What’s inside your head?

The democratic myth of “stream of consciousness” invites us to believe that underneath it all, we’re all the same. But are we?

Do you think in words, or pictures—or something else?

Language is my delight; I am an irrepressibly verbal person. But I don’t think in words. I used to assume everyone was like me. I thought the so-called “internal monologue” was purely a literary invention for giving readers insight into a character’s mind.

Then I started asking people what’s inside their heads and learned that quite a lot of my writer-friends do, indeed, think like Clarissa Dalloway. They have an internal voiceover, a ticker tape of articulated thoughts and feelings. To me, this sounds like an extremely irritating situation; for them, it’s normal. What a plunge!

I’m not entirely empty-headed. When I am not deliberately composing and rehearsing sentences, as I am right now, my mind is a scratchpad of abstract ideas interspersed with memories and models of potential scenarios—what I can best describe as video clips with sound. I sometimes wonder if I would have experienced my mind differently had I lived in the era before moving pictures.

Words don’t just arrive in my head. I have to make them with intention, lining up the mental moveable type that presses my ideas onto my tongue and out into the world. Words on my tongue are craftwork, like clay in my hands. All day long, I wiggle thoughts into words, connecting and correcting sentences inside the neverending, constantly evaporating book of my head. I am in love with the possibilities of written language—the sheer marvel of preserving our thoughts in abstract symbols.

If your mind works like mine, you know how easy it is to flash on an idea, to understand the answer instantly without showing your work. The real effort is in proving how you got there. When I massage ideas into writing, it helps me to say the words aloud. Right now, I am whispering, “Right now, I am whispering,” under my breath as I clack these letters out. (My desire to whisper as I compose is why I have trouble writing in public.)

How do you think? Tell me in the comments.

---

Trading Brains

When I was a kid, I fantasized that I could trade brains for a day with other people. Part of this was hubris—I wanted the other person to know how smart I was. But mostly, I was wanted in. Usually, I picked a kid in my class, perhaps a bully, but maybe also a teacher. One of the nuns. Not just to learn their secrets or get them in trouble by doing mischief but to find out how they saw the world. Did the nuns really talk to God? Did God talk back? When a bully looked at me, could they feel me looking back? When you look at the sky, do you experience what I see as “blue?” When you see “blue,” do you taste cotton candy on your tongue, or is your “blue” some other entirely different sensation I cannot fathom?

The summer before I started college, I got a full-time job working in the Mortgage Mail department of a Savings and Loan where my uncle worked. Everyone said I was lucky to have this real-world office job rather than having to spend the summer scooping ice cream at Baskin-Robbins in a gross polyester uniform. (Scooping ice cream all day gives you uneven biceps.)

It took me two hours to get to my job on public transit and two hours to get home. My assignment was to search manually for misfiles among a set of floor-to-ceiling file cabinets crammed with 8 x 10 manilla customer cards. I was told this task was vital to the company. Each card had an 8-digit number, and all cards had to be in numerical order, or the staff would not be able to locate customer records when they needed them. For this, I was paid $85 a week before taxes—$2.30 an hour.

The air conditioning was cranked high, and all the windows were tinted brown, so from inside, it always seemed like a rainy day. As I labored, shivering in my “work sweater,” with the sharp edges of the cabinet drawer poking in my ribs, I learned to separate my conscious brain—the part that was daydreaming about Ulysses and the boys I was crushing on—from the part that became quite deft at spotting the misfiles. Piles and piles and piles of misfiles.

My superiors in Mortgage Mail—fully grown women who had already spent years of their lives in this dreary building and would remain in place when I left in August—assured me I was great at finding misfiles, the best. Whether to cajole me into finding even more misfiles or to curry favor with my uncle (a man I barely knew, as is how things go in a big Irish family), I don’t know. My superiors’ praise made me flush with pride and shame because, after all, I was cheating. How could I have done a “great job” when my brain was disconnected from the task? In those days, as in the days of early parenting, I guarded my mind’s luscious deep interior, insulating it from my miserable, suffocated front-mind, the part of me that languished for eight hours every day in Mortgage Mail. Every moment of every day in Mortgage Mail, I longed to disconnect entirely. To walk into the elevator at 9 am, enter an 8-hour misfile coma, and revive on the way back down at 5.

What low-level office worker out there has not independently invented the premise of Severance?

The democratic myth of “stream of consciousness”

Thirty-five years later, my students are sitting around the seminar table eating oatmeal cookies I brought to class. I have been teaching fiction for most of my life, and my students are like a river, an endless flow of bright-eyed twenty-year-olds, always the same and always changing. I am a rock in that river. I always bring cookies, an antidote for their late afternoon blood sugar dip. Thanks to the invention of computers, none of them will be spending their summer in Mortgage Mail. They have lined up internships at Goldman Sachs and McSweeney’s—golden tickets. They are far better set up than I ever was. They will never need to protect their vivid interior lives from the monotony of misfiles. Their minds are split on an entirely different axis—thanks to the very technology that has saved them from experiencing a moment’s tedium ever. They were given no choice in this devil’s bargain. Who was luckier? Me.

Discussion, as always, is animated. We’re talking about “stream of consciousness”—the mode of writing that suggests the narrator’s unfiltered flow of thoughts and feelings. Like an internal monologue, but even more intimate, so that meaning itself can be challenging to parse. Some of them love it. They take to stream of consciousness like ducks (Newburyport) to water. Their love pleases me. I want them to love literature, even when it’s not my favorite. Others find it nails-on-chalkboard unbearable or just plain incomprehensible, like staring up too close at giant Chuck Close. And I get it; if you’ve never read or written anything in the style before, it’s a big mental ask.

