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I’m not going to beat around the bush. I have prescient dreams. Dreams that foretell the future.  Not the distant future but the impending future.

I’ll wake up, I’ll say aloud “person ‘X’ is traveling to City ‘Y’ today,” and sure enough, in the course of the day I find out that it’s true.

That’s not the whole story. I dream about people from whom I have not heard a peep in years, people who have disappeared from my radar, who could be dead for all I know, and I’ll dream about that person talking to me. Then I’ll awake, startled and bemused from the incongruity of the dream. In the course of the day the phone will ring and that person will be on the other end.

This has  happened so many times that it no longer freaks me out. To be honest, I feel a sense of personal triumph when it does occur.

Scientific theories concerning the nature of reality seem to be in such a shambles these days that it really makes no sense to doubt what’s happening to me. There is plenty of room for my experience on the junk heap of ideas that constitutes our modern explanation of the Universe. Don’t believe in my prescient dreams, believe we live in a world of ten dimensions.

Now, in my realm of cosmogony, stumbling upon a juicy morsel of a phrase such as ‘coming events cast the shadows before,’ is akin to kicking your foot on a miniaturized galaxy. Consider the furtive implication. Has someone else felt the future enveloped in their present?

Though I first encountered these words in James Joyce’ Ulysses, I knew that novel to be a fisherman’s stew of reworked sentences and so searched to find who may have come up with it first.

This led straightaway to Thomas Campbell, a Scottish poet who, in 1802 penned Lochiel’s Warning,

‘Tis the sunset of life gives me mystical lore, And coming events cast their shadows before.’

Enter Google Labs’ Ngram.

This software, characterized by virtual-reality pioneer Jaron Lanier as a perfidious mash-up of books that criminally effaces the ‘author,’ actually turns out to be a nifty search engine that counts the occurrences of words and phrases and plots them over time.

Here is the Ngram for ‘cast their shadows before:’

Note the twin peaks between 1850 and 1880. This is suggestive of the fad-forgotten-found-again cycle so common in pop culture today.  During this period, ‘cast their shadows before’ was the ‘it girl’ of sentences, drooled enviously out of everyone’s inkwell.

Ngram?

Google likes to misspell words, ‘googol’ for instance. Also ‘engram.’

Engram was coined in 1904 by German scientist Richard Semon, who went on to commit suicide.

He hoped to use his new word to explain the engraving of information on a biological substrate for later retrieval.

Apart from its adoption by L. Ron Hubbard in his theory of ‘Dianetics,’ the word engram has enjoyed a lively history in mainstream science, and remains in use today to describe the physical manifestation of a memory trace.

In his work ‘The Mneme,’ Semon suggests it was a widely held fin de siècle belief that what we might today refer to as ‘episodic memory,’ or memories ‘containing rich contextual details about events that are specific in time and place,’ shared analogous properties with the ‘memory’ of the germ cell for its lineage. Was this indicative of a shared underlying mechanism?

Semon, of course,  knew nothing of DNA. He looked to the germ cell without understanding that the entire genome is wrapped-up in the DNA found within every cell (not quite) in the body.

Work by Eric Kandel and others has shown that gene expression is involved in the process of storing memories. The genome is unzipped and its information is read-out by cellular machinery. Proteins are synthesized and these are used to consolidate memory in the form of altered neural structures.

The coming events of molecular biology seem to have cast their shadow on Semon’s work.

Memories of the Future

Here I return to my prescient dreams, experienced as episodic depictions of events that are yet to occur.

Let me not delve into speculation concerning the ontological status of knowledge about the future, for there lies a trap, a peat-bog of un-testable assertions which finds its natural habitat in cocktail-party chatter and not amidst a rigorous examination of the Truth as found in this humble exposition.

I will, however, parenthetically point-out that tantalizingly suggestive tidbits from science indicate the situation regarding time and its apparent ‘flow’ may defy the order of our ordinary expectations. Some, like Ilya Prigogine , are convinced that time’s arrow flies in one direction. Others have their doubts.

