by John Updike
“It’s great, by the way, your taking Paula off of Verna’s hands some of the time.”
“She’s a sweet little girl. I can see why there’s tension between her and her mother.”
“Verna’s not sweet?”
“Oh God, au contraire. Hard. Selfish.” In contrast, the implication is, to her own soft, extravagantly giving, quite vulnerably naked self.
“She’s already passed the English grammar and literature parts of her equivalency tests, and now I’m helping her with the math.”
“Does it occur to you, my darling, that Verna uses people?”
He considers this a second, enjoying the friendly sight of Esther wiping herself between the legs with Kleenex and then stepping into her lacy bikini underpants. Not two hours before, having rushed home from the day-care center, she had put these on with him in mind, after taking a quick shower, and powdering her crotch. She had thought of putting in the diaphragm but in her haste and at her age had decided not to bother, to gamble. Immundioris deinceps ex seminis sui limo. Dale glances around the attic floor for his own discarded underpants, boyish Jockeys, while asking her, “Isn’t that what we’re here for? To use each other? Isn’t that what you and I have been doing?”
Esther is slightly shocked, as I have on other occasions been, by this unexpected coolness of his, a poise that seems to arise somewhere beyond his earthly manifestation as a penniless misfit, a perpetual graduate student.
He hears the rebuke in her silence and goes on apologetically, “That’s what makes me feel guilty toward your husband. I’m using him, he’s helping me get my grant, and yet here I am, with—” His gesture floats past her nearly naked body to include the entire attic, subsuming the entire house, in the fact of his entrée into lives where he does not belong.
“Fuckable old me,” Esther finishes for him. “Maybe he’s using you.”
“How? How could he be?”
“I don’t know. Rog is strange. He never should have left the ministry, though at the time I thought I was rescuing him. He needs to manipulate people, and when he had a church that’s what the people asked for. Anyway, Dale, dear: don’t you feel guilty toward him. That’s my territory, and I don’t.”
“Why not?”
She picks up another lace-trimmed snippet of underwear from the floor and shrugs. “He’s a tyrant. Husbands tend to be. It drives their wives into a constant war of liberation.” Sensing his desire for her reawakening at the sight of her in her scant underpants, even seeing physical evidence of it as his long pale young body lies languid on their shabby mattress, she pushes her lips forward and says, “I want you to feel guilty only toward me.”
Dale is entranced by her fragile-seeming awkwardness, her pointed elbows, her facially expressed determination to find the right snaps as she puts herself back into her bra. She tucks in a sliver of tit pinched below by the elastic and straightens up, looking about her as if for a fight. He asks, “Why?”
Esther mock-pouts. “Because you haven’t told me I’m a great lay.”
Rursus, Tertullian goes heartbreakingly on, ulcera et vulnera et febris et podagra et mors reoptanda? In our bodily afterlife, are we to know again ulcers and wounds and fever and gout and the wish for death—the renewed wish for death, to give the re- its curious, heartbreaking force. And yet, my goodness, pile on the cavils as you will, old hypothetical heretic or pagan, we do want to live forever, much as we are, perhaps with some of the plumbing removed, but not even that would be strictly necessary, if the alternative is being nothing, being nonexistent specks of yearning in the bottomless belly of nihil.
“Oh, but you are, you are a great lay, my God,” Dale says, led into blasphemy.
When he came into my office, he seemed uneasy, uneasy in a way new since the time he kept looking over my head out of the window and at my walls of books with their many Japanese prayers of bookmark. Instead of the denim jacket he had put on, in deference to the monotonous cold, a mustard-colored parka that had greasy stains as if used to wipe a griddle. He took off his knit wool cap. He had had a haircut, so his ears stuck out. “How’s it going?” he asked, with an affected jauntiness that ill became him.
“I was going to ask you the same thing.”
“I mean about the grant. Have you heard anything?”
