http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html

It’s well worth watching – she’s a brain researcher who had a massive stroke – and studied it as it happened.  A fascinating and revealing story, and she narrates it extremely well.

But I have mixed feelings about her ideas.

On the one hand, I wish she wouldn’t bandy around course words like “energy” and “consciousness” as if they had any currency, and I wish she wouldn’t implicate the left hemisphere of the brain as being that which individuates us and keeps people apart, singular, and “solid,” imploring us to “step to the right of your left hemisphere.”

On the other hand, she’s earnest in wanting nirvana on earth, and spreading peaceful messages, and she’s incredibly poetic not only as a performer, but as a chronicler of the stroke experience – loved her pixels of business cards description, and the notion that she no longer felt as choreographer of her life, and that she feels as the “life force power of the 50 trillion molecular geniuses that make up my form.”  All of which somewhat match my experience after being stabbed.  And she implies that feeling connected is a “choice” – “which do you choose?”:  all good.

I may well be on the same page with what she yearns for and how she at times feels.  But I’d want to be more careful in my terms, I wouldn’t localize these feelings as hemispheric – and where’s the prescription on how to feel thusly connected, and how to project that?

Many of Tuli’s lyrics are nowhere on the Internet – so here are the “Supergirl” lyrics (as best as I can understand them).

I want a girl that can
fug like an angel,
cook like a devil
swing like a dancer
work like a pony
dream like a poet
flow like a mountain stream.

Super girl, my super girl

I want a girl that can
kiss like a cherry
squeeze like a berry
smell like an ocean
talk like a songbird
walk like a fountain
touch like a flower
sing like the Leaves of Grass

i want a girl that can
love like a monkey
hug like a castle
think like a darling
laugh like a lemon
eat like a monster
roar like a jug of wine

I want a girl that can
kiss like an eagle
bend like a sapling
bark like a beagle
bite like a bagel
fly like a butter
shake like a (mumbled…’hummer’? Human?)

(in the background during fadeout) ‘up up and away!’

Thanks to Eliot Duhan for help with the transcription – and Eliot adds a verse of his own:

I wanna girl who can
Sin like an angel
Twist like an angle
Preach like an engel(s)
Fight like a stengal…

R.I.P., Tuli.

And here’s the (censored) version, hitting Turkish bookstores next month:

More information coming soon at www.elifsavas.com!

Click on picture to enlarge

A rich internal dialogue and debate rages within each of the three movements, with the music’s stops and starts and overlapping voices reflecting the constant revisions and alterations of the multiple streams of consciousness (as described in Dennett’s Multiple Drafts Model.  Throughout the piece, I use fragmented, abstract musical forms to represent the issues of subjective experience and “self-binding” that the philosopher Nicholas Humphrey sees as central to the project of “creating a person’s life.”

Performance Requirements

	Full orchestra* with keyboard synthesizer, alto and tenor saxophones, five timpani**, and a drum kit
	Eight pop singers (miked) and one classically-trained soprano.

    *Any instruments other than strings can be supplemented with MIDI instruments
    **If piccolo timpani is not available, use tom-tom or roto-tom instead