Interior States

by Meghan O'Gieblyn

  Several years ago, around the time I turned thirty, my doctor sent me to the big university hospital for an MRI. We already knew that the lump in my head was a tumor, but the scan would determine how big it was and whether it could be extracted through surgery. As I lay there with my head in the tunnel of the scanner, I found myself reverting to my childhood game. I considered the machine, how strange it was. It occupied an entire room. The voice of a woman I’d never met instructed me, through a speaker near my ear, how to position my head. I thought: I am a person of the future, enclosed in this synthetic cocoon that uses particle physics to capture the insides of bodies. But then, in almost the same moment, the technology seemed to me barbaric. The machine was loud and clunky and used radiation. It was made by the same electronics company that manufactured my mother’s overheating dishwasher. The cab driver who had taken me to the hospital claimed it could give you cancer. Throughout the rest of the session, these two images—the machine as futuristic wonder, the machine as primitive contraption—existed simultaneously in my mind, like a hologram.

  Ever since then, I think only of how our lives will be viewed retrospectively by our descendants. The tenor of my game has become tragic, and its visions arrive automatically now, without my choosing them. It tends to happen when I am most happy, surrounded by friends and good food and gentle light, and I cannot stop the thought from entering my mind: “How happy we were,” as though I am witnessing an idyll that will be obliterated by a coming horror. But the horror never comes. Instead, the ease of our lives is interrupted by isolated acts of violence that eat up the news cycle and disrupt our sleep and begin, over time, to seem unrelated.

  * * *

  —

  Most of the people I know are obsessed with the present. They would correct my phrasing, though: It’s not about history, but a mental state. Being present. Becoming present. They spend hours each week practicing breathing techniques and contorting their bodies into unnatural postures in order to focus without distraction on that which lies directly in front of their noses. The idea, as I understand it, is to dilate the mind’s eye for maximum sensory intake. If you can reduce the mechanisms of your psyche to a glacial speed, placing four walls around this very moment, you’ll be able to capture it all: the color of the grass and all its shades and variations; not only the flavor of the food, but its undertones and subtle pockets of brightness. Of course, the obstacles to this state of mind are multitude: children, lunch dates, anxiety, to-do lists. But most of all it is the devices. It is the devices, especially, I’m told—the pods and the pads and the wristbands and watches—that have colluded to whisk us away from the Eternal Now.

  When I try to envision the Eternal Now, I picture a room without windows or doors, like a stage production of No Exit. It is a room that exists nowhere in particular. In lieu of context, in lieu of vista, one is forced to find meaning in the microscopic details of the room itself, which must inevitably come to seem intricate and endless: the cracks in the wall, the wood grain that striates the floorboards. A universe in miniature. It’s difficult for me to see how this state of mind constitutes a retreat from the logic of the internet—that lens that captures everything. To exist within that room of perpetual updates and endless opinions is to believe that history can be divided not by centuries but by seconds, that every idea must lead to finer sub-points and infinite distinctions that ultimately contradict one another. I sometimes wonder whose job it will be to weed through our digital garbage and make sense of it all. Graduate students, I suppose—if there are graduate students in the future. And they will be forced to conclude that everything that could possibly be said about us was true, as well as its opposite: that our souls were vitiated by decadence; that we were creatures of self-denial; that we indulged the flesh; that we were not vigilant about self-care; that we had become barbaric; that we had become effete; that we consumed too much fat; that we did not consume enough.

  Perhaps the essential appeal of the digital world is its capacity not to distract us from the present but to clench us in its maw. There is something hypnotic in its assurance that nothing lies beyond the day’s serving of novel minutiae. To leave this world, even for an hour, is to find yourself drifting uncertainly beyond the margins of the moment. Your mind begins to wander, or else you find yourself slipping uneasily into the past. A few weeks ago, a friend of mine arrived at the gym and discovered that he’d forgotten both his phone and his headphones at home.

  “What did you do?” I said.

  “I spent an hour on the elliptical thinking about my regrets.” He smiled sadly, the way people my age have only begun to—a tentative wistfulness. “That day,” he said, “I got a real workout.”

  * * *

  —

  Although it would have seemed absurd only a short time ago, it is now possible to conceive of eating at restaurants as an act of courage, just as it has become plausible to view any number of ordinary pleasures—doing lakefront yoga, sampling truffles, reading The New York Times—as fragile and therefore historically meaningful. It is possible to think this way (indeed, hardly anyone discourages it) because there are people who want to stop us from doing these things; who impart violence to keep us from dancing in clubs and going to concerts and eating delicacies while discussing the state of our souls. Nobody mentions these people that night at the restaurant, as the eight of us sit in the candlelit room made entirely of wood, but the most recent attack is still fresh enough that its presence is felt nonetheless. The danger itself is not real to us, but there is a certain energy in the room, an unspoken conviction that we are part of a common enterprise; that the idle and forgettable tasks that previously occupied our days are now undertaken deliberately, in a spirit of defiance. This is another way of seeing.

