Changes Pt. 3: The Balance Of Averages (I)

I’ve posted about Jill Bolte Taylor before (I’ll spare you and myself the embedded video and just link you to her TED talk), so imagine my satisfaction when I heard her again on this week’s new Radiolab episode, Words.

Jill is the neuroscientist who studied strokes firsthand when a blood vessel burst in her left brain hemisphere and, among myriad other complications, completely silenced her speech centers. Her guest appearance on Radiolab expands on this silence, beyond what was touched upon in her TED talk. (I haven’t made it through her book My Stroke Of Insight, but what I read just seemed to be a wordier version of the TED talk, adding a lot of verbiage but not, seemingly, adding content.) Earlier in the episode, Jad and Robert had explored how speech, it appears, is what creates complex thought. It is language’s ability to connect disparate words that allows us to start connecting disparate thoughts. I won’t go into all the details at present (you should probably listen to the episode), but the progression of thoughts is fascinating.

Without her left brain, Jill could not talk. And she could not think in any sophisticated way. Without the left brain, there is no past or future. The left and right brains make up, for us, the temporal and the eternal, the everything and I. Without the left, there is no self, and no time but the present. The left brain creates the delineation between one’s self and one’s surroundings. This is one of the things that is often shut out by intoxicants, especially hallucinogens. This is why people on mushrooms sit on the beach and become the sand, the surf, and the sunset.

Pure silence. You know, not that little voice that, you know, you wake up in the morning and the first thing your brain says “oh man the sun is shining.” Well imagine you that don’t hear that voice saying “man the sun is shining,” you just experience the sun and the shining.

In the episode, Robert Krulwich describes it as “the absence of reflection of any kind.”

Jad Abumrad: Did you have… thoughts?
Jill Bolte Taylor: …I had joy.

This is that time, living purely in the moment, where the sense of wonder Carl and Michael Pollan spoke of is all-consuming. Every sunrise is the first you’ve ever seen. A state of constant amazement. Perhaps this is what people seek when they take drugs, but in a pure strain I’m not sure anyone would chase quite so far down the rabbit hole. Constant amazement.

To envy this state recalls to my mind Robert Burns’ To A Mouse, which we all ate in high school before reading Of Mice And Men, where Burns says the mouse is blessed because it only knows the present, not fearing the future and forgetting the past. Pollan quotes Nietzsche’s assessment of animals’ bliss:

“They do not know what is meant by yesterday or today, they leap about, eat, rest, digest, leap about again, and so from morn til night and from day to day, fettered to the moment and it’s pleasure or displeasure, and thus neither melancholy nor bored…”

“A human being may well ask an animal: ‘Why do you not speak to me of your happiness but only stand and gaze at me?’ The animal would like to answer, and say, ‘The reason is I always forget what I was going to say’ – but then he forgot this answer too, and stayed silent.”

-as quoted in The Botany Of Desire, p. 163

If this is a bliss, it is a speechless one. It is an unaware bliss, one that doesn’t know anything but bliss, does not know this is bliss. It is one that cannot be shared because it is silent, and because there would be nothing to say about it.

I’d venture that we live in a very left-brained society. Pollan makes the argument several times, though not in so many words. Both Christianity and capitalism are systems that dominate this country (and much of the world), and spend much time fixating on the future (capitalism on the better tomorrow, Christianity on the next life). We don’t, as the cliché goes, “stop and smell the roses.” Not just because we’re too busy, but because we’re too familiar. We pass that rosebush every day. It hasn’t changed. How can we look at it in any new way?

I’d put money on the idea that one of the pulls towards drugs is an attempt to balance this out. To muffle the left brain and spend some time in the present, and in the quiet. Hopping towards the right.

Do we find balance this way? If we spend, say, 75% of our waking time in the left brain, then, on occasion, 90% into the right for a few hours. Is a balance of averages balance at all? Silence from the left can bring wonder, but can it bring wisdom?

I’ve sat in these thoughts since yesterday, and I would say this of my asceticism: what I want is to use the fullness of my brain in a moment. I want, without chemical assistance, to feel a moment in the present, and feel its passing. This is what I’m always working at. If wisdom is to embrace the miracle of the fleeting moment, I would have to feel the present, and be aware of how it flits from the future to the past, in and out of existence. To be of both minds at once. (Women are apparently better at this than men.)

It will not be an all-consuming wonder, and there are times and places for that. The times when I have felt that kind of wonder, when I’ve sobbed at the beauty of just the sky above me, have been times of transition. Change makes the viewer different, makes the skin rawer. The world burned with beauty the first time I had (proper) sex with my partner, following almost two years of uninvited celibacy (and one awkward exchange we’d shared the week before). The world also lit up when I was suffering from losses before leaving California; maybe the world obligingly became beautiful because I needed it to be. They say pain and pleasure make you feel more alive. I think they make you more awake, more present. Whatever, they make you different.

