Cinnabar and Alabaster

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A few nights ago, a friend and I were having a late-night onscreen computer chat that took a turn towards Shakesperean monologues. I was scanning through the scripts online, making suggestions; he was reading them aloud in the empty room he was in and reporting to me about how energized this made him. It was midnight, one in the morning. At one-thirty, unable to stand being left out any longer, I got him on the phone and made him read one of the monologues to me. It wasn't the most compelling or dramatic reading ever done—he made me admit to that, and in the moment I could do so honestly, especially given the obstacles the performance was up against—the hour, his relative unfamiliarity with the material, the ridiculous incongruity of delivering a Shakesperean monologue in a flourescent-lit office into the impersonal mouthpiece of a hunk of beige plastic with your physical inclination towards embodiment, towards movement, restricted by the cord. But it was resonant. Is resonant. Days later I'm still compelled, hearing his voice in my head conflating with that of the last actor I heard give the same speech—and the first--and find myself walking wide swaths through the living room to avoid being diverted from my work by the siren-call of my battered Pelican Shakespeare—much loved and margin-noted in pencil-scrawls some ten years old already—resting on the fireplace shelf.

Antonio Damasio, in The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotions in the Making of Consciousness, outlines an admittedly simplistic categorization-system for the body-processes—and he makes no apology for that pragmatic but potentially unsettling affiliation—that facilitate the consciousness we experience, that allow me to respond to the monologue in the moment it's being read, to react to it and appraise its attributes immediately thereafter, to frame and categorize the experience for later retrieval; to remember days later my reaction, my appraisal, and my categorizing; and to continue forming new connections based on each of those experiences as I experience other things slightly differently than I would have done without the monologue.

Damasio's system divides selfhood—too loosely, the thing of which we are conscious, when we are conscious—into three levels. At the most basic is the proto-self, the "nonconscious collection of representations of the multiple dimensions of current organism state" (199) where neurons fire, chemicals interact, and muscles respond to reflex. While I held the phone, my proto-self kept breathing, pumping blood, regulating my internal temperature despite the dropping mercury in the room, maintaining the homeostasis required for consciousness to occur—all of which it would have done just as faithfully were I running a race, playing video games, sleeping, or idling in a coma.

At the next of Damasio's levels is what he calls the "core self," roughly corresponding with what he calls "core consciousness," the "transient but conscious reference to the individual organism in which events are happening" (199). My proto-self might not distinguish between a coma and a race (not because different reflexes aren't functioning or neurons firing—in some cases they certainly are), a video-game and a monologue, but my core self, being a conscious "I," very much can. At the level of the core self, I was aware of the dark of the room, the phone in my hand, the voice-sound emitted by the sound-technology, the shapes of word-sounds—all of these are what Damasio calls "objects," and the interaction of my organism, or proto-self, with these objects affords the "construction and exhibition of new knowledge" that continually charaterizes core consciousness (169). In addition to being aware of these "objects," and creating conscious awareness out of my interactions with them, in the ever-present "now" of core consciousness I was also aware of being aware. This is not a spiritual distinction for Damasio; the first-order neural-mapping he identifies as being the work of the body to respond to environmental changes in order to maintain the biological homeostasis of the proto-self is part of a larger pattern which includes the second-order neural mapping of the core self, mapping that enables the body not only to respond but to make and respond to imagistic representations of its own responsiveness. Neurons fire, connections are made, knowledge is constructed. Damasio describes these second-order maps as a kind of non-verbal narrative we use those images to tell ourselves; they're how I understand that right now I'm typing at a keyboard, sitting on a sofa, hearing the fishtank burble and a car-horn honking out on the street. They're how I knew I was in a chair in the dark on the phone hearing a monologue. But they aren't how I know, sitting at this keyboard now, that several days ago I heard—and was moved by—a monologue. The core self is, as Damasio notes above, transient. In terms of its functioning, it changes little over the course of a lifetime; awake, not clouded by medication or emotional overload, I am always aware, in moments, of my own awareness of the moment I am in. But the moments it is aware of are always new moments of processing and constructing knowledge, new imagistic narratives of the present-tense. In order to know that the monologue happened—and, more importantly, that it happened to me, what Damasio calls my "autobiographical self" and its ability to construct and exist within my "extended consciousness" must be enacted.

