Fear of Forgetting

at best forgetting is simply inconvenient at its worst it can destroy a life multiple lives there are many truly awful ways you can die but significantly few Fates worse than dying not to mention that the chances of ever experiencing any of them are astronomically slim except dementia I think dementia is one of those few and it's one of my greatest fears while other fears say a fear of deep water cause what is a comp comparatively innocent distrust forgetting is unavoidable dementia is uncontrollable we have no way to slow its advancing emptiness dementia takes everything from

you before finally you lose yourself and while there are suggested ways to outrun it it's hard to be sure that you've ever truly escaped even then you may still forget large fragments of your life submit to false memories or lose important information forever we are all running out of time dementia ref refers to any sort of memory lost related confusion it can be caused by a very long list of different diseases some of them revolve around simple deficits such as a vitamin B12 deficiency but others are a bit more complicated the most common cause of

dementia is Alzheimer's disease it's currently ranked as the sixth leading cause of death for adults the disease is caused by abnormalities with two different kinds of protein in the brain one of them is linked to chromosome 21 which might be why 70% of people with Down Syndrome develop Alzheimer's after the age of 40 Down syndrome is caused by an extra copy of chromosome 21 this chromosome contains the instructions for the production of a protein called amalo precursor protein but it's what this protein breaks down into that's concerning amalo beta amalo beta protein can stick to

other amalo beta proteins gradually building up into a hard insoluble plaque between cells healthy brains usually clear out amalo buildup but those with Alzheimer's don't seem to be able to thus these plaques never stop accumulating the other toxic brain abnormality in Alzheimer has to do with tow proteins to is responsible for preserving the structure of the part of neurons that deliver nutrients to other cells in the brain in Alzheimer's these tow proteins become chemically sticky and Tangle up together compromising the delivery Network and starving your brain cells to death in the process there are seven

stages to the disease the first being the the only stage in which everything functions normally but past that it's only a matter of sinking deeper and deeper into the horror we used to be entirely unable to offer a diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease before somebody with it died an autopsy would be performed to reveal what Alzheimer always leaves behind an aggressively shrunken brain and it would be declared that this is what the patient died from of course this was not very consoling with brain Tech capable of amalo Imaging we now deal with a new dilemma now

we can tell very far in advance whether or not someone has Alzheimer's but there's still no cure it's at this point that some people in their caretaker to be are prescribed anti-depressants instead and what's left but a brain subjected to itself a long unraveling an Insidious disease advancing your synapses self-destruction phenomenology is the philosophy of lived experience of phoma it studies the way Consciousness functions as an interpreter of the world two ideas from this field in particular can help us understand what it's like to have dementia for a long time phenomenologists have been using metaphors

to help us understand their arguments Martin Hyer saw Consciousness as a forced clearing into which things are allowed into the light applied to dementia this metaphor proves especially Eerie the clearing slowly invaded by the encroaching Woods until no light shines there's an ancient Greek word that's repeated a lot throughout his writings ala meaning truth literally the word means that which is unconcealed discovered or even unforgotten he proposes that truth is in fact that which does not Escape notice this way of thinking about truth was very important to haiger he believes that everything possesses its own

Altha that every phenomenon is capable of revealing itself to us as itself not disguise as some mother thing we are merely the witnesses to this fundamental process Consciousness only sets the stage allows the entities of the world to reveal themselves to us but Hyer didn't just see truth as a revealing process he also understood that it involves an element of concealment what is hidden is only hidden in relation to what has been revealed any phenomenon can be understood in a myriad of different ways but every way we choose to approach something every Revelation conceals if

but for a moment all other interpretations new discoveries replace what was previously understood any sense of deja vu or Nostalgia seems to come all of its own but when we can trace back our memories through time we cannot deny that it feels as if something hidden in the source of those feelings has now been revealed to us through this process of unconcealment the world as an inert Force Comes Alive gains Fuller meaning it breathes deep according to the inhale and exhale of your memories Alzheimer's disease begins as it ends as a negative Gap a growing

