“Anne Carson is a poet. In a 2024 essay, she detailed her experience with Parkinson’s disease. The disease is taking away her handwriting, her primary mode of writing”
“We are what we’ve lived, and how we reacted to it. The mind writes this all down in clear but mutable handwriting. The mind writes this down in cells because cells are all we are, and all we have with which to remember”
“One of the 20th century’s most cruel discoveries was, of course, that the mind, and therefore consciousness, is made from the body”
“Richard Siken’s 2025 book I Do Know Some Things recounts not only his stroke, the horror of it, but also the recovery”
“Siken’s horror at not knowing words with which to build the world around himself might better reflect what children feel”
“Siken rebuilds the word and world from nothing, and writes it down”
“The brain is a careful, robust, and fragile place”
“Brains have structures, and all brains have neurons”
“Words are the first metaphor, the word standing in for the object”
“The body will make a scientist of us all, particularly in the moments when it fails us”
“For Carson, the fragmentation of her handwriting is not merely aesthetic: “The precisely controlled movements of handwriting lead to patterns in the brain that promote learning. The brain opens, deepens and enriches itself. There is in it (speaking subjectively) an exhilaration and a feeling of homecoming.””
“Our mind acts on the world through thinking”
“Carson described the thinking that occurs between reader and writing as matching wits”
“Memory should write down each day with perfect specificity and recall potential, but any hard drive—and the brain is a hard drive—can only hold so much space. So many days to write down”
“So, the files must be compressed and processed, and the photographs my eyes take so many times a second cannot be kept. The color of a car changes, as does the month he said that horrible thing to me, and the year in college when I read that book that changed me forever”
“Without memory, our thinking becomes unmoored. We remember, among other things, words. Without memory, language loses itself”
“She quotes a psychiatrist describing the central dogma of information flow (e.g., the “transcription function”) in biological systems and then summarizes: “What I take from this is that the brain has its own handwriting, which depends on a certain protein.””
“The brain uses information in the book that contains our genetic material, and it writes out what functions a cell should perform”
“Description may well be the beginning of control. When the latter is not to be found, the former may become primordial”
“No one can write from the other side of their own death. So, my existential worry: I am afraid of dying because the dead can no longer write”
“Thank you, memory. This beautiful essay”
“Even with bad handwriting, I can write”
“If my brain is imperfect, the essay will be imperfect, but all essays are. They attempt. They think. The thinking doesn’t have to end. Until it does, but before that, this. This bright, built world, and I can make it for myself”
“Siken and Carson lost their language, and their writing from the other side reminds us of its magic. Language. They show us that they can even survive lost language through writing, imperfect writing”
“I can grant myself this page. Every day that I sit and think and think and write can become a day worth remembering, even when it hurts”