Jill’s animal bliss is a bliss without change. It is a simple bliss; with the speech centers silent there are no complex thoughts, no complex emotions. As Jad and Robert ask, can you think about time if you don’t have a word for it? Can you think about thinking? About language? The sophisticated wonders, of discovery, of falling in love, are absent. I wish it wasn’t so goddamn difficult. Change is never easy, nobody wants it. It’s no shortcut to wonder; this is the long way. And it’s often a crapshoot if you’re going to find wonder via joy or pain (or at all).

But it’s a wonder we can share. So I’d like to keep evolving.

Changes, Pt. 2: The Sense Of Wonder (I)

Science is still one of my chief joys. The popularization of science that Isaac Asimov did so well — the communication not just of the findings but of the methods of science — seems to me as natural as breathing. After all, when you’re in love, you want to tell the world. The idea that scientists shouldn’t talk about their science to the public seems to me bizarre.

-Carl Sagan, Wonder And Skepticism

Michael Pollan’s book The Botany Of Desire is, as he phrases it, “a plant’s-eye view of the world.” In it he studies the relationships humans have with plants, from food to flowers, the way we’ve tamed them in our gardens and, at the same time, become agents for the plants, become a kind of sophisticated bee ensuring the plant’s perpetuation and evolution.

Yesterday I read the chapter on marijuana.

I’ve always been skeptical of intoxicants, marijuana perhaps more than most because it was so popular in my hometown. I’ve never smoked it, I’ve sipped only a small amount of alcohol in my life, and even gave up caffeine several years ago. Intoxicants have always seemed a cheap shortcut to the wonder Carl talks about, the wonder I felt was a scientific wonder, the wonder of falling in love. The stickler in me feels that wonder should be earned, that I’d rather read something revelatory or fall in love than smoke marijuana. Though, interestingly, Carl smoked marijuana almost daily.

(For anyone wondering, I do believe all drugs should be legal. Being a teetotaler ≠ being a prohibitionist.)

But Pollan points out that, biochemically, the high of discovery and the high of marijuana are identical: THC is similar enough to the brain’s own cannabinoid chemical, anandamide, that it fits like a key in the lock of certain receptors in the brain. Pollan writes of the discovery of the cannabinoid network:

The cannabinoid receptors [researcher Allyn] Howlett found showed up in vast numbers all over the brain (as well as in the immune and reproductive systems), though they were clustered in regions responsible for the mental processes marijuana is known to alter: the hippocampus (memory), the basal ganglia (movement), and the amygdala (emotions).

-The Botany Of Desire, p. 153

So Pollan becomes curious as to what (again, biochemically) it means to be “high.” His interview subjects were tight-lipped on the subject (one scientist responded “we don’t yet understand consciousness scientifically, how can we hope to understand changes in consciousness scientifically?” (Pollan, p. 158)). But they did all agree, as poets and youth have all agreed, that the effect it is having on the hippocampus is to disrupt your short-term memory.

Yet the scientists said that the THC in cannabis is only mimicking the actions of the brain’s own cannabinoids. What a curious thing this is for a brain to do, to manufacture a chemical that interferes with its own ability to make memories – and not just memories of pain, either. So I e-mailed Raphael Mechoulam[, one of the scientists interviewed,] to ask him why he thought the brain might secrete a chemical that has such an undesirable effect.

Don’t be so sure that forgetting is undesirable, he suggested. “Do you really want to remember all the faces you saw on the New York City subway this morning?”

-The Botany Of Desire, p. 159-160

The realization here is that the brain needs a mechanism for dumping excess information. For instance, the average American apparently sees over 3000 advertisement images daily. And familiarity breeds not always contempt, but often boredom, creates the mundane, the dull, the endlessly droning repetition of daily life.

The sense of wonder comes from newness, or from seeing something familiar afresh. To do the latter you’d have to strip away that familiarity, to let yourself forget what you know about sniffing this daisy or blowing away these dandelion seeds to once again pay attention, to be in the moment.

What THC does is flood the cannabinoid network with the key to that lock, making your hippocampus quite forgetful.

This is no small thing. Indeed, I would venture that, more than any other single quality, it is the relentless moment-by-moment forgetting, this draining of the pool of sense impression almost as quickly as it fills, that gives the experience of consciousness under marijuana its peculiar texture. It helps account for the sharpening of the sensory perceptions, for the aura of profundity in which cannabis bathes the most ordinary insights, and, perhaps most important of all, for the sense that time has slowed or even stopped. For it is only by forgetting that we ever really drop the thread of time and approach the experience of living in the present moment, so elusive in ordinary hours. And the wonder of that experience, perhaps more than any other, seems to be at the very heart of the human desire to change consciousness, whether by means of drugs or any other technique.

