I periodically have a dream that, generically, is not uncommon, though I suspect its content might be. It is the dream in which one discovers a previously unknown room in one’s house. In my version, I am in the basement, walking past the furnace, when I suddenly notice a door in the space behind it. I am astounded. The space behind the furnace is not especially dark or obscured from sight. How, in the twenty years I have lived in this house, did I not notice a door in the wall behind the furnace? This defies reason, I dream myself thinking. I walk to the door, open it, and peer in. I see a cavern that has been hewn into the earth with obvious care and is illuminated with a yellowish-white light, the source of which is hidden from view. Intrigued, I enter, walk about 20 yards, follow the bend to the right, and come upon a pile of neatly stacked lumber and several professional-grade woodworking tools: a table saw, a radial arm saw, a planer, a band saw, a router table, and a drill press. I am delighted, for woodworking is my hobby. It never occurs to me that someone else might own these tools. No, those tools, more numerous than, and vastly superior to, the ones I own are obviously there for my use. And on that note of delight, the dream ends.
Theories about why we dream abound. Some consider them clairvoyant, even precognitive. Freud considered dreams the place where the riotous id came out to play. Jung believed dreams featured archetypal symbols that connected us to the collective unconscious of the human race. Some cognitive scientists claim dreams are the means by which we process the events of our days and ways; others, that they are a kind of sanitation crew sweeping away the debris of our conscious lives; others still, that they are nothing more than the random detonation of neuronal bottle rockets and roman candles. My sense is that dreams are not forewarnings, not symbols for something other than what they feature, not a quality-control processing station, not a janitorial service, and not haphazardly firing neurons. Rather, I see dreams as transparent metaphors for embodied experience, for that which in our ordinary lives we invest considerable mental energy and strong feeling.
I took up woodworking some eighteen years ago because it required a set of skills and offered an end result that my professional work as a teacher did not. In a sense, I have never been delivered from the womb of education. After being graduated from college, I taught high school, which I left to attend graduate school, from which I entered university teaching. I came to worry that such an immersive experience would cause an inbent, progressively narrowing spiral of subjectivity. I did not want my thinking and feeling to gutter like a candle flame in its own wax. I wanted my horizons expanded, not my views reinforced. In woodworking I found the motor skills required to handle tool precisely and efficiently, the judgment necessary to gauge the best way to cut wood to minimize waste and chipping and splintering, the consideration demanded by the thickness and grain and type of wood I worked with, the mathematics involved in cutting arcs and stair stringers and roof runs and dovetail joints, the reading skills entailed in making sense of cutting diagrams and blueprints and tool manuals, the language of kerfs and dadoes and rabbets and mortises and tenons I was compelled to learn, the sensual delight of wood itself—its look and feel and smell, the shaping of it, its receptive materiality.
And in woodworking I found that a well-planned sequence of tasks led to a material result—so unlike teaching, where the most scrupulously crafted lesson can produce no observable result; where whether or how well students have learned is often not immediately apparent, if it ever is. I liked the teleology of wordworking—a conception calling forth and sequencing my action, an end explaining the means. Woodworking produced a visible testament to my competence, or incompetence; something I could point to in pride, or humiliation; a practical purpose rendered wel,l or imperfectly; an aesthetic intention made into an object to be seen; a realization of my ability, my craftsmanship, that does not rely on words, that is not subject to interpretation, but is plainly, or maybe painfully, apparent. I was sometimes successful, and I felt pride. I sometimes made mistakes, and I learned from them. I sometimes failed, and I learned to start again, to be more attentive, more mindful, better.
Everything we make, it seems to me, is purposeful striving embodied, will made visible. It is ourselves inside out, constituting what appears. We are transitive. We pass into what we make. We leave traces, revelations of mind and heart and hand. A piece of us takes its place in the world of intentional things. Our makings are a sign of our reach and our limitations, our triumphs and our flaws, our status as self-governing subjects and as material objects governed by laws beyond our choice or influence. Our makings are, finally, our selves, a humble offering to the often generous but always critical gaze of a judging world.
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Saturday, December 17, 2011
The Joyous Season
Lately, I have been thinking about joy. An effect of the season, no doubt. We are warmly greeted and best wished. We are told, exhorted, to be merry and let nothing us dismay, to be of good cheer, to be happy. And we are told this is a joyous season, a season of joy. Somehow, to me, joy seems qualitatively different than merriness, cheeriness, happiness; of a different order than being wished and greeted—somehow weightier, more consequential, more momentous, more meaningful. A season of joy. What might joy consist of, be like, feel like, to account for that intuitive sense of difference, I wonder. What is astir in that word, what hovers within it, gives it its talismanic charge?
In his novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie provides an intriguing conception of joy. Junior, the novel’s 14-year-old Spokane Indian protagonist, seeking to realize his dream of a more fulfilling life, has left the reservation to attend high school in the all-white town of Reardan, some twenty miles away. He befriends the smartest boy at Reardan High School, Gordy, who mentors him on the proper way to read a book. Gordy tells Junior “you should approach each book—you should approach life—with the real possibility that you might get a metaphorical boner at any point.” Junior is stunned. “What the heck is a metaphorical boner?” Gordy replies, “When I say boner, I really mean joy.” “Then why didn’t you say joy,” Junior asks. “Boner is funnier,” Gordy answers. “And more joyful.” Under Gordy’s subsequent tutelage, Junior comes to “realize that hard work—that the act of finishing, of completing, of accomplishing, a task—is joyous.”
A metaphorical boner. In this image, seemingly silly yet perfectly drawn from the erotic clamor of adolescence, Alexie is telling us something important here about the psychology of joy, its texture and contour, its creation and reception. It’s significant, I think, that joy here is described not just as openness to the potential for being excited by, aroused by, stimulated by, uncovering the mystery, the richness, that lies enfolded in books, but also, like books themselves, as an ordered arrangement and sequential process for carrying a task through, from starting point to finishing point. Joy is not some unbidden rapture that breaks in upon us and carries us away; rather, joy is in some sense summoned, a subjective state intertwined with an objective act, the embodied experience of an effort, being finding cadence and diction in doing.
Alexie reiterates this point later in the novel when, in the space of two months, Junior experiences a torrential assault of tragedy: the senseless deaths of his grandmother, his friend Eugene, and his sister Mary. Why, he wonders, has he been singled out for so much grief? Why has he been snared in the sorrow’s too-muchness? Utterly distraught, wanting “to kill God,” feeling absolutely “joyless,” he embarks on a campaign “to find the little pieces of joy in my life,” the only way he knows “to make it through all that death and change.” He begins making lists of the people and things that “had given me the most joy in my life,” and continues making list after list, rewriting, revising, reediting, and rethinking. “It became my grieving ceremony,” Junior says. And in the crucibled intensity of this listing, this finding and sequential assembling of words, this ritual act of imposing structure, of making order amid the prattle of senselessness and the babble of contingency, Junior transcends it and, finally, reclaims joy.
Joy is, I think, ultimately about the richness of being we feel when we bestow sense on the senseless. We are blessed creatures, graced with life and the capacities to make that life expansive, expectant, fulfilling. Yet, at the same time, we are also finite creatures, limited, squeezed into a narrow timewidth, subject to the random and the unpredictable, to chance and tragedy, to the undeserved and unmerited. We are continually wounded, it seems, and the wounds often appear stubbornly impervious to suturing. In the face of our finitude, in our being beset by the arbitrary, the accidental, the sheer thrownness of things, it is all too easy to grow fatalistic, joyless, unless we make use of the fundamental rituals, the elemental ordering acts, that can give us “little pieces of joy”: nurture, friendship, inquisitiveness, compassion, craft for the hands, work that sharpens the mind. These small structuring ceremonies, these purposeful bestowals of sense and meaning, these are the way to joy, for they can be heralding signs, emblems that what we do, what we partake of, is the partial realization of a larger, more comprehensive order. And joy itself? It can take us outside ourselves, beyond the littleness that snares our spirit, can gesture beyond our finitude, can arrest the realities of here-and-now, can carve out a cranny in time, a time within time, a vestibule where we floresce, flourish.
