What did you see?
One of the flash cards was a picture of a toy circus. A one-ring circus with a circus master in top hat and jodhpurs in the center and ladies in tutus standing on backs of ponies galloping in a circle around the ring and overhead a man in tights hanging upside down from a trapeze and a woman in matching tights suspended from his hands. That practically took the pen off the scroll. It actually made me uneasy that the joys of a child were still evocative.
And then the despair of my chosen field. You’ve got to be brave when you do science. I reacted badly to the publication of an experiment demonstrating that the brain can come to a decision seconds before we’re conscious of it.
That is unsettling. And you disagree?
It would be easy to disagree. Say “Wait a minute. Is this duplicable? Will it stand?” But my own brain took over and declared its solidarity with the experiment’s results. There will be more sophisticated experiments and it will be established that free will is an illusion.
But surely—
One morning I found myself abandoning my lecture and blurting out something I had not planned to say—something like a preamble to a course in cognitive science that I had not yet devised.… [thinking]
What did you say?
What?
Something you blurted out to the class.
I asked this question: How can I think about my brain when it’s my brain doing the thinking? So is this brain pretending to be me thinking about it? I can’t trust anyone these days, least of all myself. I am a mysteriously generated consciousness, and no comfort to me that it’s one of billions. That’s what I said to them and then picked up my books and walked out of the room.
Hmmm.
What do you mean “Hmmm”? You remember why the great Heinrich von Kleist committed suicide? He’d read Kant, who said we could never know reality. He should have come out west, Heinrich. Would have saved his life. No despair of intellect possible in these parts. Something about the mountains and the sky. Something about the football team.
So you were an anomaly with your intellectual crisis.
Only one student showed up for the next class and that was Briony. We went to the student union and had coffee. She was concerned, looked me over with a compassionate frown. As I see her now I realize that she never fussed with herself the way young women do, running their hands through their hair, tieing it back if it’s loose, letting it loose if it’s tied, all those small gestures of self-reflection. Briony did nothing of that sort, she sat still, calmly present in the moment with no undercurrent of self-regard. This was early enough in the semester for students to drop out of one class and switch to another and she knew that could mean trouble for me. Of course the dean would get on my back but I couldn’t have cared less with this glorious creature before me. I basked in her sympathy. I wore a mournful expression. She extended her hand across the table as if to console me. She did not want to show me that she found me strange. She was the sort of person who’d feel obliged to engage a leper in conversation.
What was her background?
Her background? The Wasatch mountains.
No, I mean—
You want to know where she was from, this extraordinary child, who her parents were, the family that produced her?
Yes.
Why does that matter? They don’t tell you in movies where people grew up unless the movies are about people growing up. They never tell you where your heroes come from, to whom they were related, you just find them as they are, in the present moment. You’re called to worry about them as they live on the screen and all you know about them is the time they’re there. No history, no past, just them.
Is this a movie?
This is America. Having discovered each other we went hiking in the mountains, Briony and I. You could walk right up the street and find yourself at the foot of a mountain trail. The Wasatch let you know they were always there—even when your back was turned, even as you drove away from them, you sensed them. They changed constantly according to the light they negotiated but also the temperature, their coloration like their change of mood, but they were constant presences, a family of gods, low mountains jagged in the peaks, this one taller, that one shorter, but all connected, an alliance of venerable powers, trail-scarred, implacable with snow that could kill, or carelessly alive with spring foliage in all the pale shades of green or blue evergreen, but still with the yellow-brown remnants of the previous year. And then their tilt, their rising backward to their apex in the sky as if in aversion to something we supplicants had done to displease them, for when you lived in that town awhile you knew those mountains ruled, they walled you in, you were their people. Briony in her white shorts with her belted water bottle and baseball cap with the blond hair ponytailed through the hole in back, and her hiking boots and ankle socks and firm rounded mulping calves—Briony climbed ahead of me, and she was vigorous, and in my need to keep up—at moments I worried that she was trying to get away from me—I could not luxuriate in contemplation of her legs and the glory of her tight white shorts as she hoisted herself over rocks, sometimes touching the ground for support, or gripping an outcrop, and so climbing higher and higher, the path more like a series of cryptic Tibetan steps into a Buddhist acceptance of the way things really were when you didn’t talk about them.
Well, I was only asking.
You lack empathy, you don’t know when to stop asking me these things. You can’t imagine what it was like having her but never forgetting for a moment my killing ineptitude. That I would be at my most dangerous when blissfully happy. How I had to concentrate moment by moment, examine my actions, everything I did, living attentively with the minutiae, watching myself every waking minute, attending carefully, ritualistically, to everything I did so as not to become Andrew the Pretender. I can’t talk to you anymore, it is too painful. You don’t get it. Just speaking her name destroys me. I can no longer hear her voice.
