Thin Places - Or: Experiencing the Moment

As a man of a certain age, it’s not a surprise that my hair is getting a little thin in places. In my more frivolous moments, I blame Covid lockdowns and boredom for accelerating the deracination process. Who knows? Perhaps the follicles were furloughed and the roots died. But before you start thinking “what the heck is this idiot on about?? does he seriously expect me to read a blog about thinning hair??” please read on: all will be revealed (and if you’re lucky, explained as well).

So, putting to one side my hirsuteness (or rather lack of it), back to the blog: in medias res. The last few months have been challenging, Alzheimer’s-wise. For starters, the symptoms have advanced, in both scope and degree. This is annoying, frightening and worrying; but looking on the bright side it does give me material to work with for the blog; I also retain the ability to observe and rationalise what is happening upstairs most of the time; I can override some of my brain’s more outré thoughts; and forgive it when it operates capriciously, illogically, implausibly, erratically, and annoyingly; and also on occasions nonsensically, absurdly and preposterously. Forgetfulness is Alzheimer’s weapon of choice - so I am at least being normal in one sense! Add to this toxic brew constant fatigue, fear and nervousness, and it’s a thoroughly debilitating concoction. So much so that often makes me annoyed to the point of belligerency - but if I can’t have a cathartic rant about Alzheimer’s in my blog forum, where can I?

So - welcome back, dear readers, and blame the radio silence on those pesky neurons. In any case, a serial blog about Alzheimer’s also has to be elastic in terms of publication dates to some extent, to reflect on, and give voice to, the ever changing emotional and pathological dips and hurdles. So, time to crack on with describing the cracks in my brain that are starting to appear - and no, cracks aren’t the “thin spaces” of the title either. Nor does it ironically relate to the amount of text I force you to read, which can hardly be described as thin (It’s quality not quantity that matters anyway).

Quality is hard to achieve however when your amanuensis is playing hard to get. My co-writer is of course my soggy brain. For a few months now it has been recalcitrant at best and absent without leave at worst. This so-called guardian of one hundred billion neutrons and virtually unlimited storage capacity was once a limpid, clean, glittering pool of facts and language and thoughts and ideas; teeming with wildlife and colour and linguistic confidence; garlanded with water lilies of inspiration. But recently it has been become a swamp: clogged with pond weed; rife with algae; and sporting the occasional dead goldfish.

If I can extend the watery metaphor, I wish the streams of my brain would flow softly, visibly, cleanly and purposefully. The Lethe* that should be said mind’s gently flowing brook is chaotic and prone to flooding; it has sudden rocky shallows that cause my fragile thoughts to founder; it flows sluggishly in places and then is suddenly in spate, plunging down hidden, rocky waterfalls. I can experience both exhilaration and then chilling fear within a few minutes of each other. This fluid uncertainty makes me understandably even more afraid and nervous: It is a constant in my experience of Alzheimer’s and without cause in the main: it frequently spills over into what should be positive experiences. My wife and I have been on many walks recently, and when it involves a car journey and I’m not driving then the sights from the window can be both anxiety inducing or a beautiful revelation; there is no middle ground. Why beauty is a potential source of anxiety I cannot fathom. I like looking at houses as we pass them (and there are some beautiful villages and houses in the countryside surrounding where we live), but when I think about who might be living there or what goes on behind the doors and walls can make me feel nervous and under threat. It’s bizarre to say the least.

* The Lethe is a river in Hades (the underworld in Greek mythology) whose water when drunk made the souls of the dead forget their life on earth. A less erudite example is a protracted and raucous session in the pub.

Fast forward and the writing landscape has not been quite so bucolic as a result of all these mental incendiary devices. The spring of inspiration turned to mud. By way of consolation, that last sentence is rhythmically (and accidentally) a perfect iambic pentameter line of which the Bard himself would have approved: evidence that my brain is performing OK on the language stage, for now at least. Writing is nevertheless harder and more time consuming than it was, even just a few months ago. The vindictive gaslighter that is Alzheimer’s is taking a shadowy, low key, insidious, firmer hold over my thoughts, my plans, my physical ability, my memories, my mental health and my sleep. Needless to say, the disease and I are not getting on well at the moment.