void that conceals itself the second stage of Alzheimer's is when the symptoms of the disease begin to develop very mild forgetfulness a difficulty with words every now and then you'd never guess it was Alzheimer's the idea doesn't ever cross your mind why should you think that there's anything wrong we've all got to get old sometime isn't that going to have some effect on us Alzheimer's isn't a natural part of aging it's only by looking back that you can see that the signs were there all along it's the first weed growing in the clearing in the

phenomenology of perception the philosopher Maurice Merlo ponti pay special Focus to the perceptual networks of the body confronting a strange lack in the previous conversations had by these kinds of philosophers our Consciousness isn't some detached distant Beholder of the world he exclaims it's bound to a body subject to physical influences taking this into account Merlo ponti later called embodied Consciousness a kaym KMS are X shaped structures nerves or tendons crossing over each other at a junction this nomenclature is meant to illustrate the way your body as the instrument of sensation can itself be sensed how

with one hand you can feel your other it's a folding in on itself and in between mer ponti tells us that the world holds within itself a depth of experience a depth from which the significance of things arises as the intertwining of past in present imaginary and immediate body and World our existence as kaym is that depth depth is the dimension of dimensions a container for the locals of space and time it is also a dimension in which things or elements of things envelop each other this tension between them as they compete for our attention

is precisely what constitutes this depth it is surprisingly difficult to keep something buried in his fascinating book underland Robert McFarland describes how ancient structures have begun to emerge from the depths and folds of the earth glaciers yield up their frozen bodies and dying Rivers expose old monuments out from beneath their Waters even when we want to bury something deep into the obscurity of Oblivion desperately try to forget something it painfully protrudes back into our memory The Depths cough up all that is buried Merlo ponte's example of depth is of a red dress its red fabric

leaps out its color is obvious but at the same time it is sieged by a remembering of the past it is a punctuation in the field of red things a field which includes graduation robes Southern Utah desert the peera and the deviled eggs from that one Cafe and and our memories exist out there in the world the tension between the significances of past occurrences and those of the present is lodged within things as such we do not only look inward to see our past but outward into the world this is the kaym of our existence

to touch is to be touched the word is so scary it it it's a bad word Alzheimer's disease usually starts in your hippocampus one of the regions of the brain associated with long-term memory and your frontal lobe the seat of higher decision making it doesn't have to though it could form anywhere in the brain causing some pretty Eerie symptoms the disease begins to spread it isn't going to stop either it begins to take more than just a moment to work things out in your head to process what people are saying to you then there are

the questions where are we what are we doing but you've already asked that three times already it's okay you don't remember doing that these delays are Eerie uncomfortable your family casually throw around your mishaps behind your back do you think there's something happening to her I don't know but the other day she you can hear them through the walls while you try to take a nap the human tragedy is that your existence is wholly confined to the tissue inside of your skull a lump of electric fat the consistency of tofu now the same mind that

previously expanded outward into Infinity can no longer breach those pale doed walls of bone the skull is an incredibly claustrophobic space and you can feel it suffocating you as the brain fog sets in you can feel your finite being your weakness but you refuse to believe it there may be a reason why at the bottom of Pandora's Box greater than disaster and violence and sin the greatest evil of all lay hope aside from forgetfulness one of the early symptoms most people think of when they think about Alzheimer's is a negative effect it has on language

patients struggle to find the right words for things they used to be able to name effortlessly those that speak more than one language often revert solely to their mother tongue it's part of their gradual failure to identify the things and people around them Merlo pontian scholar Glenn mazus explains at depth the fight between the past and present world for what something will signify is not constituted of say separate Reds one for the dress one for the graduation gown the desert rock etc etc no he says that the red perceived is precisely this play of significances

depth explains how the mind shuffles meaning but it also describes how that meaning is stored the world absorbs the significances of our memories and experiences every individual instance of a door is one of many doors and has the power to remind us of the others in this way every object is a symbol with reference to itself as much as it is a symbol for the totality of its existence as a concept both of these symbols are actually two sides of the same coin though a name there are two different theories on how names work one

of them descriptivism states that names operate according to a description of the object so if I call something a tiger I mean something that is a large four-legged cat with orange and black stripes s kry in his book naming a necessity disagrees with this theory he points out that if we were to take a lion and cosmetically alter it so that it fit every description of a tiger it wouldn't suddenly be accurate to refer to it as a tiger the main concern behind kryp Key's theory anti- descriptivism is finding what makes an object the same