It is, at any rate, indisputable that we spend our days in part imagining the future. Perhaps we seek to choose where we will find ourselves when we arrive. Often we are able to conceive pictures of the future that are accurate in their essential structure, so perhaps it is no mystery that I have prescient dreams and that these are endowed with explicit details.

Depictions of the future can be richly textured, painted in the style of memory, and this is true not merely in the analogous sense, but in a physiologic sense as well:

Episodic memory allows individuals to project themselves
backward in time and recollect many aspects of their previous experiences (Tulving, 1983). Numerous cognitive and
neuroimaging studies have attempted to delineate the psychological and biological properties of episodic memory. One common assumption in such studies is that episodic memory is primarily or entirely concerned with the past. However, a growing number of investigators have begun to approach episodic memory in a broader context, one that emphasizes both the ability of individuals to re-experience episodes from the past and also imagine or pre-experience episodes that may occur in the future.

-Donna Rose Addis, Alana T. Wong, Daniel L. Schacter Neuropsychologia 45 (2007) 1363–1377

Now the mystery is distilled into a question: ‘what source is there for the nascent information which coalesces into the dream?’ for that is the thing I cannot recover. Where is the spider who shakes this web? I do not know.

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When Edwin met Limoncella in a bar in Buenos Aires he asked her if that was her real name.

‘It’s something my mother came-up with when she was drunk and pregnant with me, ‘ she replied. ‘She missed Italy.’

‘And how about those, are they real?’ he inquired, pointing at her breasts with his beaker of scotch.

‘One hundred percent natural, with but a baby’s breath-full of inspiration from the hands of Dr. Calderón. I’m sure you know his reputation.’ She paused and added, ‘one day he will be Saint Calderón.’

Edwin proposed marriage and Limoncella accepted coquettishly.  It had been weeks since she last had married.

The next day they hired Edema from a little slum outside of town, bought her a maid’s uniform and a fake passport, and the three of them boarded Edwin’s jet for New York.

In their new Tribeca residence, Edwin explained the terms of employment to Edema as she unpacked Limoncella’s 102-piece set of Louis Vuitton luggage.

‘You’ll receive every third Wednesday off without pay, however you must not leave the house, should there be something that we require of you unexpectedly. All other times you are to remain in the house, ever at the ready, listening intently. The faintest coo from Madame may indicate the embryonic phase of some nascent desire. At that you must snap into action. Anticipation! That is the essence of your duty.’

‘Yes sirs,’ she replied.

They soon settled into a comfortable routine. Edwin left the house at 8:30am. Limoncella and Edema believed he went to some place they referred to as the ‘office,’ although Edwin never actually mentioned any such place. He spoke few words to Edema and fewer still to Limoncella. He had taken to calling her ‘Citronella’ after several weeks, but since she never listened to him, it mattered little.

Limoncella rose daily at ten, calling sharply for Edema to bring her breakfast. Edema would roll-in a cart with all of the items Madame had requested. Of these she would eat only a thumbnail-sized bite of poached egg white, and after she would violently shove the cart aside, snarling, ‘Do you want me to get fat?’

Then, Edema would lift two chilled cucumber slices from a doily that sat on a silver saucer, using mother-of-pearl tongs to place them, ever-so deftly, over Madame’s eyelids. After, she would scurry backwards a few steps.

Should the temperature of the cucumber not be to her liking, Limoncella would demand that Edema disclose her location with a syllable or two, and then hurl whatever item she could grope the bed to find, invariably missing since she could not see.

Edema would thoughtfully cry out as if she had been struck, and Limoncella would grin with satisfaction.

After dressing, Limoncella would depart for her morning spa treatments and then spend the afternoon shopping.