Thanks to Alzheimer’s I am fast becoming a Grand Master of forgetfulness. I regularly break my own record for the number of seconds it takes to corral a thought or memory or word; or remember where in the house I left a book or other item. I constantly cannot find, or even see, objects that are right in front of me; I make copious of cups of tea and coffee and then leave them to grow cold, often in full sight. Several times a day at least I wander into a room and then wonder why (although that could be the philosopher in me). On the plus side, all these examples are tropes for dementia, so it’s reassuring at least that I am a model of orthodoxy and conformity, and I should embrace memory failures with gusto, style and reliability. Well, I need to look for the positives don’t I? I should embrace memory failures with gusto, style and reliability. Quod erat demonstrandum. Doh!

Wait: there’s more. I still struggle to recall holidays, events, walks and places I’ve visited, even when it happened recently. On the positive side, long term verbal memory remains largely accessible; but being able to recite Shakespeare soliloquies or reams of Latin or ancient Greek hexameter verse has little practical application, sadly, except to bring me personal pleasure when I am in the mood, or as a device to convince friends, doctors and specialists that yes I am completely crackers (although many of my friends, colleagues and family knew that already.)

Also in my brain’s “must try harder” column is remembering the names, faces, occasions and context of colleagues, friends and distant relatives from the past, which is becoming is a whimsical exercise at best; at worst it’s downright upsetting. Going back to the last blog posting (now so ancient it’s probably been chiselled into a stone slab; I’ll be inventing the wheel next). I “see better” now (see previous blog post), and I am enjoying the present (e.g. glorious and poignant walks and catch ups with with family and friends); and I am determined to make the most of the future that is left to me. It saddens me however that I cannot fully recollect, recall, revisit, and retain in my head places, books, films, and holidays both here and abroad. These are largely irrevocable except via albums and anecdotes. Books are also new to me, but that does at least afford me the pleasure of reading books for the “first” time almost in perpetuity, but I do struggle with remembering the plot.

Many of these symptoms are a corollary of getting older, of course, but having them in your early fifties (my disease is officially named “young onset Alzheimer’s”) is a right pain in the a**e. I have no option however but to accept, manage and move on, as far as I can given the mental hurdles. The communication between an Alzheimer’s brain and the conscious me is a bit like a Tesco home delivery: you get items you didn’t order, and replaces others that you did order with substitutions including for example tangerines for toothpaste; shoe polish for margarine; a baguette instead of a roll of clingfilm; and a tin of paint as a replacement for a 4 litre carton of slimmed milk. I exaggerate, but you get the gist, and the metaphor works. Annoying, funny and frustrating in equal measure. Then there are the speech issues. I have also noticed recently that I struggle to find the right word, which is really irritating for me, as words are normally my strong point. Le mot juste just gets lost somewhere en route from brain to voice or pen. It occurs most often with nouns for some reason. My nephew visited us recently and was discussing his new job in the police. The discussion at one point focussed on the work of the CID, and I made a contextual reference to “a detective” - except what came out from my lips was “a defective”. An innocent slip, possibly Freudian and involving handcuffs. This is just one example of many.

So how do I cope on a day to day basis? Well, an obvious tactic is to avoid shopping (and the CID) as far as possible; an approach I have perfected over the years anyway. For example, when circumstances give us no choice but to send me to Tesco, I have to go armed with a detailed list and associated metadata, including aisles, colours, wrappings, product descriptions, and precise location of unexploded in-store incendiary devices. Oh, sorry: you meant how do I cope with Alzheimer’s generally in terms of processing information? Well, same answer really: copious, detailed lists. The supermarket shopping protocols detailed above are transferable: I cope with everyday tasks by having my instructions / outings / jobs / reminders / meal preparation instructions / psychiatric jokes written down on to do / read /contact lists so I can be productive, safe, reliable and amused without too much effort.

