Beyond Thought

For Pride in New York I've gone to the edge of the city where Manhattan looks unattainably distant. It's a little queer world on Riis beach where I find sea porcelain: a broken piece of a black and white dinner bowl someone once ate out of, smoothed at the edges.

Two days prior the state passed gay marriage and the Bergdorf Goodman registry crashed from too many hits. WNYC tells me that half a million people will be celebrating "marriage equality" at the parade today and applauding Governor Cuomo as he rides by waving and waving and waving. Each block of the parade route is sponsored by Delta Airlines or Target or Skyy Vodka.

Beyond thought, beyond the carefully constructed restraint of my skull, beyond my skin and thin pulsing membranes is an instinctive joy - a reflex - so ingrained it need not be learned. Beyond thought, beyond where occipital bone meets parietal bone, beyond narrow capillaries and deep blue nerves is a question a(n) (un)certainty placed beyond thought by societal rationality and proper interiority and proper exteriority. To drill through and past it, to think deeply of what is beyond thought, beyond reflexes, beyond instinctive responses is a project at once meta/physical. It demands drilling through the shells of our bodies that move a certain way, think a certain way, feel a certain way, are a certain way.

On Pride I walk by the ocean. I have always feared it since it knocked me off my feet and held me down, pushing my head and back and stomach against the sand until I came up gasping and crying, heaving salt water out of my eyes and nose and mouth. I learned to fear the ocean by sheer force and fear and awe when my body was small and my skull not yet fused. Drilling past that fear, past the impossible contradictions of pride and law and monogamy and setting foot in the ocean and finding a chipped piece of dinnerware, reaching a point before fusion collided occipital with parietal with frontal with temporal - an impossible project - a call to think beyond thought.

Prelude to a Trepanation: The Shaping of a Worldview

The Craniotome creates space and is the catalyst for a much needed purging; a purging of information, ideas, affects, upsets, false alarms, and stray (sub)conscious thoughts.

The Craniotome offers hope, signals possibilities, and encourages change for the bad or the good; all depending on the practitioner and her proclivities. The practitioner being me in this case would suggest that its effectiveness is also contingent upon mood. I can be a moody so and so.

Life, being; thought, learning; creativity, imagination; spirituality, faith: all these things take their toll on a brain and a spirit…or a soul…or a conscious…depending on who you are and what you (don’t ) believe. For me, a combination of all three will do: spirit, soul, and consciousness…the trinity of a higher self.

The Craniotome makes room for them all, but draws a line in the sand of my consciousness and allows for some discernment in deciding what is for me and what is against me.

The Crainotome hosts a garage sale for unwanted brain leaches. Those bits that do nothing, but hinder the shaping of my worldview. It is also a life raft, rescuing the treasures I inadvertently discard in moments of distraction and preoccupation with the muck and mire of life.

Theory is great and has its place, but the process of trepanation points to what portions of it play into the heavy residue of my childhood hang-ups and grownup pet peeves. Furthermore, theory strengthens me in some places, but the weightiness of it can also weaken me in others. The Craniotome relieves much of the unwanted pressure it lays on me in an effort to keep me strong.

Praxis is important, but then there’s always me getting in the way of a properly objective analysis of said experience. The critical lens that I hone through theoretical study allows me to make some sense of it. At the same time, the Craniotome allows a little light to shine through so I can navigate the balance between theory and praxis most efficiently.

What is creativity? How do I perform a creative act? Is it all up to me or is there some sort of force outside of me moving my hands or pushing the sound through my vocal chords? And what is imagination? Merely creative thoughts planted into my consciousness by some omnipresent, omnipotent God?

Speaking of God…

Why is that (wo)man (and his/her ideologies) mucks up any productive, life-giving conception of God most of the time? And what is it about this force…this God that gets so many bent out of shape whether they believe or not? Does the power of this force…this God…diminish if it is called by another name? Why does the name divide more people than bring them together? Has humanity made God too heavy for consumption, absorption, and/or comprehension? How can God, Nietzsche, Coltrane and Kendra-as-thinking-body make peace with one another inside of my mind, body, and soul?

Time will tell and this is the space where much of it will hopefully be worked out…for me at least. There are of course no rehearsals involved since the world is but a stage and all. We are all just actors playing our roles, making it up as we go. So...here goes nothing…

Forcing the body to speak.

So what is a craniotome? A craniotome is a tool used in trepanation, or in craniotomy. These words refer to a surgery in which a hole is drilled into a person’s skull. I first encountered this phenomenon in an article for Spin magazine (“A Hole in the Head” by Susan Perry, May 1998). The article described New Age adherents who believe that trepanation leads to an opening of consciousness. These New Agers traced this knowledge to a Mesoamerican pre-Columbian religious practice. A very brief Internet search informed me that trepanation is one of the first forms of surgery, and evidence of it has been found in skulls since the Neolithic age. Craniotomy continues today, and is apparently common. While craniotomy may have a legitimate past and present, I still think the people who engage in it are odd. It will always signify frightening people, willing to drill a hole into their heads to attain an otherness that I cannot and will not understand. This is where my own comprehension, where my own morality, will not allow me to go any further. I cannot touch them, I am unwilling to, and this is a space where our common language (English) leaves me bereft.

