The upcoming issue of Metta is devoted to the experience of confusion. As a lead-in to the writing, art, music and film it contains, I wanted to get to know the shape and texture of my own confusion. Initially, I had what I thought was a long, snappy list of the things that confuse me over the course of a typical day. What should I wear? Who cares what I wear? Why is that song stuck in my head? (Why Billy Jean? She’s not my love, she’s just some girl who says that I am the one.) Where’s my toothbrush gone? Is Kim Kardashian talented? If so, at what exactly? Is her talent somehow the talent of the current age? And what age is that? Somewhere around 12? Why do so many bad movies get made? And so on. Writing my list made me feel cool and hip and clever and even a little bit funny.
I reread it after a day or two. It didn’t look as cool. I deleted it and started again.
10 ways I have been confused is different from 10 times I have been confused or 10 things that confuse me. Are there different ways we are confused? Can our experiences of confusion be grouped into categories based on some particular characteristic of the experience?
I went back through the light and the dark times during which I have been visited by confusion. Sometimes I have struggled through it as if it is a tangled forest - a dark and horrifying place - and at others it has been lighter - sitting on the front porch trying to find the nine-letter word. Sometimes it seems that time is the key factor - my past has not prepared me for the present, or the present doesn’t respond to what my past suggests should work, or a future presents something that makes no sense to me. Confusion is always a mental state, and yet sometimes it is clearly mental in origin, at others the source is physical. Sometimes I confuse myself, sometimes it is other people or the physical world that seems contradictory, unjust, unbelievable or simply overwhelming complex. Confusion has shapes and colours, textures and edges.
I made the decision to try to make a list of 10 ways on the spur-of-the-moment. It seemed like a good number - enough to stretch me, to make me really take the journey, but not so many (I hope) that I end up repeating myself or trying too hard to sound clever.
There is no order, no hierarchy of experiences or explanations. I get confused a lot, often about where to begin. “Begin at the beginning,” they say, but I am not a traumatized witness trying to recall details for a good looking detective on a badly scripted TV show. I don’t really have a beginning, so I’ll just start with the first time I head-butted a car.
#10: when my mind is not in charge of what’s happening
A friend and I had driven down from Auckland to Lake Taupo in New Zealand. We pulled into a narrow parking spot in front of a cafe so we could get out and have some lunch. Careful not to scratch the car next to us, I unfolded my long legs (I’m 6’3”) and put my feet on the gravel. I reached up and lifted myself out of the passenger seat. Twisting around, I stood in the doorway of the car, looking across the roof at my friend, who had turned away from me and was looking at the cafe across the road. Then my brain lost control of my body. My body twitched, as if someone had grabbed the steering wheel and yanked it violently. My face bashed into the roof of the car. It made a soft “bonk” sound and I let out a short groan-gasp as I bounced back up.
That was weird, I thought. Then it happened again: head thumping down chin first, lips and nose second, into the roof of the little white car. Then up again, again a groan, and a desperate desire for my friend to turn around. But I didn’t have time to say anything, and I was’t sure I was able to, before I head butted the car again. I was completely out of control of my body. I think I didn’t fall simply because I was caught between the two parked cars, one catching my back while the other caught my face. I bounced again, and again saw that my friend hadn’t heard what was happening or turned around. I remember wishing she would. I needed to be rescued somehow from whatever was happening to me, but I remember also knowing that what was happening must, to an outsider, look bizarre and comical. An invisible hand was bashing my head into the car, bouncing my face like I was being beaten by some magical thug, and I felt that only I could really see that the thug was me, was inside me, but was also not me. I was not in charge.
Then it stopped. I felt faint and drained. My friend turned around and asked what had happened. We went inside and had some lunch.
There are states of mental confusion where the mind cannot make sense of its surroundings (drug states, hallucinations, visions, waking dreams and waking nightmares) but this confusion was different. It was the confusion of being aware of what was happening but unable to intervene. Even knowing what was happening didn’t stop me from asking “How is this happening?” and “What do I do?” I waited and whatever had taken it away gave the steering wheel back to me, to my brain. I felt lucky. Relieved. But for days I walked around carefully monitoring my brain-body connection. I held it like I was carrying a crystal bowl full of water.
The confusion seemed simply to come down to the fact that one of my basic assumptions - that I was in charge of myself, able to control myself and my functions - was not right, or at least, not always. I wonder about Alzheimer's patients, about how confusing it must be to sit with the “knowledge” that you - the thing you think of as the you at the centre of you or, if you like, the diffuse aspect of you that connects and animates all the other parts - are imaginary and unreliable and prone to fading in and out of existence, even while the rest of you keeps moving around, groaning and laughing and bumping into things, wanting someone to turn around and notice, but knowing that what they might see looks ridiculously foolish.