Edema had only a scant hour to unpack the shopping bags the porter brought up before cocktail hour would be upon her. She struggled to find places for the necklaces, bracelets, dresses, cashmere sweaters, Swarovski-studded track suits and handbags that came through the door each day.

Edwin had provided a standing order for her to dispose of items after one week and this she obeyed with organized efficiency, creating charts of items noting their acquisition and disposal dates.

It wasn’t much different than what she expected the United States would be like, so she could not have imagined the feeding frenzy which would ensue every Thursday, when the porter brought sacks of jewelry and clothes down to the package room.

Precisely at 4:30, as detailed in a note Edwin had pinned to Edema’s uniform, ice crystals were to be visible to the naked eye in the swirling liquor of his martini when he came through the elevator door.

Once, when Edema saw the liquid had settled to a ripple-less state, still, untouched, its meniscus hugging the very top of the rim, she began to tremble with fear and cried to the blesséd Virgin, fearing that Edwin had met with some horrible end.

Presently however, he breezed into the foyer, epithets tumbling before him in the direction of Edema, who was by now down upon one knee.

‘I paid that miserable porter the better part of a month’s wages to dispatch those wretched yapping puffball lap-dogs unto the joyful bliss of doggie heaven. And look here- white frisé hairs on my trousers.’

‘Yes sirs, but these are the new dogs. The insurance pay.’

‘Well when you see him, I want you to tell him to stop being so clever. A properly gruesome crime-scene might induce her to forego acquiring the next litter. Has he no sense, that man?’

‘Yes sirs. I will tell.’

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Years ago, when the economy was more benevolent than the one we currently endure, I could cover my monthly expenses with only a few days’ labor.

As a consequence of this good fortune I was permitted to pursue intellectual endeavors that had no intrinsic ability to pay back in cash what time they consumed. Competitive etymology is a good example.

If I were to be vanquished at a dinner party by someone’s thrilling elucidation of the origin of the word ‘sincere,’ I would merely vow to hunker down, spending hours in the library to search for an even more convoluted tale to spin.

That is how I came upon the word augury and its noble heritage.

The Augur was a Roman priest who specialized in divination by observation of the flight patterns of birds. We hark back to that meaning when we say ‘this augurs well for such-and-such.’ Perhaps more would choose ‘this bodes well’ instead, but ‘to bode’ is not a subject of this post.

Apparently, the Augur was, in turn, a refined version of the Auspex, a practitioner of haruspicy who, in his more primitive and hands-on manner, would divine the forthcoming unfolding of events through assiduous examination of birds’ entrails.

Peering inside an avian cousin and compelling oneself not to avert the gaze, but instead to studiously penetrate to the meaning of the play performed there on the stage of the glistening, iridescent viscera is to arrive at the undeniable fact of our own material nature.

One has to admit, it does convey a certain symbolic representation of a willingness to bear the full weight of the ‘truth,’ whatever it should happen to be.

Still, there is something inherently poetic captured by the unflinching, individual and coherent mind put on display by a darting flock of birds. An ensemble becomes one.

As proof of my assertion that this is ‘poetic,’ I submit these lines from an actual poem by Richard Wilbur, called ‘The Event’

What is an individual thing? They roll
Like a drunken fingerprint across the sky!
Or so I give their image to my soul
Until, as if refusing to be caught
In any singular vision of my eye
Or in the nets and cages of my thought,
They tower up, shatter, and madden space
With their divergences, are each alone
Swallowed from sight, and leave me in this place

I had mixed feelings about this poem when I first encountered it in a book review. I am naturally repelled by poems that utilize rhyme. I have, however, concluded that this one merits some respect, especially given that I have remembered the image of the ‘drunken fingerprint’ for years now. Also, I am drawn to the image Wilbur uses to depict time flowing backwards:

As if a cast of grain leapt back to the hand,
A landscapeful of small black birds, intent
On the far south, convene at some command
At once in the middle of the air, at once are gone
With headlong and unanimous consent
From the pale trees and fields they settled on.