-The Botany Of Desire, p. 162

The experience of being high (I’m taking this on hearsay, but the hearsay is very loud on this subject) is to make grand the mundane. Pollan quotes David Lenson’s book On Drugs: “[on marijuana, a] cup ‘looks like’ the Platonic Idea of a cup, a landscape looks like a landscape painting, a hamburger stands for all the trillions of hamburgers ever served, and so forth.” (Pollan, p. 147) Pollan describes this as “open[ing] a door onto a world of archetypal forms”. (ibid.)

Wisdom, Straub said, is finding wonder in the everyday. To know that everything is a miracle. And it is reductive to say that marijuana is nothing more than a shortcut to wonder (stretching it to say a shortcut to wisdom). It gives the user a chemical boost larger than closing one’s eyes and taking a deep breath is likely to do. When we seek wonder of the semi-transcendental level, we can’t simply fall in love at whim. If I were to, after 26 ascetic years, choose to smoke (or eat) some marijuana, I’d fear it being a mundane act. I’d seek out the specific variety bred for the kind of high I’d be interested in. I’d take it into the woods with someone special and share the experience, chasing solitude, attempting to do nothing but experience the high. Make it a modern-day spirit quest, with far lesser expectations.

But I wonder if I’m not too set in my ways to change. Though change is another path to wonder, and maybe it’s not a stretch to say wisdom as well.

.

_{(That was technically the end of my thought, but here’s a coda: perhaps another part of me that distrusts marijuana is the disgrunted democratic socialist part. Pollan mentions that capitalism, with it’s emphasis on working hard today for a better tomorrow, suppresses marijuana because it clashes with the drug’s push towards living in the moment. But to me, marijuana seems the purest form of capitalism. I can see the ad campaign, even: “Does looking at the stars at night fill you with wonder? We’ll sell you that feeling in the daytime for $10 a dime bag.”)}

Changes Pt. 1: Brevity (I)

Even eternity, it seems, is brief.

-Peter Straub, On Morality And Change, afterward to Sandman: Brief Lives by Neil Gaiman

Yesterday was telling me about memory. That’s how I’d describe it, at least, if I believed in mysticism. Whatever interest I followed told me about memory and forgetting, our curious bicameral brains, and the sense of wonder. The three, it seemed, are pretty well linked. I would assume what happened is that I latched onto the idea and and began weeding it out of everything I read and heard. Or else it’s all coincidental. I found these in reading Neil Gaiman’s Sandman (and distilled in Peter Straub’s afterward), in Michael Pollan’s The Botany Of Desire, and in listening to Radiolab. I’ll talk about all three by and by. I also ate many cookies yesterday, apropos of nothing.

Brief Lives, the 7th volume of Sandman (which I am reading in the bookstore in my free time), is all about beginnings, endings, changes, and Death.

In this volume, a lawyer named Bernie Capax, formerly an acquaintance of both the Marquis de Sade and Sigmund Freud, is killed by a collapsing brick wall moments after savoring the memory of the particular and distinctive way mammoths smelled. When he finally understands that he has, after all this time, come to the end of his life, he turns in search of approbation to the attractive, black-clad, slightly punky and slightly slovenly figure before him, one of Gaiman’s most inspired notions being that Death looks something like the young Chrissie Hynde. I did okay, didn’t I? he asks. Fifteen thousand years – that’s not so bad. As ever, Death is sensible, matter-of-fact, and frank, and replies: Bernie, old man, you just got the ordinary deal – you got a lifetime.

So every life, being no more or less than a lifetime, is brief; every life, being brief, is equal. Attorney Bernie’s last words are the disappointed protest “Not yet…,” are a wail of disappointment. What is a brief duration (and any duration is brief) is to be embraced, valued, reluctantly surrendered. Only the mad and the stupid throw their lives away.

-Peter Straub, ibid.

In another, earlier story in the series, Death and the series’ protagonist, Dream, agree to let a 14th century man named Hob live for as long as he wants to, seemingly out of curiosity. He and Dream meet in the same place every hundred years to see what Hob has learned about life, and whether he’d like another hundred years. At one meeting he is wildly successful, and a later one he is destitute and miserable, but he always re-ups for another century on earth. Near the end of the story, 600 years have passed, and he still can’t imagine he’ll ever choose death. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Even in an endless future, I feel the present would still mean the most to me. Outliving everything… I hope it would make the present more precious, knowing better than anyone how absolute and inexorable an endings is. But at the same time, doesn’t familiarity render everything common? What Hob’s story questions is whether wisdom is found in eternity.

