My first plan was to study everything—philosophy and what they called “humanities”—as well as science. But about a week into my first formal course in philosophy I found myself repelled by what struck me as the shameless frivolity of Plato’s Symposium. Here we were, using up our parents’ money at an expensive private college and reading about a group of men discussing whether to drink their wine competitively or at a more measured pace, given that they already had hangovers from the night before. Frivolity did not seem to be a problem for many of my classmates, especially the girls among them, who tended to major in art history, in preparation, I suppose, for a life of museumgoing. For reasons I might have been able to articulate if I’d taken a course in women’s studies and knew something about the financial outlook for single women, I had to be more practical. But Reed had eliminated its sole Marxist philosopher in a McCarthyite purge five years before I arrived, so I had no notion of class or economic necessity, and women’s studies would not emerge for another decade.
And what was so special about Plato? I knew enough—which was almost nothing, but still enough—to suspect that Plato was so popular and enduring because he was the most obvious proto-Christian among the swarm of pagan philosophers. As far as I could tell, he was the inventor of the idea of the one perfect God—omnipotent, all-knowing, and all good—whom I had also encountered in Saint Augustine. If there was one thing I understood about God, it was that he was not good, and if he was good, he was too powerless to deserve our attention. In fact, the idea of a God who is both all-powerful and all good is a logical impossibility—possibly a trap set by ancient polytheists to ensnare weak-minded monotheists like Philo and Augustine, and certainly not worth my time. I transferred out of the philosophy class immediately and replaced it with glassblowing, which was recommended, although not required, for chemistry majors.
I hit college, as it turned out, during the great surge of scientific reductionism that had been unleashed by the “new biology,” meaning the discovery of the genetic code and the helical structure of DNA. Why the replacement of Mendelian genes by polynucleotides should be viewed as a “reduction,” or any kind of diminishment, remains unclear to me today, since the molecules that had been put in charge of things—with their stacks of resonant rings and long zippers of hydrogen bonds—were as a grand and complex as anything I could imagine. But this was the reigning dogma: Big, visible things were all the products of tiny, invisible things, and although we didn’t yet know all the intermediate steps, living things arose seamlessly out of dead chemicals. Hence the hierarchy of the human intellectual edifice: The social sciences were ultimately reducible to biology, which was in turn reducible to chemistry; and the only way to get to the roots of chemistry was through physics. At the core of everything was mathematics, of which philosophy was a clumsy, slow-witted outgrowth. Metaphysics, including the question of why, had been abolished or left to the dubious oversight of the arts.
Chemistry seemed like the appropriate starting place for me, if only because I had qualified for a special accelerated first-year course, led by a whimsical young British professor with a habit of punning. “I’m sorry,” he would say in response to a titration result, “but you’re a bit off base.” Near the beginning of the semester he invited all dozen or so of us accelerated students to his house for refreshments and a little “welcome to chemistry” speech, followed by a lengthy hi-fi rendition of recorded whale sounds. Judging from the perplexity on my classmates’ faces, this was a brilliant pedagogical intervention, sending the message, You are completely out of your depth. You don’t know shit and you probably never will.
It was in this elite chemistry class that I got to know Jon, a classmate from New York, who was the first person ever to hit me with an unanswerable moral—or, as I would later learn to say, “political”—challenge: What if I became a chemist and found out that my work was being used by the military for the production of weapons? Well, I wouldn’t feel so good about that, I told him—although I have to admit my notion of “the military” had not moved much beyond World War II, minus the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, which my mother had explained as practically a humanitarian mission, designed to bring an early end to the war. Okay then, Jon asked, what if my work was being used only indirectly to produce instruments of death: Would that be all right? What if this whole lovely institution we found ourselves in, with its gargoyles and fey calligraphy classes, was actually dedicated, at least in the sciences, to producing the technologists of homicide? I found this notion too improbable to entertain, suggesting as it did that the entire panorama of middle-class American life was a façade concealing some fiendish imperialist enterprise. I would become a scientist, advancing the frontier of human knowledge by an angstrom or two, and if any unseen agents lurked in the shadows intending to transform my chemistry into toxicology—well, that was beyond my jurisdiction.
Ignorance is my only excuse for this callousness—that and the fact that I found myself entranced by electron orbitals. In the context of college chemistry, quantum mechanics was not a license to subatomic madness and indeterminacy, but a set of limits and rules: Electrons could be in one orbital or another; they could never be in between. Here, finally, were the rules of engagement governing the frantic couplings and uncouplings of atoms, the secret of how matter shapes itself out of incoherent plasma. Besides, at the time of Jon’s interrogation, it was beginning to occur to me, though still only dimly, that it might be possible to inhabit the world I was being prepared for—to do things that other people deemed useful, to have an occupation, to become an actual scientist, and to keep all that was uncanny or unspeakable stuffed out of sight.
