings I wake up full of confidence and ready to go and on other mornings I wake up feeling flat and depressed and wanting to avoid the day. Where does that come from? It may be connected to my dreams or my dreams may simply be a projection of that inner visceral drive that takes me up and down, a frothy remnant of what is going on deep within me.
Another similar inexplicable thing is that during an ordinary day when I am merely going cheerfully about my business, a shadow crosses over me, the feeling a rabbit has when a hawk flies overhead, except that when I look around there is nothing there. One moment I am cheerful and the next a premonition of disaster hovers over me.
And of course my conscious self tries to figure this out. What is it that could be disturbing me, what threat is there that could soon blindside me? And of course, if I am reasonable about it I know that any moment I could have a traffic accident, could disturb another human who will lash back at me, could suddenly be sensing a tiny ache that will grow into cancer and kill me. Plenty can go wrong in my life, chance disaster is possible anywhere.
But at other times I wake up anticipating the day and everything seems bright and shiny and alive. Something within me transforms the everyday world with the power of intense romance, but with no girl in her radiant presence, who could cause this, in sight. I just feel very alive.
My question is why, out of the blue, I feel delight one moment and immobilized the next, with the transition back and forth for no apparent reason. I think this is the same inner visceral drive that has been impelling all animal life along, me or Maggie. Some force beyond my control drives me along or at other times makes me howl as Maggie does when she hears thunder.
It is my intuition of some deep inner drive that I wonder about. When I am up and high I wonder if something within me is projecting a life giving illusion that makes me dance when it is apparent that I am one of the living dead, soon to die whose ultimate significance is denied by absurdity. Maggie thinks she is important, I think I am important and we are both passing the time, usefully from the perspective of evolution, until we shortly die leaving not a trace. Maybe it is necessary that my inner visceral drive overrides the futility of life in order to keep me going to prolong the species. So I wake up high and no shadow hovers over me.
But maybe I need to be reminded that when high, in a sort of manic state, that I am in a state when I can do something foolish and threatening, so I suddenly sense the shadow floating over me to bring me down.
My inner visceral drive which is central to my animal existence and is the same for all animal life, the life force that impels all life from humans, to Maggie, to crocodiles, and amoeba and ferns, embedded in our genes is central to who I am. And my conscious effort to be aware as I write here is maybe just the frothy projection in daylight that my dreams are in the middle of the night, simply reflections of the life force that is pulsing within me.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 