Prisoners of Consciousness

Clive Wearing's case is perhaps the most comprehensive one of amnesia to date. I've been fascinated by the concept of having zero memory ever since I heard about Clive during a Psych 230 (Brain, Learning and Memory, taught that year by John Jonides--who lectured on this particular module--, Steve Maren, and Joshua Berke) lecture in my first semester of college. People in general are obsessed with memories--making them, retrieving them, making them up, making something of them, the last one perhaps most crucial to our functioning. Anyhow, I recently found out somebody had done a documentary called "Prisoner of Consciousness" on him. My first urge was to scrunch up my eyebrows and ask, is he really the prisoner, or are we, those with perfectly well-operating and maybe even hyperactive memory systems, more so imprisoned than he is? Doesn't his inability to remember life free him from the responsibility of "making something of it?" And then, is he a prisoner only because he has to continue living in the world of people? And then this led me to remember (yes) a story a friend had recalled (there, again) to me about his brief scuffle with amnesia: it involved a skiing accident, and emerging from complete unconsciousness (note that this does not mean cessation of all brain ino activity; just that we are not aware of this brain activity, and so cannot judge, feel, shape it, as we would in waking or even a dream) into a state of complete placidity (and amnesia)--a transcendental state of wisdom, perhaps, in which one is aware that one knows nothing (Plato's definition of wisdom), and for once understands that and why there is no need to change from the present state.

So all this talk about prisoners and memories is wonderfully (and complexly, confusingly) relevant to the paper I am currently writing (and is due in 24 hours!!) on WANTS. Now Want is another lynchpin of my particular quest for restful consciousness (not wise, in the least, I am). Want is a lack and a drive; it marks the relationship between an internal state and an external interaction; we want something, so we strive to get it, or else we hold that want in, roasting ourselves with the deliciousness ( in lack there is promise; in fulfillment, there is another want waiting, another rung of Plato's ladder to ascend) to the point where we have collected enough char to create ART.

The prompt, broken down to its essentials:
What motivates desire?
What are the consequences of desire?
How does desire create conflict between individual and larger systems? Between a person and people?
How does desire create a story?

My simple response to that is, desire creates life--or "felt life," as Richard Bausch put it (and I take to mean life beyond biological maintenance of survival). Without desire, there is no movement; without movement, we are either mentally vegetative/dead or we have obtained that transcendental wisdom (I use this term because I don't know how else to describe it; it may not be wisdom at all, or even transcendental, but I want to point out the existence of a super-state that somehow manages to integrate everything, and by doing such, eliminates all need for want--is there a NEED for want?) The last question in the parentheses leads back into the prisoner concept, as well the concept I prodded a bit in 240: Art as Excess. Is Want a consequence of consciousness? If so, are we all Prisoners of Consciousness? Prisoners of our own wants, as the stories I've chosen to analyze seem to illustrate? If wants are necessary for the maintenance of movement/Life, then one want must lead to another, and one quickly finds himself an atom splitting and splitting a nuclear fission reaction. But how about if we choose a want in the beginning that goes straight to the source--not sex, drugs, love, but Art--a want (the want is the drive behind artistic creation) that is fundamentally unfulfillable, perhaps even insatiable in its demand for human soul and other such resources. So are artists the only ones able to escape the prison of consciousness? Or are they the ones who accept the prison, and by acceptance, redefine it ("Only when we accept our limits can we go beyond them." - Albert Einstein)? Or is art merely a distraction too, leading to unnecessary pain, the raw need of the artist's want making him intolerant to the logistics of life itself? Or am I spinning myself in circles here because I haven't defined what a true artist is yet? Here's Paul, who thinks himself an artist; here's Sonny, who really is an artist. Art is not the pursuit of some ideal world; art is brutal acceptance and the attempt to go beyond, the attempt to take what is to what can be; the process of taking WANT to IS.
And what about memory? What about Clive? Having no consciousness, but undoubtedly conscious of the self, he wrote constantly, he was creating himself constantly. Which leads me to ask, do our wants create our selves, or do our selves create our wants? He was amnesic, he wanted to write, he created himself, if only for a moment. Seems cyclic.

The problem I have with academic papers is committing myself to one idea and ONE train of thought/draw out one proof long enough to slap down five or so pages. I didn't have such a huge problem before, but 240 seems to have opened this door in the floor, and now I'm Alice wandering around in Some Land past the looking glass, Peter Pan refusing to give up play for serious, methodical analysis. It's hard to bridge imagination and analysis; maybe this is what the artist does best, and maybe this is what transcends, bringing the self to others through art.


--EDIT--
More:

I think I am going to analyze these stories:
Sonny's Blues
A Good Man is Hard to Find
The Third and Final Continent
and maybe also:
Paul's Case
A Temporary Matter

maybe my framework is wrong...