Wisdom is a matter of recognizing that nothing stands still, that everything is hurtling toward its own conclusion. Wisdom is the celebration and the memorialization of the temporal. (So wisdom consists of the ability to observe, “This is a beautiful day.”) [...] Of course, the truth is that no one likes change. People in hell not only refuse to leave it, they invite you in, too. Even people who have blasted the other lives that touched their own blasted lives proudly declare in old age that they would not change a thing – all that cursing and screaming was their life, by God, and it is not possible to imagine any other. Change introduces unpredictability, uncertainty, a universe of disorder. Right before an amoeba splits in two, it says to itself, uh uh, no way, I ain’t gonna do that, nope.

-Peter Straub, ibid.

If in a thousand years you have seen everything twice or more, the only thing that can change anymore is you. If the observed does not change, the observer might. Though I’m not sure the world truly stays the same, but perhaps, given enough time, we’d see the margins within which it changes, just how far it is likely to go in any given direction. Maybe that’s where the wisdom comes from. Maybe it comes from testing your own margins.

And maybe it comes, trite as it always sounds, from the tiny moments, when held.

Closer To The Moon (I)

(You may have to click on it to read it.)

I have two co-workers on my team on-site at the Boys & Girls Club. One, Eric, is 27. The other, Kellyn, is 22. I just turned 26.

Eric and I have been talking a bit (and Kellyn probes, maybe because this might be her future) about how many people around our age are feeling the pressure to get married, have a house, have a kid. Not too many people who have actually done it, but who feel anxious because they thought they’d be there by now. One of the BGC employees, Willy, had just come back from his honeymoon; he’s maybe a year older than Eric. When Eric said “how’s it going” one day, Willy shrugged and said, “it never ends.”

When Eric asked what he meant, Willy sighed and went on, “every day you eat dinner, and then you wash your plate. And depending on what you ate you wash the plate a little differently, but in the end it still goes in the same place.”

Willy’s the kind of guy who busts on the kids in his affectionate/asshole way. It seems kind of important to him to be buddies with them, and to also be devoutly respected. The kind of guy who’s still basically a high school senior, the kind of jock that usually ends up a gym teacher.

Kellyn asked us if we feel a pressure to get married. Eric said that not only did he not, he feels that the idea that adulthood means “married with a mortgage and a kid by 30″ is a very young notion of maturity. But what I said was I felt a similar anxiety. I said “it’s not that I want to be getting married, working a desk job and getting a house. It’s just I thought whatever I was going to do instead I’d have figured out by now. I thought that I’d have a thing that I do every day, and kind of have a bead on how to do it. But every day I still feel like I’m winging it.” Eric expressed a similar feeling of improvising your life. I suppose it’s why people join the military. (It might be why we joined AmeriCorps.)

Talking to my shrink about it this past week, we discussed how your first 12 years of school offer you a template. You get up at set hours and have these things you’re supposed to do every day. As you get older you get a little more wiggle-room, as when in high school you can at least pick your electives, but I remember being excited for the day I could write my own template. Then there’s graduation, the end of the world, and you’re offered the college template, which is a lot more than just a class schedule. College is understood to be many things, experimentation with drugs, sex, sexual orientation, friendships and your own personality. You’re expected to move away from home for the first time and “find yourself.” Ze Frank phrased it well when he said “college is like taking a step closer to the real world. Kind of like how climbing a tree gets you closer to the Moon.”

After college there’s a vague template that goes like this: get a job with a decent salary and room to ascend (probably in an office and if related to your degree, only peripherally), date til you find a wife or husband, have an expensive wedding, get a house, have a kid, retire eventually, die.

I think a lot of the world sort of casually rejects this notion when they’re young, but in the backs of our minds we consider “growing up” to be accepting this template. (I don’t know about you but I thought the ending to Knocked Up was the most fucking depressing thing in the world.) I went to art school, which is peopled with the kinds of creative types who do not casually but quite emphatically reject this template. I’m sure may other types reject it as well. The problem is that school taught me to follow templates; not only did life never offer me my own, it never taught me how to write one. Every day I’m making it up as I go, and I’m 26 now and I still don’t think I’ve got it figured out. I don’t know how to figure it out.

Reading this final comic of Dar, then, came at the right time (as things always do when you’re looking for them). It presented the idea that maybe you don’t ever really “figure it out,” that you keep winging it and suddenly you stumble into it. From the sound of it, she never had a specific goal in mind, and she spent much of the time being a complete mess. But then one day she finds herself in a situation that makes her happy and fulfilled, without much clear idea of how the fuck she got there. She was an artist, and the only thing she did (sporadically, intermittently) was keep making art.

She was 26. It was 2010.

And I look at where my life was when I was 20. And compared with where I am now, it does look like I could plot a trajectory. I’m in a job I truly care about for the first time, I’m in a fledgling relationship that not only makes me happy but had an actual beginning this time, I still haven’t produced a film but I’ve written a few, I have more projects with more ambition and in more formed stations of production. I still feel as though I’m making it up as I go along, and maybe this thinking is all placebo effect, but placebos can be powerful things when you use them properly.

