The Sage Forge

My introduction to the curiosities of the brain and mind began when my family discovered I was writing with the wrong hand about the time I was entering the second grade.  Some children are slow to choose handed-ness and my tardiness was compounded by the fact I had started first grade as a five-year-old.  My first grade teacher decided I wrote better with my left hand after watching me struggle to finish assignments as I switched from one hand to another and back.  In truth I was not writing at all.  I was drawing, a conceptually and intellectually distinct activity.  My "writing" process required that I choose a word, translate that word into a visual image, and DRAW the image from memory.  It was an arduous and non-automatic set of steps.  By the end of the third grade my education was essentially in a crisis mode.  I was dyslexic (as I remain in some ways to this day), dysgraphic, and promotable only by the ardent pleading of my parents and the obvious fact that I could hold intelligent conversations with adults.

Thanks to my mother's pre-medical education at Centenary College of Louisiana one of the things I could speak intelligently of was a bundle of nerve fibers called the Corpus Callosum.  As I neared the fourth grade she had explained to me the communicative function of this structure connecting the cerebral hemispheres and how the language functions of the left side of my brain were required to be routed through the motor cortex of the right side of my brain to get writing down to my left hand.  With this discussion she convinced me to spend a year writing right-handed, a process that often required me to tuck fingers of my left hand into belt loops to keep the thing out of the way. 

This process introduced me to the OTHER me.

Most people think of themselves as one person.  To be introduced to the sensation of having more than one personality at work in a single head one would normally need to have the two sides of the brain separated, an operation usually only undertaken to tame the storms of uncontrolled and life-threatening epilepsy.  As an eight-year-old with a unified brain I had the experience of witnessing one side of my brain attempting to fool, cajole, or even fight the other into sticking with the scribal status-quo, and sometimes working so hard at it that I could be confused as to which direction I was supposed to write on a page.  Before I was nine I knew I was, at the very least, a pair of sometimes conflicting personalities and, if it was clear that the lively disputes of this bicameral governance implied more than one mind, who should be surprised that 'we' would consider the notion of a cerebral "vox populi"?

To be clear, my lifelong cranial bi-partizanship has nothing to do with the disorder of the mind called Multiple Personality Disorder.  In that problem the mind splits itself into discrete personalities, each of which, while dominant, thinks itself the sole legitimate personality of the person.  I have never seen documentation of a case of MPD that was bilateral. In my case, during a critical period of brain development, a step in which one hemisphere of the brain usually establishes an absolute dominance over perceived personality was circumvented, permitting both hemispheres to express themselves overtly.  That aspect of my personality solidified in a crucial period of shared responsibility and has never gone away.

I write left-handed again, though I usually take phone notes with my right.  During the experiment of the fourth grade my writing process, with either hand, became far better integrated.  I do, in fact, write as opposed to drawing words.  But the process is interesting to behold from the inside as the overeager imagery and emotion of the right hemisphere is sometimes merely ruddered by the formality of the left while at other times a relatively sterile left hemisphere analytically poles an uninterested right through canals of thick discourse.  No matter which side is momentarily dominant there is always someone looking over their shoulder.

What is the deepest insight I draw from this process?  The most pervasive instinct of the human mind is that there is one right way, one truth, one reality.  The converse we see reflected in society, that there is NO right or wrong, is not its opposite.  It is, rather, its frustrated reflection.  When we can't determine the "truth" even the well educated and very intelligent fill in the blanks with useful contrivance.  This avoids what I have termed "vertiginous awareness", the knowledge of phenomena for which we have no explanation, and can find assurance of no order.  I don't have the luxury of such unity.  In its negotiated truce my brain has forced on me many points of view where most people can imagine only one.

A generation ago my great uncle, Oliver Emmerich wrote in his book "The Two Faces of Janus" of a Southern culture that, in their understanding of the one truth, hadn't been able to imagine the world being thrust upon them by the seemingly wild changes in the United States.  He reported that those changes came, none the less.  In his tale Janus the dichomaton stood for the guard against the unwelcome guest- change.   In these entries the two faces will peer inward to take a look at the changing view of the mind, the strange place it occupies, and how it becomes, is, and expresses us.