Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything

by Ehrenreich, Barbara

  Only now, after fifty years of denial followed by a few weeks of intense research into the mystery of the silicon electrode, can I declare myself finally redeemed. Everything happened as I reported it. There had been no “dirt” or “noise” beyond the normal smudginess of the physical world. The problem was that in 1963 there was no theory to explain phenomena like this, in which dead matter seems to organize itself into unexpected patterns. Nor could I have known about the martyrdom of the Soviet chemist Boris Belousov, who in 1951 had stumbled upon a similarly anomalous finding, one involving a chemical reaction that produced regular oscillations in the color of his reagents. When he submitted a paper on this phenomenon to a peer-reviewed chemical journal, it was rejected as “impossible” and in violation of the second law of thermodynamics. After a number of further attempts at publication were also rejected, Belousov, thoroughly humiliated, abandoned science. It was not until 1980, ten years after his death, that his work, after repeated replications in other laboratories, received a prestigious Lenin Prize.

  At the time of my own mysterious finding, a theory was just beginning to germinate, bubbling up more from mathematics than the physics, but it would be at least another decade before any equations existed to describe the sort of thing I had observed, and they would turn out to be totally unlike any equations I had ever seen. In fact, they are not even “equations,” they are called algorithms or “maps,” and they offer no definite predictions, just a sense of how things unfold from one point or set of conditions to the next. An equation is static and can be mistaken for a tautology, but an algorithm is a recipe for motion and growth. I am in no way qualified to describe this new science of “nonlinear dynamics” or, as it is sometimes more sensationally termed, “chaos theory,” but more and more so-called complex phenomena, like weather and even the onset of epileptic seizures, have been yielding to this new mode of explanation. All I really understand, from my limited reading, is that nonlinear dynamics represents a paradigm shift at least as shocking as quantum mechanics. Which is not the kind of thing you want to encounter when you’re just trying to finish up your senior year of college.

  As of this writing, I have accumulated a number of articles on the odd behavior of silicon electrodes and managed to read in most cases at least the “abstract,” “discussion,” and “conclusion.” My father, who for obvious career reasons took an active interest in semiconductors like silicon, would have been fascinated by the chemistry. As far as I can make out, the storyline centers on microscopic pores that form on the eroding silicon surface—veritable catnip for a metallurgist. But from there on the math gets funky and the story takes a nonlinear twist: The pores generate “bursts” of current that somehow manage to synchronize with each other to create a macroscopically observable “self-organized process.” If my father had scoffed at quantum mechanics, I’m afraid he would have sneered at nonlinear dynamics, especially if accompanied by the notion of “chaos.” He would have concluded that science, with its newfound attachment to “uncertainty” and “probability,” had grown weak at the knees and unable to take a stand against the unknown. I suspect he would have seen the entire twentieth-century progression—quantum mechanics, then nonlinear dynamics—as part of a long, tragic slide toward decadence and mysticism.

  And considering the silliness that chronically infects the interface between science and popular culture, he might have been justified. Whenever a crack appears in the lockstep logic of cause and effect—from this to that—a certain kind of opportunist sees openings for boundless free will, or even God. We can skip right by the tedium of math and science and admit that anything, anything can happen in this magical universe we inhabit: Particles can communicate across galaxies, wishes can be fulfilled through “visualization,” diseases can be vanquished by “positive thoughts.” Whee!

  But it’s true—and I wish my father was alive and lucid enough to discuss this—that the reductionist core of the old science has been breached. We have had to abandon a model of the universe in which tiny hard particles interact and collide to produce, through a series of ineluctable, irreversible steps, the macroscopic world as we know it. The heartbreakingly dead landscape of physics, which I had first encountered in high school, has come squirming into a kind of “life.” But there is no way I could have known this when I was twenty-one, nor would I have had any idea of what to do with the information if I had.