What I take from Dar is that you go out to sea and you do finally end up somewhere. You end up a grown-up. It’s not that she’ll never be a mess again. It’s that she found her own meaning of adulthood.

(there are, of course, people locked in patterns of dysfunction that always end up right where they started again, but I look at my history and I think I’ve broken out of the serious ones)

(also, Dar favorites: 1, 2, 3.)

Love, Blood And Rhetoric (I)

We’re more of the love, blood and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can’t give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They’re all blood, you see.

-The Player, Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead

It’s funny the way your mind works when you aren’t looking. When I was very young, for some reason I knew that people died, but I thought it was only us. I didn’t know that all that lives will die (…except turtles…). When my dad told me that, no, one day my dog would die too, that’s what shattered me.

Rewatched Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead yesterday. Inexorable, terrifying, unbearable… sometimes someone needs to take the piss out of death.

For those who don’t want to watch til the end:

Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one. A moment. In childhood. When it first occurred to you that you don’t go on forever. Must have been shattering, stamped into one’s memory. And yet, I can’t remember it. It never occurred to me at all. We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the word for it. Before we know that there are words. Out we come, bloodied and squalling, with the knowledge that for all the points of the compass, there’s only one direction, and time is its only measure.

Love, blood and rhetoric. I guess that’s what they say, there is only sex and death. And talking about it.

Sick Day (I)

I’ve been sick this weekend. I’ve been in Rhode Island for a year and a few months; this is the fourth cold I’ve gotten in that time. In the same length of time in California before preceding the move, I did not get sick once. Being sick again after being so chronically healthy before puts my mind in odd places.

Sometimes I watch Ze when I get sick:

When I get sick I start scripting the video tape that I’m gonna leave behind when I die. Sometimes imagining that even makes me cry. Both hurting and happiness make me feel more alive, but as I get older it seems that hurting’s the low hanging fruit.

I remember my best friend, Julie, when we lived together in Oakland, and every time she’d get sick she’d be afraid of death. She got something really rugged one time, moved into my room and didn’t leave the bed for three days except when I’d help her down the stairs for the bathroom. Lighting the candle under dish after dish of tea tree oil with the little monkey statuette candle-holder I’d gotten her for Christmas when I was too broke to shop anywhere but Twice As Nice. She sucked through half a bag of cough drops in those three days. I had to keep reassuring her that this wouldn’t kill her.

Samuel R. Delany said:

Daily – sometimes even two or three times a day – I would undergo a moment’s heart-pounding panic, as I realized that, someday, I would die… that, indeed, I would have to live through the last few seconds of my life and make the transition into permanent infinite nothing. (For all my religious upbringing, the consolations of heaven never seemed more to me than myth or metaphor – possibly, I suspected, a radically misplaced one.) At its best, this panic would last two to five seconds: if I were walking down the street, it would make me swallow, or perhaps speed my pace. My heart would hammer, twice, three times. My breath would grow rapidly shallow. These attacks were total – and almost blinding. When they lasted only a second or two, I was basically all right – once they were over. A four- or five-second one, however, could make me halt and lean against the wall of a building. I might even have to sit on a stoop. There were periods in my life when these attacks would last ten, twelve, or even fifteen seconds. At such a length they left me physically devastated. When they lingered that long, I might even cry out in the midst of one, or have to lie down for half an hour afterwards. Sometimes I speculated that, should one ever last as long as a minute, I would probably not survive.

-The Motion Of Light In Water, p. 46-47

The idea of death has gotten more and more impossible for me as I’ve gotten older. When I was a child and I’d learned enough about astronomy that I knew one day the sun would burst into a red giant and consume the Earth, I lay on the floor of my room with my arms out and tears running down my face, trying to hug the entire planet because someday it would be gone. When I’d get scared about dying, my mom would say that I don’t have to worry about it for a long time; my mom was never very good at comfort. Long compared to what?

Julie’s best friend died in elementary school from complications during heart surgery. She had a weak heart, but that’s not what killed her. It was the doctors.

I knew a guy, Zane, who died a few years ago. He had the most advanced lung cancer the doctor had ever seen in a twentysomething; he’d been smoking over a pack a day since he was 12. He was about my age when he died. My friend Micah, an atheist, said for the first time he knew, somehow,  that when he died he’d see Zane again.

As I give up the last shreds of the spirituality I’ve always clung to, I’m trying to face the idea of nonbeing. And I can’t. How can a being even conceive of not-being? The human memory doesn’t begin working until some months after birth; as long as we have had memories we’ve known that our existence preceded them. It leaves us with a sense of having-always-been. There was a time before I was here; I can’t fathom it.