But give them time. Anyone with a decent ear can learn to use stream of consciousness, or its conventional cousin, the internal monologue, to whip up soulmates, monsters, and naïfs. Even I—ole empty-headed me—have used it to good effect. To me, this implied universal mode of mind feels contrived, of course, but it has the capacity to delight—like a trompe trompe l’oeil painting or bedding plants painstakingly transplanted in a garden.

Literature is a bit like government in that it is held steady by custom and convention. There are many unspoken and unenforceable—yet vital—contracts between the writer and the reader. The internal monologue exists to give us a portal to another person’s mind. If the writing is adept, we don’t stop to question where the voice is coming from as we move through the thoughts. We are already there.

The invitation—and it is tempting—is to assume the unknowable: that we are all like this. That we are alike. But are we?

---

The Human Family

I grew up in the 1970s in the West Mt. Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia, which was then and remains a nationally famous model of racial integration. From the blissfully naive perspective of childhood, it seemed to me that racial segregation and inequity were sins of a long-distant past. (Arithmetic feels so different when you are young.) I lived in the utopia of a new and better world. For thirteen years, I attended a local Catholic girls’ school, which had been racially integrated since its first class in 1917. Among my Black neighbors were the city council president, a famous concert pianist, doctors, and lawyers. My parents, both white, had been raised in mostly white neighborhoods, but when I was a girl, almost all of their friends were Black. There were other white girls in my school, but I had very few white friends until I went to college at the University of Pennsylvania—

—where all my classmates were white. It took a while to notice that there were no Black kids in any of my classes. It took decades to understand that not noticing was a perk of my white privilege.

In 1981, Sesame Street introduced the song “We All Sing With the Same Voice.” A video montage of a diverse group of American kids lip-sync the lyrics, sung by an unseen children’s choir. The editing is simple and clean, and the effect is powerful. As I rewatch it now on YouTube, the purity of those children’s voices brings a lump to my throat, and I yearn for those lost days, to sing along as I did with my own children when we watched on the VCR, over and over again, in the nineties. The song encourages kids to see themselves in and through the eyes of others, an idea that is anathema to conservatives, then and now :

When I'm by myself at night
I hold my teddy tight
Until the morning light
My name is you

…

I have sisters one, two, three
In my family there's just me
I've got one daddy
I've got two

A few years later, Maya Angelou’s 1990 poem “Human Family” elicits this sentiment, as hard to pin down as it is to argue against. What a lovely and embraceable thought: the idea that we beat with the same human heart. I was raised on the democratic myth that while we celebrate our external differences, under the hood, “we are more alike than we are unalike.” When I started writing fiction in junior high school, my mother advised me to search out “universal” feelings and thoughts. It was not bad advice—universality is the audacious premise behind all literature. I believed that I could teleport with ease into the mind of any type of person, regardless of age or place in history and geography—oh, the arrogance of the young. I got away with more than I should have because I was clever with words. I took a class with Carlos Fuentes in college, and after he read my story, he turned to me seriously and said, “But—how old are you? And when did you live in Egypt?”

Maya Angelou died in 2014. Two years later, Apple used a voice recording of her reading “Human Family” in a maudlin iPhone ad that aired during the 2016 Olympics. I invite you to watch the ad. I imagine its creators had watched the Sesame Street song growing up, perhaps on repeat like my own kids. The Apple video is a montage of photos whose creators are credited by first name and last initial (clunkily foreshadowing Lumen Industries.) The text at the end reads, “Shot on iPhone.” Astonishing to me, there is no mention or image of Angelou, as if crediting her is somehow irrelevant because, you know, we are all the same. While I don’t understand the corporate rationale or legality behind this erasure, I get the message loud and clear: you and I are part of the same blob, all of us, distinguishable by our trails of metadata.

Well, you know the rest of this story, the direction we were already hurtling towards during those 2016 Olympics, and how those of us who didn’t already know—like me, I didn’t know—learned (plot twist!) that we do not all sing with the voice, are not alike at all.

Worms

It was October. I was typing. The frost was on the pumpkin. Our Ukrainian babysitter marched into my office, holding a laundry basket.

“Do you want me to put worm shit on the children’s bed?”

We stared at each other across a gulf of confusion. The Gulf of America. I saw that I was ignorant about her culture—so ignorant. Worms-in-beds-as-folk-custom ignorant. She could not understand why this crazy American lady was shocked by the idea of using the flannel sheets in her own linen closet.

All day long, my physical brain metabolizes content (that horrible word) and excretes the metadata that feeds me back into the cycle. As I pause from this writing, a little movie from last summer’s heat plays in my head: I lift the lid of the compost bin, and in a breathtaking feat of vermiform athleticism, dozens of worms leap toward me. I feel proud of myself for not screaming. I can do this. I hold the kitchen bucket upside down, and three days’ worth of coffee grounds (which is to say, a lot) rain into the writhing garbage. Some day, this grainy mess will become the black gold that feeds the hellebores.

Some day, I’ll be worm food. You, too. We’re alike that way.

---

More Essays on Literature, Culture, and Resistance:

The Path of Least Resistance

The Mind Of Winter Fire

Don’t Diss The Crone

How Not To Be Eaten By Bears

The Hypothetical Grandmother