The Boundary Of Being

What must it be like not to be conscious of being conscious?
How must it feel to have to re-invent the world every second if that is the extent of your memory span?
Imagine looking in the mirror and not recognising yourself and, come to that, not even being able to reason that what you see is a mirror image of a self that you no longer are aware exists.
Imagine words that are no more than a jumble of meaningless sounds.
Imagine a world with no continuity, no beginning and no end, nothing except an ever present existential moment that is born and then dies almost at the same instant.
Add to this the occasional moment of lucidity as random neurones flicker into life for just long enough to tell you that the cerebral prison you inhabit is both a life sentence and a death sentence.

This then is the background to the images and words you are looking at. To observe someone with Alzheimer's Disease is to feel helpless in the face of a physical degenerative disease of the brain which causes a progressive decline in the abilities of the sufferer to remember, learn, understand, communicate and reason.

These then are faltering steps on a journey we can barely contemplate through the ruins of reason and the insidious destruction of memory. For on this helter-skelter ride to oblivion the destructing self fragments into a myriad frantic nightmare moments and somewhere in this cerebral vortex the soul remains, a captive spirit yearning to be free, yearning so hard to see the light. The keeper of the light can only carry a flame and hope that it burns bright enough to light the way for her through the darkest of nights-- -What you see here is one dim candle in the darkness, one small sanctuary to cling to, when life's traces have all but gone and left a vacant page. David Lindsay-Coggins January 1996