  Chapter 9

  Suicide and Guilt

  My mother’s first suicide attempt, in early September 1964, barely grazed me, which is to say that I successfully fended it off. I didn’t give much thought at this point to other people’s emotional states, except as a subject for theoretical speculation, and least of all hers, probably since I’d expended so much of my childhood energy trying to avoid being sucked into her personal vortex of anger and disappointment. I might have told you that there were other, far more vivid things going on in my new life as a graduate student in New York City, things that distracted me from the spectacle of her decline, and there were, but insofar as I can identify my own feelings at the time, I just didn’t care. The literary precedent, although it didn’t occur to me then, is The Stranger by Camus, which opens with the lines, “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure.”

  In high school I had fretted over the possibility that I was mentally ill, but in the wake of my mother’s near-drowning experience, I faced a less flattering diagnosis—that I was selfish and mean. It was my mother’s sister Jean who articulated the accusation, calling to tell me that my mother had just survived a suicide attempt, and where had I been when she needed me? Apparently my mother had loaded up on alcohol and sleeping pills before walking off a pier at Atlantic City, where she had been an alternate delegate at the Democratic convention, but had flailed around in the water enough to be noticed and rescued. She had repeatedly tried to call me before attempting to take her own life, according to Jean, who had once loved me enough to name one of her daughters after me, and was now yelling at me over the phone about the moist, smothering concept of “responsibility.” I was horrified, although not on account of my mother, I am sorry to say, but because I had discovered in Jean a vantage point from which I was not a bold existential seeker—just, as my mother had so often suggested, a cold, aloof person, unfit for human company.

  Jean’s tirade rested on the assumption that I would have dissuaded my mother from trying to kill herself, but anyone could see that she was spiraling toward ruin in one form or another. She had gotten no alimony or settlement of any kind from the divorce, either because she was too proud or inept to fight for it or because there never really was much money there, just the illusion of wealth created by my father’s expense account. So she was working at various retail jobs while trying halfheartedly to keep my teenage brother and sister out of trouble. She was also drinking recklessly and bringing men home from bars, to the dismay of my little sister.

  Sometime in early 1964, she and my siblings had decamped from L.A. to Ames, Iowa, for the putative support offered by her sister and her mother (the latter having moved from Butte to Ames when Jean went through her own breakdown a few years earlier and became temporarily unable to take care of her children). The move to Iowa soon led to tensions between my mother and Jean—my favorite aunt, the one who had taught me how to smoke cigarettes a few years earlier—because I suspect Jean was embarrassed to have anyone as risqué as a “divorcée” sloshing into her respectable life. Jean’s husband was a doctor, a Republican, an Episcopalian, and a collector of Civil War memorabilia, while my mother, with her drinking and atheism, was almost bohemian by Ames’s standards, intolerant and mercurial, once even getting drunk at a social gathering and picking a theological fight with the Episcopalian minister. In the early summer of 1964 she cut her child-raising responsibilities in half by sending my thirteen-year-old sister back to L.A. to be raised by my father and his second wife: a move that replicated her own abandonment as a child, not perfectly, but near enough.<
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  On my occasional visits to Ames, I was expected to participate in the new ritual she had developed since her divorce. She had always liked to smoke and drink and talk into the evening, and now she did so compulsively, with minimal encouragement, as single-mindedly as a solitary writer sitting down to fill a blank page. In fact I think this was her equivalent of writing, or at least her way of organizing a narrative out of the scraps. After the dinner dishes had been put away, she poured us drinks—“highballs,” they were called, meaning possibly “Seven and Sevens”—and sat me down for a nonstop monologue on themes of her selection. It was gratifying, in a way, to be treated as an equal and offered my own ashtray and drink, or at least restored to my early childhood role as confidante, but I would find the next morning that I had no memory of what she had said. The plots were too tangled, the personae too similar, the undertone of resentment too uniform. One theme I can recall had to do with people who had slighted her in some way or seemed to look down on her, and there were a lot of people in that category, if only because she didn’t have a college education, and now not even a husband or house of her own. But then these people always turned out to be shallow and ignorant themselves, as evidenced, for example, by the complete absence of books in their homes. Or she would retrace the narrative of her own sad existence, from her lonely childhood with her grandparents to her betrayal by my father, always ending in sodden despair, because although she couldn’t expect me to understand this, given how “above it all” I always pretended to be, a woman is nothing without a man.

