The Becoming of a Mind

And what of a thought?

“A madman experiments on the heads of orphans.” — Proverb

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She walked to her train, blending in with the steadfast inertia of the sidewalk commuters, a constant stream of souls that spoke eerily little, quiet but thinking, always thinking.

The crowd reminded the young woman of something she’d once heard, that if you thought about something for long enough, you became that thing, a sort of transmutation by meditation, a psychic skill practiced by only the holiest of holy men or, conversely, by power hungry tyrants. She was of the personal belief that, in this world, what she privately referred to as “the uncanny present,” an ever-changing, almost-yet-not-quite-familiar reality, if you thought about something for long enough, you became thought itself.

Is that what I am? A reverie, an idea, a notion of the city? One of many, traveling from one synaptic terminal to the next, transferring all types of data, personal and otherwise, axon to dendrite, along pathways dilating into the greater surrounding nothing, an electro-chemical impulse with a face and a name, an I.D. number, one whose free will exists, if at all, solely on the margins of what is known as life?

And what of a thought? A mind? An imagination?

Below the surface, past the cerebral cortex, through the limbic system, down the neural tissue of the brain stem, from the very depths of her world’s being, she had emerged, fully formed, as fully formed as anyone else, a dream-image, a message from the unconscious, a picture of a loved one that flashes as you pass an old familiar place.

This is her world, and, despite its lack of a physical being, it is not much different from our own: a world of ideas, an accumulation of decisions, a constructed reality, one that could be de-constructed and re-constructed in any number of ways, endless re-configurations, some unfamiliar, while others, frighteningly familiar and, worst of all, hostile to life.

Her train pulled up, and she rode it home, quiet but thinking, always thinking.