The deaths that do assault me are the deaths of other living things. The atheists who say that there is no reason to believe in morality are the worst kinds of atheists. If you say that this tiny, fragile life is all any living thing ever gets, than causing pain of any kind is just insufferable. It’s impossible; it cannot be imagined. I don’t know how any atheist can eat meat, can justify that a cow raised for beef came into being, spent its entire life in a pen so narrow it couldn’t turn around, slept in its own shit, and was slaughtered as an adolescent. At which point it simply ceased to exist; that was everything there ever was of it.

My dad sent me a link some months ago to this commencement address by Steve Jobs. Jobs says that your eventual death is the greatest motivator, something necessary to life. It’s important that we die so we make use of the time we have. Well what a sweet and simple and reductive fucking sentiment, Steve. Have you ever once really tried to imagine simply not existing? Do you have some comforting image of an afterlife where you’ll hang out and wait for all your buddies to one day join you?

I can’t imagine my own death; it doesn’t send me into a panic. It’s the deaths of others I can’t stand to think of. Always facing outwards, I feel tremendous sorrow when I think that I might outlive a loved on without ever embracing the thought that their consciousness still exists somewhere. There’s the comforting idea that time is just another spacial dimension and maybe we can move freely through it, that our lives are like a few squares of sidewalk and there’s nothing stopping us from stepping back into it after death. But while there’s no reason this couldn’t be so, there’s no evidence to suggest it either. There is no evidence at all, for anything.

I feel such tremendous guilt sometimes. I’ve never felt in any way like I was destined to be human. I think of the thousands of insects that have died on the grill of my old van, how many nematodes I winked out of existence by eating lettuce, even guilt for the bacteria my body is killing now. They may not have a consciousness anything like mine, but it was all they had, all they’d ever have. It’s sometimes impossible to take the idea, that so many deaths are unavoidable, while placing so much stock in postponing my own.

And I can’t feel it completely. I can only feel myself brush against the magnitude of it. It’s just not something the brain is built for; it’s built to keep existing. If evolution is all about avoiding death, why would we evolve a mechanism for accepting it?

The only nonreligious friend I know who said he didn’t fear death was my old roommate Kean. I said “I can’t stand the idea of nothingness.”

He said “Really? I think it sounds peaceful.”

I hope to hell he’s right.

re: Forgiveness (H)

Jack, on forgiveness, in The Problem of Pain, p. 124:

“The demand that God should forgive such a man while he remains what he is, is based on confusion between condoning and forgiving. To condone an evil is simply to ignore it, to treat it as if it were good. But forgiveness needs to be accepted as well as offered if it is to be complete: and a man who admits no guilt can accept no forgiveness.”

And I haven’t listened to Gil talk about forgiveness yet, but I’d bet you’ve got it right, and I’m more inclined to that sort of point of view: harboring anger damages that harborer, and it is best if we can avoid doing ourselves that damage.

But what I want to respond to is what you said about brotherhood. Ian, we must have that whole philotic twining going on. Family is a sacred concept for me, right up there with Home. And I had someone who said, “I’ll always be your family.” And those are dangerous words to someone like me.

And he never took it back the way the person who broke your heart did, but he hasn’t acted within my concept of family. And I don’t know how to say how anguishing that is. And this is the only kind of permanence possible in a relationship: my own commitment. And that’s my commitment: no matter what, whether or not he’s family to me, I’ll be family to him, as much as he’ll let me.

re: No Way (I)

Touché.

Again, I do not insist that there is a soul. I am very skeptical of the people who say there is; my dad and I once had a long talk about ethics. I asked him if he thought the way cattle were raised for beef was ethical, describing the shit-filled pens so small they can’t turn around. He said no, that wasn’t ethical. And I said, “but you sell beef in your restaurant. You’re profiting off of this system.” I prodded about the hypocrisy.

And he told me that when he looks deep inside himself, he knows he has a soul, and that he knows animals do not.

Myself, I told him I look deep inside myself and know that I have empathy for a cow that has an electrode jammed into its brain and is suspended by one leg and carved alive, and to deny that empathy is inhuman. What I know and what he knows are in opposition, and I know that many people feel no empathy for animals, that the measure of what is ethical can’t just rely on gut feelings. Gut feelings so often justify specious acts.

And Hope has called me out: consciousness and life are not the same thing. The brain may die and the body can live on a respirator. The body may fail and be resuscitated, and it’s not like hitting a reset button and a new consciousness will emerge in the body. They don’t seem to be the same thing. So yes, ok, I accept consciousness being an emergent property of a complex brain as the more probable theory.

I’m reminded of a quote from everything will be ok:

Bill daydreamed about all the brains in jars he used to see in school, how he used to wonder if there were still somehow pieces of individuals inside, scattered fragments of partial dreams or lost memories locked deep within that dead tissue, or whether this entire archive is immediately erased the moment that the body fails. He began to think of people in a new light, how everyone’s just little more than that frightened, fragile brainstem, surrounded by meat and physics too terrified to recognize the sum of their parts, insulated in the shells of their skulls and lower-middle-class houses. Afraid of change, afraid of decisions, afraid of pain, stuck in traffic listening to terrible music.

