The Ghost in My Brain by Clark Elliott Read Free Book Online Page A

scientist—I had taken to capturing the most salient details on scraps of paper around the house, and in short text files on my computer, stuffed into random directories. It was ironic that I could not read, but as long as I did not go back over my work, or think about what I was saying, I could write after a fashion, consistent with my odd, fractured brain state. Trying to read would leave me in pain, and wear me out within a few minutes. By contrast, if I just let my fingers produce the sentences directly from the images in my head, I could write for twenty minutes or more at a time. The key was to
not see the words
.
    This turned out to be a general theme in my life as a concussive: my creativity was actually enhanced—both by myneed to invent novel solutions to tricky problems that now continually arose in everyday life, and also, in a perverse way, by damage to the perceptual filters that most of us use to block out much of the detail in the world around us. For someone like me whose filters weren’t working, those observed details could sometimes lead to creative ways of seeing solutions that others might miss. *
    To outsiders it looked, on the surface, as though my life were continuing as it had prior to the crash. Because of my recent divorce, I had purchased a burned-out house in a neighborhood close to where my children lived, and, making use of my experience as a former boat builder and carpenter, I was rebuilding it. After the crash, I made my teaching at the university a critical priority, second only to being a father. My young children were with me a little less than half of the time, and the rest of the time I lived alone. As I was able, I continued to manage the subcontractors who were often in and out of my house.
    My personality was such that I tended to keep quiet about my struggles and see if I could work them out on my own. My mother often joked that the first words out of my mouth as a toddler were, “Do it myself! Do it myself!”
    But I couldn’t hide everything.
    One of the problems that started to arise, and that ultimately I had to be quite vigilant about, was that while writing I would use inappropriate words in odd places. At times this was sopeculiar that I feared appearing mentally ill to others in my professional life. My notes and e-mail messages from the time show that I frequently had begun incorrectly substituting words in my writing that
sounded
similar, or, sometimes, that were
conceptually
similar. For example: over-serving/(instead of) observing, way/weigh, right/write, imagine/manage, say/said, feeling/meaning, phone perception/phone reception. Sometimes I would get phrases wrong, such as “yet to be reader”/“yet to be written,” and “wrapped tightly under practice”/“wrapped tightly under plastic.”
    I believe that many of these errors had to do with my inability to do two things at once, and would happen when my mind strayed momentarily to an ancillary thought. In one example, while composing an e-mail response, I noted that I was thinking of a “file” where text about a tenure meeting was stored. The “f” from file caused “meeting” to become “feeting,” which was subconsciously corrected to “feeling,” thus producing the phrase “tenure feeling” in place of “tenure meeting.”
    I had different difficulties with spoken English.
    According to my brother’s observations, which he made during a rare visit a year after the crash, I would “talk . . . like . . . this . . . ,” with my eyes staring out of focus, and my head tracing slow arcs through the space around me, as though I were trying to
will
the words to come to visual consciousness, or trying to locate them in the space around me, searching for them in slow motion.

WHY ARE YOU HERE?
    Several weeks after the crash I was feeling so debilitated and confused that I again