object even if all of its descriptive features have changed the answer he provides is that the name takes precedence naming something is what identifies it not describing it the philosopher schav zizik has explored some of the interesting implications behind this idea for one thing he points at that what anti- descriptivism shows us though it doesn't know it is that it is actually the name itself which creates an identity objects need a name to recognize themselves and that's especially true of people if a name is what tethers an object to its identity throughout its many changes

then there must be something in the name which represents that object better than the object itself possibly could a self-referential symbol because names radically represent objects this way they also capture that un aable something which is in that object more than any given version of it a redness more red than any particular red this is how language establishes its connection to depth words also enact a play of significances the word red could refer to any shade of red anything that is red all of it grasping at that unattainable redness a name unites this given field

ties it together into a nod of meaning Freud displayed this ability of language with his practice of free association it was common for him to ask his patients to respond to a prompt with the first word that came to mind doing so would assist in therapy by revealing the patients experiences their memories and where there is memory there is depth simple but how to explain the dreaded moment in which a loved one with dementia fails to recognize you anti- descriptivism also shows us that without a proper signifier a name our understanding of the object itself

is lost without a name loved ones become igmas we can't tell who they are what we're left with are only descriptions a list of attributes sourced from a fading memory kirka does not tell us that descriptions cease to be descriptions only that they are not enough to identify an object the way a name is is this inadequacy of description not displayed best of all when someone with dementia calls you someone else's name maybe it was the name of one of your parents or a relative you likely satisfied some part of their description but that is

not who you are the clearing is overgrown with thickets and Thorns the true nature of things now conceals itself escapes notice all of this is to say that philosophically considered dementia is the total loss of life's symbolic richness and the world can only be understood symbolically INF fiction in art to forgetting is linked to the feeling of the symbolic rotting away into tomorrow you can't discuss dementia like this without mentioning the caretaker specifically his work everywhere at the end of time a 6-hour collection of albums which together thrust you head first into the deteriorating mind

of an Alzheimer's patient over those 6 and A2 hours you'll hear old music slow down reverse crackle distort Echo and die the albums each correspond to one of the stages of Alzheimer's and could be summarized by one word daydream reality rupture or [Music] and they were originally released over 6 months intervals to give a sense of time passing but this recommended that's listened to all in one sitting if you haven't never listened to everywhere at the end of time and are considering it you should probably consider your mental health beforehand on the first listen The

Collection feels evil ominous or demonic if you're in a particular ularly sensitive mood different sections can evoke dangerously powerful emotions it is simply put devastatingly effective at what it tries to achieve all that unpleasantness is the point of course Leland Kirby the artist behind the character of the caretaker stops at nothing to make you understand every stage is accompanied by detailed descriptions and track names both of which are essential to understanding the emotions that accompany the disease for example the tracks glimpses of Hope in in trying times denial unraveling and surrendering to despair tell their

own story Beyond just the music The Genius of everywhere at the end of time is how the music it samples and the memories those samples represent are used certain Tunes slowly dissipate into unrecognizable Silhouettes and after a certain point even when we cannot describe the music playing amidst the confusion some people have still been able to name the samples flipping in and out but knowing they're there does not mean that we can recognize them that they aren't lost amidst the pandemonium out of the many effects Kirby uses to depict the Distortion of memory the most

common one is a kind of vinyl static it echoes explosively in your skull but static has a dual meaning it refers to this hissing we associate with the grime lodged into the grooves of aged vinyl records just as much as it does a complete absence of movement I've always thought the combination of these two definitions was rather unsettling it reminds me of the decay of hydrogr clearing of the drying up of Merlo ponti's depth the hardening of active neurons in the plaque the end of the project is genuinely incomprehensible even though it was all made

from pre-existing records I can't even tell what instruments they're playing at the end here and then we're met with a horrible silence the album covers were everywhere at the end of time were done by Ivan seal a longtime friend of Kirby's it isn't the first time they've worked together he also collaborated with Kirby to create the album covers for an empty Bliss Beyond this world and take care it's a desert out there amongst others Seal's paintings are hard to process it's never obvious exactly what these paintings are actually of the longer you look at them

