Dogs at the Perimeter Read Free

the hub of white matter. What has happened is that her left brain, the dominant side (she is right-handed), has atrophied – it is wasting away in the same manner that a flower left too long in the vase withers. Throughout Elie’s left brain this disintegration is happening. Language is only the first thing that she will lose. It may come to pass that, one day soon, she will not be able to move the entire right side of her body.
    The images show something else too. While one side of her has begun to atrophy, the other side is burgeoning. Elie’s right brain has been creating grey matter – neurons – and all that extra tissue is collecting in the back of her brain, in the places where visual images are processed.
    “It’s a kind of asymmetry,” Hiroji had told her, “a kind of imbalance in your mind, between words and pictures.”
    “So what is it, all this, that I’m making? Where is it coming from?” She waved her hands at the bare walls, asif to pull her own paintings into the room, to trail them behind her like an army.
    “It comes from the inner world,” Hiroji said, “but isn’t that where all painting comes from?”
    “My diseased inner world,” she said. “I’m at war. I’m dwindling, aren’t I?” She picked up the MRI scans from his desk. “Do you paint, Doctor?”
    He shook his head.
    “Have you ever thought about it?”
    “No.”
    “Why not?”
    He paused for a moment. “My mother painted. She was a Buddhist, and she used to tell me that I was too analytical, that I had no understanding of the ephemeral side of things.”
    “The ephemeral,” she said doubtfully. “Like dancing?”
    He laughed. “Yes, like dancing.”
    Hiroji kept Elie under what is known as surveillance MR imaging. Scan after scan, year by year, the films show the imbalance widening. Three years after her diagnosis, Elie’s paintings, too, began to change. Where once she had delighted in turning music into complex mathematical and abstract paintings, intense with colour and the representation of rhythm, now she painted precise cityscapes, detailed, almost photographic. “I see differently,” she told him. “It comes to me less holy than before.” He wanted her to go further, to explain thisholiness, but she just shook her head and poured the tea, her right hand trembling.
    “The conceptual and the abstract,” Hiroji told her, “are no longer as accessible. Your interior world has changed.”
    Hiroji and I co-authored a paper on Elie’s condition. He described to me how, in Elie’s home, her paintings graced the walls. He had the sense that they pleased her because they brought the interior world into the world that we live in, the one that we hold and touch, that we see and smell. “Soon,” she had told him, tapping her fingers against her chest, “there will be no inside.”
    Elie is almost completely mute now. When she telephoned Hiroji, she wouldn’t speak. She would hit the keypad two or three times, making a kind of Morse code, before hanging up again. Her disease is degenerative, a quickening loss of neurons and glia in the other parts of her brain, impeding speech, movement, and finally breathing itself. Unable to paint, she and Gregor spend long days at the riverside, where, she once told Hiroji, things move, ephemeral, and nothing stays the same.
    Two years ago, delivering a lecture in Montreal, Hiroji spoke briefly about consciousness. He said that he imagined the brain as a hundred billion pinballs, where the ringing of sound, in all its amplitude and velocity, contained every thought and impulse, all our desiresspoken and unspoken, self-serving, survivalist, and contradictory. The number of possible brain states exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe. Maybe what exists beneath (tissue and bone and cells) and what exists above (ourselves, memory, love) can be reconciled and understood as one thing, maybe it is all the same, the mind is the brain, the mind is the soul, the