10. Consciousness Makes Such a Noise

“It is on the whole probably that we continually dream, but that consciousness makes such a noise that we do not hear it.” —Carl Jung

During Jen’s second yoga class the next Monday, she felt like she was experiencing a breakthrough. She arrived early, while Paula was still fiddling with the sign-in sheet. Carefully, Jen unrolled her mat and straightened it until it was perfectly aligned with the floorboards. Then she pulled her water bottle out of her oversized designer purse and placed it on the side of the mat. The water inside was cloudy, flavored with lemon juice from a bottle. She was saving her fresh lemons for salads and tea.

Normally she felt restless waiting for the class to start. The yoga classes were the highlight of her day; she would have gone three or four times a day if it were socially acceptable. But today, her patience felt boundless. She took great pleasure in setting up her little area, which, she thought pleasantly, would be her home for the next hour and forty-five minutes. What a comfortable place to spend this time, Jen thought. She leaned her bag against the wall, centered her feet on the mat, and lowered herself into a loose, comfortable forward bend.

Looking between her legs, Jen could see the upside-down image of a girl entering the room and setting her bag down next to Jen. Jen pulled herself deeper into the stretch and passively observed the girl as she unrolled her own mat. The girl’s manicured fingernails clicked against the wooden floor, and Jen caught a flash of the large, sparkly diamond on the tapered finger. She was an engaged girl, Jen thought, just like she herself had been not so many years ago, at probably around the same age. But she didn’t think any of her usual bitter, spiteful thoughts towards the girl. Thoughts like, any man who needs to mark you with such an enormous diamond will never be satisfied with just one woman, especially when you get older, and angrier, especially when you’ve had a few of his babies. Any man rich enough to buy you that diamond can afford to arrange feigned “business trips,” to spend weekends at such classy hotels that the other woman would never feel the least bit like a hooker.

Jen didn’t think those things now. The shadowy suggestion, the merest wisp of these thoughts entered her consciousness, but she knew from so much daily meditation to just let them float by, unrealized.

The girl turned her head towards Jen, showing a face lacquered in heavy but tasteful makeup. The girl was new to the class; still, Jen wondered whether she had seen her at the health club before. All the women at the club looked fundamentally the same. Some had light hair, some dark, some were white and others were Asian or Latina, and a very few were black, but all of them seemed to share the same expensive haircuts, fashionable workout clothes, tidy groomed fingernails and shiny, well-moisturized legs.

Until recently, Jen would have fit in well with this crowd. During the last month, however, her grooming habits had diminished considerably. Her haircut, when it wasn’t hidden in a ponytail, was shaggy and overgrown, and she had stopped wearing makeup, which seemed unnecessary for days filled with nothing but yoga and reading. Her perfect workout clothes from the fancy yoga boutique, designed by a former supermodel turned devoted yoga practitioner, no longer held the crisp, flattering shapes that had justified their high price. Now, with twelve classes to attend each week, she could never manage to find enough clean, dry workout clothes in her closet. She had resorted to washing the clothes in her sink between laundry days and hanging them over the shower curtain rod to dry. Her cute capri pants were becoming baggy and shapeless, her stretchy tank tops frayed around the neck and armpits. Pulling her body against her legs, she could feel the stubbly hair growing on her calves, and she could not remember the last time her private waxer had visited.

Noting this change in herself, which she hadn’t recognized consciously until now, Jen felt quietly satisfied. The outer changes paralleled changes that she was making internally as she became more focused and detached. Raising herself out of her forward bend and squatting low to the floor, she counted the things that she no longer needed: haircuts, manicures, cute new clothes, leg waxings. She had simplified her food needs to lemon, maple syrup (which she was needing less and less of each week), cayenne pepper, spinach, tomatoes, brown rice, and, once a week, hard-boiled eggs. Everything was balanced and effortless, and there was absolutely nothing she needed. Reflecting on this balance, Jen felt wonderful, as though she were floating lightly above the earth, touched by nothing, more physically dirty but spiritually and ethically cleaner than she had ever been.

