“Let’s watch the language,” I’d say, reflexively, as I did a hundred times a day. But all the while I’d be thinking how perfectly right it was for them to be impatient with Holden Caulfield. How little I’d understood about the students I would have, and their lives, when I had taken the job. How irrelevant my reading list had turned out to be, carefully culled from the books I had taught to the eager students of a prestigious university just the year before. How inaccurately I had imagined these children, who turned out to be all full of bravado and street smarts and dressed in rival gang colors, but who were inarguably children all the same.
The stresses of my students’ lives sometimes seeped into school time and sometimes poured in. Our school had no money for a guidance counselor. We four teachers filled in where we could. That meant that I went to the hospital with a fourteen-year-old freshman who needed a rape kit done after a friend of her father’s had gotten drunk and come into her room the night before. It meant I took assignments to the juvenile detention facility where my fifteen-year-old student was held after she beat a neighbor girl so badly that the girl fell into a coma. It meant that I talked with the psychiatrists who had questions about my students’ school performance, and who prescribed them medication upon medication upon medication.
One of my students was so sedated by antipsychotics prescribed for aggression that his words slurred, and he fell asleep in class. Another began an antidepressant, and before long started doing her homework and stopped carving DIE MOTHERFUCKER into her forearms with a razor.
It struck me that medicine had the potential to both ameliorate and impair. At the time, I tended to be mistrustful of psychopharmacology. Yet over and over again I saw that it was often the first-line treatment for psychic distress in this group of disadvantaged kids. They did not have health care that would pay for them to be in twice-a-month psychotherapy, but they did have coverage that paid for their daily doses of new, expensive psychiatric medications whose effects had only minimally been researched in children. Sometimes the medicines helped my students, and other times they didn’t. I wondered wherein the difference lay.
In the midst of these questions and observations (and in the midst of my undeniable failure as a high school teacher) I found myself thinking more deeply about the territory of the mind. For years, I had written poems that flirted with madness. A yearning love poem had in it the figure of a cryptic madwoman:
. . . down the hill the old widow has laced her river
birch with bottles, some clear, some green, all clouded.
They stay without string or fixative, each thin neck
encircling a sturdy twig. Pieces of wind inside
she croons at me one day. A piano for the rain
she confides the next, grinning, and just yesterday,
solemn, You see, I’m making a deal with God.
Another poem explored the fractured logic and linguistic associations of madness:
the woman comes to your door and knocks.
Nothing about her looks wrong but something
does not look right. Do you have
the padlock’s key? she asks and points
to your coat closet. I have to get upstairs
delusion, illumine,
lumière, solution,
illusion, lunacy,
luz; there’s light
in all of it.
Light at the end
of the tunnel,
lights are on
but no one’s home.
The social worker is new. The man speaks
steadily without crying. Mother left
first. Father stuffed my rolled
socks into the tailpipe of a rented car. She smiles
her best empathic look, writing
absent parents, childhood trauma thinking
four more minutes he says so I’m a bird
and I’ve come to you for help
because my brother just won’t bring seed
sedate, seduce, sequester,
kestrel, guillemot, tern.
My struggling high schoolers helped me begin to understand that this poetic and intellectualized view of madness was removed, romantic, and simple. Just as, for them, Holden Caulfield failed to reflect a realistic picture of adolescent angst, so my own poetic musings about the mind’s failings largely missed the point. I was beginning to learn that real-life fractures of the mind were fascinating, and at times poignant, but they were not lovely. Instead of providing a window to an elusive realm of wisdom, mental illness more often was a flagrant display of confusion and fear, of misery made plain.
Increasingly I felt drawn to a career investigating the mind. I considered training as a social worker, or as a psychologist, but my students demonstrated what I already knew from talking to a range of therapists and doctors: the current of mental health treatment was increasingly running toward medication. If I wanted to be an educated voice that could speak to the complexities of the brain’s neurochemistry and make a cogent argument for or against medication when I believed a patient did or didn’t need it, I’d first need to learn anatomy and pharmacology. I’d have to go to medical school.
My partner, Deborah, looks back on the years prior to that decision and jokingly calls them “the years of false advertising.” It is a story she loves to tell at a dinner party when new friends ask how we met or whether I had always known I wanted to be a doctor. “Keep in mind,” she’ll say as a teasing accusation, “that when I met Christine in graduate school, she was a poet. Poets don’t have pagers,” she’ll continue. “Poets are never on overnight call.”
When I finally decided that—despite being a poet—I wanted to go to medical school, I uprooted our lives from the twentysomething dreamland of San Francisco to the somewhat less entrancing suburbs of Philadelphia in order to take a year of premed courses at Bryn Mawr College. I was met with a rude awakening and a dose of self-doubt.
