A Match to the Heart

by Gretel Ehrlich

  Hours later we were on a new plane bound for Los Angeles. The friends who met me said it was too late to drive to Santa Barbara; they had reserved a hotel room for me, and though I was frightened to stay alone, I didn’t say so but went obediently to bed. Not knowing where I was when I woke each morning was no longer a surprise. The surprise was that I was alive.

  chapter 10

  Water puts out fire. The restoration of my health depended on it. If I stopped following fire, simply stopped, perhaps fire would stop erupting all around me. In the morning I was driven to my new abode, an airy, spare beach house rented from a friend. Though I had been born in Santa Barbara, I had never known how the city was named or who Saint Barbara was. Now the coincidence seemed uncanny.

  In the 1700s, after being caught in a fierce thunderstorm, the secretary to the Portuguese explorer, Juan Cabrillo, who was passing through the channel, gave the Chumash village the name Santa Barbara in thanks to the saint for keeping him alive during the storm. He had chosen Saint Barbara for a reason. Born Barbara Dioscorus, she was the daughter of a wealthy man who became enraged when she converted to Christianity. In revenge, he had her beheaded, but immediately he was struck by lightning and killed. After, Barbara was made a saint who protected those threatened by thunder, lightning, and fire. Perhaps I had come to the right place at the right time.

  In my airy living room, I lit a candle for Saint Barbara and read about amulets, household protectors, good luck charms such as the leaves of elder and bay trees, holly, ivy, and mistletoe, houseleek grown on a roof, mugwort, orpine, Saint-John’s wort, or rosemary, all of which are said to protect a house from lightning.

  For so many years the ranch in Wyoming had felt like the center of the world. In its wild solitude, communities of plants and animals came into existence and died; the seasons battered us; friends came and went; hard work engraved itself in our skins. Now I was someplace else and alone. No dogs greeted me, and there were no chores to be done in the morning.

  Simple and spare, the beach house shook on its pilings each time a wave broke against sand. Floor-to-ceiling windows faced the ocean on one side, and mountains and a salt marsh studded with egrets and blue herons on the other. From my parents’ house a mile away, one could see right through my living room as though through an X-ray in which I had been caught trespassing.

  In my coming-back-to-life dream I had been crucified and suspended in the ocean. That’s why, now, I wanted to live at water’s edge. Here, I would surrender to whatever swam through me: death nailed to life. Here, I would be restored.

  The cruciate form is an arbor vitae, a tree of life, a human with arms outstretched in surrender. The horizontal bar is the road we travel, the linear direction of a life, and the vertical stave is the spiritual elevator that lifts and drops us from the realm of the gods to the underworld, passing through the middle where the human heart is pinned, representing the necessity of blending sacred with secular.

  During my first night in the house, the sky cleared and the Big Dipper’s handle dropped down behind a chaparral-covered peak as if to say that Wyoming, where I had spent many winters, was buried deep inside the mountain and was no longer accessible to me.

  At dawn, a white rainbow—a fogbow—arched out of turbulent channel waters and touched the roof. I called Blaine and told him I had not expected to still be alive. He laughed and said, “Of course you’re not dead.” After, I sat on granite boulders piled in front of the long string of houses as protection against storms. The tides were a form of breathing and the waves were big. In one I saw a single leaf of seaweed suspended in green bubbles, pointing upward, rising as the wave crested, pointing toward light.

  My dry eyes filled with tears—not grief exactly, but bewilderment. I was in exile, not in a foreign country, but my own home-town. The wind off the ocean was cold but my tears were heated by subcutaneous fires following the path lightning had taken inside my body, the way ground fires follow tree roots. With binoculars, I glassed the coast north in the direction of Blaine’s house, and beyond to Point Conception, the Chumash charnel ground. The stepladder of electricity out of which a lightning stroke is made is the ladder I climbed, fell from, and climbed again.

  The bottoms of my feet and the palms of my hands were hot. Everything liquid in me boiled. Now the open window to the outside world from which I had withdrawn sucked in cool fog, viscous as flesh, while my own body was ash riding marine air.

