Theory of Mind
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Theory of Mind
My dog runs away from drifting balloons, paper bags that have been caught by the wind, Jesus statues (those in an upturned bathtub) and vacuum cleaners. Theory of mind is the ability to understand that others have intentions and feelings. My dog? My dog has way too much of it.
Boredom
Chirping sounds made by bored chickens on a summer afternoon. They are well fed, and unmatched in stupidity. This one walks with a lazy stride, jerking its little pancake of a head to and fro, and that one pecks at a stone that has not contained a living thing since the Deluvian period. How can we not love them? my mother says, and she is so right.
Early Anatomy
At age five I was asked to explain my belly button. “It is the place,” I said without hesitation, “where the skin has been tied together.” Hence, the concept of the human body as a sack filled with all necessary ingredients, which is then tied up and sealed after a final quality inspection.
Fresh Enthusiasm
Ah, the fresh enthusiasm of people not yet touched by the inevitable turn of events! He’d arrived loud-mouthed, propped up by perpetual confidence, and spoke leaning into my ear, which I managed to cusp with my hollowed hand. He had important things to say. In the whole picture of things, I liked him. He was the spitting image of me arriving somewhere in a strange territory, though I’m normally timid, not asserting myself. Otherwise everything about him is the same.
A Theory of Consciousness
As I was in the process of falling asleep, the other night, I was in a state where my mind’s eye looked at several things at once, in random order but with great intensity. And then I thought that consciousness has a lot to do with volley ball, the game of keeping a ball afloat, at all cost, among several players, the players being the subjects successively touched by the ball in my increasingly complicated simile, with the ball being the focused attention that can only look at one thing at a time (a.k.a. touch one player at a time) while the other players are jumping nervously up and down, making the ball aware of the fact that they are still in the game while still others stand in the wings, wanting to have a go in the game but being rejected, even treated with derision, by the ones active, and then, while I was thinking of the ball flying through the air, never touching the ground, I thought – OMG! — about volley ball being played by people all naked, and at that very moment I lost track of the ball and what it stood for, consciousness or a ball an sich, and that must have been the moment my consciousness slipped out, because, beyond this point, I have no recollection whatsoever.
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