Joy, as activity imbued with purpose and the delight we take from it for its own sake, can provide a privileged glimpse of transcendence, of the more so that we are. We take a step, take several steps, turn a corner, and there we are. We meet the meant of ourselves, the deep of us that points beyond us. We are not marooned in the mere, the only. Is this not the message embedded in the steeples and spires and vast vaulted ceilings of the great cathedrals? Is this not the message encoded in the incarnate deity whose birth is celebrated in this season? Is it not a message that speaks to us in any season?
In his novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie provides an intriguing conception of joy. Junior, the novel’s 14-year-old Spokane Indian protagonist, seeking to realize his dream of a more fulfilling life, has left the reservation to attend high school in the all-white town of Reardan, some twenty miles away. He befriends the smartest boy at Reardan High School, Gordy, who mentors him on the proper way to read a book. Gordy tells Junior “you should approach each book—you should approach life—with the real possibility that you might get a metaphorical boner at any point.” Junior is stunned. “What the heck is a metaphorical boner?” Gordy replies, “When I say boner, I really mean joy.” “Then why didn’t you say joy,” Junior asks. “Boner is funnier,” Gordy answers. “And more joyful.” Under Gordy’s subsequent tutelage, Junior comes to “realize that hard work—that the act of finishing, of completing, of accomplishing, a task—is joyous.”
A metaphorical boner. In this image, seemingly silly yet perfectly drawn from the erotic clamor of adolescence, Alexie is telling us something important here about the psychology of joy, its texture and contour, its creation and reception. It’s significant, I think, that joy here is described not just as openness to the potential for being excited by, aroused by, stimulated by, uncovering the mystery, the richness, that lies enfolded in books, but also, like books themselves, as an ordered arrangement and sequential process for carrying a task through, from starting point to finishing point. Joy is not some unbidden rapture that breaks in upon us and carries us away; rather, joy is in some sense summoned, a subjective state intertwined with an objective act, the embodied experience of an effort, being finding cadence and diction in doing.
Alexie reiterates this point later in the novel when, in the space of two months, Junior experiences a torrential assault of tragedy: the senseless deaths of his grandmother, his friend Eugene, and his sister Mary. Why, he wonders, has he been singled out for so much grief? Why has he been snared in the sorrow’s too-muchness? Utterly distraught, wanting “to kill God,” feeling absolutely “joyless,” he embarks on a campaign “to find the little pieces of joy in my life,” the only way he knows “to make it through all that death and change.” He begins making lists of the people and things that “had given me the most joy in my life,” and continues making list after list, rewriting, revising, reediting, and rethinking. “It became my grieving ceremony,” Junior says. And in the crucibled intensity of this listing, this finding and sequential assembling of words, this ritual act of imposing structure, of making order amid the prattle of senselessness and the babble of contingency, Junior transcends it and, finally, reclaims joy.
Joy is, I think, ultimately about the richness of being we feel when we bestow sense on the senseless. We are blessed creatures, graced with life and the capacities to make that life expansive, expectant, fulfilling. Yet, at the same time, we are also finite creatures, limited, squeezed into a narrow timewidth, subject to the random and the unpredictable, to chance and tragedy, to the undeserved and unmerited. We are continually wounded, it seems, and the wounds often appear stubbornly impervious to suturing. In the face of our finitude, in our being beset by the arbitrary, the accidental, the sheer thrownness of things, it is all too easy to grow fatalistic, joyless, unless we make use of the fundamental rituals, the elemental ordering acts, that can give us “little pieces of joy”: nurture, friendship, inquisitiveness, compassion, craft for the hands, work that sharpens the mind. These small structuring ceremonies, these purposeful bestowals of sense and meaning, these are the way to joy, for they can be heralding signs, emblems that what we do, what we partake of, is the partial realization of a larger, more comprehensive order. And joy itself? It can take us outside ourselves, beyond the littleness that snares our spirit, can gesture beyond our finitude, can arrest the realities of here-and-now, can carve out a cranny in time, a time within time, a vestibule where we floresce, flourish.
Joy, as activity imbued with purpose and the delight we take from it for its own sake, can provide a privileged glimpse of transcendence, of the more so that we are. We take a step, take several steps, turn a corner, and there we are. We meet the meant of ourselves, the deep of us that points beyond us. We are not marooned in the mere, the only. Is this not the message embedded in the steeples and spires and vast vaulted ceilings of the great cathedrals? Is this not the message encoded in the incarnate deity whose birth is celebrated in this season? Is it not a message that speaks to us in any season?
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Rebelling Against Aging
The possibility of treating aging is not just an idle fantasy. By altering the genes of the tiny worm Caenorhabditis elegans, one can slow their aging. The result is that the worms live much longer and they remain youthful and healthy longer. The current record for enhancing C. elegans longevity is an astonishing tenfold increase in lifespan.
Dr. David Gems
I am at that age where age ceases to remain graffitied in the fine print of consciousness and assumes the graphic clamor of 24 point boldfaced Verdana. Any articles I happen upon that treat the topic of biogerontology—the science of aging—exert an irresistible allure, even ones that deal with lowly nematodes like C. elegans. It’s not that I fear aging, or suffer debilitating anxiety about it; rather, it angers me. I don’t like it. I consider senescence a corporeal insult and betrayal. I remain as I always have been: enchanted by the abracadabra of life, of living in the kinesthetic world of unending experiences, of sights and sounds, of savors and tangs that touch us into being. And while those experiences can abrade, they can more often rub us the right way. The Hayflick limit, that built-in restriction on the number of times a normal cell divides before it stops, strikes me as abjectly cruel. Quite simply, I resent that my body, the body that embodies experience, gradually and inexorably dysfunctions and deteriorates all the way down to the cellular and molecular levels. I take umbrage at the body’s truculence, its maddening disregard for what I want, its crassly insistent bullying to keep me trussed up within it. I take offense at its methodical unkiltering, its havocing declension.
I am not alone in this. Most of us, I suspect, are Ponce de Leoned. Myths from every culture have featured anti-aging stories of immortality, and most every religion has offered, and continues to offer, a vision of and a process for achieving it. One of the oldest written literary works, The Epic of Gilgamesh, written more than 4,500 years ago, narrates on twelve cuneiform tablets a search for immortality. Poetic treatments of the afflictions of aging abound: William Butler Yeats does not fancy being “old and gray and full of sleep,/ And nodding by the fire,” nor does Mathew Arnold “It is to spend long days / And not once feel that we were ever young,” or Billy Collins “No wonder the moon in the window seems to have/ drifted/ out of a love poem that you used to know by/ heart.” William Wordsworth notes that nature “takes away/ Our playthings one by one.” Dylan Thomas counsels his father that “Old age should burn and rave at close of day;/Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Donald Hall, with bitter irony, affirms “that it is fitting/and delicious to lose everything.” A lamenting Robert Frost observes that he “craved strong sweets, . . ./ when I was young;/ . . .Now no joy but lacks salt,/ That is not dashed with pain /And weariness and fault.”
The possibility of treating aging is not just an idle fantasy. By identifying genes that control aging rates, we can also learn about the underlying biology of aging. We can explore the aging-related processes that the genes influence. Many aging genes are associated with a nutrient-sensitive signalling network. Dampening the signals that this network transmits slows growth, increases resistance to stress and increases lifespan.
So, when a biogerontologist like David Gems offers scientific support suggesting that senescence is a treatable disease, I pay attention. I want my golden years to be aurific, to carbon-copy the “Late Ripeness” that Czeslaw Milosz experiences as he approaches 90: "I felt a door opening in me and I entered the clarity of early morning." I want to stand on the prow of the ship, arms open wide, and, even if I cannot proclaim myself “king of the world,” embrace the horizon.