You, with the ear for voices?
I can still summon the voices of my long-dead mother and father. I can hear their voices quite well if only for a fading moment. What I hear is their moral nature. My mother’s practicality. My father’s sad evasiveness. Their moral nature is in the remembered voices of the dead. It is what is left of the dead that is still them, that fragment of the voice that renders a moral nature though the rest of the person is gone.
But her voice, Briony’s voice, is gone, you say? You don’t hear it? Maybe that’s why for my part I can’t seem to get a fix on her. I get your voice, your feeling what you think and feel about her. It’s as if it’s in the way, your voice. What was she like, except for her athleticism? And she was a math major? They go together, perhaps, the math, the gymnastics. Doing geometry on the parallel bars.
Who said she was a math major? How did you know that?
Didn’t you say—?
Are you CIA?
Really, Andrew.
I don’t know why I talk to you.
Martha I feel as if I know from your description of the way she acted. But Briony doesn’t come through to me.
She was a younger person, Briony, still becoming herself. Innocently smart. Unaffected. She didn’t act as if she felt especially pretty. She was intensely physical, as grown children are. When she liked something it was passionately. She had favorite books, favorite bands. She worked at her studies. She could write a grammatical sentence—you know how rare that is in an undergraduate? She believed in her life, her future.
I see.
Martha was being, Briony was becoming. What kind of a shrink are you who has to be told this? You have the heartlessness of someone living vicariously. That’s what you’re doing, isn’t it, living vicariously through me. I am grist for your mill. Jesus! Don’t you have a life of your own?
Not really.
I’m not clear on the time here. When did you and Briony marry?
We never married.
She was your wife.
Of course she was my wife, but
we never married. We never got around to it. We never got past the intense feeling for each other that you have to get past in order to legally marry. In our minds we were married. We didn’t need anyone else to tell us we were. We were Andy and Bri. One day I went to the Saturday football game, and there she was, of course, atop the cheerleader pyramid, and doing a swan dive into all their arms at the end of the cheer.
I should have known …
Meanwhile there he was, the lout, padded and helmeted, leading his team out of the huddle, glancing disdainfully at the defenders, running off his plays with calm authority and moving his team efficiently down the field. I watched as he threw the football forty yards in the air, a perfect spiral right into the arms of his receiver. Touchdown. Twenty thousand people leapt to their feet, and roared, the college band struck up a victory march, some idiot in an ape costume danced a jig in front of the stands, and I realized I had stepped into a powerful tribal culture here, and if I was going to extract her from it I had some thinking to do.
I seem to recall your saying the lout didn’t have a chance once you entered the picture.
Well, after all, I was Andrew, he of the dark mournful eyes. Even as I lectured provocatively, they shone with a glistening cry for help. To Briony this was personhood on display. The vulnerability of the teacher at the lectern was a new classroom experience for her. She stared at me, she was attentive. [thinking] I’d known since high school that women were attracted to me. My first girlfriend was a zoology nerd at the Bronx High School of Science. She said I had the eyes of a langur. After school we went to her apartment, where her parents weren’t home, and we made out.
Because of your languorous eyes.
Well, that and the mop of curly hair, though by now it has lost its color. I have always been good-looking in a kind of weak-jawed way. And I had attitude. I was one of those wise-ass high school kids, loose-limbed and scornful of everything. The fact is, Doc, that I’ve had a lot of success with women. But this with Briony was different. Overwhelming. An abrupt neural resetting wherein I found myself with an immense capacity for love. Much later, when we were living together—actually, we had gone out for a celebratory dinner—we had just learned that she was pregnant—Briony admitted to a revolutionary experience of her own: Andy, she said, I realized one day in class that I’d been waiting for you. And there you were. There was such recognition. It was as if this was only the latest of our lives, she said.
But at this point, here at the peak of the Wasatches, I only knew how I felt. It wouldn’t do to be careless. I needed to know more before making my move. More of what, I didn’t know. [thinking]
What?
Emil Jannings.
What?
I didn’t want to be Emil Jannings in The Blue Angel. You remember that movie? The professor who falls in love with this cabaret singer Marlene Dietrich and ends up as a clown in her sleazy act, crowing “Cock-a-doodle-doo!” He gives up everything to marry her and of course she screws around. His life is ruined, job, dignity, it’s all gone. He staggers back to his empty classroom one night and dies at his desk. You mean you never saw that?