  Under a full moon, one western grebe paddled the up and down swing of incoming swells. The sea was charcoal. Its deep creases surged into waves that knocked the storm wall. During Dickens’s time it was thought that coastal people died during ebb tide. “ ‘People can’t die, along the coast,’ ” said Mr. Peggotty in David Copperfield, “ ‘except when the tide’s pretty nigh out. They can’t be born, unless it’s pretty nigh in—not properly born ’til flood. He’s a-going out with the tide.... If he lives ’til it turns, he’ll hold his own ‘til past the flood, and go out with the next tide.’ ”

  I was in luck for a few hours, the tide was coming in. At sunset pink light channeled upward in bright stalks like the aurora. A lone pelican skimmed by as the red globe of sun dropped below the horizon. How could it disappear like that? Would it return? Far out on a western point, three surfers rose and fell as if doing prostrations, as if their devotion could bring the sun back again.

  High tide. The stairs to the sand, carved into granite boulders, were wet, and in moonlight the boulders themselves looked like the storms against which they gave protection. I lay in bed with the windows wide open. Where was the grebe? Was she still floating, or had she gone to some safe haven for the night? Perhaps high tide would carry her into my house of glass, glass being nothing but heated sand. I was afraid to sleep because my body felt heavy, like an injured horse who can no longer get to his feet but lifts his head from time to time and begs for mercy. I lay quietly, but each time a wave crashed, the tremor of the house stirred all my thinking.

  Lightning is thought to be a celestial fire caused by a Greek god’s flicking whip, or flashing mirrors manipulated by the Chinese goddess Tien Mu, or stone axes hurled down from the clouds. The image of lightning occurs in all cultures as an emblem of power, chance, providence, and destiny, or as the piercing light that reveals divinity. For Tibetans it is associated with the Vajra, both phallus and sword representing the diamond-cutting clarity with which we transpierce self-delusion, preconception, and neurotic fear. Fire represents male energy, whatever is yang—powerful and phallic—while water is yin and female.

  Takashi, a farmer-monk from southern Japan who visited me at the beach house, said, “You have always been so strong. Now it is time to learn about being weak. This is necessary for you.”

  How could I grow strong by becoming weak, I asked. I was being purposefully naive. What he was asking for was balance. Health cannot be accomplished any other way. I pondered the dampening of the forceful energy, which had always welled up inside me. How does one do such a thing and not ask for death in the process? But that was the point: I didn’t have to do anything. There was still a lot I had to learn about getting well.

  I was weak and the sea was strong, but the swell went flat and pelicans diving for anchovies had to cut up the ocean’s surface to make it move again. A single plume of fire shot up out of the sea thirty miles from where I was sitting—not wildfire climbing lodgepole pines, as I had seen in Yellowstone Park, but a controlled stem of natural gas from an offshore oil rig.

  Far down the beach a bulldozer pushed sand into a high barrier in front of a row of houses. So much for the acclaimed ocean view. I’d rather be swamped by a rogue wave than wake up to a wall of sand every day. The sky filled with mare’s tails—streaming clouds that forecasted a change in weather—and below them, a single yellow tail of smog flew. A squirrel sat on a rock in front of the house, balancing himself by holding a spear of ice plant. He looked out to sea. I looked. What else was there to do? The weather changed but I was the same
, or was I?

  Intelligence exists everywhere in the body, not just in the brain. An electrochemical pulse beats in every one of our hundred billion nerve cells. It is the “life force” referred to in other cultures. Much like the cumulonimbus clouds, where lightning is born, nerve cells are structured with a difference in electrical potential between the inside, which is negative, and the outside, which is positive, so that in response to stimuli, polarization can take place. Sudden storms of firing neurons travel on long tendrils that sprout from the brain stem and spinal cord and burrow into every organ and muscle in the body. We are the body electric—or, more precisely, the body electrochemical. I no longer think of the brain as being that hard globe atop our shoulders but a body within a body: a long-limbed and flexible apparatus hunting and gathering messages, parlaying them into tiers and nets of neuronal connections almost unthinkably intricate, in which tiny voltage spikes fire into the burning bush of perception, activity, and consciousness.

