Thinking Meat
In my more eldritch moments of high-gothic fantasy, and practicing the Buddhist art of visualization, I will visualize myself as a twitching bundle of nervous fiber strung over a broom handle; just a big ganglia thrumming with a convolute life, less a brain than a body, a spasming electrical whip with multiple strands, dressed in carhartts and hoodie, that, like a positive lead on a running motorcycle, is tense with life and convulsion and clearly is plugged into something…?
I got electrocuted too many times by the electric fencing that kept in the horses on the farm where I grew up; my ten-year-old self called this shock “swallowing the onion,” which seems like a fair description of electrocution, where, for a second, I could feel my spine convulse and my brain turn off. I am Frankenstein’s monster, brought into a kind of life by an aluminum wire strung through the forest: the current makes my ganglia arc in its corporeal jacket—what the psychoanalyst would call a reflex arc, if the monster were a mind and if electricity were libido.
This analogy does not fall so far from the tree for Freud’s whole conception of psyche, as he lays out in his abandoned Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895), is electrical in nature. Here anatomical brain science is run out and systematically replaced by metaphor—so the terms reflex arc, current, resistance, discharge, cathexis and complex (the ganglia itself), remain an integral part of the psychoanalytic style sheet. Resistance, as it is still used in the literature today—for example, the resistance to saying everything—is precisely an electrical metaphor; that is, it is transitory phenomena, there is no resistance without current. But what is the current?
That, from an anatomical perspective, it is literal electricity (note 1), is a fact useless to the psychologist—unless you are administering ECT. An earlier age inferred a soul, but only in man. Chinese medicine, since time immemorial, has called this stuff chi and found it flowing in all things—perhaps it is the great Tao itself. In his economic model (read electrical) Freud called it libido, or more poetically, a wish. “Nothing but a wish can set our mental apparatus at work” (SE V, p 567). Becoming aware of one’s resistance (or non-resistance) to the occult voltage of desire (within you and without) is the better half of analysis.
Mary Shelley brings the dead monster to life with electricity and so gets to the uncanny pulsing heart of our weird situation. According to science, who would reduce psyche to chemical and charge, we are the undead monster. But the scientist, per The Big Lebowski, is not wrong, he’s just an asshole (and more than a little myopic). And yet it remains one of those unspeakable paradoxes that the flipside of high holy sentience and every human epiphany is just incarnated electrical impulse. This is the so called “hard problem of consciousness,” a problem that science just can’t solve, that mysterious borderland where brains and bioelectricity becomes, in Buddhist terms, pure luminous mind. It is likewise this same frontier that consciousness, going the opposite direction, can’t stomach; today we call it body-horror; Freud named it the unconscious (note 2).
Personally speaking, I find it amusing that the nervous system is nervous; nervy, jumpy, sensitive; as if my broom handle ganglia, electrocuted by a horse fence, were surprised and unnerved by being able to feel at all. The feeling of inanimate matter (note 3) turned animate by desire (and that will soon be inanimate again) is probably bottomless; there is no limit to these feelings—hence the experience called mystical. Our mortal coil possesses a profound sensitivity to which we remain mostly unaware and yet it is the basis of our awareness. Viewed from another angle, it’s like the Cronenberg version of St. Paul: “it is not I who live, but the pulsing viscera who lives in me.” Sentient ganglia is the wicked fact that all our notions of transcendence and immortal souls would attempt to cover up and deny—the unholy fact of thinking meat.
your solenoid
“It’s alive!” Gene Wilder in Young Frankenstein (1974)
Note 1: In 1780, Luigi Galvani, him of galvanized nails, found that frog’s legs twitched when touched by electrode; he inferred an animal electricity.
Note 2: This is the unconscious in its most general sense, that of an intermediary between psyche and soma, spirit and matter, subject and object. “It seems to me as wilful completely to spiritualise nature as radically to despiritualise it. Let’s leave it its extraordinary variety which reaches from the inanimate to the organic and living, from the physical life to the spiritual. Certainly, the unconscious is the proper mediator between the somatic and the mental, perhaps the long-sought ‘missing link’” Freud in a letter to Georg Groddeck, June 5, 1917.
note 3: to be fair, the term inanimate matter is a dead metaphor, a fantasy of science that would deny the existence of spirit in all things. On the contrary, in our view the metabolic universe is animate at every point.