It’s convenient to think of consciousness being dependent on a brain. It makes the argument for vegetarianism easier; you can think of a plant like a braindead body on life support, alive and with some reflexive action, but not conscious, without will, and not afraid to die. But is this accurate or simply convenient? A UC Berkeley bioethics student I met one time rejected a lot of vegetarian doctrine because he said that certain mushrooms show more evidence of conscious thought that certain animals. A sea squirt has no central nervous system but still evidences a will to live.

But what is life? Orson Scott Card, crazy demagogue and Mormon, came up with this concept of philotic twining in the book Xenocide. A philote was the smallest unit of space, the thing that could not be divided further, like a mathematical point that is infinitely small. Philotes make connections to other philotes, twining together, and a philotic connection expands across infinite space, and philotic vibrations across twines are instantanous no matter how many light years apart the philotes are. When a network of philotes becomes complex enough, it becomes life, and if even more complex it houses an aiùa, the location of the soul.

Mind you, this is a whole lot of shit. But if science or religion could provide me with something so specific, something that says “this is what life is and this is how and why it functions,” it would answer these questions. If life could be said to have mass, weight, could be measured and plotted on a chart. When does it start? Why can it leave the body and come back? Does the body generate life, or does the presence of life in the mother and father create the body in the womb? How is my life different from the life in a fern? What is the qualitative difference between conscious life and unconscious life, sentient and otherwise? And if it is measurable, where does it go when the body dies? The universe is a closed system, or rather The Bulk is; nothing gets in or out. We wrote higher-dimensional theory simply because gravitons seemed to wink out of existence, and no model of the universe could allow for anything to cease to exist; they must be going somewhere outside our universe. If life is physical and not metaphysical, it can’t simply stop. There is no room for nonexistence.

But if consciousness is not intrinsic to life, and one may exist for a time without the other, then even if life is eternal, does everything that makes me an individual die with my brain? And do we hold onto the idea of God simply because we can’t accept that idea?

Douglas Adams weighs in on God:

I don’t accept the currently fashionable assertion that any view is automatically as worthy of respect as any equal and opposite view. My view is that the moon is made of rock. If someone says to me “Well, you haven’t been there, have you? You haven’t seen it for yourself, so my view that it is made of Norwegian Beaver Cheese is equally valid” – then I can’t even be bothered to argue. There is such a thing as the burden of proof, and in the case of god, as in the case of the composition of the moon, this has shifted radically. God used to be the best explanation we’d got, and we’ve now got vastly better ones. God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining. So I don’t think that being convinced that there is no god is as irrational or arrogant a point of view as belief that there is. I don’t think the matter calls for even-handedness at all.

(read the interview here; or listen to it read by Arthur Dent)

There is a very long speech he made about the idea of living ethically with the idea of a false god, similar to how feng shui is based on pretending your house is home to a dragon. I will probably be returning to this speech but you can read it here. Or pick up The Salmon Of Doubt.

But I still have to ask: the story Daniel Quinn shared about seeing the world on fire and feeling the presence of some immense spiritual power… is this inadmissable as evidence? How much can we dismiss people who have had such an experience? I’ve never had one, so I can’t base any credit I give spirituality on someone else’s testimony. But can I really throw all of it out entirely? Millions of people claim to have felt the touch of god, and it seems like awfully dubious science to say that no shred of this testimony has value. But their testimony is useless to me. What if I did have one? Should I reject it because science has no way of measuring it? Or should I reject science because it can’t quantify the one thing I know to be true?

It sure would be nice to move in four dimensions. The idea that time is just one more direction means that nothing would ever have to end.

re: Quantification/ Memory & Details (H)

Disclaimer: rambly and more personal than usual.

I’m scared of forgetting, too. It is terrible to me, the people who once mattered so much that I barely remember anything about now, who seem distant, who I don’t love anymore. It seems horrific, that we can forget (a longer, more personal reflection on this).

As for details–maybe it’s just something about the way we love, Ian, the seeming importance of the details. Even with love for friends that has a romantic part (meaning, an urgency and joy typically associated with eros), I am sentimental: in the morning I will be embarrassed to having admitted that I have an old grocery receipt of V’s, and the box from this fancy chocolate, her favorite, that she shared with me. And when I am really in love, my god, the smallest of details seems immense, important, and usually beautiful. In some sense, it is difficult for me to imagine the content of romantic love without this. What is there in place of the constant noticing and adoration for the other’s smallest gesture, unfamiliar and then familiar! habit or taste, scars, dimples, places where bones have broken, speech habits, eyelashes, et cetera? Do some other sources of joy spring up in place of that? Maybe the pain of details afterward, and the fear of forgetting them, is worth how much joy we get from them to start with…

Which brings me back around to the question of the difference between being in love and obsession… ?