The awakening came in the form of my first physics exam. In college and graduate school I had studied little, breezing through a scintillating range of humanities courses with passion, great enthusiasm, and a minimal expenditure of energy. Nonetheless, I knew my year at Bryn Mawr would pose a different set of challenges, a kind of learning with which I was unfamiliar. So I studied. Hard. And when my first physics exam was handed back to me, a large 28 was scrawled across the top. I hadn’t remembered that there had been as many as thirty questions. I flipped to the final page. There hadn’t been. I was puzzled. I tried to determine the point allocation per question and how it would add up to 28/30 or perhaps even 28/35. Then the professor projected the range of scores on the screen in the front of the room, and I saw that my lone 28—on the far left side of the bell curve—was, in fact, a 28 percent. Failure was 60 percent. I hadn’t just failed the test, I had bombed it.
This does not become a story of redemption and physics success. I did pass the course in the end, but just barely. I say without hesitation that if I were asked today to explain even the simplest relationship between force and velocity, or the concept of vectors, or whatever the hell else is in physics, I couldn’t attempt to tell you without breaking into a fit of uncontrollable laughter at my own ineptitude.
And yet, despite my physics failures, I am, today, a practicing physician. I’m a psychiatrist and a writer. I love my job, and I think I’m good at it. I speak with some frequency at medical schools across the country, and as deans and faculty members brag to me about the staggeringly high MCAT scores of their matriculated students, I think only of how poorly I would have fared on the MCAT and how certain my rejection would have been from any medical school that required it.
Thankfully, Brown did not. Instead, the admissions committee asked me about my poetry and seemed to ignore my dismal physics performance. When I wrote about my high school teaching experience and how it had led me to want to practice psychiatry, they trusted my curiosity and commitment. They wanted to know more.
When I learned that I had been admitted and
expressed shock to a friend of mine who had done her undergraduate work at Brown, she grinned widely and shrugged. “A doctor poet? Of course you were admitted! That’s just the Brown way.”
I began writing Body of Work—a memoir about the experience of dissecting a cadaver—as a first-year medical student at Brown. In the summer after that first year, when students could apply for competitive funding to support bench or clinical research, Dean Donald Marsh created and granted me a Summer Fellowship in the Arts and Humanities. While my peers worked with cell cultures and pipettes in basic science labs and crunched data for clinical trials, I used my funding to tramp around Italy researching anatomical theaters, underground crypts, saintly relics, and creepy wax museums.
In my second year, I scurried from pathophysiology lectures over to the literary arts building, where I was permitted to take an independent study writing elective with literary arts professor Carole Maso. Though our buildings were less than a block from each other, the talks I had with Carole about dissection were otherworldly and provided a necessary contrast to the medical lens of anatomical science. Those conversations allowed for more poetic and dreamlike intrusions to be woven into Body of Work in a way that mirrored the weird and unsettling mortal dreamscape of cadaveric dissection.
In my clinical years, I received medical school credit—just as I would have for a dermatology or neurosurgery elective—for researching and writing about the wild history of anatomy with its body snatching, grave robbing, and defiance of church and law. The pages I wrote during those electives formed the central historical component of my book manuscript.
In the years that followed, Brown has continued to be an academic home that has supported my own individual career priorities rather than forcing me to rigidly adhere to traditional expectations and pathways. I have now written a second book—Falling Into the Fire—about my most compelling clinical encounters as a psychiatrist. My earliest inclinations to explore mental illness through both literature and science have been allowed to take root and indeed nurtured here. I think back to that high school classroom confluence of psychopharmacology and Holden Caulfield, and the progression from there to my current faculty position in Brown’s department of psychiatry seems almost linear, if not conventional. The shape of it has something to do with momentum, with trajectory. It’s beginning to feel like some kind of a vector.
Cursing My Way to Enlightenment
A. J. JACOBS
I remember embarrassingly little from my classes at Brown. Among the flotsam still drifting around in my skull:
• My Nietzsche professor Martha Nussbaum’s astrological sign is Taurus (one of my classmates raised his hand in the middle of a lecture to ask her, “What’s your sign?”)
• The important literary fact that James Joyce had an irrational fear of thunder
• All the distinctive grammatical properties of the word un-fucking-believable
That last one came from my intro to linguistics class. My TA was a grad student with shoulder-length hair and a sneering disdain for schoolmarmish prescriptive grammar (he would say, without irony, that linguistics is the “funnest” social science, using a word that still puts my computer spell-check into code red). But he loved what he called descriptive grammar—the study of how language actually works.
During one session, we were discussing suffixes and prefixes, and how they change the meanings of words. He told us there’s another way to alter a word: the infix. This is when you insert a sound into the middle of a word, not the beginning or end. Arabic and ancient Greek have infixes, as does Khmer, the language of Cambodia. But English? We have but a single infix: fucking. As in in-fucking-credible. Or un-fucking-believable. Ala-fucking-bama. It serves as the ultimate intensifier.
Why do I remember this fact while 99 percent of my Brown education has faded to oblivion? Why does this stay with me while I’ve forgotten all four of Buddha’s Noble Truths, all seven spectral classes of stars, all sixteen Habsburg monarchs?
Obviously, the human brain loves a good curse word. At least mine does, which is why I can recall offensive anatomical terms in most of the Romance languages and yet can’t recall the name of my freshman dorm.