In the dim light of the Oregon winter, my youthful quest for “the truth” now looked like a remote and improbable adventure. I resolved to start all over again, humbly accepting as “givens” the data, the theories, the mathematical and physical rules that other, more knowledgeable people had come up with. If I began with electron orbitals, I could build up to atoms and molecules, then macromolecules and, someday, if I had enough time, beyond them to cells and organisms and perhaps all the way to the biological underpinnings of mind. Already, the first-year math course was offering me an example of cosmic vistas emerging out of humble, plodding beginnings. I had had no idea where things were going when the professor introduced us to the Peano postulates, the axioms that govern numbers, or at least positive integers. It all seemed arbitrary and makeshift until, in a sudden moment of glory, the “real line”—all the possible sequential numbers—rolled out like a golden road to infinity. This was the great promise of science, that if you were patient enough, and willing to balance one rock on top of another for as long as it took to build up some height, you would eventually arrive at a place of great order and beauty.
The problem with science, which I had somehow failed to anticipate, was that it involved working in laboratories. Now, I was no klutz, having been taught by my mother to cook and to sew. I could make a flaky piecrust from scratch and install a zipper in a skirt so that it lay perfectly flat. But I had never disassembled a machine or traced the flow of kinetics through an automobile engine, and in the course of my brief career as a scientist, laboratories were becoming intimidatingly capital-intensive—not just Bunsen burners and Rube Goldberg contraptions for the fractionation of liquids, but eventually spectrometers, centrifuges, and bulky instruments to measure the radioactivity in a conveyor belt of test tubes. Everything that was forbidding about science—the tyranny of numbers, the imperative to communicate only in measurements—took architectural form in the laboratory, where scientific asceticism was reinforced by the total absence of decoration and usually also of windows. It would be easy to do something wrong, like waste the chemical sample I had been given to identify, or screw up an expensive machine, or even to do something dangerous. That glassblowing class that I replaced philosophy with earned me a near-failing grade: I was too paralyzed by my fear of compressed gases and acetylene torches to actually bl
ow any glass.
But mostly I just lacked the patience required for lab work. If someone had already determined the elements composing some organic compound, I saw no reason to repeat his or her work. In physics lab, I easily persuaded my stolid male lab partner to do the actual experiments in exchange for my doing the calculations and graphing the results. In organic chemistry, I cheated on identifying compounds by going through the chemical supply room and sniffing everything until I found an olfactory match for my mystery substance. Lab work is highly skilled manual labor, and I had great respect for it, even taking some pride in my deft pipetting. I just didn’t feel I had the time for it. At heart I was always an aesthete, going for the breathtaking patterns that can emerge from scattered fragments of data, a predilection that should probably have steered me straight into math. When I hit Galois theory in advanced algebra, I could feel my mind temporarily expanding to contain undulating matrices of numbers larger and more luminous than galaxies.
It was because of math that I fell in love. Well, not only math. I knew Steve, who was already a senior when I met him, through his younger brother, but everyone else on campus knew him too. He was said to be the most brilliant mathematician in the student body, charismatic and devilishly good-looking, with green eyes and a perpetual half-smile signaling innate superiority in every potential endeavor, and I still have a photo to prove it. Oddly enough for Reed, he was also an athlete and a contender for the state squash championship. On top of all that he was cool, though we were not yet in the habit of measuring attractiveness by heat content. He was James Dean rolled up with Isaac Asimov, an aristocrat in jeans and a denim jacket, the owner of the fastest motorcycle on campus. In mythology, the confluence of such attributes generally signals the presence of a god or a demigod, and when Steve appeared one Sunday afternoon in the doorway of the empty classroom I had found to study in, far from the dormitory’s din, I felt like one of the maidens of Thebes when the gorgeous Dionysus shows up in town. He announced that he was planning to ride a bicycle from Portland to San Francisco at the end of the semester. Would I like to go with him?
Oh yes, I would follow him, I would follow him anywhere. And I did, on my borrowed French racing bike, up the steepest hills on the Oregon coast, going well past the point of pain in my unconditioned calves and quads, sleeping chastely under the open sky, which often meant in the rain, and getting up to do it all over again, sometimes going a hundred miles a day, until finally my knees gave out near Eureka, California, and we hitched a ride to the Bay Area with a kindly husband-wife truck driver team. One night before my injury we kissed, for the first time, under a sickle moon that I could see over Steve’s shoulder. Rotate it one way and you had a bridge or a shelter; turn it upside and you had the horns of a bull. But our greatest moment of intimacy was mathematically inspired. We stopped on the side of the road and leaned on our bikes so Steve could explain to me the transfinite cardinal numbers. These are the ones that measure degrees of infinity, beginning with aleph-naught, which is the “number” of integers (1, 2, 3, etc.), and moving on to aleph-one, which measures the infinitely larger set of all real numbers (there is, after all, an infinite number of numbers between any two integers). How many of these alephs could there be? Could there be a class of super-meta-numbers with which to count them? It was in contemplation of these mysteries that I accepted, with some reluctance, that I had fallen in love.