the more confusing they get and just when you think you might have figured it out there's always that lingering doubt it's an uncanny rendition of roor shock's ink block test steel had a collection showcased in 2011 titled the object hurts the space in which many of these confusing characters of real objects placed against their usual pale backdrops were displayed some have wondered if seal didn't construct sculptures for his paintings as a model during their creation but fittingly enough he says he paints his imagined objects from memory with its unavoidable airs s himself has also created

some experimental recordings playing the tracks during his showings he uses a computer program to build nonsensical sentences out of a given set of words many of the tracks share the theme of free association an activity reflected in the paintings themselves but his artwork grows ever more disturbing when paired with Kirby's music the way these covers precariously grow more violent abstract and unidentifiable in relation to Alzheimer's isn't just a metaphor take a look at this back before there was amalo Imaging doctors relied on tests such as these to judge whether or not a patient could be

diagnosed with Alzheimer's I'm particularly fascinated by this one called the clock test in which patients were asked to draw the numbers on a clock what fascinates me is the way you can plainly see the cognitive decline just like in skills artwork for the album the covers to everywhere at the End of Time remind me as they do others of the last self-portraits of artist William uter Molen before he died from Alzheimer's they document 6 years out of his 11-year decline the series ended when he could barely commit his pencil to paper but his raw portrayal

of Alzheimer's didn't begin with these self-portraits the early signs of his dementia can perhaps be read in an earlier collection of art he called The Conversation Pieces they were a mostly biographical set of artworks celebrating the life he shared with his wife and the warm companionship of his friends I get an odd feeling when I look at these paintings though a subtle sense that there's something wrong I feel it in the artist shifting perceptions of space objects and people all which may be hints towards the disease that would later take his life and then he

got the news his last large painting blue skies depicts Williams reaction to his diagnosis a devastated figure holding on to a table as onto a raft in the blue bleakness of an empty Studio during the meeting with his doctor William was encouraged to continue painting he agreed to and had his work submitted to a nurse to be photographed thus the portraits documenting his decline came about his last portrait was scribbled on the napkin in the year 2002 he died in [Music] 2007 sometimes friends and even family will abandon Zone with dementia when former US President

Ronald Reagan was diagnosed his ambassador to the UK and very close friend Walter anber thereafter refused to see him it Disturbed him to see Reagan so out of it doing so meant denying the entire family his support in the process for many years it was believed that people with dementia suffered from Insanity allo Alzheimer first discovered the plaque and Tangles related to Alzheimer's disease in 1906 but it wasn't until the late '70s that knowledge of the disease found its way into hospitals World War I the rise of fascism in Germany and World War II halted

research and cast a lot of Doubt onto the work of German scientists Alzheimer's research was left unread for decades much of the research today has been trying to make up for that lost time meanwhile the number of patients grows in his enlightening book the problem of Alzheimer's Dr Jason carsh discusses the critical flaws in our history of treating those with the disease medical institutions have prioritized funding potential cures over present treatment even denying Medicare coverage for the costly expense of receiving a diagnosis however our failed attempts at a drug for Alzheimer's have time and time

again been reliably covered by insurance companies he explained PLS the problem then and still today in America is that an effective intervention is not a treatment unless it has a business model programs and interventions meant to support caretakers are largely without a system to promote or sustain them harwish claims this this disparity between the financially robust drug industry and the uncoordinated efforts of caretaker programs that's at the heart of the modern Alzheimer's crisis caretakers are largely on their own to shoulder the task of caring for the Alzheimer's patients and their families it's a daunting task

a 24/7 job with an insane Financial cost some caretakers are left with a choice retire and watch over their loved one full-time or take on another job to avoid going broke in the process I'm seeing this for the first time and yet this is not the first time the moderate stages of Alzheimer's Mark a point of no return on the outside we watch the person we love struggle to do simple tasks it takes them an exhausting amount of effort nothing feels right everything is slightly off laid into the disease it's even a battle for them