  The sky outside the window turns from pink to blue to black, and once the food is cleared away, our conversation grows sober. We confess that we’re forgetting things we used to know; that technology is developing faster than we can assimilate ourselves to its alterations; that growing older feels, in many ways, like backpedaling. We are trying to convey that time for us has ceased to feel real. We cannot conceive of the next dispensation. The only people who have a clear vision of the future, it occurs to me that evening, are those enemies of liberalism. But their vision is insane.

  I say: “I wonder if it’s different for people who have kids.” All of us present are childless. I try to explain that when a person has a child, they feel invested in the progression of history. I’m thinking of my sisters, how they’ve become, through motherhood, less cynical about the future. I’m thinking, too, about the end of The House of Mirth, when Lily Bart holds the servant woman’s baby and feels, for the first time in her life, anchored in time. “All the men and women she knew were like atoms whirling away from each other in some wild centrifugal dance: her first glimpse of the continuity of life had come to her that evening in Nettie Struther’s kitchen.”

  The woman who has recently returned from New Mexico interrupts me. “But people with children never think about these things. They’re too busy—or else they see it as frivolous.”

  Everyone agrees: We hear things of this sort all the time from our friends who have children. “I used to think about existential questions, but now the only thing in my head is diapers and feeding times.” This is, in fact, the draw of having children, says a woman sitting across from me: the ability to drown out all philosophical concerns with the exigencies of maintaining another person’s life; to batten down the progression of time with an ongoing state of emergency.

  But of course we are too self-aware, the eight of us, to let such a statement stand. Someone points out that we ourselves are no better. All of us have our distractions, our self-delusions, our ways of avoiding the dull baseline of reality.

  One of the writers remarks that the best advice he ever got about character development was to ask oneself: What is the lie this character harbors ab
out himself? “All of us have a lie that we hinge our entire lives on,” he says.

  “That’s horrible,” one woman replies, “to think of what it might be.”

  There is a long moment of silence, and then the woman who has been diagnosed with cancer speaks. “You probably know what it is, though,” she says to the other woman. Then she gestures broadly, including the entire table. “All of us probably know, implicitly, what our lie is. Just think about it.”

  The room again grows silent, and for a moment there’s a vital, almost giddy energy among us. Everyone seems to be simultaneously looking, and trying very hard not to look, at the person across from them. Then the waiter comes to drop off the check. We look at the time. Outside, there is still a line of customers waiting on the sidewalk to be seated. It’s late, we conclude; we should go. One man lays down a credit card, and the rest of us send him money invisibly, through our phones.

  “We hated those people who were lingering at their table,” I say, as we stand to leave. “And now we are those people.”

  Someone else says: “It’s the circle of life.”

  * * *

  —

  For a long time afterward, I recalled the moment at the restaurant when we all looked at one another across the table, each of us ostensibly thinking about our lie. What was clear in that moment was that we all believed we could correctly identify our own self-deception, a conviction that seemed, the more I considered it, peculiar to people my age. Unlike the disciples of Freud, who sought to lay naked the hard knob of truth at the core of their existence, we are content merely to insist that we’re cognizant of the delusions that animate our lives, that we can approximate their location in the byways of our psyches. (“Don’t do anything,” the facilitator said the one time I tried meditating, when I inquired what to do about runaway thoughts. “Just be aware of them.”) But the more I thought about this assumption, the more I came to find its premise absurd.

  Throughout my twenties, I was a prolific journaler. I filled pages of Mead notebooks with self-analysis and self-diagnosis. I still have these notebooks, and when I go back and read them today, I am struck by two things: one, how relentlessly self-aware I was. In each entry, I dissect my own faults and delusions with unflinching vigilance, circling back to each statement to offer caveats and addendums. “I realize, of course,” begin so many transitions. Or once: “Don’t for a second think I’m unaware….” And yet the second thing that strikes me is how, despite these interrogations, I remained patently unaware of the most obvious truths about myself. Things that would be clear to any sane reader are circled and evaded with an ignorance that is almost farcical. It is as though I was capable of seeing everything except that which was most obvious, except the thing that was right in front of me.

  Awareness is not the same as perspective; sometimes the former is an obstacle to the latter.

  * * *

  —

  A man I used to know, a pastor, once said that self-awareness was the consequence of original sin, that first error committed in the primordial garden. Humans were once as happy as lambs, munching the grass, unaware of their minds or their bodies. It was greed that set us apart from the animals. We desired a knowledge of ourselves that was meant for God alone and could not but doom us to unhappiness. This, of course, is the Christian view of things: that we were better off as sheep.

  Now we are passing this curse on to the inanimate things of this world. I live in a house full of objects that are slowly becoming conscious: a thermostat, a coffeemaker, a computer, a phone. Throughout the day, they watch me and blink their blue lights and silently gather information, and on some days I believe, along with the optimists, that they will soon tell us everything we care to know about ourselves. But I do not sleep well. My dreams are rife with shadows and menace, and the house, during those hushed hours before dawn, seems to groan beneath the weight of those budding brains. Increasingly there are nights when I sit up in bed, awakened by the panic of some half-remembered thought, one of those foundational problems that gets lost in the wash of secondary concerns and emerges only when you are loose and unguarded to remind you, with a start, that you’ve forgotten the original question; that you’re missing the point.