Even as Jen suddenly made eye contact with the engaged girl and realized that the girl was openly staring at her, her mouth open in a dumb look of surprise, she was not troubled. Let her stare, Jen thought. She can’t see me. I don’t exist to her; she is only seeing a façade, constructed in her own head, that she imagines is me. It seemed ridiculous that Jen had ever been troubled by people’s stares, by the photographers, by the lies and misrepresentations in the magazines and on TV. That world, the world of people who observed her, was in a different stratosphere from the one she inhabited, and they were as baffling and unknowable to her as she was to them. Jen had always thought of herself as the fish in the bowl, but there was no reason that it shouldn’t be the other way around. To demonstrate this point Jen felt tempted to mirror the girl’s gaping expression back at her, but she knew this was unnecessary, since, funny as it would be to Jen, it would hurt the engaged girl’s feelings and thus bring unneeded ugliness into the world.

Jen looked around and saw that the room had filled now. Seven other students had set up their mats, five prissy-looking girls, one young guy with long hair whose tank top showed off his enormous muscles, and a black woman in sensible sweats and t-shirt who was probably Jen’s age but whom Jen would have called “older” next to the exaggerated youthfulness of the other students. This woman was such a relieving contrast to the other students that Jen found herself beaming at the woman, who caught Jen’s eye and then looked away, an embarrassed expression on her face.

Paula was already welcoming the class, giving a little speech about injuries and working within your limits that Jen had heard so many times that it had started to merge with the Sanskrit yoga terminology in her mind. But today, Paula added something new at the end, startling Jen out of her comfortable trance.

“Yoga is about self-discipline,” said Paula. “But it’s a common misconception that self-discipline is the same as self-deprivation. That might mean overtraining, like if you do a sport or work out in addition to your practice. It might mean holding your body to unreasonable standards. You might not believe it, but your yoga teacher does not expect you to be an olympic athlete or a fashion model.” A few of the students laughed indulgently at her joke; Jen noted that these were the class regulars. The new students, like the engaged girl next to Jen, didn’t laugh. The black woman, whom Jen also hadn’t seen in class before, smiled politely, reminding Jen that she should do the same.

“It might even mean believing that there are certain foods that you must never eat, or thinking that you must maintain a very rigid diet. But of course, this kind of self-deprivation is bad for your physical and spiritual health, just like any form of extreme behavior. It makes your health and your yoga practice into something you have to do, that you force yourself to do, like taking bad-tasting medicine.”

Paula wasn’t looking at Jen; in fact, she was facing the opposite direction. Jen recognized, however, that these words were directed at her. She felt embarrassed, but also oddly pleased to think that Paula cared about her enough to make a special speech. Her face felt warm, and she could imagine herself turning red at the unexpected attention. She lowered her eyes forcefully to her mat so that in case Paula turned around, Jen would not appear to be paying special attention to these words.

“Remember,” said Paula, “depriving yourself in the name of spirituality is as vain as pampering yourself for the same reason.”

That’s not what I’m doing, Jen thought indignantly, her embarrassment quickly overtaking her flattery. But she was able to calm herself quickly. I was being vain, Jen thought, with a rush of peaceful understanding. Vain to think that everything is about me. That speech had nothing to do with me; that is just how I interpreted it. I’m sure everyone in the class had some personal connection to that speech. She suddenly couldn’t believe her own hubris to think that Paula would make a speech just about her.

That’s my problem, Jen thought. I’m too self-centered. And she felt it deeply in her heart, and she wanted to spend this yoga class, and all the yoga classes in her future, curing herself of this shortcoming, which was the source of so much pain and humiliation.

Watching Paula demonstrate the opening poses for the class, stretching her arms high above her head so that her biceps pressed into the sides of her dreadlocks, Jen returned to her earlier state of tranquility, comforted by the familiar pattern of the sun salutations. She remembered how, when she started doing yoga, the beginning of each class was a horribly uncomfortable transition from her stiff regular life into the series of stretches and poses. Now, she realized happily, that boundary had blurred, had disappeared, so that there was no distinction between her yoga body and her regular body. She could have fallen into any of those stretches at any point in the day, sometimes did so in the hidden back aisles of the library as she waited for her next class.

As she relaxed into the final downward-facing position, focusing on rotating her arms, on pressing her heels down, on keeping the lowest part of her back curved, Paula appeared behind her, pressing on her lower back to force her deeper into the stretch. This was the best feeling yet; the tendons in Jen’s calves and ankles seemed to be opening up, melting into the air around her so that the boundaries of her own body no longer held and could not restrict her.