to speak in complete sentences it's depressing it's awful it's embarrassing for them a total personality change is common in these stages I've read story after Story of sweet husbands and wives growing uncharacteristically brutal and violent even beating their families there's just this unexplainable rage boiling up inside of them in very extreme cases they'll get caught in the grip of psychosis experience wave after wave of hallucinations but sometimes it isn't all so dramatic sometimes it's as understated as stubborn characters growing milder like little children it isn't uncommon for patients to frequently make sexual racist or otherwise

derogatory remarks either some people with Alzheimer's lose their ability to filter what is and isn't appropriate to say many of these curses and slurs might be some of the only words words they still remember deeply encoded into one of the last remaining sections of their brain but you are still self-aware in these stages feel Despair and embarrassment and shame and question why you're doing what you're doing you don't know one guide explains it you start thinking strange thoughts that don't make sense but you can't stop them from flooding your Consciousness the static screams now the

static giving birth the static giving birth the static giving birthday for most of us forting something is nothing more than trivial annoyance that's not to say it doesn't still affect us at times I won't remember why I've entered a room after I walk into it it's something that happens a lot with my ADHD it's like I found myself running on autopilot and suddenly become aware that I have no idea what I'm actually doing it reminds me of the second episode of the six season of Doctor Who day of the Moon as a kid the episode

introduced me to the silence who I still think is the most fascinating Creature from the show Steven Moffett the author of many of the show's most famous aliens often relies not so much on a terrifying appearance as much as he does a terrifying premise the same is true for the silence are you ready to hear that premise they're an alien that you can only remember for as long as you perceive them the moment you look away any idea of their existence is Thoroughly washed from your memory but this creepy effect really is pulled off best

in this scene from day of the Moon in it we watch a woman Amy Pond struggle to escape from an orphanage walking up the stairs there's writing on the wall that said to keep appearing on its own we watch Amy enter her room hear the door closed it's locked but as she grips the door handle a recorder embedded into her hand relates to her a message in her own voice I could see them but I think they're asleep get out just get out she runs through the window tries to push it open t begin to

run up her arms light up her face the entire scene takes up less than 4 minutes but how much time does each of those tallies represent really how many attempts to leave that Amy can no longer remember and thus aren't shown to us as the audience all it took was one glance to ruin every single one of them some days with a DHD I swear I spend more time wandering around wondering what I'm supposed to be doing than I do doing the thing I was supposed to be doing I feel disoriented distracted and just like

that orphanage scene I can't help but think about all that lost time trying to do the one task there is it almost goes without saying a link between our memory and the way we Orient ourselves although my ADHD related forgetfulness can be inconvenient eventually I do remember what it is that I was supposed to be doing some days it only takes seconds because I know something is wrong I can feel it and working back from that feeling I can reorient myself exit the room re-enter it sure it's inconvenient but lost time is really the worst

of it dementia on the other hand is perhaps more akin to the silence itself in the end there is no sense of disorientation attached to the forgetting of one's objective and so a new and sometimes delusional objective is spontaneously invented the existence of the old one was entirely erased the moment you looked away a negative Gap a void that conceals itself in kurur vonat slaughterhouse 5 were told the story of Billy Pilgrim a man who has become unstuck in time he enters a door in 1995 and finds himself in 1941 walks back through it into'

63 he feels an endless sense of stage fright we're told because he never knows what part of his life he'll have to act in next vonette wrote the novel in order to describe his time as a p during the bombing of Dresden in World War II as he himself says all of this happened more or less and we do spend time with Billy during the war a lot of time actually jumping between birth and death and everywhere in between but there is one scene that I thought a lot about while reading it feels strangely normal

Billy sits in the basement writing letters to newspapers about his time as a zoo animal on an alien planet the heater isn't working but he hasn't noticed he's been dozing off traveling through time every time he falls asleep that's it Billy writing falling asleep Billy writing it inspired a sad kind of Hope in me as the reader I hoped that this hellish eternity of walking through doors into the armpits of time was just one big delusion I yearned for a reasonable explanation I wanted this to be it the indisputable reality as if all the rest