The extended consciousness is not bound to moments and non-verbal narratives; it exists as a realm of connections and re-connections that make possible meanings and interpretations. It is aware of its own "autobiographical memory," the "organized record of past experiences" (199) that, in my case, among an uncountable number of other interconnected experiences, includes having the sheet pulled over my head so the doctor could isolate and carefully weave the stitches I had in my chin when my brother tripped me on my grandmother's patio, gazing into the face of a boy I danced with at my high school prom, and listening to the other night's monologue. It is the extended consciousness, which Damasio identifies as a "prerequisite to" our ability to "behave intelligently over vast domains of knowledge" (199) that makes it possible for me to remember and write about the monologue now, and not just in terms of my own experience. Extended consicousness allows me to recall now that the monologue was read to me earlier in the week; it is also how I know I first read the monologue contextualized within its scene, act, and play as an undergraduate at Virginia Tech, how I remember lying on the floor with 8 or 10 close friends to watch Kenneth Braunagh's movie-interpretation of Henry V (because that's the play in question) on the floor of my mother's house, how I know I've seen the film many more times than that, how I remember the dark, almost-empty high school auditorium where I watched a friend under a single spotlight deliver the same monologue as an audition piece, how I know Braunagh directed other movie-versions of Shakespeare's plays, how I can name a few of those, how I know who William Shakespeare was and that today is his birthday. The complex web of connections the autobiographical memory relies on and its inherent fallibility is also why, although I'm sure I knew at the time, I no longer remember what my friend was auditioning for—it wasn't a stage production of Henry V, which I know thanks to one of the most peculiar quirks of human memory, one Damasio doesn't take up: I can't remember a complete list of the productions my high school theatre staged, but I can still identify with confidence items that aren't on the list I can't remember.

In Damasio's words, the study and enactment of consciousness aren't just about what neurological events happen when my heart beats while my body rests obediently in a chair, when I hear (and by responding to my own image-mapping know I'm hearing) a friend read me Shakespeare, when through memory and interpretive connection I can understand the content of the speech, know from that content when to expect my friend's vocalization to rise and fall in pitch or volume, and remember other voices rising and falling; consciousness is about the feeling of what's happening. From the first, he describes consciousness as being made by both "body and emotion," and at first glance, this seems a viable enough distinction: it's not difficult for me to conceive of my being physically tired and chilly during my friend's monologue while at the same time being emotionally—a word we use in common conversation that aligns more closely with what Damasio calls the "state of feeling made conscious" (37)—alert and delighted. As he describes them, "emotion" and "feeling" are both themselves unconcious states. Emotions are biological, are "complex, stereotyped patterns of [neurological] response," "at their most basic…part of homeostatic regulation," and are, as repetition and experience teaches us how to categorize and pattern them, always "inseperable from the idea of reward or punishment…pleasure or pain…[and] the idea of good and evil" (54-5). Feelings are the images of these emotions we make as part of the second-order mapping strategies our core selves use to bring us to awareness of what we're experiencing; only when this awareness occurs does Damasio describe us as conscious and capable of "feeling a feeling."

Here is what happens when "emotions"—whether by our common understanding or Damasio's specifically biological one—are set side-by-side with characteristics of the "body" in Damasio's formulation of consciousness: the tiredness and chill my physical body experienced were things my proto-self knew about and was working chemically & neurologicaly to respond to. My core self neurologically mapped imagistic narratives of these experiences so that I was conscious of them and knew in the moment that I was tired and cold. Through its neurological storage-and-retrieval and association systems the extended consciousness of my autobiographical self allows me to remember these now. Rather than contributing to and/or constructing consciousness in different ways, however, as his title might suggest, my what-we-call-emotional alertness and delight are part of this same formula to Damasio: my proto-self was balancing the objects "alertness" and "delight" alongside "tiredness" and "chill" (56), my core self was making nonverbal narratives from and so affording me conscious awareness of these objects and my responsiveness to them, and my autobiographical self remembers them too. Using his more basic conception of emotion as a pattern-able biological response instead of making an already-patterned and so recognizeable respose an emotion-object makes whatever difference his title implies even less discernable: emotion is part of what the proto-self is already occupied with handling, is part of the map of images we become conscious of in the transience of our core selves, and is part of what remains retrievable to our autobiographical selves. Regardless of what our first category-making responses to the split might be, Damasio's own theoretical work defines emotion as already biological, already of the body, and "body and emotion" is a nonsensical distinction.

Shakespeare knew this. At the turning point in the monologue, when the king shifts his focus from exhorting the devotion of his men to promising them their reward—for if emotion is always about punishment and reward, and you're trying to convince an army to face the probable punishment of death, you need a nice reward to offer those who beat the odds—he calls them to look into the future and imagine themselves remembering, and in that moment of projected remembering he describes their bodies as unwitting actors-out of emotional response:

He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a-tiptoe when this day is namèd
And rouse him at the name of Crispian. (4.3.41-3)

The old men Henry describes—the projected selves of who the morrow's battle will become—do not decide to "stand a-tiptoe," presumably not the easiest task for the agèd and war-wounded; their response is an enactment of the (becoming-conscious) feeling of the (unconscious) feeling of their neurons making second-order imagistic maps of the first-order emotional response their proto-selves respond biologically to when their eardrums vibrate to the sound of the word "Crispian" spoken with a countryman's crisp pronunciation. Although I imagine the Bard, given his apparent interest in consciousness, psychology, emotion & human motive, would have been intrigued—if not utterly captivated—by Damasio's work, he'd probably have called it something else.