Craniotome evokes thoughts of Bataille, a man so strange and fascinating that you can't help but be influenced by his thought. While Bataille was not in any way a New Age practitioner, it is clear from his writing that he was fascinated with anthropology. He was fascinated with the specifically spiritual aspects of colonized others. Along the same lines, he was obsessed with Otherness, and wrote extensively on it. Much of his writing spoke of the otherness of the human body and the things the body does (things that are utterly common to us) – an eye, sex, the anus, death. What are the limits of the body? But even further, what are the limits of our own conceptions of our body? One reason I am unwilling to fully conceptualize self-trepanation is because I am unwilling to even think of doing this to myself. Trepanning is somewhere beyond my own reasoning ability and similarly, the embodiment of the practice is beyond my language. Even if these things could be described, I would not want to hear them. These are practices that push at my very own limits of knowing the Other.

This has always been one of anthropology’s projects: attempting to know the Other. From Durkheim, to Mauss, to the reiterations we see in Bataille. However, it goes even further than this. Anthropology is not just about trying to understand the Other, it is about trying to place the Other into a conceptual framework in which it will not fit. To denounce and explain the Other through social theory, through psychology, through a science of economics. Yet, all these theories only make us think that we know about Them. Bataille teaches us that sometimes we come up against something wholly familiar to us, and when the light diffracts against it, it becomes something indescribable and unknowable. An eye, the sun, sex and death. Thus, we do not even fully know things that we judge as banal.

With craniotome I hope to probe these spaces that are beyond comprehension. To probe these spaces where I might not have the language nor tools to decipher. Not everything must be spoken of or explained, but I will embark on this curious journey nonetheless.

Acido ergo sum

“Acido ergo sum.”

— Hopscotch, Julio Cortázar

In the ninety-ninth chapter of a novel that ends in the fifty-sixth, Cortázar rewrites Descartes best known conclusion. Thought, the quintessential human function, the necessary condition for and confirmation of our existence, has been exposed as a product of electrochemical gradients and synaptic potentials within a densely interconnected neural circuit. With the cogito situated somewhere among electromagnetic fields and chemical phenomena, “not so different as we used to think from things like an aurora borealis or a picture taken with infrared rays” (Cortázar 470), a thinking being is a fundamentally material one. But is it necessarily a finite one?

The kernel self is sealed within the skull. There it thumbs through words and images in bounded awareness. But what is the sum of this inner experience if not a desire to go beyond this very boundedness, to satisfy some nostalgic longing for a bygone continuity? Might we say, metonymically, that what we desire is in fact a trepanation?

The eye perceives a hole, something missing. But by the ambiguity of an absence, precisely where there is nothing, may something come to be. There, between the external world and the small tract of brain, exposed yet intact, there is a fusion of separate entities as the self overflows and exceeds itself — there is a revelation of continuity, of eternity.

The craniotome. Perhaps it is a sterilized surgical tool. Perhaps an electrical drill, a corkscrew. Perhaps it is anything that we put to our own head to repudiate our wholeness, to dissolve the isolating
separateness of being.

Master, Cut the Stone Out

“Master, cut the stone out, my name is Lubbert Das”

thus reads the inscription of Hieronymous Bosch’s enigmatic painting “The Stone Operation” currently on display in the Prado in Madrid. The painting is obscure even for an artist as mysterious as Bosch, whose nightmarish scenes and rumored dabbling in Christian esotericism have brought him a modern infamy disproportionate to his relatively small body of work produced in the late 15th century. In the picture, a doctor removes the Stone of Folly (a trope of Netherlandish folklore) from his patient’s skull, while a priest and a nun look on. It is probably the most famous Fine Art representation of trepanning, or something close to it.

Renaissance works like this intrigue us because there is a vacuum of meaning. The twentyfirst century understands realism, understands abstract modern art, but we have difficulty parsing these strange voices crying from the wilderness of the past, in which figures meant to represent human beings stare unblinkingly, almost with boredom, on the Holy Virgin enthroned and bursting from the seams of reality, or on horrific battlefields. There is a real disconnect, meaning that is impossible to embody, despite our best efforts to bootstrap ourselves into a bygone consciousness.

Bosch’s own trepanning has a dual significance for us. As writers and thinkers ever honing our critical and intellectual skills we hope to remove the “stone of folly” from our own skulls, but we also take an interest in the operation itself, this impossible maneuver, a siege on the house of subjectivity itself. In our capitalist world, where maximization of all desires and of all possibilities is an article of faith, such meaningless sacrifice of well-being offends us. But I believe more time should be spent looking at the places that such an exercise of imagination takes us; into worlds where value is not linear and infinite, where value is chattel for stranger things. Trepanning, so close to life itself, so far from “ours”, is a perfect symbol, a placeholder for the horror of ritual, of sacrificing value, where you can really get a whiff of the Other in the forest. And so I hope this blog will be both the removal of the Stone and the removing itself. The craniotome.