of it playing out in his head would make it any less painful the novel knew and I liked toying with me the structure of slaughterhouse 5 does somewhat mimic the delusions of those with middle stage Alzheimer's though people with Alzheimer's sometimes live in the past are misplaced in time to suddenly grow adamant that their Grandpa's coming over call out for a dead child childhood pet sometimes they'll just wander off break out and walk to work the way they used to read through this lens the book grows even more discomforting Merlo ponti tells us that as

an embodied being the depth of your immediate experience doesn't call forth your memories as pure abstractions rather your memories reflect the bodily experience of your past to use this example of a red dress again when that dress reminds me of something say the graduation robe I see myself wearing that graduation robe and I feel the way my body moves hiking through the red terrain of Utah this is the way your memories are formed so they're remembered the same way to relive your past would be to act out this role in an essay from his Memoir

everything in its place Oliver sax recites his experience with a particular Alzheimer's patient who used to be a medical director for a hospital in fact it was the hospital he was later admitted to though he was severely dis oriented and agitated for most of that time there would be moments in which he believed he was once again a medical director for the hospital during the Halls he'd speak to other patients and flipped through their charts unless someone stopped him one time he spied his own chart said Charles M that's me flipped it open read Alzheimer's

disease and cried out God help me as he began to sob after that he could sometimes be heard saying I want to die let me die SX liked these moments in which Dr M believed he was one once again a doctor to stepping into a role touring the Halls reading charts and assisting patients were all a part of his habitual body a role summarized by the experiences of his past stepping into this role oriented him forward as freshly as if he were still a doctor because in a certain sense his body remembered as much as

his mind did if you remember hyder's metaphor of the clearing his concept of Altha unconcealment is that all phenomena have the capacity to reveal their true nature to us as the Mind begins to erode more and more of what reveals itself to us is hidden away short-term memory fails to function and so the information of the present world is lost to the shadows of one's ancient forests delusions function against the background of our faith in the world we all place so much trust in Altha of a world which autonomously reveals itself that the delusional never

consider that the truth has been concealed from them sax asks the question alongside many other caregivers should we therefore tell patients that they are no longer what they used to be should we take away their accustomed and well- rehearsed identity and replace it with a reality that though real to us is meaningless to them he answers his own question to do so would be Beyond cruel for patients with dementia all of the potential significances of something are confined to the depths of their imagination instead of the present world the immediate presence of things means nothing

it holds no new significance we now Traverse wholly into the realm of the imaginary Alzheimer's disfigures your memories beyond recognition before it ever lets you forget them in the 1995 animated film Ghost in the Shell a special op cyborg tracks a mysterious brain hacker with the hopes that it will help her understand her own Humanity the film presents us with a future in which the human body is a mostly outdated piece of technology prosthetic manufacturing has advanced to the point where most people have been transplanted into completely new forms retaining just enough of a margin

to call themselves human despite the synthetic of it all there is still deep down in everyone the thing that you could call the soul something that cannot be replicated something wholly organic an elusive nebulous Force called a ghost although a ghost can't be replicated it can still be manipulated ever since I first saw this film there's this scene with a garbage collector that's haunted me I've even had dreams about it in the midst of the cop's pursuit of the brain hacking Puppet Master were shown a conversation between two garbage men one of them tells his

coworker that his estranged wife won't let him see his daughter so he's hacking into her brain to understand why he even moves to show his coworker a photo of his daughter the garbage man however has been ghost hacked neither his wife nor his daughter are real the woman whose brain he was hacking into is actually a government official we're showing the photograph of his daughter again as all of this is being explained to him look this is the photo you showed to your coworker who do you see I had a picture of her she was

there she was smiling like an angel what's her name how old is she where did you meet your wife and when did you marry her I'm sorry to put you through this pal come on who do you see the Puppet Master works like a parasite a cybernetic virus wildly mutating the mind of its host then sending itself out to breed inside the skulls of others this man's memories aren't the only thing that's been manipulated no the film is insistent he's been ghost hacked his very Soul has been meddled with and as such his identity too

he used to be a husband and a father now he understands himself to be neither of those things those memories that emotion none of it matters now despite his pleas the cops can't tell him who he is Renee decart's Maxim I think therefore I am is a large part of the philosophical identity of Ghost in the Shell it expresses a radical doubt in the existence of everything that happens to us you can doubt all of this dayart says but you can't doubt the thing doing the doubting even if you do doubt your own existence there's