Of course, I know full well that the jagged jostle of an iceberg will, eventually, breech the hull. I want that “eventually” to be more eventually than the current term limit, which the Bible sets at three score plus seven and attributes to a bit of Divine jealousy tempered with irony. After noting that Adam and Eve have “become like one of us, knowing good and evil,” God shows them the Garden door, convinced that humans will poach “from the tree of life and eat, and live forever!” Still, Adam lived to be 930; his son Seth, 912; Seth’s son Enos, 905; and the record-setting Mathusale, 969. I do not wish to live that long. Just longer, a good bit longer, than three score and seven, and in good health, for the story of the unfortunate Trojan royal, Tithonus, lover of Eos, goddess of the dawn, depicts a ghastly denouement. Unaccountably, especially for a goddess, Eos neglects to include eternal youth as part of a packaged deal when she asks Zeus to grant Tithonus eternal life. The dark and chilling result of that bit of absentmindedness surpasses even H. P. Lovecraft’s most morbid nightmare: "but when loathsome old age pressed full upon him, and he could not move nor lift his limbs, he babbles endlessly, and no more has strength at all.”
No, I do not want arrested aging. I want decelerated aging. I want aging that exits the autobahn and hits a school zone. So it is that I read with avid interest about
Resveratrol: a substance found in the skin of red grapes, it has received much press for its anti-aging effects, which are controversial in animal studies and lack scientific validation in human studies. I’m inclined to think the high speed pursuit of resveratrol as an anti-aging elixir is being conducted in a clown car. Red wine sales, however, are booming.
Telomerase: an enzyme that reconstructs telomeres, a sheath at the end of DNA thought to be involved in cellular aging. Each time a cell divides, the telomere shortens, eventually disappears, and the cell, unable to divide, dies. If telomerase had a “like” button, it would be getting repeated clicks.
SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence): research into regenerative medical procedures to repair the damage caused by age-related diseases in the human body. Kind of like a periodic checking-under-the-hood body tune-up.
Cryonics: low-temperature preservation, irreversible at present but assumed to be possible in the future when medical advances will have discovered cures for currently incurable diseases. Ted Williams is cryonically preserved. In the movie “Forever Young” (1992), Mel Gibson was successfully revived. Perhaps, given his recent escapades, he needs a recooling.
Nanorobotics: the use of tiny medical robots injected into the bloodstream for search and destroy missions targeting life-threatening organisms. A health enforcement squad, discreetly undercover, rooting out the impediments to indefinite youthfulness.
And having broached the topic of medical machinery, special mention must be made of a version of transhumanism, which predicts that, due to exponential growth in computing power, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence around 2045, at which point it will be possible to transfer human consciousness into these HAL-ed up computers and live, forever and a day, in a virtual environment. Could there be a more viscerally appalling instance of Thoreau’s concern that we are becoming the tools of our tools? Beyond the moral and ethical issues such an upload would raise lies what looks to me to be a profound category mistake: transhumanists, in thrall to the quantitative, technical wonders of computer processing, do not appear to fully understand that the very thing we cherish in ourselves and others is the qualitative, the personal idiosyncracies and particularities, the singular and irreducibly unique individualizations that lattice our identities, the feelings and faults and needs and gratifications and graces and ingenuities and plunging sadnesses and seizing joys and exuberant ricochets of creative thinking that define us. The transhumanist idolatry of the machine is, for me anyway, haywired: it pulps, pauperizes, and degrades.
One aim of aging research is to develop drugs that can reproduce the effects of dietary restriction and also of genetic alterations that slow aging. One approach could be to use drug therapy to target the nutrient-sensitive pathways that regulate aging and that seem to mediate the effects of dietary restriction on aging. The ultimate goal would be a pill that one could take regularly from midlife onward.
Though scientific data has yet to confirm its ability to extend human life, calorie restriction (CR) has proven successful in rodent and nonhuman primate studies, in some instances extending life span by 40 %. Certainly, the 2000 members of the Calorie Restriction Society, who reduce their caloric intake anywhere from 25% to 40% of bodily requirements, believe in its promise. And because a CR diet consists mostly of fruits, nuts, and vegetables, it does have some healthful secondary benefits. CR does exact a price, however; its adherents lose their libido, are perpetually cold, and they look, well, cadaverous. It impresses me as an overly punitive way to live, exhausting in its continual self-policing vigilance and colossal denial of hunger, self-punishing in its implacable refusal of the unsayable but richly delightful yesness of anything sweet or buttery or rich, anything taste-bud dizzying, dazzling, dallying. If John Calvin, that steeping tea of admonishment, were a foodie, a CR diet would be the grim and gloomy result. Why, I wonder, purposefully, willfully, carry a dietary November in our hearts? How is it that a superimposed layer of calculability wholly displaces those moments of appetitive spontaneity and impulse that round out the fully-inhabited integrity of our selves, that give our lives a melody as well as a song, an accent as well as a language? How is it that we are willing to trade in our culinary party clothes for sackcloth and ashes?
So, yes, a pill to do the distasteful, untasteful, business of CR seems to me the best of all possible worlds. And in the meantime that stretches between now and that panglossian future, those beset by longevity concerns might do well to follow the common sense (CS) plan: eat genuine, and genuinely healthy food; get some regular exercise, no matter what as long as it gets and keeps you moving; set goals, ambitious ones, be conscientious in working toward them, and, when they are achieved, make them the means of further goals; love well, and immerse yourself in a variety of communities. The CS plan is not new, is decidedly unsexy, scientifically speaking, but it does declaw the galling scratch of age. It’s a sensible plan to adopt, until the nanobots are ready to roll.
Dr. David Gems
I am at that age where age ceases to remain graffitied in the fine print of consciousness and assumes the graphic clamor of 24 point boldfaced Verdana. Any articles I happen upon that treat the topic of biogerontology—the science of aging—exert an irresistible allure, even ones that deal with lowly nematodes like C. elegans. It’s not that I fear aging, or suffer debilitating anxiety about it; rather, it angers me. I don’t like it. I consider senescence a corporeal insult and betrayal. I remain as I always have been: enchanted by the abracadabra of life, of living in the kinesthetic world of unending experiences, of sights and sounds, of savors and tangs that touch us into being. And while those experiences can abrade, they can more often rub us the right way. The Hayflick limit, that built-in restriction on the number of times a normal cell divides before it stops, strikes me as abjectly cruel. Quite simply, I resent that my body, the body that embodies experience, gradually and inexorably dysfunctions and deteriorates all the way down to the cellular and molecular levels. I take umbrage at the body’s truculence, its maddening disregard for what I want, its crassly insistent bullying to keep me trussed up within it. I take offense at its methodical unkiltering, its havocing declension.
I am not alone in this. Most of us, I suspect, are Ponce de Leoned. Myths from every culture have featured anti-aging stories of immortality, and most every religion has offered, and continues to offer, a vision of and a process for achieving it. One of the oldest written literary works, The Epic of Gilgamesh, written more than 4,500 years ago, narrates on twelve cuneiform tablets a search for immortality. Poetic treatments of the afflictions of aging abound: William Butler Yeats does not fancy being “old and gray and full of sleep,/ And nodding by the fire,” nor does Mathew Arnold “It is to spend long days / And not once feel that we were ever young,” or Billy Collins “No wonder the moon in the window seems to have/ drifted/ out of a love poem that you used to know by/ heart.” William Wordsworth notes that nature “takes away/ Our playthings one by one.” Dylan Thomas counsels his father that “Old age should burn and rave at close of day;/Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Donald Hall, with bitter irony, affirms “that it is fitting/and delicious to lose everything.” A lamenting Robert Frost observes that he “craved strong sweets, . . ./ when I was young;/ . . .Now no joy but lacks salt,/ That is not dashed with pain /And weariness and fault.”
The possibility of treating aging is not just an idle fantasy. By identifying genes that control aging rates, we can also learn about the underlying biology of aging. We can explore the aging-related processes that the genes influence. Many aging genes are associated with a nutrient-sensitive signalling network. Dampening the signals that this network transmits slows growth, increases resistance to stress and increases lifespan.
So, when a biogerontologist like David Gems offers scientific support suggesting that senescence is a treatable disease, I pay attention. I want my golden years to be aurific, to carbon-copy the “Late Ripeness” that Czeslaw Milosz experiences as he approaches 90: "I felt a door opening in me and I entered the clarity of early morning." I want to stand on the prow of the ship, arms open wide, and, even if I cannot proclaim myself “king of the world,” embrace the horizon.
