1. MY MILLIMETRIC MUTENESS

Humans die daily of brain injuries. Inflamed, the gray matter swells towards the skull. That final millimeter of inflammation loads the dice and alters the prognosis. Life, this ongoing condition of embodiment, exists at the behest of the tiniest distinctions. When it comes to the brain, millimeters mark the most importance distance between the body and the corpse.

I get swarmed by the game of it as the news media serves up the latest story about football and traumatic brain injury.

Football season in the US leaves me mute, speechless: there is no frame to collapse the gap that separates me from the majority of Southerners who identify as college football fans. They wear their team as a brand; they pause in the Piggly Wiggly to introduce themselves to strangers who brand themselves of the similar team.

2. “SENZA PAROLE”

I keep returning to an essay by Andrea Marcolongo, “Ancient Family Lexicon, or Words and Loneliness,” where she mentions senza parole, an Italian phrase that appears in various permutations across Latin languages.

To quote Andrea’s exquisite rendering:

Andrea’s speechlessness is declarative, which is to say: her tattoo designates an area of embodied experience that is mute. Or muted. One could read this senza parole as a response to loss, but each reading complicates the boundaries of what Andrea is saying / not-saying.

After her mother’s death, Andrea dyed her hair black. I drowned my black hair in bleach. Both Andrea and myself changed our hair color in order to negotiate the rupture of self that greeted us from the mirror. That reflected image no longer aligned with the inhabited self.

The easiest way to express this is by acknowledging two simultaneous, somewhat contradictory truths about the nature of recognition, namely, 1) both A’s, Andrea and Alina, could not bear to recognize their mothered selves 2) neither A could recognize herself.

3. RE-COGNITION

Speechlessness can be a responsive state, one that communicates without saying (or says what it knows it can no longer say). As with the A’s, a part of this speechless is responding to the experience of recognition.

To recognize, or re-cognize, is to know again. As such, recognition is a form of knowledge that presumes comparison to a prior knowledge: the thing seen and then recovered, the instance lost and returned when walking across a similar terrain, the face on a subway that reappears in the cafe.

When I read about the football player who loses his mind in his 40’s due to a TBI accrued in his 20’s, I am drafted into an uncanny re-recognition, a doubling of the original meaning (to re-cognize)that re-re’s the absolute randomness of life. The sirens intrude and echolocate my body; I close my eyes and imagine hovering above it, untouched, unmolested by physical sensation.

There is nothing a human can do to earn or deserve a brain injury. And there is nothing a human can do to earn or deserve surviving such an injury. Even as the mind loses the self, the brain injury, as a clinical fact in the medical chart, knows what it means to lose one's name – or to lose the connection between the name and the personhood.

4. LOADING THE DICE, GAMING THE OUTCOMES

My partner is amused by what he calls my “Baba superstitiousness.”

I, too, am amused by his amusement, though, to be fair, back in the medical nightmare that was 2023, I brought a bit more of that all-American rigor into my notation of portents. I counted the black cats that crossed my path and then canceled each event with the non-black cat that followed. In trying to stay ahead of the curse, or calling it even, the tally of forthcoming misfortunes refused to balance out to zero.

“Visually, the sum of bad luck is a zigzag,” I told the man.

As a numbers-fiend, the man felt it necessary to respond with a plethora of (unrelated and fairly recent) neuroscience-related statistics, as if to suggest that the numerical data was more protective than reading for signs.

“Statistics lied about the odds of being hit by a car while crossing beneath a red light,” I reminded him.

I didn't know to fear a car's failure to stop. That possibility wasn't on my mental horizon. 

"But what would you have done differently if you'd known to be afraid?" he asked. 

“I would not have crossed.”

I wanted to say: I would have waited until every car that wanted to destroy me passed by. I would have stood there, frozen in time, a statue of the self before the accident. 

Instead, I note that Salman Rushdie said the saddest city in the world is located in Alifbay. It is so sad that it has forgotten its own name and so the sadness floats about without attaching itself to a proper noun. The deepest sadness comes from being nameless.

5. FEAR! DANGER! PROFANATION!

“Fear isn't a story about reality,” my friend says. “Fear is a story about what we find salient in reality.”

She invites me to yoga. I decline: clearing my head sounds like being suctioned.

“Have it your way,” she replies. “You’re the only one that can determine your mental health.”

My friend really doesn’t even know how goofy this purely-psychological construction of mental health sounds to some of us. She has yet to lose a grandparent or parent to Alzheimer’s. She lives in the land of Free To Choose. I don't want to argue, don't want to disprove, don't want to disagree. . . 

Fear is an intensified way of reading. Sometimes it is based on things we’ve imagined; other times it is based on things we’ve experienced. I’m not sure the two are the same, despite the efforts of late capitalism and popular culture to fashion political coalitions defined by shared fears. Identifying ourselves by fear seems like a doomed political project at a time when we desperately need vision.

“So what is danger, then?” the middle teen asks me. It is bewildering to watch to her drive this wretched minivan; bewildering and marvelous to imagine the places she will choose to go on her own. The question of danger comes up as we talk about what to consider when running a yellow light. “You have to weigh various factors,” I admit.

As a concept, danger is obviously contingent, multivariant, and fluid. The feeling of danger can mark unmet aesthetic or social expectations, and these expectations emerge from our daily reading of the world, a reading that —- over time—- can develop into a commitment to read the world we are given in a particular fashion or worldview.

Danger appears when we read it again, in light of context and new information. Or maybe just shifts in syntax and juxtaposition. After all, juxtapositions are central to Walter Benjamin’s respect for surrealism’s profane illuminations. What am I saying?

We know the first number is zero. 

The slipperiest situation in the natural world is black ice, melting ice with a thin layer of ice on top. Black ice forms suddenly, a surprise formed in early evening when the dew point dips below freezing and moisture slickens into a deceptive, invisible ice. Black ice is the deadliest for drivers who don't believe the road needs reading. 

We know the last number is unknown.