  Eventually these monologues got her in trouble, or at least a tiny, small-town version of trouble. She befriended a young woman in Ames, whom, like me, she plied with liquor and recruited as an audience. But this woman, who may have been a graduate student in English, I can’t remember, turned out to be a traitor and a spy. A few weeks into their apparent friendship, she published a barely disguised story of my family in some, needless to say, obscure local literary magazine, and there it all was, not elegantly written but faithfully rendered: the heroic rise out of Butte, the scramble for material comfort, the decline into adultery and, though it was perfectly evident without being mentioned by name, alcoholism. It made a good story in the American Tragedy vein, with its arc of success and disillusionment, but it was all too recognizable, including to some friends of Jean’s. My mother processed her humiliation by incorporating the story of the story into her monologues as one more example of betrayal and occasion for bitter tears. Two or three hours into one of these sessions and I would have to fight the impulse to say: You can stop right here. There’s no need for any of this to continue.

  So it may be just as well that my mother couldn’t reach me when she was on the verge of killing herself, because if she had gotten maudlin over the phone, as she almost surely would have, I might have told her that there are situations in which suicide is the most rational choice and that I could certainly understand. The reason she couldn’t reach me is so bizarre that I didn’t even try to tell Jean. For reasons connected to my increasing distaste for lab work, I had spent the last few weeks of the summer in Istanbul—the period when my mother was in Atlantic City—attending an international summer school in quantum chemistry, with no regular access to a phone.

  Why quantum chemistry in Istanbul? Well, almost a year earlier, in some kind of spasm of hubris and denial, I had presented myself at Rockefeller University in New York as a graduate student in its fledgling theoretical physics department. At the time I had my reasons: I was still trying to get to the bottom of things, to the reductionist roots from which all phenomena arise, and furthermore I knew that unless Rockefeller acquired a linear accelerator, there would be no possibility of laboratory work, because most of what went on in this physics department concerned subatomic particles. But I realized at some level that this choice of subject matter was insane, like taking up a career as a novelist, only in Chinese.

  I spent the first few months of graduate school pretending to be a student of theoretical physics. This required no great acting skill beyond the effort to appear unperturbed in the face of the inexplicable, which is as far as I can see one of the central tasks of adulthood. But it didn’t take long before I admitted defeat. In college I had gone from chemistry to physics, moving purposefully, I felt, from the complicated to the ever more fundamental, from the macro to the micro and below that to the nano and pico. Throughout my education I had always managed to make up for a sketchy background through heroic bouts of study, but this didn’t work when the subject was “strangeness” or the fundamental symmetries of nature. I realized that if I was going to continue as a graduate student at all, and thus continue to receive my fellowship, I would have to reverse course and ascend the ladder of complexity all the way up to biology, which was after all Rockefeller’s central area of endeavor. I would not go as far as organisms, I promised myself, and their baroque proliferation of strategies and shapes; I would stick as close as I could to the clean edges of chemistry.

  The organization of lab work was, and still is, entirely feudal. A “lab” was not only a place or a room or series of rooms, it was the fiefdom of a particular scientist. To “go into” a lab as a grad student was to apprentice yourself to this scientist, with the idea that you would, after several years of patient toil, ascend to a similar rank yourself, at which point you would be able to offload the manual labor to people more junior than yourself. After escaping from physics, I was snatched up by a rising member of the scientific bourgeoisie, the immunologist Gerald Edelman, who was thought to be a genius and whose lab already contained about a half dozen eager graduate students and at least as many postdocs. I was attracted by his mad intensity, not always distinguishable from mere ambition, as when he told me and another potential student that you’re not really doing science unless you find yourself “waking up in the middle of the night screaming.”