But to make myself feel better, I’m going to argue there’s a greater significance to un-fucking-believable. I’m going to say that those five minutes discussing the fucking infix were the most quintessentially Brunonian five minutes of my education. They encapsulate everything wonderful and progressive—and simultaneously lampoonable—about this great university. I’ve broken it down to three reasons:
1. Intellectual Inquiry Has No Limits
For this essay, I read a book called The History of Brown University, which traced the evolution of Brown’s curriculum. Thank God I was not a graduate of the class of 1850. The curriculum was eye-glazingly narrow, a mix of basic math, Roman writers, and more Roman writers. Livy, Horace, Tacitus, and on and on.
As a 1990 grad, I read my classics. But I was allowed to write papers about the umlaut over the vowels in heavy metal bands and the sexual politics of the Smurfs (why only one female, and why was gender her defining attribute?). And most proudly, I wrote about the ritual of the bong hit in twentieth-century colleges. Naturally, for that one, I had to do some serious participant observation, as all good anthropologists do.
This type of study is easy to mock. E. D. Hirsch Jr. made a career of railing against it. And newspapers have written hundreds of articles about the absurdity of college courses that dissect Keanu Reeves’s oeuvre. Some of the ridicule is probably deserved. While I was at Brown, there was an actual course called “John Locke, the Rape of the Lock and Matlock.”
Even Ira Magaziner, creator of the New Curriculum, talks about the danger of trivializing college, quoting a critic who says it leads to “the belief that all knowledge is so good, that all parts of it are equally good.”
But the general idea is true: All of life is a petri dish. We should bring a critical eye to everything, including bong hits.
2. It Helped Erode My Provincialism
I got the word provincialism from Magaziner’s famous 1968 report on the New Curriculum (which I had never read before I was asked to write for this book). He argued that battling provincialism—our own slender view of the world—is one of the primary goals of a Brown education. It’s a good point. We need to know that other cultures solve problems differently. There’s more to this world than the prefix and suffix.
And just as important, we need to be reminded that our own rituals and rules would make other cultures scratch their heads (or whatever their gesture for confusion might be). What would they make of the Super Bowl halftime show? Or even odder, the Brown marching band?
Of course, this can be taken too far. It can slide into total moral relativism. It can lead naïve college students (like I once was) to believe that all ethical systems are equally valid—a notion that causes fear and loathing from pastors, Republicans, and parents. It can cause dorm room discussions like How can we judge the Taliban? Aren’t they just operating by their own culture’s rules?
At Brown, I became too smitten with moral relativism. In the years since, I’ve gotten older and either wiser or more closed-minded, take your pick. I’m no longer absolutist when it comes to relativism, but some remnants remain.
3. There Are Patterns Among the Chaos
During his lecture, my linguistics teacher explained that the fucking infix cannot be inserted randomly. You can’t say incredi-fucking-ble. You can’t say Al-fucking-abama.
You have to obey the unconscious infix rules. (My attempt to articulate those rules: the fucking must come immediately after the prefix, but if there’s no prefix, then before the first stressed syllable.)
That’s one of education’s most important jobs: shining a light on the mental rules of which we are barely conscious. The infix rule may not have a huge real-world impact. But what about the unconscious bias that attractive people are morally superior? Or our tendency to interpret neutral data
as supporting our preconceptions?
Well, that’s my argument. As with many of the essays I wrote at Brown, I’m not sure I’ve totally proved my point. But I had a fanfucking-tastic time trying.
The Entropy and the Ecstasy
MARY CAPONEGRO
To find a name for this function [Rudolph] Clausius said: I prefer going to the ancient languages for the names of important scientific qualities, so that they may mean the same thing in all living tongues. I propose, accordingly, to call S the entropy of a body, after the Greek word “transformation.”
—Leon Cooper, An Introduction to the Meaning and Structure of Physics
Brown is such a part of me that any attempt to articulate its essence feels as tautological as using a word to define that word. The institution thoroughly shaped my life, as for nearly a decade I had the privilege of both being educated and becoming an educator there. The university, and by extension Providence, was one of those places that in retrospect one realizes was the place to be—both superficially, in the trendy sense, and profoundly, in the existential sense: to be and to become, i.e., to be transformed—and I am inclined to concur with Roger Williams, christener of Providence, in associating the city with the divine.
The shadows of benevolence eventually crept up on civic life, and in the eighties, Providence politics were always juicy with scandal. I arrived toward the end of Buddy Cianci’s first mayoral stint (terminating with that infamous assault charge) and left shortly before his second (punctuated by the four-year jail sentence for racketeering). Nationally these were of course the Reagan years, and down from College Hill, some graduate students joined Providence citizens to demonstrate outside city hall in Kennedy Plaza, chanting, “No more fights, no more war / US out of El Salvador,” and on occasion we boarded a bus to Washington to do so on a larger scale. Still in high school as the Vietnam War wound down, I experienced this picketing as my first concrete political gesture—beyond voting for the first time that prior year. At an institution that formalized the sponsorship of international dissident writers, it was natural to get at least a little bit involved.
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