Of course, I know full well that the jagged jostle of an iceberg will, eventually, breech the hull. I want that “eventually” to be more eventually than the current term limit, which the Bible sets at three score plus seven and attributes to a bit of Divine jealousy tempered with irony. After noting that Adam and Eve have “become like one of us, knowing good and evil,” God shows them the Garden door, convinced that humans will poach “from the tree of life and eat, and live forever!” Still, Adam lived to be 930; his son Seth, 912; Seth’s son Enos, 905; and the record-setting Mathusale, 969. I do not wish to live that long. Just longer, a good bit longer, than three score and seven, and in good health, for the story of the unfortunate Trojan royal, Tithonus, lover of Eos, goddess of the dawn, depicts a ghastly denouement. Unaccountably, especially for a goddess, Eos neglects to include eternal youth as part of a packaged deal when she asks Zeus to grant Tithonus eternal life. The dark and chilling result of that bit of absentmindedness surpasses even H. P. Lovecraft’s most morbid nightmare: "but when loathsome old age pressed full upon him, and he could not move nor lift his limbs, he babbles endlessly, and no more has strength at all.”
No, I do not want arrested aging. I want decelerated aging. I want aging that exits the autobahn and hits a school zone. So it is that I read with avid interest about
Resveratrol: a substance found in the skin of red grapes, it has received much press for its anti-aging effects, which are controversial in animal studies and lack scientific validation in human studies. I’m inclined to think the high speed pursuit of resveratrol as an anti-aging elixir is being conducted in a clown car. Red wine sales, however, are booming.
Telomerase: an enzyme that reconstructs telomeres, a sheath at the end of DNA thought to be involved in cellular aging. Each time a cell divides, the telomere shortens, eventually disappears, and the cell, unable to divide, dies. If telomerase had a “like” button, it would be getting repeated clicks.
SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence): research into regenerative medical procedures to repair the damage caused by age-related diseases in the human body. Kind of like a periodic checking-under-the-hood body tune-up.
Cryonics: low-temperature preservation, irreversible at present but assumed to be possible in the future when medical advances will have discovered cures for currently incurable diseases. Ted Williams is cryonically preserved. In the movie “Forever Young” (1992), Mel Gibson was successfully revived. Perhaps, given his recent escapades, he needs a recooling.
Nanorobotics: the use of tiny medical robots injected into the bloodstream for search and destroy missions targeting life-threatening organisms. A health enforcement squad, discreetly undercover, rooting out the impediments to indefinite youthfulness.
And having broached the topic of medical machinery, special mention must be made of a version of transhumanism, which predicts that, due to exponential growth in computing power, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence around 2045, at which point it will be possible to transfer human consciousness into these HAL-ed up computers and live, forever and a day, in a virtual environment. Could there be a more viscerally appalling instance of Thoreau’s concern that we are becoming the tools of our tools? Beyond the moral and ethical issues such an upload would raise lies what looks to me to be a profound category mistake: transhumanists, in thrall to the quantitative, technical wonders of computer processing, do not appear to fully understand that the very thing we cherish in ourselves and others is the qualitative, the personal idiosyncracies and particularities, the singular and irreducibly unique individualizations that lattice our identities, the feelings and faults and needs and gratifications and graces and ingenuities and plunging sadnesses and seizing joys and exuberant ricochets of creative thinking that define us. The transhumanist idolatry of the machine is, for me anyway, haywired: it pulps, pauperizes, and degrades.
One aim of aging research is to develop drugs that can reproduce the effects of dietary restriction and also of genetic alterations that slow aging. One approach could be to use drug therapy to target the nutrient-sensitive pathways that regulate aging and that seem to mediate the effects of dietary restriction on aging. The ultimate goal would be a pill that one could take regularly from midlife onward.
Though scientific data has yet to confirm its ability to extend human life, calorie restriction (CR) has proven successful in rodent and nonhuman primate studies, in some instances extending life span by 40 %. Certainly, the 2000 members of the Calorie Restriction Society, who reduce their caloric intake anywhere from 25% to 40% of bodily requirements, believe in its promise. And because a CR diet consists mostly of fruits, nuts, and vegetables, it does have some healthful secondary benefits. CR does exact a price, however; its adherents lose their libido, are perpetually cold, and they look, well, cadaverous. It impresses me as an overly punitive way to live, exhausting in its continual self-policing vigilance and colossal denial of hunger, self-punishing in its implacable refusal of the unsayable but richly delightful yesness of anything sweet or buttery or rich, anything taste-bud dizzying, dazzling, dallying. If John Calvin, that steeping tea of admonishment, were a foodie, a CR diet would be the grim and gloomy result. Why, I wonder, purposefully, willfully, carry a dietary November in our hearts? How is it that a superimposed layer of calculability wholly displaces those moments of appetitive spontaneity and impulse that round out the fully-inhabited integrity of our selves, that give our lives a melody as well as a song, an accent as well as a language? How is it that we are willing to trade in our culinary party clothes for sackcloth and ashes?
So, yes, a pill to do the distasteful, untasteful, business of CR seems to me the best of all possible worlds. And in the meantime that stretches between now and that panglossian future, those beset by longevity concerns might do well to follow the common sense (CS) plan: eat genuine, and genuinely healthy food; get some regular exercise, no matter what as long as it gets and keeps you moving; set goals, ambitious ones, be conscientious in working toward them, and, when they are achieved, make them the means of further goals; love well, and immerse yourself in a variety of communities. The CS plan is not new, is decidedly unsexy, scientifically speaking, but it does declaw the galling scratch of age. It’s a sensible plan to adopt, until the nanobots are ready to roll.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Waiting In Line
We hate to wait, and we especially hate to wait in checkout lines, especially in grocery store checkout lines. We are all allotted one and a half billion heartbeats, and we are loathe to expend more than a couple of them in checkout lines. No matter how long we have shambled through aisles and departments; no matter how long we have lingered before shelves and displays; no matter that the average wait is under 5 minutes, according to a 2007 study, and that we overestimate the wait by as much as 50%; no matter whether or not we have anything better to do, or anything at all to do; if we do not move, with gazelle-like speed, through the checkout line, the thudding kick-drum of impatience thumps within us. And, can anything be more abysmal, more an affront to all that is holy and just, than to choose a line only to see the one we ignored move faster? One need not be an evolutionary biologist to know, with the certainty of an evangelical holding four aces, that the human genome, somewhere in its tangled grammar, contains a gene whose expression is waiting irritation.
Undoubtedly, I am missing that gene, for I don’t mind waiting in checkout lines; in fact, I actually enjoy it. Whitman declared, “I witness and wait.” I witness as I wait.
I find product placement—that cynical “Oh, yeah” in response to classical economics theory of utility-maximizing, rational-choice consumerism—quite educational, a multi-course feast for the enquiring mind. From the various magazines and tabloids I learn that Elvis was abducted by aliens, Clint Eastwood is being hassled by the FBI, Nostradamus has predicted the outcome of the 2012 presidential election, the 100 prophecies that will come true before Christmas, and a potential epidemic from a new form of influenza—the snake flu. I learn the latest intelligence about Mel and Oksana or Brad and Angelina or Ashton and Demi or Jennifer and Justin or Kim and Kris or George Clooney and whoever. I learn the latest escapades, mostly tawdry, sometimes tragic, periodically inspiring, of celebrities, near-celebrities, pseudo-celebrities, and wannabe celebrities—the infidelities, the spats, the boorish behavior, the unmake-upped moments. I learn how to make a perfect pie crust, hard-boil an egg in a microwave, and keep shoelaces from unraveling. I learn the 26 ways to use vinegar, the 7 best pick-up lines, the 10 things never to say on a first date, the 3 magic moves to flatten your belly, an amazingly easy way to remove counter stains, and the 5 secrets to reducing your spouse to drooling desire. I learn about fashion and technology and home décor and fine cuisine and budget dining and medical advances. The checkout line is encyclopedic, a Harvard for the unlegacied.
