Free A Match to the Heart by Gretel Ehrlich

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.
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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