Paula lowered her head next to Jen’s ear as she pressed. “Your vertebrae are hurting my hands,” she whispered. She paused for a moment before adding, in an even lower whisper, “He’s not worth it.”

“Which one?” asked Jen, in a regular speaking voice, but Paula had moved on to the engaged girl, who had turned her head sharply in response to Jen’s question.

Jen thought about Paula’s words as she jumped lightly forward out of the pose and began the series again. Did they mean that Paula’s speech really had been directed specifically at Jen? And what was Paula implying? Jen felt her face flush again, this time in anger, to think that Paula was connecting anything about Jen’s body, Jen’s behavior, to a man. That was the last thing Jen was thinking of; in fact, except for her recurrent dreams, Jen had not thought of any man, of any romantic or sexual part of her life, for weeks and weeks. Paula had it all wrong.

But Jen’s newly honed yoga skills would not allow her to remain annoyed; a yoga class, after all, was an exercise at not getting annoyed at all manner of annoying things, including prissy, show-offy, or smelly classmates, ringing cell phones, loud farts, and most significantly, teachers who often seemed more judgmental than compassionate. Of course, Jen reasoned, Paula was just trying to help her. And Jen had been rejecting her friendship for a month, turning down her invitations to spend time together between classes. I should go to lunch with her this week, Jen resolved. On Wednesday. Jen was anxious to clear up this misunderstanding sooner, but not so much that she was willing to break her fast.

She returned her focus to the standing poses. If she thought about how Paula was viewing her, it made her feel anxious and queasy, so she did her best to empty her mind.

“Parsvokanasana,” said Paula, walking between the students as she talked, the bottoms of her flowy pants dragging on the floor. “Take a longer stance and lower your right hand inside of your right knee. Try the clasp if you’re more advanced.”

Jen lowered herself into the deep lunging position, extended her arms, and reached them behind her. Instead of locking her fingertips together, as most of the students did, she stretched just a bit farther and grabbed her left wrist with her right hand. She remembered how difficult this position used to be for her in Becky’s class, how angry and impatient she would get waiting until it was time to let go. Even now it challenged her balance a bit, and she felt her ankles wobble as she stretched her top arm farther and farther down her back. She remembered how she used to always look at her toes in this position and, for old time’s sake, she shot a glance down at her feet. This time, she thought with an internal laugh, her pedicure really was ruined; traces of the burgundy paint clung to the center of each toenail, and old dirt from the floor of the yoga room had permanently darkened the calluses building up unchecked on the tips of her big toes.

Suddenly she felt herself tottering and beginning to lose her balance. From somewhere nearby, she heard Paula’s voice: “Don’t look at your feet, Jen,” it said, in a quiet, concerned tone.

Jen’s resolution not to fall suddenly became unshakable. “You’re floating,” she said to herself, pulling her back straight and looking at the wall ahead of her. “You’re floating and you can’t fall.” Jen really did feel like she was floating, like her body had become weightless as her skeleton aligned itself into the perfect manifestation of this posture. Her left shoulder was rising straight above her right one, her left hip was pointing up towards the ceiling, the top of her head stretched as far as physically possible from the bottoms of her feet. In a moment her feet would lift off from the floor and she would begin to rise like a balloon, slowly up towards the ceiling.

And then, in a transcendent moment of release, Jen did begin to float. She saw the ceiling flash in front of her, and then the room began to spin and turn like she was tumbling out of a cloud, except upwards. She laughed to herself, wondering what Paula’s hair would look like from up at the top of the room.

Then there was a loud crash and a snapping noise. It broke the spell that was holding Jen off the floor, and she landed hard on her side. She tried to look around for the other student who had fallen, the one whose crash had caused her to fall as well. It hurt to turn her head, though, because her arm was pinned under her in a funny way.

Paula was kneeling next to her. “Don’t move,” she said, quietly but emphatically, as though she had said it once already.

“It’s okay,” Jen said, embarrassed that Paula would be fussing over her. She raised herself up onto her elbow. Something felt sharp and stingy in her side, but she didn’t want Paula to know. “I almost had it. My balance is getting better.”

“Lie down,” said Paula, in a louder, more commanding tone. Paula looked odd; her deeply tanned face had turned pale and sweaty. Jen lowered herself back to the ground, not wanting to draw any more attention. She could see the engaged girl standing above her, her eyebrows furrowed and her painted lips pursed in an expression of concern.