still something doing the doubting Merlo ponti's philosophy of kaym explores a part of this idea that often goes unexplored if we can only be certain of our own existence how can we possibly Define ourselves because there is a world we exist in it and whether or not we believe it's real it is subject to our perception our experience is living in the World construct who we are exposing the world as a delusion means to lose oneself in the process if nothing is real then how can I be who I am who am I really if

anyone at all in goodbye worlds before your eyes a recently deceased Soul fished up out of the inky Black Sea of limbo recounts their life and preparation to be judged it is also a game in which time jumps forward when you blink your eyes are the controller and now I'm about to spoil the entire game in an interview one of the games developers explained that most games are about empowering you and this is about taking power away and it is sort of about humbling yourself to the fact that you're going to have to Blink eventually

but the blinking mechanic isn't the only interesting thing about before your eyes there are are of course the key moments in which the game requires you to make a choice or to do something while these vary in importance from minor choices to pivotal Forks they all contribute to your final sense of self yet right at the climax of a life woven together from misery and Triumph there's this moment in which it's revealed that you aren't exactly who you think you are so terrible this was beyond shocking to me I mean I guess I should have

seen it coming but I didn't I almost couldn't believe it I was so invested in what was happening that I never stopped to think that maybe some of the shock of this twist had to do with memories that I skipped by they seemed boring to me when I was first thrust into them so I blinked but it didn't matter the memories I did see the ones that really led me toward this radically different sense of self those could not have been further from the truth of who I was it led me to doubt even some

of the earliest memories did those really happen or were they just necessary for the greater lie in Ghost in the Shell it's implied that the new memories of the garbage collector came at the cost of his old ones this isn't so far off forgetting a memory usually allows a false one to take its place filling in details for the events that we more or less still remember refracts Real History into nonsense ever since I was young my parents have kept a yearly photo album of our family I also contributed in documenting my childhood through my

love of filming my own movies but we usually have the same conversation when we discuss what's in them would I really remember so much of my childhood if these photos and videos were never taken there's a problem with the Twist and before your eyes that reminds me of this dilemma you see the game acts as if the person lying is the same as the person being lied to but they're not because it turns out that the main character of this game knew the truth the whole time that he was the one who actually came up

with this fake life we've just been shot through so in the context of the game I was the delusional one I thought this was my life but in fact someone I thought was me had made up these memories for me it's a really small thing to be critical of but what follows from this Dynamic shapes the entire Story the game wants to tell I'm still not sure who the player is supposed to be in all this are we Benjamin be or aren't we but that just makes the story so much more compelling in the context

of false memory it isn't very often that we become adamantly invested in something that never happened but this vividness is a key part of the false memories in Alzheimer's it's just another way you lose fragments of yourself to the disease dementia isn't brutal only because you lose yourself though your autonomy and various parts of your identity the most frightening thing about it to me is the loss of the world the journey into to a realm that evades understanding this is what the sixth stage of Alzheimer's is known for patients have no clue where they are

who they're with any concept of time what they're wearing sometimes can't remember their name sometimes the names of objects all of it is distorted gazed at through a glass Darkly reality thrashes about angrily miles away from here in the distance like a dream in his consideration of space and time the philosopher Arthur schopenhauer makes the remark that our Waking Life in our dreams represent two different ways of reading the same book our systematic reading is real life the time when everything flows cohesively but but when we're done trying to study we sometimes continue to flip

through the pages read in a disconnected method without cohesion I once had a nightmare I haven't been able to forget since the night I had it in it an AI slowly and torturously reversed my Consciousness back through time time leaving me nothing more than an empty unblinking reflex machine it was chemo for the cancer of thought now I could think nothing would only ever think nothing maybe it was because I had just read I have no mouth and I am a scream before bed a book by the way whose title quite suits dementia but if

you can't even say to yourself anymore that you can think if no thoughts run and an uncomfortable silence fills your head can you use yourself s to confirm that you exist with any certainty or is life itself then degraded to an inescapable dream an idol flipping through the pages of space and time people with dementia are not thoughtless or void of sentience there's more evidence than not that they haven't fully lost themselves it's more accurate to say that they cannot express their identity cannot fully resemble it even their body can no longer step into the