I imagined that he seated himself in the chair of many woods rather tenderly, as if his bones ached. His waxy face had added to the pink scrapes of acne along his jawline bruiselike patches below his eyes, the kind of shadows that, we boys used to kid one another in high school, indicated too much masturbation. “As I said,” I said, “Closson is not uninterested; the unusualness of the proposal amuses him, much as it does me. But, in view of this same unusualness, he wants to meet with the full Grants Committee and would like you to appear before them to make an oral presentation and submit to a few questions.”
A weary “Oh Jesus” escaped him.
I smiled at this sign of deterioration. “It would be a relatively painless little trial,” I said. “Let me describe Closson. He’s a man of about sixty, rather stout, with a curious square head, almost like a box of bone, with this thinning hair combed all the way across from just above his ear”—I was quite vain of my own fluffy gray mop, with no sympathy for the touching stratagems of the bald—“and an absolutely unquenchable—what can we call it?—twinkle. He was born a Quaker in Indiana, and studied in Germany just after the war. Heidegger’s his baby. He believes nothing you could put into writing, but there’s still that inner light, that Quakerness, which makes him rather holy. He looks at someone like me as a sort of paleontologist, and the period of the Church Fathers as absolute darkness, a battle of dinosaurs. Closson was curious, specifically, as to what of your own you were going to bring to these scientific points you allude to, and that I described to him as best I could. How does the computer, he asked me, come into it?”
“As the means,” Dale said, “to pull it all together, to make the universal model that we can, I don’t know, sift. Also, it throws some new light on old questions, like the body-mind problem.”
“Ah,” I said, “the body-mind.”
His hands began to trace circuits and connections in the air, and our shared awareness of his being saturated in intimacy with Esther—shining with it as a fish fresh-pulled from the ocean shines with saltwater and its own slime—shuttled to the backs of our minds, much as the herpes virus hides at the base of the spine. “There’s a general impression,” he said, “that it’s all settled, what with psychopharmacology, increasingly sophisticated brain anatomization, the chemical understanding of synapses, all this trendy fiddling with the cerebral hemispheres and the corpus callosum and so on, and above all with the rise in the last twenty years of computers, that we know just what mind is: it isn’t an immaterial substance; it’s a function, like a haircut is a function of hair.”
“I see that you got one,” I said. I had also noticed that Esther lately had trimmed her dangerously long nails.
“It gets to feeling scratchy after a while,” he explained. “People make this analogy with software/hardware: the brain is the hardware, and mind, so-called, is the software. But if you take that analogy seriously, you get right back into dualism, because software can exist without hardware. Or, rather, it can function with a variety of hardwares. If a computer running a program is destroyed, you wouldn’t have to reconstruct the computer to get the program running again; you could put it into a new computer, or even work out the same logical relationships with pencil on paper.”
“A paper afterlife. ‘A paper moon,’ ” I quoted, smiling, “ ‘floating over a cardboard sea.’ ”
He was too young to know the song. He went on, “All this talk about computers that think is to anybody on the inside a terrific non-issue. You can link up all the computers from here to Palo Alto and you still won’t get self-consciousness out of those billions and billions of bits, out of all that stored memory and algorithms: you’re just as likely to get it out of the telepho
ne company’s wires and switchboards. You won’t get sensation, you won’t get emotion, you won’t get will, you won’t get self-reference. Hofstadter can talk all he wants about Strange Loops, but until he builds one that can make a computer reprogram itself or get so bored inside its box it commits suicide, it’s in the same category as life assembling itself in the primordial soup. The category, I mean, of fantasy, of faith. Materialism is a faith just like theism: only it asks a lot more in the way of miracles. Instead of asking we believe in God it asks we don’t believe in ourselves; it asks we don’t believe in our own awareness, our own emotions and moral sensations.”