And there is moral improvement to be had while waiting to check out. I look right at, I mean really regard, and then, in a burst of smug self-satisfaction, resist the farrago of sugared seductions, the candied temptations, that surround me. Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, get thee behind me; Hershey’s Kisses, I will not give thee a foothold; Tootsie Roll Pops, I spurn thy allurements and cast thee aside. Who can doubt that free will exists, that resolute singleness of purpose can restrain the churning force of desire. In the humble checkout line, I find proof positive.
Perhaps most puzzling, certainly to my wife Kathy, is that, while I tend to be socially reticent, in checkout lines I become suddenly and strangely chatty. Once, to a woman behind me with a large, shockingly pink purse resting in the child’s seat of her shopping cart, I said, “That’s certainly a striking purse.” “Oh, thanks,” she said; “I bought it when I was in Memphis.” “I hope you got a chance to visit Graceland while you were there,” I replied. She smiled, and tuned the purse around. Emblazoned in rhinestones on its front was “Elvis.” “I bought it there,” she said. For the next five minutes we parsed Elvis as if he were a compound-complex sentence: his best songs, his best movies, his shopping for a pink and black suit at Bernard Lansky’s Beale Street store, his fondness for peanut butter and fried banana sandwiches, his picture with Richard Nixon, the fake FBI badge Nixon gave him in response to his request to be made an FBI agent, his incorporation of martial arts moves in the Jailhouse Rock dance sequence. We agreed that his creativity was in adapting songs, and that, in bringing black music into the mainstream, he played a small part in racial integration.
On another occasion, seeing Pop Weaver microwave popcorn among the items of the customer in front of me, I began a conversation that escalated into a friendly debate on the relative merits of microwave popcorn in general. He preferred Pop Weaver because the company’s founder, the Reverend Ira Weaver, was dedicated to providing the healthiest and best-tasting popcorn at the cheapest price. “They don’t advertise,” he said, “and they use plain brown bags. That helps keep the cost down.” I allowed that Pop Weaver was good but held out for the superior taste of Orville Redenbacher; besides, as Orville claimed in his iconic TV ads, every kernel popped. “That’s where the value comes in,” I noted; “minimal waste.” The debate ended in a draw, but we did agree that in the archipelago of satisfyingly salty-crunchy munchables, popcorn was an island of sensible snacking.
From a young checkout cashier, I discovered that she had just learned she was pregnant, that her lineman husband was home for a several-week stay, that she had pork slow-cooking at home in a crock pot, and that dinner that night would consist of shredded pork sandwiches and her favorite food, tater tots. I wanted to say I was a vegetarian and that tater tots contained enough saturated fat to clog a water main. But I didn’t. She was happy. Instead, I told her what was also true: “You know, when I was a kid, I loved tater tots. My dad said I’d turn into a tater tot. I had a nightmare about that.” She laughed. I laughed. We shared a laugh.
Individually, or even taken together, these waiting line conversations did not amount to much, and yet, they amounted to a lot. They took us out beyond the trip-wired, self-defensive perimeters behind which we tend to hunker, took us, if only momentarily, into that often unrealized common life in which we all participate. Too often, we wait impatiently, waiting for the oven timer to chime, for a leaf to fall and a flower to appear, for a meteor to rift the heavens, for our name to be called, our number to come up; waiting for what’s lying in wait to make itself known; waiting for the rapture, the quickening, the gathering of the righteous, for kingdom come that never seems to come; waiting, fist to cheek, elbow on the window sill, for something to pass by worthy of our regard before darkness falls. We wait, feeling that time has stood still, feeling suspended in it, yet all the while it tick-tocks on, as do we, always in transit, always finalizing, heart beating, blood circulating, breath pulsing in and out, growing each moment just a little bit older, time passed time past, an entropic echo, as we wait to check out. In those waiting line conversations, maybe, just maybe, the dense gravity of our minute-and-secondhandedness momentarily lightens and, as the poet Amy Clampett says, we “fall upward.”
Undoubtedly, I am missing that gene, for I don’t mind waiting in checkout lines; in fact, I actually enjoy it. Whitman declared, “I witness and wait.” I witness as I wait.
I find product placement—that cynical “Oh, yeah” in response to classical economics theory of utility-maximizing, rational-choice consumerism—quite educational, a multi-course feast for the enquiring mind. From the various magazines and tabloids I learn that Elvis was abducted by aliens, Clint Eastwood is being hassled by the FBI, Nostradamus has predicted the outcome of the 2012 presidential election, the 100 prophecies that will come true before Christmas, and a potential epidemic from a new form of influenza—the snake flu. I learn the latest intelligence about Mel and Oksana or Brad and Angelina or Ashton and Demi or Jennifer and Justin or Kim and Kris or George Clooney and whoever. I learn the latest escapades, mostly tawdry, sometimes tragic, periodically inspiring, of celebrities, near-celebrities, pseudo-celebrities, and wannabe celebrities—the infidelities, the spats, the boorish behavior, the unmake-upped moments. I learn how to make a perfect pie crust, hard-boil an egg in a microwave, and keep shoelaces from unraveling. I learn the 26 ways to use vinegar, the 7 best pick-up lines, the 10 things never to say on a first date, the 3 magic moves to flatten your belly, an amazingly easy way to remove counter stains, and the 5 secrets to reducing your spouse to drooling desire. I learn about fashion and technology and home décor and fine cuisine and budget dining and medical advances. The checkout line is encyclopedic, a Harvard for the unlegacied.
And there is moral improvement to be had while waiting to check out. I look right at, I mean really regard, and then, in a burst of smug self-satisfaction, resist the farrago of sugared seductions, the candied temptations, that surround me. Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, get thee behind me; Hershey’s Kisses, I will not give thee a foothold; Tootsie Roll Pops, I spurn thy allurements and cast thee aside. Who can doubt that free will exists, that resolute singleness of purpose can restrain the churning force of desire. In the humble checkout line, I find proof positive.
Perhaps most puzzling, certainly to my wife Kathy, is that, while I tend to be socially reticent, in checkout lines I become suddenly and strangely chatty. Once, to a woman behind me with a large, shockingly pink purse resting in the child’s seat of her shopping cart, I said, “That’s certainly a striking purse.” “Oh, thanks,” she said; “I bought it when I was in Memphis.” “I hope you got a chance to visit Graceland while you were there,” I replied. She smiled, and tuned the purse around. Emblazoned in rhinestones on its front was “Elvis.” “I bought it there,” she said. For the next five minutes we parsed Elvis as if he were a compound-complex sentence: his best songs, his best movies, his shopping for a pink and black suit at Bernard Lansky’s Beale Street store, his fondness for peanut butter and fried banana sandwiches, his picture with Richard Nixon, the fake FBI badge Nixon gave him in response to his request to be made an FBI agent, his incorporation of martial arts moves in the Jailhouse Rock dance sequence. We agreed that his creativity was in adapting songs, and that, in bringing black music into the mainstream, he played a small part in racial integration.
On another occasion, seeing Pop Weaver microwave popcorn among the items of the customer in front of me, I began a conversation that escalated into a friendly debate on the relative merits of microwave popcorn in general. He preferred Pop Weaver because the company’s founder, the Reverend Ira Weaver, was dedicated to providing the healthiest and best-tasting popcorn at the cheapest price. “They don’t advertise,” he said, “and they use plain brown bags. That helps keep the cost down.” I allowed that Pop Weaver was good but held out for the superior taste of Orville Redenbacher; besides, as Orville claimed in his iconic TV ads, every kernel popped. “That’s where the value comes in,” I noted; “minimal waste.” The debate ended in a draw, but we did agree that in the archipelago of satisfyingly salty-crunchy munchables, popcorn was an island of sensible snacking.