The black woman appeared next to Paula. “I’m a doctor,” she said.

“I think it was just her rib,” Paula said to the woman. Paula stood up, giving the woman more space.

“What was my rib?” asked Jen, getting scared. Why was everyone hovering over her?

The doctor kneeled down next to Jen and placed her hand lightly on Jen’s side. Pain shot through Jen’s lung, and the room spun again, as it had when she had been floating. The doctor was so close over her that Jen could smell her spicy perfume. She coughed, and pain shot through her lung again. She wanted everyone to back away, to give her air.

“Did you faint, honey?” asked the doctor.

Without waiting for an answer, she turned her head up to face Paula. “Yeah, her rib,” she said. “There’s probably nothing to do for it, but she should get an x-ray just in case.”

“What,” said Jen, still having trouble getting a decent breath. “What’s wrong with my rib?”

The doctor turned back to face her. Her face bore a look of deep concern, or even pity, as though looking at Jen made her very, very sad. “It’s broken, honey,” she said. “Jennifer,” she added. “Didn’t you hear it snap?”

Chapter 11:
http://kickoutofyou.blogspot.com/2008/08/11-result-of-what-we-have-thought.html

9. The Extra Ounce of Power

"Only a man who knows what it is like to be defeated can reach down to the bottom of his soul and come up with the extra ounce of power it takes to win when the match is even."
—Muhammad Ali

The lamp on the table wasn’t red, but it had a red scarf thrown over it, so that red was the color it projected out the window and into the street below. Everything else in the room was also red—the walls a deep burgundy, the mirror framed in fiery teakwood, the bedspread a seductive plush red satin. Jen looked down at her legs, thin white sticks against the bloody color of the bedding. Her corset was black and lacy and left her shoulders, arms, and legs bare. On the table under the lamp sat the one item in the room that wasn’t red: a bowl of bright, cheerfully yellow lemons.

A ceiling fan spun overhead, stirring the hot, steamy air around the room. Overhead, through the roof, she could hear the whirring sound of a helicopter. She knew that someone was arriving. She waited expectantly, fluffing up the satin bedspread and ruffling her hair.

She heard footsteps in the hall, growing closer and closer. A sudden wave of stage-fright came over her as she realized what was about to happen. She looked over at the bowl of lemons and had the sudden awareness that, instead of waiting for a man to walk through the door, she should be juicing the lemons, turning them into cool, satisfying lemonade. But before she could rise from the bed to grab the bowl and leave, Bradley threw open the door, looking every bit the cowboy in brown leather pants and a western-style shirt. She had seen him dressed this way once before in a movie. It was a bad movie; all the critics had agreed.

“I knew I’d find you here,” he said, leering at her from the doorway.

“Don’t talk,” said Jen. “Just get it over with.”

She lay back on the bed, lifting her bare legs in the air. Her thighs were huge. They looked like fat white sausages. They were swelling, growing bigger each second. She reached out to stop them from growing, and they puffed out around her hand like rising dough. The room was growing darker, the light blocked by her legs, which would surely suffocate her in a moment. She cried out, but her voice was muffled by her own flesh, which was filling her mouth and blocking her nostrils. She tried to scream, but her inward breath only sucked her skin more tightly against the back of her throat.

As she lost consciousness, Jen could hear the sound of the helicopter again, circling and circling in the sky above. And she could hear Bradley’s voice, from somewhere far away behind her legs.

“I always knew you’d get fat,” he said.

“Jen,” called Becky, entering the room with a cordless phone in her hand. “Your mom,” she said, holding the phone far away from her own body as though it were something she had pulled out of the garbage. Jen took it from her, opening her eyes wide to demonstrate her incredulity that Becky would deliver such a call to her. Becky returned an exasperated eyebrow raise and displayed her empty palms to indicate that the matter was out of her hands.

Jen had been sitting by herself in the TV room, cross-legged on the couch, holding a book in front of her as though she were reading. The book was Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha. It was the most spiritual book that she could find on her little bookshelf. All of the books on the shelf were gifts, and she had only read a few of them. Siddhartha was an old gift from Becky. Jen had been reading it for the last few days, very slowly. Halfway through a paragraph, she would find her thoughts wandering to the recurrent dream she’d been having almost every night for the last three weeks, ever since one tabloid had reported that she was a prostitute and the other magazines had started calling, calling at all hours, circling the house in their helicopters, looming outside the front gate in their dark-windowed mafia cars, like patient but determined hunters following the scent of blood.