Or maybe there’s this more basic issue, about how we see life, a microbiology approach (understand the whole by understanding the parts):

Louise Gluck wrote that she became a criminal in love. I became a thief. I filed away the things she told me about him, the details that, I’ve decided, must either mean nothing or combine to form a complete, if pixilated, image. I collect evidence: the bite marks littered down my neck, the scratches abandoned on my spine, the hand print he forgot on my thigh. I don’t shy from my sin; I spread it out and study its wretched and fungal growth with left-brained detachment, searching for the first spore and charting a morbid trajectory. I can prove nothing: my work is falsification.

or systems biology approach (look at the big picture and see how it all fits together):

He is drawn to her darkness. His own fluorescent lightness seems infinitely reducible, but her darkness is full of things that appear to him indivisible, incapable of atomic splitting. She lures him in by removing bits of gauze and letting him gaze upon her various injuries, bruises like berry stains, puncture wounds with crusted, volcanic edges, soppy stretches of gum where baby teeth fell out and a second set never grew in. He wants to light her darkness, or at the very least, to keep her company in it.

[fix'd! -I]

Quantifying Life (I)

I remember when I was younger, some things would upset me and my parents would placate me by saying, “someday when you’re older, you’ll understand.” But now I’m older, and I forgot what those things were. Maybe that’s what they were talking about.

-Ze Frank

A friend of mine went to UC Berkeley for Chemistry, which he’d loved in high school (Mr. Hopper would set off the fire alarm three times a month, juggling with flaming rubber balls). Somewhere in college, he lost Chemistry. So deep in its minutia, he couldn’t see what he loved in it anymore. I hope he found it again; I don’t really know him anymore.

As we get older, do our lives make more or less sense? Do all these details that make everything unclear fade away, erode until only the important things are visible and our trajectory over decades to this point is clear? Or do we just amass so many details that we can’t tell the significance from the meaninglessness?

Hope sent me this really really interesting article, where they studied a group of over 200 men for almost 70 years (so far), that seems to imply the former, but they do make a point that reading all the hard data makes it almost impossible to find correlations. What is significant? What is even graphable? How do you fit a life into a boxplot?

I wonder if our brains, pattern-making machines that they are, are just better at their own workings than at working out other people. I’m thinking of Buckminster Fuller (oh, I’m sure we’ll speak of him again) and his Dymaxion Chronofile. He started cataloguing absolutely everything: copies of letters, shopping lists, dry cleaning bills. The file, logging from 1920 to his death in 1983, laid end-to-end, was 270 feet long.

The thing is that, logging one’s life actually makes that life impenetrable. Are the details so unimportant? I’m a compulsive journaler (or I was until I became a compulsive blogger). How do we know what’s an unimportant detail and what’s important to save?

In my experience, it’s only your own brain. Every time I move, I end up leafing through some old notebook I dig up. I recall one specific time when I read an account of tending to my then-girlfriend when she had food poisoning. My friend and I had gone over to where my girlfriend was housesitting. We were going to watch the Broadway production of Sweeney Todd on DVD. The friend and I fell asleep on the Tempurpedic mattress. I woke up a good hour later; my girlfriend was in the bathroom throwing up, and had been for some time. Sent the friend home, called my girlfriend’s mom who came over and helped tend. My friend Dario, who sometimes drunk-dialed my girlfriend, called, and I talked to him for a while.

I read all this, having not thought of the night for months, and a hundred details that I hadn’t written down came back. I remembered buying her and her mother bagels in the morning, with very specific orders, having to find my way around Piedmont which I’d never explored, riding my girlfriend’s bike home because she was not up for riding. Even now, I still remember the general shape of the living room and kitchen, where the bedroom was in relation to the TV, and the bathroom. Not the colors, but ther general color temperature of the house. The dogs looking at us expectantly though I can’t remember the breed.

But those details are probably largely wrong, misremembered, imagined. What I really remember was that my girlfriend and I were having a hard time. We hadn’t slept together in months, she was away from home all the time. She had a very serious mutual crush with a friend of hers, and was spending considerably more time with him than with me. I had kept asking myself “how am I more her boyfriend than he is?”

That night, tending to my vomiting girlfriend, I knew that this is what made me her boyfriend.

What makes me remember this so clearly now is not that it happened, it’s that I re-read it months later. I haven’t had to read it since. The important bit is there. And no one reading that notebook could possibly know what the important bit is.

So I have to come here, years after the fact, and say what the important bit is, now that I know. Perhaps perspective is worth a damn.

My brain is the code-maker and the cipher.

In the same vein and something I’ve been meaning to look into: The Up Series.

(how do you measure a life? I’m going to have Rent in my head all night…)