From a young checkout cashier, I discovered that she had just learned she was pregnant, that her lineman husband was home for a several-week stay, that she had pork slow-cooking at home in a crock pot, and that dinner that night would consist of shredded pork sandwiches and her favorite food, tater tots. I wanted to say I was a vegetarian and that tater tots contained enough saturated fat to clog a water main. But I didn’t. She was happy. Instead, I told her what was also true: “You know, when I was a kid, I loved tater tots. My dad said I’d turn into a tater tot. I had a nightmare about that.” She laughed. I laughed. We shared a laugh.
Individually, or even taken together, these waiting line conversations did not amount to much, and yet, they amounted to a lot. They took us out beyond the trip-wired, self-defensive perimeters behind which we tend to hunker, took us, if only momentarily, into that often unrealized common life in which we all participate. Too often, we wait impatiently, waiting for the oven timer to chime, for a leaf to fall and a flower to appear, for a meteor to rift the heavens, for our name to be called, our number to come up; waiting for what’s lying in wait to make itself known; waiting for the rapture, the quickening, the gathering of the righteous, for kingdom come that never seems to come; waiting, fist to cheek, elbow on the window sill, for something to pass by worthy of our regard before darkness falls. We wait, feeling that time has stood still, feeling suspended in it, yet all the while it tick-tocks on, as do we, always in transit, always finalizing, heart beating, blood circulating, breath pulsing in and out, growing each moment just a little bit older, time passed time past, an entropic echo, as we wait to check out. In those waiting line conversations, maybe, just maybe, the dense gravity of our minute-and-secondhandedness momentarily lightens and, as the poet Amy Clampett says, we “fall upward.”
Saturday, November 12, 2011
Quoting and Paraphrasing
We quote to reproduce a source exactly and to provide the tonal core of the source’s voice or the impact of its expressive power. We paraphrase to restate that voice, that expression, in our own words, avoiding thereby the distracting iteration of quotations or the charge that we have done little more than create a string of prose beaded by someone else’s words. Most composition textbooks emphasize paraphrase and advise writers to quote sparingly. The original, the direct, is erased, to be replaced by the writer’s restatement of the original.
There are two related problems with paraphrasing. First, it is a translation, and translations never capture the original in its full integrity. The second problem lies in what Walker Percy calls “the symbolic complex,” a preformulated perception whose value lies only in the degree to which what is perceived approximates the preformulation. The danger, in short, is that paraphrase can blunt or distort the original, can chamfer or curtain its difference, can even render it mute.
I’d like to think that when we look at the things around us, when we gaze at and regard the phenomena that environ us, we have the choice to quote them or paraphrase them, to open ourselves directly to them or cast them into our own language.
My neighbor has counted every tree on his property and catalogued them by species, as if their sole value lies in their number and diversity. He has inventoried his trees, itemized and columned them in a mental ledger. They do not stand individually before him, are not palpably real and living things, have no secrets. They testify, rather, to the accumulated extent of what he owns, and in that extent he finds self-satisfaction. He does not know and, judging by his reaction to my mentioning it, is incurious about the cultural history of his trees. He does not know that oaks have been immemorially associated with strength and courage, that Socrates called oaks oracle trees, that a poultice made of oak leaves can be used to heal wounds. He does not know that maples represent balance and practicality, that elms emblemize intuition and mental strength, that lindens betoken purity and truth. No, my neighbor has paraphrased his trees, made them images of what he holds within the bounded lines he occupies. He has, in effect, made them images of himself.
I believe trees have a capacity for expression. I’d even say trees can, after a fashion, talk. As cultural ecologist David Abram asserts, trees “can seem to speak to us when they are jostled by the wind,” the “different forms of foliage,” those leafy tongues, lending them “a distinctive voice,” a particular dialect. “To be sure,” Abram says, they “do not speak in words. But neither do humans speak only in words.” Beyond the verbal, we employ, to a much larger extent than we realize, the language of bodily gesture, of pitch and tone and cadence. Linguistically, we share an affinity with trees.
If trees can talk, they can be quoted, directly. Here is what my trees say to me: “Renew yourself each year without fail; be a shading comfort and a nesting home for others; send the branches of yourself outward and upward, and in the winter, let them arch like cursive strokes across the leaden sky; let your living days ring you around and make you wise, and if not wise, then stoic, imperturbable; feel that you are deep-rooted and can withstand the beleaguering bluster of the fiercest gale; refuse to be hijacked by pieces of time; know that, like me, you cannot be shawled by your physical qualities, that you are something more, something implicit, something ineffable and undistilled; and know that that something can be listened to.” And I quote.
There are two related problems with paraphrasing. First, it is a translation, and translations never capture the original in its full integrity. The second problem lies in what Walker Percy calls “the symbolic complex,” a preformulated perception whose value lies only in the degree to which what is perceived approximates the preformulation. The danger, in short, is that paraphrase can blunt or distort the original, can chamfer or curtain its difference, can even render it mute.
I’d like to think that when we look at the things around us, when we gaze at and regard the phenomena that environ us, we have the choice to quote them or paraphrase them, to open ourselves directly to them or cast them into our own language.
My neighbor has counted every tree on his property and catalogued them by species, as if their sole value lies in their number and diversity. He has inventoried his trees, itemized and columned them in a mental ledger. They do not stand individually before him, are not palpably real and living things, have no secrets. They testify, rather, to the accumulated extent of what he owns, and in that extent he finds self-satisfaction. He does not know and, judging by his reaction to my mentioning it, is incurious about the cultural history of his trees. He does not know that oaks have been immemorially associated with strength and courage, that Socrates called oaks oracle trees, that a poultice made of oak leaves can be used to heal wounds. He does not know that maples represent balance and practicality, that elms emblemize intuition and mental strength, that lindens betoken purity and truth. No, my neighbor has paraphrased his trees, made them images of what he holds within the bounded lines he occupies. He has, in effect, made them images of himself.
I believe trees have a capacity for expression. I’d even say trees can, after a fashion, talk. As cultural ecologist David Abram asserts, trees “can seem to speak to us when they are jostled by the wind,” the “different forms of foliage,” those leafy tongues, lending them “a distinctive voice,” a particular dialect. “To be sure,” Abram says, they “do not speak in words. But neither do humans speak only in words.” Beyond the verbal, we employ, to a much larger extent than we realize, the language of bodily gesture, of pitch and tone and cadence. Linguistically, we share an affinity with trees.
If trees can talk, they can be quoted, directly. Here is what my trees say to me: “Renew yourself each year without fail; be a shading comfort and a nesting home for others; send the branches of yourself outward and upward, and in the winter, let them arch like cursive strokes across the leaden sky; let your living days ring you around and make you wise, and if not wise, then stoic, imperturbable; feel that you are deep-rooted and can withstand the beleaguering bluster of the fiercest gale; refuse to be hijacked by pieces of time; know that, like me, you cannot be shawled by your physical qualities, that you are something more, something implicit, something ineffable and undistilled; and know that that something can be listened to.” And I quote.
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Two Visitors
Each year my home hosts two visitors. They arrive separately, each at the same time, year in and year out, without fail. They are anticipated, and, while not particularly welcome, for I issued no invitation, they are not unwelcome, either. I suppose you could say that they invade my home on an annual basis, but because, practically speaking, there is nothing I can do to stop their arrival, I have learned to accept their advent, even to anticipate it, and use it to do what I like to do best: observe and learn.
* * * * *
The beginning of August, usually within the first three or four days, marks the appearance of what I call the “storm window spider.” From some deep, sub-windowsilled lair, it emerges into the 1/8-inch space between the storm window and screen of the very window before which I sit to eat breakfast and lunch, and, often, to read. Obeying a biological directive not to be denied, my storm-window spider opens the spinnerets at the base of its abdomen and filaments the lower six inches of the screen, from one edge to the other, with an undulant, gauzy trap for miniature forms of life that learn, too late and much to their sorrow, what, exactly, they have gotten themselves into.
Most striking to me is the spider’s immobility. Like some Araneae Zen master, it sits, rinsed of second and minute-hand consciousness, occupying the same spot on the screen no matter when or how often I look. I have seen it move only once, when, jerking abruptly into motion, it traced a zig-zaggy square around its resting place before resuming it. Perhaps that motion was a bit of exercise, an arachnid constitutional to stretch its eight segmented legs and pump some fresh, pale blue blood through its single-chambered heart.