  At first I was flattered to be offered a place in such a popular, state-of-the-art laboratory, and delighted to be assigned to the fashionable study of protein conformational changes, which was my first exposure to chemistry as a three-dimensional undertaking. Proteins are long chains of linked amino acids, folded into specific “conformations,” or shapes, that determine their ability to function within a cell, so their foldings and unfoldings are essential to the chemistry of life. But it didn’t take long to figure out that I had really been assigned to a machine—the spectrofluorometer that we used to analyze the fluorescent light emitted by dyes chemically attached to the proteins under study, which occupied most of a dark, closet-sized room off of one of the main laboratories. I discovered just how tightly I was meant to be attached to this machine one evening a couple of months into my tenure at the lab, when I was preparing to leave for the day and Edelman stepped into my closet and asked if I understood how much the spectrofluorometer had cost. Because at that price, he explained, he needed it to be running fourteen hours a day at least six days a week, or some other improbable length of time. This is what science had come down to: heads of laboratories getting grants to buy machines that would then come to dictate the research agenda of their laboratories. Why were we studying the use of fluorescent dyes to track conformational changes in proteins? The primary reason seemed to be that we had the equipment to do it, and the equipment could not be wasted. I told Edelman it was Friday night and I had a date and was going anyway, but I left with the feeling that my days of being a free-floating intellect were over, that I had become something more like a machine-tender, or a nineteenth-century mill worker in Lowell.

  So when sometime in the spring of 1964 I saw an announcement for the quantum chemistry summer school, I couldn’t resist: the exotic setting, the chance to fill in this yawning gap in my chemistry education with a new view of the world expressed entirely in wave functions! Edelman objected, correctly interpreting the trip as a vacation, but I wasn’t going to spend my summer in a closet when I could be outdoors or at least someplace absolutely foreign. There wasn’t any wildern
ess in my life anymore, even on the margins, and if I wanted to explore new places I had to make an effort to get to them. That’s how I ended up in Istanbul when my mother was reportedly trying to reach me; though I was probably not actually at a lecture on quantum chemistry, which turned out to be even more opaque than theoretical physics, where at least there’d been a few flashes of lucidity. When she was calling me, if she had indeed been trying to reach me, I was most likely wandering the streets of Istanbul, trying to fill the time when the lectures were going on until I could return unnoticed to the dormitory and whatever book I was reading at the time. These walks were challenging in their own way, because I was in no way prepared for the hostility of the Turks once you got away from the main tourist square—the cold stares at my bare arms and ankles, the complete absence of places to sit down, get a snack, or use a toilet. But it was better to walk than to sit and watch the tridents representing wave functions march across the blackboard to a soundtrack of broken English.

  Jean didn’t know the full story of my dereliction. My crime, since that’s how she saw it, was not that I was missing during my mother’s crisis. In fact there had never been any understanding between my mother and me that we needed to keep in touch, or even know each other’s phone numbers and general locations at all times. If there was a crime here, it was something Jean couldn’t have known about and that I only uncovered within the last year, in the course of trying to create a personal/historical timeline for the summer of 1964, also known as Freedom Summer: There was quantum chemistry starting in the middle of August, then the Democratic convention at the end of August. What I had forgotten or somehow misplaced in time was that my mother had come to visit me for a week or so in New York before going on to the Democratic convention. This was to be her only visit during my five years in graduate school, and it would have been my chance to bond with her, to go out to ethnic restaurants and maybe, if the tickets didn’t cost too much, sample the emerging off-off-Broadway scene. Maybe I even imagined doing these things with her as a vivacious and only slightly tipsy companion, but when she actually showed up I retreated into my traditional revulsion and arranged to keep our contact to a minimum. I didn’t want to drink with her; I didn’t want to get trapped by a monologue. So I worked long hours in the lab and devoted most of my evenings to my latest boyfriend, leaving my mother to fend for herself in the local bars or my bare little apartment, where there must have been nothing to do but drink and contemplate her manifest uselessness to the human race.