_What Should We Do With Our Brain?_ : Philip, Catherine Malabou, & my new book on Alzheimer's

                                                 [Philip, post-surgery]

Last week, Lori Yancura (my co-instructor of a course on dementia/Alzheimer's last semester) and I took her dog Philip to the Hi`olani Alzheimer's Care Center in Honolulu. A group of residents sat in a circle in the common area, the parrot "Sweetie" squawking on occasion, or punching his beak against the glass, making a clicking sound. Each resident wore a cream-colored anklet, lest he or she wander away from the unit (the elevator requires a code, and the Alzheimer's wing is not on the ground floor).  Lori let Philip off his leash; he greeted each resident in turn, eliciting reactions from joy to "he's going to bite me," or even "he's going to bite my pussy," as one woman said with Alzheimer's inappropriateness. For an hour he earned treats for his tours around the inner circle. One woman said repeatedly, "let me try!"and then, "What's his name?" She had "had a dog in her past," a phrase that sounded familiar to me from a communication I once got about my mother. Another woman said, "I'm not an animal person," to which another said, "me either." But, for the most part, the hour was happy. Only one woman ate the treat that was intended for Philip, after asking for a glass of water so that (one gathered) she could "take it."

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In her short book, What Should We Do With Our Brain?, Catherine Malabou writes: "An Alzheimer's patient is the nemesis of connectionist society, the counter-model of flexibility. He is presented as a disaffiliated person: errant, without memory, asocial, without recourse. One observes in his brain a thinning of connections, the accumulation of fibrils inside neurons, and the presence of senile plaques--all factors contributing to rigidification and loss of suppleness, which, paradoxically, lead to a chaotic wandering." She relates the image of the Alzheimer's wanderer with that of homeless, illegal immigrant, or unemployed persons. "In fact," she continues, it is no longer possible to distinguish rigorously on an ideological level between those suffering a neurodegenerative disorder and those with major social handicaps." Her paragraph moves with typical Malabou-ian speed, leaping synapses as a hiker might rocks in a narrow stream bed in advance of a rainstorm. Malabou tries throughout to separate the notion of "flexibility" (inherently passive, operating on workers to make them do the bidding of global capital) and "plasticity" (active, resistant, involved in recreating identity by way of creative destruction--plastique being the French word for explosive).She finds plasticity even in the early stages of Alzheimer's, as I would too in noting the artistic richness of that phase of the illness.

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My high school English teacher passed me a copy of Proust, said, "read a page of this." I had never seen anything like it, the looping sentences, meditations wrapped inside the barest cocoon of plot, a memory obsession so much like my own. That obsession dates back as long as I can remember, as if an obsession with memory pre-dates memory itself. The loss of a stuffed animal that so haunted me when I was four was probably just the conscious manifestation of a sense that had originally had no language involved in it.  Language and memory cannot exist without each other, can they? I'll be teaching "Combray" (at least) in a class in the Fall, if I get enough Honors students. So I'm reading Proust now, finding those madeleines and cobblestones in the text: "oh, I remember this," having almost always to do with a moment Marcel recollects his past, suddenly, accidentally. After eating his mother's madeleine, Marcel writes of "this all-powerful joy . . . connected with the taste of the tea and the cake . . . Where did it come from? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it?" (60).


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That "all-powerful joy" reminds me of the joy expressed by Alzheimer's patients--those who can still feel it--in the presence of a dog or a flower. Whether or not the patient had a dog or flower in her past, what is triggered is not memory but presence. A presence the rest of us interpret as memory, perhaps. When does memory simply become another mode of presence? How can I reconcile, bind together, what I learn from Malabou's dialectical mode of thinking and the Buddhist texts, like Norman Fischer's new book on Lojong, which call the very notion of identity into question? Where does a notion of resistance, so important to Malabou, fruitfully work together with a notion of non-resistance, crucial to Fischer and other Buddhists?  Perhaps it is in this moment where recovering memory so resembles being in the present, where history emerges as something stronger than it had been when it was. 


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My new book is out from Singing Horse Press.  It's an extended meditation on my mother's Alzheimer's and on her illness, its social and cultural effects, as well as on ways in which to write the disease without appropriating it (taking oneself as the center of the story, not the person who is ill, in other words). It is the second volume of my Dementia Blog, but stands apart from it, is more playful that it was, more various.  It's as if the accelerated diminishment of my mother's condition, her fall into silence, obliged a formal excess.  A plasticity, not a flexibility, I hope.  Here are the books' covers, and also a link to the press and to Small Press Distribution. I wish I'd had Malabou's thinking on plasticity as I wrote these books, her sense that even in its destruction, the brain/mind creates itself anew.