  2017, Ploughshares

  A SPECIES OF ORIGINS

  The dinosaur billboards start appearing around Chicago: THE BLAZING BRACHIOSAURUS, THE SWIFT PTERODACTYL. We see them throughout Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio. The illustrations are vintage comic book: colorful, muscular animals bursting out of the confines of the frame. Sauropod necks stretch down toward the street. A triceratops bolts headlong into the blue, ready to pounce on an oncoming car. Their names are stamped in block text, bold and bright and selectively alliterative. THE MIGHTY MASTODON, THE SUPER RAPTOR.

  “Why not the Rapacious Raptor?” asks my boyfriend, Barrett, who is along for the ride. “Or the Rapturous Raptor?” It’s ninety-eight degrees outside, and we’re driving down the freeway with the windows down because my car’s AC is broken. Both of us are starting to get a bit batty from the heat.

  “Or the Raptured Raptor,” I say.

  “Raptured?” he shouts over the wind.

  “Taken by God. Raptured.”

  He absently tugs at his beard and says, after a moment, “So that’s what happened to the dinosaurs.”

  * * *

  —

  Imagine the Ark in all its glory: an ancient ship, built of pine, fir, and cedar, rising out of the hills of Northern Kentucky. It will be taller than the Giza pyramids, longer than an American football field by a good one hundred feet, and shaped like a cargo ship, with a cambered roof and a small stern projection like a rudder. On board, there will be animals: zebras and monkeys, alligators and ostriches. The robotic beasts will appear incredibly lifelike, with roving eyes and real fur and iridescent scales of molded foam rubber. The ship will sit on eight hundred acres of bluegrass near I-75, the busiest North-South interstate in the nation, but it won’t be visible from the highway. This is intentional. Ken Ham, the Australian visionary behind the Creation Museum, claims that the whole point of the Ark Encounter is for people to encounter it (as the name suggests)—to have an experience with the historic truth it represents. This can’t happen if commuters are just gawking at the ship from their cars during rush-hour gridlock. The Ark is a boat that can change lives, a boat that has the power to prove God’s Word is the truth. It’s also a $73 million project, slated to open in 2016, with construction beginning this year. (The attraction officially opened in July 2016.)

  I’ll be the first to acknowledge there are few things more odious than the marriage of evangelism and big-budget productions. But when I first heard about the Ark Encounter while surfing around the Christian blogosphere (as we former believers are apt to do), some atavistic part of me was fascinated with the project. Throughout my childhood, I’d regarded Ken Ham as a bona fide celebrity. Back in the ’90s, long before the Creation Museum came into being, my homeschool group would get together to watch videos of his seminars for the Institute for Creation Research: lectures about how the dinosaurs became extinct (humans killed them) or why the platypus sinks the whole theory of evolution. This was when he was in his early forties, sporting overgrown Abe Lincoln chops that made his face seem remarkably (and unfortunately) simian. He managed to strike us kids as a trustworthy enough source, delivering factoids in his cool Aussie accent. He was an avuncular science guru—the fundamentalist response to Bill Nye, minus the bow tie and the zany fun. Incidentally, Ham faced off against Nye earlier this year, in a webcast debate about the merits of creation science. Many commentators noted that the debate was over long before it started, citing Nye’s willingness to engage with creationism as a legitimate scientific position. As one writer noted in The Daily Beast, “Ham won this debate months ago, when Nye agreed to participate.”

  My siblings and I were, in many ways, your typical young-Ear
th creationist kids. Our parents homeschooled us so that we wouldn’t be exposed to things like evolutionary biology, and they took us to summer camps where we were taught how to debate “secular science.” I wasn’t allowed to see The Land Before Time because it alluded to the Earth being billions of years old. By eight, I had memorized ocean salinity stats to persuade unsaved kids that the Earth couldn’t possibly be more than six thousand years old. By twelve, I knew to raise my hand whenever someone mentioned “millions of years” and say, “Excuse me, sir/madam: Were you there?”

  Noah’s ark is the story most frequently ridiculed by opponents of biblical literalism, and the Ark Encounter is designed to demonstrate that it was indeed possible for a ship of this size to hold two of every kind of animal living today, plus those that are now extinct, like the dodo and the quagga—not to mention the Blazing Brachiosaurus, the Mighty Mastodon, and the Super Raptor.

  My parents, who’ve visited the Creation Museum many times since it opened in 2007, have been urging me to visit the museum for years, suggesting that I might find it “interesting” (read: conversion inspiring). And my Facebook feed is perennially littered with posts from my old Moody Bible Institute friends claiming the museum is “powerful” and “faith affirming.” But it wasn’t until the Creation Museum announced it would be holding an information session on the Ark Encounter and that Ken Ham would be there in the flesh, accompanied by the Ark design team, that I finally got up the courage to head south for a few days and see what all the fuss was about.