The dream was a little different each night, but a few features remained constant. She was always on a movie set. She was always a prostitute. Bradley was always there. And every night the dream ended the same way, with her body inflating like rising bread. The sound of helicopters was also there each time, but since she could actually hear them in her sleep, they didn’t really count as part of the dream.

Becky had barely spoken to her in weeks. She’d been busy deleting phone messages, sending out statements to the press, meeting with Jen’s lawyer. Jen didn’t want to bother her any further by showing up at yoga, so she had started going to Paula’s classes instead. Paula taught at a health club in the valley, but Jen didn’t mind driving out there. It was nice to get away for a while. She had started going twice a day, once very early in the morning, before most of the photographers had arrived at her house, and once in the afternoon. Usually she would stay in the valley in between classes, reading and drinking unsweetened herbal iced tea at various cafés, switching often to avoid word of her location getting out. Still, people stared at her, and took pictures with their cell phones, like she was some kind of tourist attraction. Yesterday she had gone to the public library instead; it was filled with homeless people sleeping on chairs, and no one had seemed to notice her.

Paula must have been wondering what Jen was doing between classes, because she had asked Jen to lunch several times. “Can’t—got an audition,” Jen would say, smiling in polite regret. The truth was that she had increased her fast to five days a week. On Sundays and Wednesdays, she would eat salads and brown rice. But all the other days, she limited herself to her fasting drink, along with as much herbal tea as she wanted. After the first week, the sticky sweetness of the drink began to annoy her, so she had been cutting down the proportion of maple syrup to lemon juice. The lemon tasted clean and bitter and purifying, and she felt light when she drank it. She was becoming obsessed with lemon; her appetite for it couldn’t be satisfied by just her fasting drink. She began adding it to her herbal tea, and even sprinkling it over her Sunday and Wednesday salads.

The prospect of dealing with her mother just now made her feel dizzy. In fact, Jen did not want to deal with anything at all. She just wanted to do yoga, and drink tea with lemon, and sit and read and think, quietly. She didn’t want to talk to anyone.

Jen put down her book and held the phone to her ear in silence for a moment, enjoying the last seconds of peacefulness before the conversation began. Becky smiled weakly, her face revealing the slightest flash of reluctant sympathy, before rushing back out through the doorway.

“Hi mom,” Jen said, when she felt it would be too rude to wait any longer.

“Jenny,” said her mother, in a tone that somehow combined worry and relief together. “Why haven’t you been answering your cell phone?’ Her mother’s voice sounded distant and tinny, like music projected through bad speakers. It sounded like a dream. She wondered for a moment if this were a dream, if everything had been a dream. The last few weeks were fuzzy, difficult to remember. This thing about prostitution, Skipper in his flamingo shorts. And further back, Bradley’s new girlfriend, her marriage ending. It all would make more sense as a dream, she thought.

“Jenny, did you hear me?” said her mother. Jen had forgotten that her mother had asked her a question. Now she remembered but she couldn’t remember what the question was exactly.

Luckily, her mother repeated it. “Why haven’t you been answering your phone?” she said, enunciating clearly and putting heavy emphasis on each syllable.

Jen realized that she hadn’t seen her cell phone in quite a while. That seemed odd; she usually carried it with her when she left the house. Where was it, she asked herself, beginning to panic, not because she cared about where the phone had gone but because it was scary to have lost track of something that used to be important to her.

Then, from amid the swirl of images and events from the last few weeks, the memory sharpened into focus. “Becky has it,” said Jen. She remembered Becky taking the phone, telling her not to take any calls or talk to anybody. Jen hadn’t spoken on the phone since then. Her mother must have really laid into Becky to have gotten through, Jen thought, suppressing an urge to laugh, which she thought might be rude.

“Hmm, Becky,” said her mother, with mild disdain. For reasons that Jen couldn’t remember right now, Jen’s mother and Becky did not get along. Jen didn’t have any reply, so she waited silently for her mother to say something else.

“Are you okay?” her mother blurted out.

“Of course I’m okay,” said Jen. “I’m fine.”