Now, back to the increasing distance between me and said brain. There is still a rift to be mended, but I have to be firm and assertive. After all, I am the thinking, conscious part of this writing partnership / duality; I am the one who (eventually) publishes copy that is polished, detailed, funny and moving (well, that’s the aim at least). I am the one who gives the signal to the brain to deliver language, memories, warnings, instructions to all the nerves in the human body etc., given certain parameters. The cerebrum merely flicks the switches. In summary, I am the one with consciousness in this partnership. The brain is consciousness-less (?!), and all I need and expect from it is to be firing on all cylinders. With Alzheimer’s however the messages sent back from the (supposedly) thinking part of my head have recently been increasingly getting lost in transit; vague; slow to appear; difficult to interpret; occasionally incomprehensible; or chewed by my mind’s guard dog. The copy coughed up by this “partnership” was becoming simplistic, trite, irrelevant or hackneyed in a “once upon a time”, “they all lived happily ever after” sort of way; or, at the other end of the scale, the tedious James Joyce “Ulysses”, stream of (un?) consciousness approach. The relationship between “me” and “brain” is Cartesian Dualism at its manifest worst. Not so much “I think therefore I am” but rather “I used to be able to think productively and carefully, therefore I am becoming bloody annoyed at my increasingly uncooperative cerebral cortex”. Not quite as snappy, I agree, but still apposite. As a human being I still possess consciousness, even if it is difficult to define what that actually means, or why mine appears to go walkabouts regularly. [A slight detour, if you are interested in learning more about the “problem of consciousness”, is an excellent Guardian article on precisely this topic; bear in mind however that it is quite long and the dissection and interplay of the science and philosophy is quite intense - I struggled].

The majority of us don’t see consciousness as a “problem”, but speaking from the personal standpoint of my illness and its symptoms, I do treat consciousness as a problem, one that Alzheimer’s exploits and develops.I’m becoming b****y annoyed as the disease progresses: I get locked into regular debates and arguments between the ‘conscious’ me and the ‘unconscious’ physical entity lurking under my hair, head and scalp (thin places again). And unlike Basil Fawlty, I can’t even physically attack it with a tree branch whilst shouting that I’d had enough and I was going to give it a right good thrashing, much as I’d like to. [I could leave that until the illness is advanced, when the description of me flogging myself with a branch (with pictures of course) would be a shoo-in as a corking blog posting - though I may need a ghost writer by then, not to mention psychiatric support.] I joke, but the difficulties for me, and for my family, are emotional as well as mental, and and make the quotidian events and tasks and plans even more difficult, freighted as they are with an increasing sense of loss and misplacement.

Anyway: back to ‘reality’, however that is constructed, appraised and defined, and and who or what is doing it. If I can use a metaphor based on current events, I am writing this during a relaxation of the rules of ‘cerebral lockdown’, when thought processor and thought creator (hah) can at last join up in a friendly and productive partnership, without the need for intellectual distancing. For the first time in several weeks I have the inspiration, motivation and logical tools to be able to write. In fact, if you will indulge me in yet another metaphor, my cerebral cortex has seen the error of its ways and is behaving less like an wilful puppy and more like a guide dog: passively sitting and begging; docile; no barking; and fetching lexical sticks with reasonable speed and alacrity. As opposed to the mental equivalent of chewing the carpet; weeing on the dahlias; or biting the in-brain postman trying to deliver parcels to and from other parts of my brain for sorting, processing, discarding, publishing and storing. The clouds have parted. I can work and think and write without having to step gingerly across sticky amyloid plaques and tau proteins (remember those?).

As a result I can for the moment write lucidly and honestly again, and closer to the pre-Alzheimer’s Chris as I have been for quite a long time. Now - back to the title. what the heck are “thin places”? Have I taken advantage of the recent government announcements with regard to a relaxation of Covid restrictions and decided to set up a small business offering revolutionary new hair transplant techniques outdoors to gentlemen of a certain age, after a year without hairdressing has accelerated the follicle ageing process? Boringly, no.