  An electrical impulse travels down an axon—the transmitting arm of a cell—and when it arrives at the axon terminal, certain chemicals, called neurotransmitters, are released from a gated surface—like a gated irrigation pipe—into the synapse, a gap across which those chemicals must travel to reach the other shore. The shore is the dendrite, which is the receiving arm of a cell body.

  The synapse is holy. Apse comes from apsis, whose roots mean, to loop, wheel, arch, orbit, fasten, or copulate, and the apse of a church is a place of honor. The synapse is the gap where nothing and everything happens. Bodies of thoughts swim in the synaptic lake, sliding over receptors, reaching for the ones that live on the other shore. An interval of between 0.5 and 1 millisecond transpires before an impulse makes its way across the gap, as in the bardo where we pause between life and death, treading water in the oblivion of a gray sea.

  What is a thought before it registers as memory? Is it a shape, or a shadow, or only unarticulated grayness that can’t be held? Is it like unrequited love, or a lover who is spirit only, who has no body?

  In the aqueous territory of the synaptic cleft, transmission occurs: the release of calcium activates an enzyme called calpain, which eats into the membrane of the adjacent cell body, changing the shape of dendritic spines and, in the process, creating a physical memory. New neural pathways—new brainscapes—are made each time a memory occurs.

  The transmitting axons and receiving dendrites never touch; it’s all in the current, in the gap, in the accidental flow and rhythm of things, in the firing patterns of neurons that decide if a connection will be made.

  Patterns of pulsating electrical currents beating rhythmically throughout the nervous system activate cascades of molecular events: the binding of neurotransmitters to receptors causes the release of other enzymes. Some transmitters excite the cells, others inhibit them. When cells die, a group of scavenger cells takes them away. Tightly bound ganglia of nerve cells connected by long fibers are wrapped in myelinated sheaths—fatty, protective tissue. Currents sweep down these telegraphic wires, and in places, impulses jump from one myelin-free area to another, touching bare nodes, called the nodes of Ranvier.

  In the midst of this complexity there is simplicity: the electrical alphabet of the nervous system is made up of what’s called “stereotyped signals,” which are, oddly, quite limited in number and variety. The signals generated in a dog, rat, horse, or squid are the same as the ones that pulse through a human. They are, as Blaine put it, “the universal coins for the exchange of thoughts, feelings, actions, meanings, and ideas.” How these simple impulses are encoded and then translated into the structure of experience—what we call consciousness—is not precisely understood. But the complexity is hinted at by the recent findings of neuroscientists: there are perhaps a hundred million interconnected neuronal groups responding to stimuli simultaneously, all the time, in each human brain. And even though neurons that die are not replaced, the dendritic structures are able to regrow, so that in a brain stem injury such as mine, the structures will eventually be repaired.

  Thoughts are swimmers that leap, arch, loop, wheel, dive, or dog-paddle in the synaptic gap, the body of water that is like the sea at the beginning of all things, the sea without light. But if living and dying are complementary aspects of the same cycle, then are thinking and not-thinking the same kind of act?

  I kept returning to the gap. It is the nervous system’s River Styx, where memories, like lives, are ferried. How many crossings do we make in one life? Perhaps the brain is filled with small channels, bodies of water like the one I was living on where Chumash Indians paddled and aukulash-a Chumash shaman—sang swordfish songs; perhaps the body is maritime and the act of making memory is natatory—a continuous breast-stroke though a fast current of electrochemical impulses, and the gap, like any sea, is a form constantly undoing itself into a formlessness that rises into shapes through which we can swim. The cleft, the gap, the river into which microscopic channels release calcium, might also be called the bardo of unconditional consciousness, a self-awareness out of which we can’t swim.