I could easily enough remove the web, and, in fact, did so the first time the spider appeared. By the next morning, however, it had once again “launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself.” And so, I’ve come to view that persistently expressed gossamered tapestry as a form of art, the procreant urge of the spider self unreeled and externalized, its inside made outside and filigreed across the latticed canvas of the screen. Besides, it may be that the spider trains in eight eyes on me as intently as my two eyes monitor it. Perhaps it thinks me a diminished thing, six eyes and six legs short of normal development. Perhaps it watches me sit mostly immobile, in the same place, at the same time, every day, doing the same things, and wonders, bemused, about such a strangely routinized creature. It’s best, I’ve concluded, to let the web remain, removing it only when, toward mid-September, the spider abandons it and retreats deep below the sill to await the next beckoning call of August.
* * * * *
Not long after the storm-window spider has withdrawn, on or about October 7, the wasps arrive. Never in the summer. Only with the serious onset of Fall. Coming home for lunch, I’ll find anywhere from 6 to 10 elegantly slender, narrow-waisted, resonantly buzzing bodies congregated on the living room piano window. I surmise they construct a nest inside the house wall, tucked up near the front-porch soffit, and despite my past attempts to caulk possible ports of entry, I am, finally, unable to discover the crack or crevice by which they get there. I suspect that, roused from their night-chilled torpor by the warming day, they make their determined way down the wall and enter the house through the large double-hung front-room window. My efforts to seal it, though, have proven as unavailing as my outside efforts. They always find a way in. They will not be denied entrance.
I open the piano window to let them find their way back outside. The loiterers I scoop up in a glass or jar, cover it with a piece of paper, then release them outside. My wife Kathy watches, bemused at the futility of my gestures. “They’ll only wind up coming back inside,” she tells me, and I know she’s right. Still, I cannot find it in me to kill them. While I cannot, like Thoreau, feel “complimented by their regarding my house as a desirable shelter,” I can agree with him that they have “never molested me seriously.” They have stung no one but me, and that was once, as I reached under a lampshade to turn on the light, only to dispossess a wasp at its ease on the switch.
No, I cannot kill them, even if they do raise and perplex Robert Frost’s question of what gets walled in, and what, out. They harbor no malevolence, feel no need to beleaguer, have no aforethoughted intent to inflict a stinging wound. They are catalyzed by a cell-deep imperative. They only want out, out to do their pollinating work, out to scavenge, driven by a need for sweets and carbohydrates—a final feast before the coming winter that will mark their end—out, and then back again to nest and colony, back home, a home my home provides.
* * * * *
We are doubly housed, it seems to me. One house, framed with studs, sheathed in a dermis of Tyvek and clapboard, sets a boundary between inside and outside and protects us from the outside by keeping the outside out. And yet, strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, given that we are only partially removed from nature, we bring the inside partially out. While we are wonderfully endowed prefrontally cortexed creatures, we yet remain enfleshed biological beings as well. We stand above that in which we are also firmly emplaced. And so, we build decks and front porches and terraces and sun rooms and porticoes and verandas, furnish them with chairs and tables and hammocks and coolers and portable ovens, and use them to eat and snooze and sip iced tea or lemonade or a cold beer and read and write and people-watch and creature-watch and world-go-by watch and, sometimes, maybe often times, just sit and ruminate. Who knows; perhaps some ancestral tug, some savannahed impulse, compels us to return to that from which we originally emerged, but mediated by the indoor we bring outdoor—a hybrid space, a third home. Who knows; perhaps at some level, some profoundly deep level where blood memory lies ineradicably embedded, we feel orphaned, taken by evolution from our original ground of being, and therefore, seeking as much of a reintegration as our new condition allows, we let the wild things in.
* * * * *
But we inhabit another house, bone-studded and skin-sheathed, a SmartHouse, really, powered by the thrumming energy of heart and mind, the churn of consciousness, and to avoid the echo chambering din of our self-reflexive selves, we need to let ourselves out, others in. Nathaniel Hawthorne warns us that “the saddest of all prisons is a [person’s] own heart.” David Foster Wallace warned the 1995 graduates of Kenyon College of the seductive tendency to think themselves “alone at the center of all creation,” lords of their “own tiny skull-sized kingdoms.” But the outreaching gesture of sympathy can be rebuffed, our words can be misconstrued, our intuition can be mistaken, our understanding can falter, the gaze of others, always judgmental, can be withering. Safer, we conclude, to hunker down, dig in, pile up sandbags to thwart threats to our private conceptions of ourselves. And, so, our house has windows to see out, but no door to let in. We monitor our thoughts, our feelings, but find ourselves reluctant to share them. We want to be secure; we want to bond and understand. We linger at the windows, wistful, waiting, yearning to send forth a sticky thread in hopes of making an anchoring contact, but somehow, someway, it falls short. We buzz at the windows, wanting out, wanting out, but never venturing forth beyond the defensive perimeter to engage the could be, the is-there-more, and maybe, just maybe, leave our shackling too-muchness behind.
* * * * *
The beginning of August, usually within the first three or four days, marks the appearance of what I call the “storm window spider.” From some deep, sub-windowsilled lair, it emerges into the 1/8-inch space between the storm window and screen of the very window before which I sit to eat breakfast and lunch, and, often, to read. Obeying a biological directive not to be denied, my storm-window spider opens the spinnerets at the base of its abdomen and filaments the lower six inches of the screen, from one edge to the other, with an undulant, gauzy trap for miniature forms of life that learn, too late and much to their sorrow, what, exactly, they have gotten themselves into.
Most striking to me is the spider’s immobility. Like some Araneae Zen master, it sits, rinsed of second and minute-hand consciousness, occupying the same spot on the screen no matter when or how often I look. I have seen it move only once, when, jerking abruptly into motion, it traced a zig-zaggy square around its resting place before resuming it. Perhaps that motion was a bit of exercise, an arachnid constitutional to stretch its eight segmented legs and pump some fresh, pale blue blood through its single-chambered heart.
I could easily enough remove the web, and, in fact, did so the first time the spider appeared. By the next morning, however, it had once again “launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself.” And so, I’ve come to view that persistently expressed gossamered tapestry as a form of art, the procreant urge of the spider self unreeled and externalized, its inside made outside and filigreed across the latticed canvas of the screen. Besides, it may be that the spider trains in eight eyes on me as intently as my two eyes monitor it. Perhaps it thinks me a diminished thing, six eyes and six legs short of normal development. Perhaps it watches me sit mostly immobile, in the same place, at the same time, every day, doing the same things, and wonders, bemused, about such a strangely routinized creature. It’s best, I’ve concluded, to let the web remain, removing it only when, toward mid-September, the spider abandons it and retreats deep below the sill to await the next beckoning call of August.
* * * * *
Not long after the storm-window spider has withdrawn, on or about October 7, the wasps arrive. Never in the summer. Only with the serious onset of Fall. Coming home for lunch, I’ll find anywhere from 6 to 10 elegantly slender, narrow-waisted, resonantly buzzing bodies congregated on the living room piano window. I surmise they construct a nest inside the house wall, tucked up near the front-porch soffit, and despite my past attempts to caulk possible ports of entry, I am, finally, unable to discover the crack or crevice by which they get there. I suspect that, roused from their night-chilled torpor by the warming day, they make their determined way down the wall and enter the house through the large double-hung front-room window. My efforts to seal it, though, have proven as unavailing as my outside efforts. They always find a way in. They will not be denied entrance.
I open the piano window to let them find their way back outside. The loiterers I scoop up in a glass or jar, cover it with a piece of paper, then release them outside. My wife Kathy watches, bemused at the futility of my gestures. “They’ll only wind up coming back inside,” she tells me, and I know she’s right. Still, I cannot find it in me to kill them. While I cannot, like Thoreau, feel “complimented by their regarding my house as a desirable shelter,” I can agree with him that they have “never molested me seriously.” They have stung no one but me, and that was once, as I reached under a lampshade to turn on the light, only to dispossess a wasp at its ease on the switch.
