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The mind is its own place

Day or night, awake or asleep, there’s something inside me that whispers, prattles, and clatters; my head is not a quiet place, I fear.

Sometimes I think I am in control, but mostly I just listen for interesting or useful ideas and borrow them, noises and all. I mean, I created them… didn’t I? We want to believe we own our inner dialogue, or at least lay claim to it and pretend. But where does it come from? Even if it is associated with mental illness, the voice has to come from somewhere; there has to be a progenitor…

Although there are various ways to categorize them, I am drawn to the idea of Charles Fernyhough from Durham University in the UK that ‘there are four levels that speech goes through on its way to being fully internalised: external dialogue (such as children’s conversations with their parents); private speech (when children talk out loud to themselves); expanded inner speech (inner speech that closely copies external dialogue, in full sentences and in a similar format); and, finally, condensed inner speech, or inner speech that is a disjointed, a mix of words and ideas and what the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky called ‘thinking in pure meanings’.’

A similar confusion of word-ideas like that has discouraged me from venturing more than a few pages into James Joyce’s novel Ulysses. And yet I tolerate a similar milling crowd of random thoughts that bounce around like gas molecules inside my own head without distress. Perhaps they are the norm, though; perhaps patterns that I can recognize only surface from time to time… Maybe constructive thinking is simply what happens after the various constituent parts of the recipe have been mixed and cooked.

It’s all very bewildering if I break my inner noises down like that, however; many of them are not readily identifiable as personal: they are noncommittal about their ownership; they simply appear out of nowhere and then, like a tongue of flame in a campfire, disappear without a trace into the night that surrounds them: noises in a forest.

And I’m not sure I’m comfortable with calling it an ‘internal dialogue’ either; multilogue may describe it better, given that ‘I am large, I contain multitudes’ as Walt Whitman proclaims in his Song of Myself. And yet, at the end of the day, as it were, there I am: a me who is allowing these voices to run rampant through my head like children in a playground.

Because of the years I wear, I sometimes wonder if I am only now able to gain access to the mayhem in the black box that is my head without prejudice, and without suspecting illness. True, I’m not as certain with my opinions, or as quick with solutions as in the old days, but I lived even then, with the same barrage of raw, unpeeled thoughts and conflicting semi-ideas as now. I just never had the leisure to analyze them in all their bizarre complexity then, I suppose.

Of course, now it should be easier perhaps: as an elder, I have elderly friends with whom to share my newly discovered inner perplexity. I’m finding that it is a difficult subject to raise with them, however. It’s not so much that they have no internal dialogue -the delightful yet abysmally unhelpful term for which is anendophasia, I discovered- more that they have never thought there was something swirling around inside their heads that they’d had any desire to examine after so many years of adapting to it.

“Do you think in words?” I decided to ask William during a lull in the conversation I’d struck up with him on a park bench one day.

He turned his head towards me and examined my face for a moment. “Are you serious, G?” He seemed puzzled why I would even ask such a question. “Of course I do -we all do…”

I shrugged. “I sometimes find it hard to explain an idea that just occurred to me – well, to put it into words, anyway…”

William smiled and stared at a child playing with her dog on the grass in front of us. “It’s just age, that does that, G.” He sighed and sent his eyes back to land softly on my cheek. “I sometimes forget the word I want… I mean it eventually comes to me,” he hastened to add, “But not before I have to use a word that is obviously a stand-in for the part.”

I nodded in agreement. “But that’s different, I think. I mean that raw, ideas, as yet unattached, uncooked, and so unrecognizable as even ‘ideas’, hang around in the background just hoping for a moment in the pot…”

He looked at me as if I were having a senior moment -well, another one.

“And like the flicker of a flame, they sometimes never amount to an actual thought that I need to characterize in words… And then, if I don’t grant them a further audience, I suppose they head backstage somewhere.” I sighed in frustration. “It’s difficult to explain what I mean, William…”

“Obviously,” he said, and then smiled to ease my discomfort. “I have to confess that sometimes I don’t understand my dreams, though; I’m not even sure there’s a lot of words in many of them -just, well, ideas, or maybe feelings that don’t need explanations… Is that what you mean, G?”

I nodded. He was close, and something occurred to me after he confessed. Was Shakespeare really on to something profound? Are we really such stuff as dreams are made on? Does the internal multilogue we all seem to endure become apparent only in our sleep? Remember his character Demetrius saying in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: ‘Are you sure that we are awake? It seems to me that yet we sleep, we dream.’

Maybe my confusion is not so unusual after all; maybe our little life really is just a sleep… And, like the dream-stuff roiling in my head, I’m choosing glimmers from different plays…

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