Love was not on the list of things we ever talked about in the two years we were together. For me, the on-and-off solipsist, love did not entail any curiosity about Steve as a separate conscious being with his own history and internal tangles. He was a celestial light source, that was all, to which I was attracted like a meteor to a pulsating star. As for his view of human attachments, he was a self-proclaimed logical positivist who disdained all nonquantitative observations. If I had told him that I loved him, he would have wanted to know what units of measurement I was using and whether this condition could be independently verified. This left nihilism as the only common ground we could coexist on, and a stripped-down kind of communication limited to sharable data, or discussions of the relative merits of mathematics (beautiful and clean) and chemistry (cluttered and fanciful).
This is how besotted I was: In between the calculus and the physical chemistry and my efforts to learn German (required for science majors) on my own, I wrote him a love poem, which of course I never sent:
You in the dictionary of delight
You between youth and years and yet
What words approach without confining?
You are this last instant: now
Now: lost instant. You are
The breath before the fragrance
The song thought, the thought unsaid
The word unthought
And yet: You are
Bright safety and brink of chaos.
When Steve asked me to marry him and transfer to the University of Oregon, where he was now a graduate student, I said yes, although it was months before either of us dared reveal this plan to our families.
I introduced Steve to my parents during the Christmas break of my second year in college, to startling effect. With hindsight I can see that much of what happened was predictable, for example, that my mother would be charmed by Steve and the sweetly quizzical look he gave all new people that he met, the one that seemed to say, “This could be fun.” I gloried in my mother’s newfound respect for me: I might be of substandard appearance, especially now that I had abandoned lipstick and wore my hair in two thick braids, and sadly deficient in feminine social skills, but I had somehow managed to attract an unquestionably superior male, one as strong and handsome and smart as my father. Nor should it have been a surprise that my father responded to Steve with undisguised hostility and competitiveness. He had been sending me mixed messages ever since I got to college. If I mentioned that I had gone to a party and had a good time, he would warn me not to “make a fool” of myself. If I praised a professor, he would say that professors were all “phonies,” incapable of landing more productive jobs. When he learned about the upcoming bike trip with Steve, he had forbidden me to go, leaving my mother to argue that in the modern world young people did things like this and no one thought the worse of them. The age-old family factions were realigning themselves, putting my mother and me, for the first time ever, together on the same team.
The trouble began with my father, apparently inspired by the setting of the sun, challenging Steve to explain why the full moon always rises at exactly the same moment as sunset. Steve must have hesitated or fumbled the answer, because my father, already a couple of screwdrivers on his way toward incoherence, was emboldened to launch a disquisition on the distribution of human intelligence, which he claimed varied “exponentially” from person to person, meaning I suppose that some people are very, very smart and others are as dumb as dirt. But that “exponentially” set Steve off. What did my father mean by that? Steve wanted to know. Was he suggesting that intelligence did not follow a normal bell curve, as do height or weight? That the relevant mathematical function involved exponents? And now I saw my father more completely unmanned than he had been by quantum physics and by someone who could have been a junior version of himself or might have been if Steve had won his muscles in the mines instead of the squash courts.
Then came the part that I had no way of foreseeing. After Steve left—for his parents’ home in Long Beach—my father sat me down to explain that Jews never married out of their “race”; they just “used” non-Jewish women and moved on. Jews? All along my parents had had friends with surnames like Goldstein and Cohn and Dwork, as did I, without any mention, at any time, of a propensity to violate gentile women. I knew that Steve was Jewish, although of course also an atheist like me, and had even heard his mother refer to me as “the shiksa,” as if unaware that I had access to a translator. But in the hierarchy that I had absorbed over the years from my parents, or at least from my mother, Jews were at the top—better educated, more culture
d, and of course “cosmopolitan,” the very traits my mother aspired to—while Catholics, with their “mumbo-jumbo” religion, formed a slatternly underclass, and Protestants were only slightly less benighted. I asked my father for examples of Jews despoiling women for the sport of it, but he was saved from having to answer by my mother’s entrance into the debate. What was he saying? Did he know what he was saying? Couldn’t he accept that his daughter had a boyfriend, as most girls eventually did?
Alcohol played a part in the escalation of the fight; at least I can think of no other excuse for my father’s behavior, not that alcohol ever performs very well as an excuse. He bellowed that he never wanted to see that “Jewboy” in our home again, leading my mother to tell him to “get the fuck out,” and I didn’t know which word to be more shocked by. I’d never heard “fuck” from my mother before, and I’d never heard “Jewboy” at all. My father obliged, slamming the door after him and no doubt heading for a dimly lit martini source where he could drink until closing time. This was the event that set my parents on the fast track to divorce. Within a year and a half, my father would marry his secretary and my mother would establish the hazardous habit of picking up men in bars and bringing them back to the apartment she shared with my siblings. Neither of them ever qualified as a role model, but as far as I was concerned, my mother had won her almost two-decade-long war with my father, who stood revealed as a stupid, drunken, bullying bigot. For the first time in my life, but by no means the last, I was ashamed of him.
Living With a Wild God Page 15