No, I cannot kill them, even if they do raise and perplex Robert Frost’s question of what gets walled in, and what, out. They harbor no malevolence, feel no need to beleaguer, have no aforethoughted intent to inflict a stinging wound. They are catalyzed by a cell-deep imperative. They only want out, out to do their pollinating work, out to scavenge, driven by a need for sweets and carbohydrates—a final feast before the coming winter that will mark their end—out, and then back again to nest and colony, back home, a home my home provides.
* * * * *
We are doubly housed, it seems to me. One house, framed with studs, sheathed in a dermis of Tyvek and clapboard, sets a boundary between inside and outside and protects us from the outside by keeping the outside out. And yet, strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, given that we are only partially removed from nature, we bring the inside partially out. While we are wonderfully endowed prefrontally cortexed creatures, we yet remain enfleshed biological beings as well. We stand above that in which we are also firmly emplaced. And so, we build decks and front porches and terraces and sun rooms and porticoes and verandas, furnish them with chairs and tables and hammocks and coolers and portable ovens, and use them to eat and snooze and sip iced tea or lemonade or a cold beer and read and write and people-watch and creature-watch and world-go-by watch and, sometimes, maybe often times, just sit and ruminate. Who knows; perhaps some ancestral tug, some savannahed impulse, compels us to return to that from which we originally emerged, but mediated by the indoor we bring outdoor—a hybrid space, a third home. Who knows; perhaps at some level, some profoundly deep level where blood memory lies ineradicably embedded, we feel orphaned, taken by evolution from our original ground of being, and therefore, seeking as much of a reintegration as our new condition allows, we let the wild things in.
* * * * *
But we inhabit another house, bone-studded and skin-sheathed, a SmartHouse, really, powered by the thrumming energy of heart and mind, the churn of consciousness, and to avoid the echo chambering din of our self-reflexive selves, we need to let ourselves out, others in. Nathaniel Hawthorne warns us that “the saddest of all prisons is a [person’s] own heart.” David Foster Wallace warned the 1995 graduates of Kenyon College of the seductive tendency to think themselves “alone at the center of all creation,” lords of their “own tiny skull-sized kingdoms.” But the outreaching gesture of sympathy can be rebuffed, our words can be misconstrued, our intuition can be mistaken, our understanding can falter, the gaze of others, always judgmental, can be withering. Safer, we conclude, to hunker down, dig in, pile up sandbags to thwart threats to our private conceptions of ourselves. And, so, our house has windows to see out, but no door to let in. We monitor our thoughts, our feelings, but find ourselves reluctant to share them. We want to be secure; we want to bond and understand. We linger at the windows, wistful, waiting, yearning to send forth a sticky thread in hopes of making an anchoring contact, but somehow, someway, it falls short. We buzz at the windows, wanting out, wanting out, but never venturing forth beyond the defensive perimeter to engage the could be, the is-there-more, and maybe, just maybe, leave our shackling too-muchness behind.
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Leave-Takings
My backyard trees are autumn-adorned, brocaded in deep scarlet, reddish gold, honeyed amber, and sassy yellow—tongues speaking in hued accents a chromatic carnival of color, a retinal assault of beauty so rich, so dense, that, had it mass, its weight on my shoulders would bend my back. I wish it would last, but, of course, I know it won’t. I know it is conjured only to be eclipsed—a requiem, really. I know that its very transience gives it its allure, that we treasure that which is soon to be lost. And even as I gaze, leaves leap from branches, “leaf subsides to leaf,” and I know the rasp and pang of a difficult truth: the change of seasons has pulsed to life biological forces not to be denied, forces that transmit hormones that create abscission cells that cluster at the nexus of stem and branch, gradually unmooring each leaf until a breeze completes the separation. The trees are unleaving. The leaves are leaving, they are leaf-letting-go. The leaves are leave-taking. To gaze, directly and attentively, at something is to become entangled with it. So it is with me as I regard the leaving leaves, watch their fluttering, pinwheeling plummet. I think of leave-takings of my own.
I think of my graduation from college, English majored, degree and teaching license in hand, and my wondering, Have I chosen well? Is teaching meant for me? And I found that I had, that it was. I think of the morning of the day I was getting married, and Mom joining me in the kitchen for coffee and telling me she dreamed that she walked into the family room and saw that the goldfish had disappeared from its bowl. And I said, “Mom, you don’t need to be Sigmund Freud to know you’re experiencing a version of empty-nest syndrome. I guess we’ll have to call it empty-bowl syndrome. And besides, be glad you didn’t find the fish belly-up. I am.” And she laughed that laugh she had. And I thought of how, many years later, she was carried away into the darkness of Alzheimer’s disease, where I was just a face without a name, before she finally, mercifully, got her wish and was carried away into a deeper darkness. And I think of Dad’s gradual decline after a punishing fall that left him lying on the hallway floor for more than a day before he was discovered, and the death certificate that gave as cause “Failure to thrive,” and my thinking that whoever wrote that stark sentence did not know my Dad. And I think of my looming retirement, of the colleagues from whom I will take my leave, colleagues who have cared for and inspired me and never, not once, hid their light under a bushel; and students who have gladdened and saddened and maddened me and always, always pushed me, as I pushed them, to know more, to be better.
We are always leave-taking, it seems, always, in ways large and small, saying farewell, goodbye. It’s the way of things, and it’s best not to deny the inevitable. We live through, but we cannot dwell in, or on, a moment, a day, a season. We cannot give ourselves over to pieces of time. We are in them, but not of them. Each moment arrives unfreighted and quickly departs, cargoed perhaps with yearning or joy or penance or rupture or hope. We need to be beside ourselves, to view those shards of time from the outside, to step aside and back and out from them if their relation is to appear. We are on the move, in motion, churning, always churning. We cast a backward look, for that anchors us, but we move onward, for that completes us. We unfold. We go on going on. We make ourselves cohere. We gather the events and experiences and contingencies and set them to a plot, make them into a narrative, continuous and durable, whose revelatory theme is the who that we are.
I think of my graduation from college, English majored, degree and teaching license in hand, and my wondering, Have I chosen well? Is teaching meant for me? And I found that I had, that it was. I think of the morning of the day I was getting married, and Mom joining me in the kitchen for coffee and telling me she dreamed that she walked into the family room and saw that the goldfish had disappeared from its bowl. And I said, “Mom, you don’t need to be Sigmund Freud to know you’re experiencing a version of empty-nest syndrome. I guess we’ll have to call it empty-bowl syndrome. And besides, be glad you didn’t find the fish belly-up. I am.” And she laughed that laugh she had. And I thought of how, many years later, she was carried away into the darkness of Alzheimer’s disease, where I was just a face without a name, before she finally, mercifully, got her wish and was carried away into a deeper darkness. And I think of Dad’s gradual decline after a punishing fall that left him lying on the hallway floor for more than a day before he was discovered, and the death certificate that gave as cause “Failure to thrive,” and my thinking that whoever wrote that stark sentence did not know my Dad. And I think of my looming retirement, of the colleagues from whom I will take my leave, colleagues who have cared for and inspired me and never, not once, hid their light under a bushel; and students who have gladdened and saddened and maddened me and always, always pushed me, as I pushed them, to know more, to be better.
We are always leave-taking, it seems, always, in ways large and small, saying farewell, goodbye. It’s the way of things, and it’s best not to deny the inevitable. We live through, but we cannot dwell in, or on, a moment, a day, a season. We cannot give ourselves over to pieces of time. We are in them, but not of them. Each moment arrives unfreighted and quickly departs, cargoed perhaps with yearning or joy or penance or rupture or hope. We need to be beside ourselves, to view those shards of time from the outside, to step aside and back and out from them if their relation is to appear. We are on the move, in motion, churning, always churning. We cast a backward look, for that anchors us, but we move onward, for that completes us. We unfold. We go on going on. We make ourselves cohere. We gather the events and experiences and contingencies and set them to a plot, make them into a narrative, continuous and durable, whose revelatory theme is the who that we are.
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