In considering the motion of a flock of birds the question peeps into my head, ‘how do the one hundred trillion cells of the human body come to believe they are one organism?’ It sounds like a joke when you phrase it that way, but who would even know if there were dissenters in the ranks?

Time and Moments

‘One Way Sign’

Wilbur’s casual allusion to running the film of reality backwards through the projector of time brings to mind this photograph that I have so urgently tried to place in a spotlight where it will be seen and acclaimed.

Its origins lie in my posing to myself the question ‘how does the self continually, instantaneously and spontaneously maintain its apparent integrity from moment-to-moment?’ I began to address this question in SyntheticBlog with the post ‘My Son the Narratologist,’ when I explored the role of narrative as it exists in our minds.

I have detected in my recent readings that there is a tendency to relate the continuity of self to our notion of time and its origins. Perhaps this follows logically, though it could merely be a trend, a fashionable intellectual conceit. I tend towards the former view.

We (let me use ‘we’ as a shorthand for a dominant idea in our culture)believe that time flows continuously in one direction and that is exists apart from our awareness, and by extension, apart from any awareness.

After our death we suppose that time will exist unchanged for those who remain and  that, in this sense all minds are irrelevant to the existence of time. Yet evidence favoring this belief is scant, while evidence against it is difficult to dismiss. An introduction to these ideas can be found in the amiable manifesto Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe.

Naturally, since humans all tend to ask the same questions about themselves, the history of these ideas can be verifiably traced back 2500 years to the well-known set of Zeno’s Paradoxes.  Originally forty in number, only seven have been preserved and these come to us by way of Aristotle.

The ‘Arrow Paradox‘ posits the falsification of time by its reduction to a set of points on a path that themselves are without duration. With that in mind I turn once more to my photograph.

Conventionally, in our left-to-right reading society, the movement of media through time, media like video and audio played on a computer, is depicted with arrows pointing leftward to go back in recorded time, and arrows pointing rightward to signify a forward march. Here is a snippet from the Windows Media Player toolbar:

We all know how to interpret this. Now look again at the ‘One Way’ sign above. According to our conventions of iconography, it seems to declare there can only be movement: backward into the past.

Curiously, within us is an autobiographical self that ordinarily moves rather effortlessly in this direction. The voice that speaks our past to our present selves, never ceasing to tell its story, always strives to paint the present in pointillist colors from yesterday’s palette.

Yet it struggles always to pin down the blob of mercury that is the future, and this failing has engendered the varied arts of divination, augury being but one of many.

Those who have experienced prescient dreams may harbor different feelings about this blob of uncertainty we call the ‘future.’ I know I do. ‘Coming events cast their shadow before them,’ as Joyce quotes Thomas Campbell in Ulysses.

Could the roiling cauldron of that-which-is-possible gel for an instant, perceptibly, and thereby convey its image to our selves?

“Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.” -Joyce, once again from Ulysses.

Much of our awareness seems to consist of an uninterruptible flow of chatter in our heads. Is it from this that we assemble a ‘self?’

In Need of a Good Trepanning

 

Finally, in my tour of the word augur, I cannot omit its use as the name of a tool used to bur round holes, for example in the art of trepanning, or trepanation.

People have endured this practice of drilling holes through the skull for thousands of years. According to the International Trepanation Advocacy Group, one can even elect to have this procedure performed today.

I do like that people use the phrase ‘drill down’ to indicate a hierarchical relationship that needs examination at a core level. Besides the obvious evocation of trepanning, this metaphor fits in nicely with the notion that the self can be examined in a similar fashion.  Furthermore it brings us to a clearer delineation of the essential, Cartesian problem of mind: drilling down reveals merely matter, but inwardly is a personal private universe known only to oneself.

.A pleasant place to contemplate these ideas can be had in Solms and Turnbull: Brain and the Inner World: An Introduction to the Neuroscience of Subjective Experience.

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