A useful definition of “thin places” is contained in another (much shorter!) Guardian article. Whilst in Milan for work, the article’s author (Oliver Burkeman) takes time out to visit the Convent of the Santa della Grazie, which houses the famous original painting of The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci, in which Jesus tells the disciples that one of them will betray them (resulting in uproar, denial, betrayal and his crucifixion). The lack of crowds in the early morning, just after dawn, made the visit even more special. He is sufficiently moved to write down his thoughts and feelings: “The hour added something otherworldly to the atmosphere. None of us seemed fully awake; the silence felt tangible”; He quotes from other sources: thin places are “those rare locales where the distance between heaven and Earth collapses”; and “We're in the territory, here, of the ineffable”. Perhaps my favourite description of the phenomenon is by the English philosopher, and specialist in aesthetics, Roger Scruton: “Moments that are saturated with meaning, but whose meaning cannot be put into words.” This is what is meant by “thin places”. They are “places of energy. A place where the veil between this world and the eternal world is thin. A thin place is where one can walk in two worlds – the worlds are fused together, knitted loosely where the differences can be discerned or tightly where the two worlds become one.” For the captivated author it was a balm that soothed the rudeness of an attendant in the church, when she shouted abuse at him for not handing in his audioguide handset. Never mind the ineffable: many would think his treatment by one wholly unholy staff member would have tempted him to eff the effable back at her, but that would have been unseemly in such a peaceful, thin, and sacred environment.

Thin places are not restricted to sacred and holy places, or prayer and religious ceremonies. Spirituality, or depth of emotional feeling, comes in many different guises, activities and experiences. I’m sure we can all recall moments that were special and took us out of the ‘here’ and into the ‘there’; moments where words and descriptions do not do justice to the experience; they fall short in the presence of something that cannot be clearly defined, but which is powerful, enduring and transformational. This can be walks in the sunshine or just sitting outside in the garden on a bench and looking out at the view. It can also reflect meeting up with good friends past and present: the melding of friendship and reminiscence can create a depth of experience that is real and powerful - it’s a bit like Bluetooth: pairing music and speakers. I recently went for a walk in the Cotswolds with a couple of close friends; and there were a few moments where our consciousnesses (?) and time seemed both to stop temporarily. We just looked - no discussion was necessary. The scene did not need to be analysed or defined; it just was. Past, present and future become one; friendships and perceptions and the moment fused and become recognisably a “thin place”, even if our views diverge over what its “ineffable reality” connotes. The friends I was walking with are both Christians; I hold no religious beliefs. But even if we disagree over wellspring and teleology, the experience remains powerful and shared. I was also married in a church, despite the fact that I am not a Christian; the vows we made and remain faithful to to this day however created a union that is infinitely precious, miraculous and almost tangible in its landscape of love, family, friends and future offspring. A church and its history takes those sentiments and gives them depth and emotion beyond its walls and beyond the present. “History is now and England” as T.S. Eliot put it - it is a moment frozen in time and space but at the same time transcends both.

I have also experienced “thin places” when walking in “high places” i.e. mountains. It cleanses the soul whether walking or climbing or abseiling; it offers views, summits and high places which can make us feel insignificant, but also magnified and augmented, in a deeply personal way. Views across to other peaks or distant towns and villages serve to remind us of our consciousness, and how it can raise the blinds to reveal a multicoloured past, present and future. It is much more than just exercise: it is about renewal and returning to elemental places that will outlive us for millennia. It makes your heart soar. Over the years, in the company of friends, I have climbed, ached and laughed up, across, and down countless peaks in the Lake District and North Wales, (most of whose names I sadly can’t remember any longer, except for the obvious ones like Snowdon or Hellvellyn).