  Fog rolled in like a form of sorrow. To live exiled from a place you have known intimately is to experience sensory deprivation. A wide-awake coma. My marriage was failing and I was not well enough to do anything about it, much less live on the harsh and remote ranch we had jointly loved. Day quickly became night and the fog held. The sea was a memory bank into which everything fell and was lost. I dove in but came out empty-handed. Just before the lightning strike, and for who knows how long after, there was an unoccupied space, a blank I couldn’t name or fill. Does memory take place during amnesia, and if not, what does occur?

  The fog lifted in the evening and a blue-black band at the horizon marked the end of the sea and the beginning of thought. Where does a beginning begin when nothing has gone on before?

  From reading the work of the neurobiologist Gary Lynch, I knew about the architecture of memory, the almost frenetic activity of the brain—hundreds of thousands of connections firing and refiring, tiers and layers of neuronal nets, tissuescapes coming into existence and giving birth to new ones almost instantaneously—but what, I wondered, was the architecture of amnesia, of unconsciousness, of forgetting?

  Lynch had found that neurons contain two separate biochemical mechanisms, one for learning and one that goes against learning—a deconstructivist neurotransmitter that breaks up the dendritic structure of memory. But he is not sure what happens during amnesia. Is a memory of a certain event formed, then torn down? Or does some neurotransmitter block the release of calcium and the action of calpain so that no memory takes place? Or are they released but transformed in the synaptic gap by a third enzyme?

  To think about thinking is memory in the act of self-creation, causing a new dendritic shape to form inside the brain’s circuitry. To ponder the workings of the nervous system—how mental events occur, the infrastructure of memory—is to think about the geography of our psyche. How do we get from a simple, universal electrical signal to a rich conceptual world of imagination, association, and intellect that seems to flow seamlessly as one stream of continual experience? How does such translation and integration occur?

  All that’s known is this: there is no central processor, no single computer. Nothing that simple. Millions of neurons process information simultaneously and in parallel, not linearly, but the actual chemistry and electrical properties of that integrative process are still being mapped. Even so, it seems odd that during the evolution of brain circuitry and thinking, the ability to understand itself did not get wired in. Such built-in innocence seems like a terrible oversight.

  Just before dawn I sat on jagged rocks and waited for the sun to rise. Salt water fell into my coffee cup. Sun tipped the insides of cresting waves as if they were knees bending. Seawater glazed sand into transparencies—window panes that faced a blank. My heart hurt. I lay back against heat-holding granite.

  Lazily, I watched a slivered moon move west, its back hunched to winter sun. Mayb
e I dozed, probably not, but this daydream occurred: I was with friends from the dance company in London. They took my hand and ran until I was floating. All the heaviness, tiredness, and deep aches left my body and inside the fog bank we danced a dance that required no movement yet dissolved mist and dazzled still air.

  Wide awake, standing on wet sand in the fog, I found I couldn’t really see very much of what was around me. Though my vision hadn’t been impaired (some people develop cataracts after a lightning flash), my curiosity had been curtailed. I was too fragile for self-examination. It was enough to get up, get dressed, and assign myself some meager activity for the day that I was rarely able to accomplish. Illness is terribly self-involving—that’s how the body heals itself, by appropriating all interests and energies. My vision seemed linked to mental and physical coordination, a way of hanging on wherever I was so that I wouldn’t fall. I was still treading water in the bardo.

  On Thanksgiving the ocean was royal purple and flapping like a white bird. A band of pollution into which vermillion had leeched made it a painter’s sky, a palette whose generosity was to create beauty out of waste. Later the swell went flat. The sea was a void that could not fill itself and continually broke open at my door. When the wind came up, purple water looked tormented, its head all bandaged in kelp, and the channel islands beaten by waves were lost in mist.

  Purple changed to blue dappled with pink: the water was a shield, reflecting what was above, below, inside each wave. The waves started blue, ribbed black, ended white. Where kelp beds floated, the sea was bright like ice. Two pelicans skimmed whitecaps with their wingtips, and farther out a hidden reef broke waves the way irony breaks open certain truths.