annus mirabilis II

Time isn’t like the other senses, Eagleman says. Sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearing are relatively easy to isolate in the brain. They have discrete functions that rarely overlap: it’s hard to describe the taste of a sound, the color of a smell, or the scent of a feeling. (Unless, of course, you have synesthesia—another of Eagleman’s obsessions.) But a sense of time is threaded through everything we perceive. It’s there in the length of a song, the persistence of a scent, the flash of a light bulb. “There’s always an impulse toward phrenology in neuroscience—toward saying, ‘Here is the spot where it’s happening,’ ” Eagleman told me. “But the interesting thing about time is that there is no spot. It’s a distributed property. It’s metasensory; it rides on top of all the others.”
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Burkhard Bilger - The Possibilian What a brush with death taught David Eagleman about the mysteries of time and the brain. (An interview with David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, where he directs the Laboratory for Perception and Action and the Initiative on Neuroscience and Law) in Profiles: The New Yorker - 25 April 2011

Life has a way of inducing obliviousness from any individual. How the variegated musings of a quotidian experience seem to compound and coagulate on its own accord, specifying obsolescence and absent-mindedness even from the most anal-retentive and meticulous of us. The pace of subsisting becomes unbearable, insurmountable, irrevocable that to pause and ruminate may be deemed superfluous and unnecessary, if not simply inconvenient and a gross vanity.  The consciousness of our immediate reality has a precesion both rudimentary and rampant, that we tend to be existential if only to maintain a semblance of sanity, or feign a sense of foresight and control. But of course, we cannot respond to life’s meanderings without the cobwebbed interjections of memory; history being a typically uncooperative ally is the valuative paradigm by which we process our decisions.

But this is not always the case. Once in a while, tranquil moments are imperative to place things in perspective, lest we lose our grasp of the situation from the contrite philandering of reality, both grim and menacing. Erudition springs forth from these slow moments, when our sense of self is made apparent from introspection, and contemplation.

Of these cogitations, I have realized, to my fond surprise, that there is a definite deficiency in my sense of time. It is ironic how someone whose cognizance and consciousness delves primarily in the realm of detail, where specifics abound replete with causality and meaning. But that is who I am, a chockfull of contradictions. So I find myself discovering in my reflections that my blog has turned another year. Without my noticing that another year has come to past. Peculiar how time (or my impression of it at least) flies effervescent when one is having a great experience, only because my recent preoccupations have kept me fixated on the pregnant promises of tomorrow, rather than the acrid antithesis of the pallid past.

It feels appropriate too, that a pause be afforded at this moment; the lent season being conducive to the endeavors of the spirit. To introspect and assess what has transpired both here, where my words lie as reflections of my inner struggles, and out there where life triumphs against and with the workings of fate. One year seems to have gone past fast, like a frail mist subliminating for the promise of day. I was, and still am, enveloped in the myriad of responsibilities and workings that define my waking hours, but these days lightness pervades me, caressing and relaxing the perennially high-strung anxieties I possess. It would be convenient to say that a lot has changed in the course of a year, but the truth is very little has, in many ways I still am the same socially-inept and awkward guy, the same decidedly high-strung obsessive worker, the same opinionated and oft agitated creative. The last year have provided a breadth of experience more than I could ever hope for; further molding and defining my thoughts about life, blogging, and the human condition.

It would be great to assert that I am substantiated by my writing, to presume that the little attention or feedback my verbose litanies have garnered suffices, and may very well be unnecessary. But no man is an island, and no literature devoid of its predecessors, no word without an etymology. That the very reason I am able to expound my thoughts here, and wherever I am moved to do so, is because of what I have read and experienced, lived and delved, exposed and engaged in. So to say that my words are my own, hermitic extant and purist in morphology, is a disservice to those whose presence have enriched my life, both constructively and otherwise, and by doing so have empowered my writing.

Much has happened in the course of a year. And beyond all that has transpired and occurred, I am in awe and thankful. Not all stayed; being fickle our attention waivers and ebbs like the shifting lulls of the sea, as some would seek newer pastures to graze upon, fresher fields to harvest thoughts from. We are evolving, as we must, continually becoming more of who we are, and changing to realize what we must become. But some did stay, and few even went beyond the four corners of this world of simulacra, to become as real and authentic as life can allow them to be, and for that I am grateful beyond what vocabulary can describe and express.

In the history of humanity a year maybe momentary, infinitesimally brief and insignificant, to warrant the length of exposition I have offered. But time is not my parameter, for I lack the factions appropriate to place things in the context of its linear nature. Experience is the yardstick by which I generate perspectives from. It may not be as precise an accounting, but with the subjectivity in the paradigm I am afforded the humanity that my language seems to lack at times.

It has been a wonderful year indeed. Of discoveries and disappointments, connections and contradictions, of newfound emotions and forgotten pain, of old friends and new ones, adversities and accolades, of believing and bereaving, of understanding and accepting. That life continues despite the hurdles fate uncompromisingly hurls our way, and that the spirit continues to persist more resilient and steadfast than the lure of capitulation.

Someday, when we have ceased to exist, our words would persist, not as monuments of some grandiose egoistic design, but as reminders of the human struggle, and its triumph. Let our scars bear witness to the reality we inhabit, may our words be the evidence of our life, and allow this place to be the sanctum by which our spirit is freed.

Annus Mirabilis - Lat. Year of Wonders, a remarkable year.
Original image from here.
The full article in The New Yorker is here.
The first Annus Mirabilis is here.