Category Archives: Aging and Brain/Body Acuity

Cyborgs R Us

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Like a few million others, I got a new iPhone for Christmas. I think it has 56 gigabytes of memory. I’m eagerly anticipating the release of the Apple Watch in a few months. I’ve promised my daughter I’ll buy her one and doubtless I’ll get one for myself. Then I’ll be a full on cyborg with my heart rate, step and activity patterns, sleep (or not-sleep is more like it) record, and I can’t imagine quite what all else (but I want it!) will be recorded and readable to me (and maybe millions of others, but I can’t comprehend why they would be interested) on my iPhone, my iPad, my MacBook Pro with its retinal display (which I’ve never quite understood, but know it is “good,” no “better than good … as in great”), and my Mac (sitting there on my desk all lonely because it can’t get up and go). I’ve had a FitBit exercise monitor for years and have dutifully entered on my FitBit webpage every morsel I’ve put in my mouth; never mind that I’ve gained weight despite never (in almost 3 years) having had a day where my caloric intake was more than my burn. Crap! I step naked on my FitBit scale every morning and the results (not just weight, but also percent body fat … however it knows that) are automatically sent to all my devices. Every morning I get a cup of coffee and sit down to check my stats … and then fire up my financial tracking program to monitor my “total net wealth” (thankfully it is above zero). This is 2014 and I’ll soon be 72. Continue reading →

Enhancing in the Fat Present

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Paleoethnographer André Leroi-Gourhan understood the hand as the first tool; I prefer to think of the finger as claiming that honor. The first intentional point of a finger, both phylogenetic and ontogenetic, is a gesture that directs the eye beyond the physical body to an object “there” that aligns with the finger “here.” The act creates a copresence with the implication of enhancing and awakening—identification in separation. The finger prosthetically extends the body beyond its physical limits into the world coincident with bringing the world into the body; the loop that characterizes all gesture richly understood. Leroi-Gourhan saw the hand as a fundamental tool enabling the externalization of memory, the origination of symbols and writing and enumeration—the beginning of the digital age—eventuating in touch pads, handhelds, gestural controlled technology, and wearables that, assimilated with the skin, enhances by gesture and touch the entire body. What Leroi-Gourhan understood, recognized by Jacque Derrida’s and Bernard Stiegler’s attention to his work, was that this prosthetic extension of the body into the production of graphics is an enhancement that does not reject physicality and body even in these body-transcending actions. Sociologist Marcel Mauss recognized the inevitable cultural, historical, and psychological shaping of all gestures and that these “techniques of body” serve to mark cultural, historical, individual identity. Gesture accomplishes the seeming impossibility of transcending the physical realized by means of the body’s capacity for living-movement. Continue reading →

I Don’t Want to be a Mystic!

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July 26, 2012

Sam Gill

for Meghan Zibby

It was a pause that left a trace really, just one of those moments that sometimes surprise us when, in the midst of reading, a word speaks emotional volumes to us even when we aren’t altogether all that sure that we know why or even what the word means.  This time, in the midst of reading a novel, the word was “mystic” and it was used to identify a man who in his maturity was handling a situation with confidence and grace and wisdom and wonder and enthusiasm and charm.  Another character, his official superior, quietly watching him in awe identified him as a mystic.  Never mind that this guy was a Jesuit priest, the word struck me powerfully and personally.  At this point in my life (why have I waited so long?) I’m eager to cultivate qualities that will allow me to live with grace and quiet (hmm? maybe not) confidence, giving of myself in such a way that is delicate and genuine and generous.  I’ve been musing about how to go about doing this when at my age (seems this is more a concern to me than I thought) there is such a draw to grief and loss and regret and depression if not also moments of pure desperation.  I’ve been thinking of it as an age or stage of life thing, but when I give it a little more thought I can’t really see why it should be anything other than a life thing. Continue reading →

Spooked on Halloween

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for Eduardo

The Pearl Street Mall was a sea of little ghouls and goblins each carrying a plastic pumpkin filled with colorfully wrapped sweet substances of bodily abuse, a manic high soon to plummet into screams and sobs.  That parents enable this is the mystery of Halloween.   The wild swings of my emotions, rafts of delight pummeled by waves of desperation, didn’t need sugar for fuel.  Just being there was enough.  Carlos was ardently directing Fatu, a punker winged insect of some cute variety, to the best candy hauls.  Jenny was trying to keep pace but kept running into kid-dragged women she hadn’t seen for years, torn between catching up and keeping up.  Somewhere in the middle, fifth wheel (not even fifth business), I watched the punker insect (the sweetness in my life) honing in for another drag on a sugar source.  My unbound love for her curiously embraced my unexplained desperate need to find in the crowd a mate, a peer.

Joy buffeted by waves of pain threatened to wash me out to sea; stalked was I by the “undertoad” that sucks on you drawn to the odor of emotions leaking uninvited from their cave.  Alone, isolated, unmoored in an ocean of kids and young parents.  Smiling and laughing while silently fighting to swallow the bile-tasting ache for lost life, for time past, for uncertain future.  Desperation joked with fear, flirted with pain, masked by a smile, as I reluctantly grasped my aloneness, a specter in the middle of this mob.

In the sea of cute monsters and darling robots herded by smooth-skinned dark-haired vibrant bouncy-stepping laughing young parents, scanning for a mate, a peer with a light in the lighthouse even, turned up only bent-shouldered wrinkly scaly-skinned sallow dim-eyed shuffling caricatures of aging humans.  Guess my mates were wearing costumes, too.

Sam Gill

October 31, 2010

BBM Vol. 1 Introduction

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[podcast]https://sam-gill.com/mypodcast/samgill1.mp3[/podcast]

BBM Vol. 2 The Meaning of the Body

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[podcast]https://sam-gill.com/mypodcast/samgill2.mp3[/podcast]

BBM Vol. 3 Tradition and Change: Memory and Neuroplasty

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[podcast]https://sam-gill.com/mypodcast/BBMv3MP3.mp3[/podcast]