role the thoughts they think may be entire ly incoherent most of the time but there're still people that doesn't necessarily answer the question though unlike what dayart would have me believe it's not the world I need to doubt it's my own mind I reach out to touch this world and get a taste of my undoing I can only ever question what's happening to my brain because of the way my symptoms manifest themselves in the world because of the way they culminate into this dreamlike state the world has always been presupposed so though I may not

be thoughtless as the world crumbles around me into a dream I'll ask again am I certain I really [Music] exist a man's dreams span years and Juno's the long dream taking up multiple lifetimes in a single night and when he wakes up the next morning his body ages as if he had lived those years when he does wake up trying to remember where he is is like trying to remember or something he did on a random afternoon decades ago it well it takes him a moment after a while he can't tell reality apart from his

dreams but as the length of his dreams grow longer and longer pushing close to A Thousand Years A Night his body ages far beyond any possible human limit transforming him into a genuinely tragic kind of being he fossilizes in his bed during the night crumbles to dust that morning the doctors are baffled but the question I have is in the end which to him was really the dream I think there are several comparisons that can be made between this story and Life In A demented state it probably seems like every strenuous attempt to preserve what's

left of an already scrambled mind ages the brain faster and faster as it decays patients cannot remember learn or understand but even in these later stages the constant debilitating confusion can give way to an instantaneous and Lucid Clarity they're still in there somewhere drifting and unable to express themselves properly except for these impossible instances I bet I bet you can actually feel the interval of time between every final Moment of clarity growing larger and noticeably larger until you finally had your last did you appreciate it as we get closer and closer to the end of

it all the decline can be rapid the final stages of dementia are without description without description because all symbolic Powers have been lost firstand representation is not possible late stage dementia is thus defined by what is lost the reality of which cannot ever be approached nor comprehended that you have lost anything at all is not even recognized and yet it is around that gaping void that every aspect of daily life continually orbits there's an ancient Greek story that details a competition between two expert painters one of them paints grapes so convincing that birds swoop down

from the sky to try and eat them but his competitor paints a curtain after the first painter has displayed his work he tells the other to move the curtain aside so that he can show off his Masterpiece but there is nothing behind the curtain the curtain is all there is the story reminds me of the last album cover for everywhere at the end of time compared to the other covers this is perhaps the most distinct and yet even now we cannot Define this empty form a door with tape on it a blank canvas a picture

frame with nothing to display every one of these is a guess but they all represent a lost medium there is nothing behind the curtain because The Depths have now dried up all that's left of a previously profound world is a Barren moonscape with a surface of Bedrock impenetrable and vast and infinitely shallow the final year looks pretty much like you'd expect it to endless days spent lying Motionless in bed unable to communicate when you're feeling too hot or too cold speech limited to slur gibberish and then there are the rashes and sweaty blisters forming along

your stiff body next to any unexplainable bruises the second to last thing to go is the ability to smile and sometimes that's it but other times Well other times it's not sometimes there's something more there's a mind-boggling phenomenon called terminal Lucidity it sometimes happens to those people whose brains have been in Decline for many years right before their death suddenly they'll regain some level of cognitive ability this can mean anything from a wordless but knowing exchange to an impossible restoration of all their memories then they die typically within a few hours this last Harrah could

last for minutes or it could last for days the phenomenon is spoken of in Golden Mythic terms the effect on ignorant families is devastating it can feel like they've lost their loved one all over again but for those in the know these final moments can provide closure what's left of their cognitive faculties in this moment are only Shadows dancing the dance of misery truth is they are already gone all of this is just the afterlight glow of a star gone out in some distant Heaven yet to vanish from our skies but eventually the light does

dim and then they forget how to breathe forgetting sets a limit to the way we experience our existence dementia is like a drain at the bottom of the universe it pulls every part of reality down into it and yet even when there is nothing left even after every experience you've ever had even the ability to experience has been taken this drain is the one thing that remains what are we in life but a whisper a long drowned out breathless whisper come let's watch together as that Whisper Of The World rolls away and enjoy the memory

of it while we can there will be no encore