I winced at the width and violence of some of his gestures; I wondered what moral sensations he felt, fucking my little Esther. “Tell me, though,” I said. “How do you feel about a dog’s circuitry? Is there self-consciousness there? Anybody who’s ever owned a dog would assure you there’s emotion. Certainly there’s memory, and isn’t what we call self mostly memory? There’s even free will; you can see dogs trying to come to a decision, waffling and wavering, and then feeling guilty about it. Imagine,” I said, “a hierarchy of organisms up from the amoeba—which does respond to certain stimuli, like heat and light, so there’s some degree of apprehension there—up through the spider and the lizard, and the mouse and the squirrel, to the dog and the dolphin and the elephant and the chimpanzee: surely by the end term of this sequence you’re getting into brainpower not qualitatively different from ours, and personality, and emotion, and sensation, and those other good things you say a computer could never have. Where do they come in, at what point in the complication of the neuron structure? What will prevent that same point from being reached as computers become ever more complex?”
Dale leaned his unhealthy pale face toward me. The haircut had subtly distorted its proportions, so that some moral imbalance or inner torque seemed expressed. Zeal to speak pushed little bubbles into the corners of his mouth. “Because I know,” he said, “what’s inside a computer; it’s just little switches, tiny little switches that move current around in certain patterns so that calculations result, all in terms of zeros or ones—off or on, high or low, hot or cold, full or empty, whatever. The speed is fantastic but the basic event is totally simple, and no matter how many billions of connections you kludge together there is basically nothing there, spiritually speaking. How could there be?”
I could see I had led him onto ground where he felt shaky. I lit my pipe. The smoke of the first puffs built up like sculptures of bluish stone in the shaft of sun; though the month’s cold had been relentless, the sun was strengthening every day—at our backs, as it were. “But mightn’t our own brains look exactly the same way, to an electrical engineer?”
“In theory, Professor Lambert, but only in theory. In practice, there is something there nobody wants to talk about: you. When you hear a noise—those bulldozers over there, for instance—vibrations compress the air and move through the glass and stone and touch the little bones in your ear, they communicate the disturbance to the eardrum, which passes it on to the fluid of the inner ear, and that moves some filaments that generate electrical impulses that travel along the auditory nerves to the brain. But who is hearing the noise? Not the brain by itself; it’s just a mass of electrochemical jelly. It doesn’t hear anything, any more than a radio hears music it plays. Who, furthermore, decides to get up and go to the window and see what’s making the noise? Something makes those neurons fire that move the muscles that move your body. That something is non-physical: a thought, a desire. People are willing to admit that the brain affects the mind—creates the mind, you could say—but, illogically, don’t accept the other side of the equation, that mental events create brain events. Yet it happens all the time. The world we live in, the subjective world, is a world of mental events, some of which set up electrical signals that move our bodies. This is the most obvious fact of our existence and yet materialism asks us to ignore it.”
The eddies his breath set in motion were destroying the smoke sculptures I was erecting. The pipestem was warm on my lower lip and I thought of lip cancer. I often think about how I will die, what disease or surgical procedure will have me in its tarantula grip, what indifferent hospital wall and weary night nurse will witness my last breath, my last second, the impossibly fine point to which my life will have been sharpened. I picked up the pencil stamped PILGRIM DAY and studied its point; I sighed and said to Dale, “That mind-electricity jump is a hard one to picture.”
He said quickly, “But electricity-mind doesn’t give you any trouble.”
I answered slowly. “It seems to me we do have to watch out for semantic confusion. Not everything we can put a word to is a thing in the same way. Like haircut and hair. When a materialist says ‘mind’ he just means to speak of a way the brain operates, as one says ‘seeing’ or ‘sight’ of the eye. This reification of abstractions and processes is what Ryle, among others, tried to clear up; ever since Plato, we’ve been stuck with it, and Christianity seized upon the confusion wherever it suited it. In the beginning was the Word. In the beginning, that is to say, of our wishful thinking.”
“On the other hand,” my young opponent said, shifting his weight so actively that the university chair protested with a cracking noise (the boy was still less enfeebled by adulterous guilt than I would have liked him) “materialists ever since Democritus have had to explain away consciousness as an epiphenomenon, as an illusion. Yet it’s all we have—”
“Which doesn’t mean we’ll have it forever.”