“I mean, whatever you want to do with your life is all right with me,” said her mother. “I’ve always supported you, right?”

Jen suddenly remembered why her mother must have called. “Mom,” she said, trying to interrupt.

“It’s just, I know I’m not supposed to read the tabloids, but sometimes they say things on the cover and I just can’t help it.”

“You shouldn’t believe everything you read, ma,” said Jen. Her accent was sounding New Yorky, like her mother’s. It sounded strange and remote to Jen, as though her voice had joined her mother’s at the other end of the bad microphone.

“I know you don’t want to talk to me about this, but I’m your mother, and besides, I know what you’re going through.”

Oh no, Jen thought. She had a good idea what her mother was going to say, or what kind of thing, and she didn’t want to hear it. She felt flushed and grumpy and too impatient for this. “Listen, ma,” she said, in a final, half-hearted attempt to stop the speech.

“Don’t let them call you bad names, Jenny. Hold your head high,” her mother said. “You know, when I first joined the Order of the Beckoning Lily, people said horrible things about me. They called me a slut and whore and all the chauvinistic, vanilla bullshit you can imagine.”

Jen hated when her mom used this kind of language. Now there was going to be a long speech, Jen felt sure. She didn’t want to hear it, but she felt too vague and unfocused to try to stop it. She remembered to use the same strategy she used when Becky started on a long rant: breathe and wait for it to be over.

“People just don’t want to confront the mystical aspect of sexuality,” her mother continued, sanctimoniously. “People like your grandmother. It frightens them, Jenny. I know you used to really react against it.”

Yes, Jen, thought, bitterly, her mind sharpening again as a rush of unpleasant memories appeared in clear focus. She remembered high school, and her mother’s twenty-four-year-old boyfriend, and her grandmother coming to stay for two-and-a-half months because her mother had run away. Run away to be initiated into a sex cult. “It’s not a sex cult,” her mother would say. “It’s an erotic occult society.” Whatever you called it, it was completely humiliating. She’d gotten used to hearing about it now, nodding politely at stories of nude mud wrestling rituals and religious ceremonies held in giant, inflatable kiddy pools foaming with sacred oils and bath bubbles.

“Honey, I’m just so proud of you. It’s like you really are my daughter. I had no idea…” Her mother’s voice trailed off, constricting as though she were trying to stop herself from crying. “I’m just really proud.”

Jen was startled. She had never seen her mother so emotional about something she had done. She didn’t know what she should do. She had been planning to tell her mother that the whole story was a lie, but now she felt unable to disappoint her.

“Mom,” she said, noncommittally.

“Some of the younger people in my chapter know about this guy, Skipper,” her mother went on. “They said him and his friends are doing some really radical stuff out there, with the big parties. It’s just another kind of ritual. I mean, it’s not my generation’s type of thing, but I know you have to do things in your own way. This is path of the future, and I think it’s wonderful that you’re embracing it.”

“Um,” said Jen, hoping her mother had finished now. “Thanks.”

“Jenny, just tell me a little about it,” said her mother, eagerly. “Are you up in San Francisco all the time? Are there any other famous people?”

“Ma,” said Jen, plaintively. “Can we talk about something else?”

“Oh, I know, you’re embarrassed to talk to me,” her mother said. “Fine, we can talk about something else.” Her voice took on a haughty, confrontational edge, and Jen knew immediately what the new topic would be.

“Have you spoken to your father?” her mother asked.

“Mom,” said Jen, “you know I don’t talk to him.” Jen’s father lived in Europe with his third wife. Since he had moved abroad, they had spoken only once a year or so. It wasn’t that Jen couldn’t afford the phone charges; she just didn’t feel motivated to call.

“Well, I’ve been trying to reach him,” said her mother. “I can never get him on the phone. That woman is even worse than Becky!” Jen’s mother still called Elsa “that woman,” even though she had been married to Jen’s father for six years.

For the remainder of their conversation, Jen’s mother launched into a lengthy invective about Jen’s father that, according to the clock, which Jen watched fastidiously as her mother talked, breathing in for five seconds, then out for five seconds, and inserting an “uh-huh” every time her mother’s speech paused, lasted exactly nine minutes and forty-five seconds.

Chapter 10:
http://kickoutofyou.blogspot.com/2008/07/10-consciousness-makes-such-noise.html