Another passion of mine that belongs in my personal pantheon of ‘thin spaces’ is classical music. I was a slightly odd child who discovered classical music at the age of about ten or eleven, and it has remained an abiding passion, although I no longer play an instrument. I played the flute at secondary school; I wanted to learn the cello but my parents could not see me lugging such a large instrument on and off a school bus. In any case a friend of my Dad’s had a second hand flute going at a low price, so my parents made the choice for me. But my heart was never really in it. In later life I took up the cello briefly (it’s my favourite instrument), but the window of opportunity came too late. Some years ago now, I also went on a workshop with the wife of a friend of mine, to make and decorate a didgeridoo from scratch (yes, really) and to have a few rudimentary lessons in actually playing it. It made a horrendous noise (but not the horrendous noise that a competent player will elicit), but it was fun and at least I managed to make a noise. I have also sung with two choirs and enjoyed every minute of it - though I’m not sure we (or the audience) ever reached or created a state of transcendence in the way I have discussed in this blog; same goes for the didgeridoo. Probably better to call it a didgeridon’t, as in “please don’t play this”, especially in the presence of small children, the elderly, and anyone of a nervous disposition.

So, no flute, cello or didgeridoo playing as an example of my thin places. The only place it ever took me to was frustration and irritation. But the love of classical music endures and enriches me; it is meaning through sound; it takes dots on a page; strings and reeds and small hammers; holes and bows; pursed lips; delicately yet purposefully placed fingers; plucking of strings and expressions of breath; a fusion of human senses and sensitivity with the natural world of sound. The output from these manufactured (in both senses), artificial objects can draw forth some of the most magnificent, breathtaking - sometimes literally - sounds that the world can foster.

My love of music is largely passive rather than active. As a young boy I got a record player as an “extra” Christmas present from my beloved grandmother, who thought I was very mature when I told her that my parents had said that Father Christmas / My Dad (I can’t recall what stage I was at in terms of the could/couldn’t believe stage) wouldn’t be able to get me a record player because there was “no room on the sleigh“. In any case I already had written my “please can I have…” letters. But I did get a new record one Christmas - Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony - The Pastoral. The past is hazy for me (let’s face it: the present is not exactly a limpid pool for me either) so I don’t quite know what came first, the record or the record player. It doesn’t really matter. I was still at the age when my record collection had some dubious inclusions such as “The Wombles’ Greatest Hits” and “The Tales of Beatrix Potter”, read by Wendy Craig, and others in that vein. I had to use my parents’ record player up until that Christmas, and I would often save up and spend my pocket and birthday money on records that I wanted based on listening to BBC Radio 3. But it was The Pastoral that was the epiphany for me. Listening to it for the first time on the radio was such a seminal event you could have knocked me down with a conductor’s baton (if it was a particularly heavy one). I was thrilled. My parents were perplexed. So many composers manage to take us to where the border between this world and eternity is difficult to frame; they offer us experience that escape logical thought, and a language that transcends barriers and cultures; it can speak for us when words fail. I am musical, but as I said above, I didn’t pursue the practical side of it. In the next blog however I would like to explore “Thin Places” in more depth, across music, literature and poetry, but I’m conscious (ha - take that, brain!) that this has been another long posting, so I ought to bring it to a conclusion.

Before I close, however, I would like to make one last personal observation. I cannot ignore the fact that it will almost certainly be Alzheimer’s that ferries me across the thin dark water at the end of my life. I am not convinced however that the process of dying is a purely binary shift between being alive or dead; on or off. I think (and hope) that the transition from one place to the next (however that is defined or perceived) will be an elision, not a polarity; a ‘thin’ and possibly conscious transition between existence and infinite finiteness [sic]. The compass of my mind will, I hope, recognise directions that extend beyond purely human senses to “see” unknown shapes, colours and meaning as the curtains are drawn all around me; like those left behind on our eyelids after looking through a sunlit window. Form without shape; id without ego. The colours fade with the horizon as I evaporate - not pass - away. From ‘then’ towards ‘now’.

----------------

#blog#earlyonsetdementia#dementia#onset#onset#early#mild#cognitive#impairment#mildcognitiveimpairment#alzheimers#dementiadiary#diary#newlydiagnosed#mindfulness#depression#breakdown#youngonset#thinplaces#

#