“—and now quantum physics tells us it’s intrinsic to matter: a particle doesn’t become actual until it’s observed. Until the observation is made, it’s a ghost. According to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle—”
My blood was up, too; in my haste to interrupt I swallowed some smoke and fought a cough. I told Dale, “If there’s one thing that makes me intellectually indignant around here it’s the constant harping of calf-eyed students on quantum mechanics and the Heisenberg principle as proof of that hoary old philosophical monstrosity Idealism.”
Dale leaned back and smiled. “Blame the physicists themselves. They keep coming up with it. Einstein hated the quantum theory. He said it was ‘spooky.’ On several occasions he tried to refute it; but experiments proved him wrong, most recently the Paris experiments of 1982, with oblique polarizers. But Young’s old two-hole experiment from, gee, way back in 1800 demonstrates the basic oddity: a succession of single photons will create wave interference patterns as if each particle is passing through both holes at once!”
“Certum est,” I murmured, “quia impossibile est.”
“What’s that?” the young man asked. He did not know Latin. But, then, he might say, those who know Latin do not know the language of computers. We all know, relatively, less and less, in this world where there is too much to be known, and too little hope of its adding up to anything.
“ ‘It is certain,’ ” I translated, “ ‘because it is impossible.’ Tertullian. His most famous sentence, in fact—usually misquoted as Credo quia absurdum est: ‘I believe because it is absurd.’ He never said that. What he was talking about, in the relevant section of De carne Christi, is shame, embarrassment. Intellectual embarrassment. Marcion, the fastidious heretic, was evidently embarrassed by God’s supposed incarnation in Christ. But what is more unworthy of God, Tertullian asks, more likely to raise a blush—being born or dying? What is in worse taste, being circumcised or crucified? Being laid in a manger or in a tomb? It’s all something to be ashamed of. But, ‘Whoever is ashamed of Me,’ God says, ‘of him will I be ashamed.’ ‘I am safe,’ Tertullian says, ‘if I am not ashamed of my Lord’—not embarrassed, that is to say, by the incarnation and all the awkwardness that goes with it. The son of God died, Tertullian says: it is absolutely to be believed, because it is out of place, in poor taste—ineptum, the Latin adjective is. And was buried, and rose again; it is certain, because it is impossible.”*
“Yeah, well,” Dale of
fered. “What particle physics has to add to that is that reality is intrinsically uncertain and in a very real way dependent upon observation. There’s this physicist named Wheeler down in Texas who says the entire universe had to wait for a conscious observer before it could be real. Not just subjective-real, but real in a very real way. The two-hole experiment, Wheeler points out, can be rigged to be retroactive—that is, the observation that ties down the particle can occur after the hybrid behavior. By hybrid I mean both states of, say, a particle position exist until measurement. Until you look into the box, that is, Schrödinger’s cat is both alive and dead. Mind really does affect matter in this sense. There’s another physicist called Wigner—”
“Please,” I interrupted. “This is very charming, but isn’t it, honestly, rather stretching it? The reason people don’t make too much of their minds is that they see how totally at the mercy of the material world the mind is—a brick drops on your head, your mind is extinguished no matter how indeterminate are the motions of the individual atoms composing the clay in the brick. Life, thought—these are no match for the planets, the tides, the physical laws. Every minute of every day, all the prayers and ardent wishing in the world can’t budge a little blob of cancer, or the AIDS virus, or the bars of a prison, or the latch of a refrigerator a child accidentally locked himself into. Without some huge effort of swallowing shame such as Tertullian outlines, there is no way around matter. It’s implacable. It doesn’t give a damn about us one way or another. It doesn’t even know we’re here. And everything we do, from looking both ways when we cross the street to designing airplanes with huge safety factors, acknowledges this, this heartless indifference in things, no matter what crazy creeds we profess.”