Over Memorial Day weekend of 2007, I was rushed into the ER of the local hospital with a case of nystagmus, strabismus diplopia, an event which temporarily left me a blind visual artist, and a cyclist robbed of balance. I was sent through a battery of tests (CAT scan, MRI, MRA, spinal tap, toxicity analysis, etc.) to try and ascertain the cause. Ultimately, two small, non-specific lesions were possibly discovered on my brain stem, and, with no other clues beyond the “neurological event”, the working diagnosis became MS.

 

Almost 400 years ago, René Descartes proclaimed the philosophical premise of mind and body separation, thereby elevating the human brain as the superior, rational center, presiding over the human body and its associations with the mundane world. I am now informed that it is payback time... MS has given my body’s immune system a loaded gun, and it is going to carry out random acts of violence on my brain, probably throughout the rest of my life, that is if the future is as dark as the data suggests.

 

This strikes me as entirely bizarre, and yet it also seems to eerily echo the climatic conditions of the day. In the 21st century, we sit at the top of a historical advantage point, here, in the Age of Information, informed by the hi-tech instruments we have created in our intellectual quest for further knowledge and enlightenment. Yet for some strange reason, reason itself seems to be slipping away, into a ground swell of fear and uncertainty, which seems to be stemming directly from an overabundance of unintegrated and disassociated information.