Stream of Consciousness

‘The concurrence of Sensations in one common stream of consciousness — on the same cerebral highway — enables those of different senses to be associated as readily as the sensations of the same sense’ [Alexander Bain The Senses and the Intellect (1855)]

‘Consciousness flows. A “river” or a “stream” are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, consciousness, or subjective life’ [William James, The Principles of Psychology 1890]

.

Consciousness is like a stream
because it always starts high-up, where clouds bewig hilltops,
or spurts, like juice from a bitten orange, from rockfaces,
or is struck-out of granite barrenness by Moses’ staff
to pour down with gravity — for our thoughts
always obey gravity, always go down and down—
and the flow grows thicker as it ages: floodier, faster.

Consciousness is like a stream because
weeds grow in it, and wag at us as we think, and fish tic and swerve
and irregular pebbles roll like tumbling dice, and the flow
opens into a pool in which carp older than Keith Richards
lurk above the mud, and the stream goes on, burbling
down to join the river, to mingle other consciousnesses
to the sea that is the salt repository of all thought.

Consciousness is like a stream
because it evaporates out of the fidgeting ocean skin
and boils coldly into the air, where it is whipped
into the concupiscent curds of Cumulonimbus,
and swells the bellies of the gravid clouds
to precipitation point, and the downwardness of rain
are trails and lines and bead-curtains of pure consciousness.