No.
At least he had his desk.
Of course Briony could not be compared to a decadent Weimar cabaret singer. On the other hand I knew I could accomplish whatever it took to destroy myself. I could imagine her staring at me in a kind of end-of-it-all sorrow as I did the Far West equivalent of a cock-a-doodle-doo dive off the mountaintop. As we sat to catch our, or rather my, breath, and drank our bottled water, I said to her, Briony, not many people could have persuaded me to climb up here.
But, Professor, it’s good and aren’t you glad you did? Don’t you feel happy? Because a climb like this gets the good brain hormones going.
I said: Please don’t call me Professor, call me Andrew. That’s what the other students call me, after all.
She smiled. OK, I will, then. Andrew. I don’t know what to make of you, Pro— I mean Andrew. I’ve never met anyone like you before.
Howso, I said.
I don’t know. I’m not bored with you. No, that isn’t the word, I’m not bored in my life, I’ve got too much to do to be bored—
That was true, she had her classes, her gymnastics, her cheerleading, she waited table in the faculty dining room and on weekends she put in hours at a local old people’s home.
—but your moodiness, she said, I don’t know, that’s so unusual, a powerful thing, almost like your way of life. And it’s such a personal way to be up in front of a class. It almost seems like a strength, like someone who has an affliction and is brave about it. When it’s just, I don’t know, a worldview that’s very solemn.
And I said: Briony, I think if we carry this as far as I’d like to, I will end up depressing you into marrying me.
Oh, how she laughed! And I with her. At that moment we were no longer teacher and student. She must have realized this because she grew quiet, not looking at me. She made a ceremonious thing of unscrewing her water bottle and holding it to her lips. I detected the faintest flush on her throat. [thinking]
Yes? You were saying?
No, I was just thinking. Suppose there was a computer network more powerful than anything we could imagine.
What’s this?
I remember trying this idea out on her. And never mind a network, just this one awesome computer, say. And because it was what it was, suppose it had the capacity to record and store the acts and thoughts and feelings of every living person on earth once around per millisecond of time. I mean, as if all of existence was data for this computer—as if it was a storehouse of all the deeds ever done, the thoughts ever thought, the feelings ever felt. And since the human brain contains memories, this computer would record these as well, and so be going back in time through the past even as it went forward with the present.
That is a tall order, even for a computer.
Not for this baby. Consider the possibility that there are things you don’t know, Doc.
I consider that every day.
I’ll tell you one thing you may not know: The genome of every human cell has memory. You know what that means? As evolved beings we have in our genes memories of the far past, of long-ago generations, memories of experiences not our own. This is not pie-in-the-sky stuff, a neuroscientist will tell you the same thing. And all we need is the right code to extract what the cell knows, what it remembers.
Sounds poetic.
I’m talking science here, I’m telling you my computer to end all computers that sucks up the mental and physical activities of every living thing—I mean, let’s throw in the animals too—necessarily then can go back in time and move into the past as readily as it moves along with the present. Do you give me that?
OK, Andrew.
So what that means, what that means …
Yes?
… that at least on the microgenetic level couldn’t there be the possibility of recomposing a whole person from these bits and pieces and genomic memories of lives past?
You don’t mean cloning.
No, dammit, I don’t mean cloning. We’re talking about how this computer could crack the code of every cell of every human brain and reconstitute the dead from their experiences. Isn’t that something like reincarnation? Maybe it wouldn’t be perfect, you couldn’t always see her, maybe if you reached out she would be just a shade of herself, but she would be a presence, and the love would be there.
Who are we speaking of now?
What possessed me to tell Briony all this? If this computer could come up with the code to read the makeup of our cells, in birth, in death, in the ashes of our cremation, in the rot of our coffins, and of course it could because of what it was, then we could recover our lost babies, our lost lovers, our lost selves, bring them back from the dead, reunite in a kind of heaven on earth. Do you see that?
Well, maybe on a speculative level …
But if you accept the premise the logic is sound, will you give me that?
; I give you that.
But you still don’t know what this computer is, do you? Oh, Doc, if there was such a computer, it could do anything, finally. I mean, call it by its rightful name. And I could have my baby with Martha brought back. And I could have my Briony, and we would bring our baby home and we would be a family.
YOU ASKED ME to keep a diary or daybook. Writing is like talking to yourself, which I have been doing with you all along anyway, Doc. So what’s the difference. I’m writing from Down East: This morning it’s like the winter fog has frozen. To walk the fields is to feel yourself breasting the air, leaving behind you the sound of tinkling ice and a tubular indication of your form. But I need places like this. I am safe here. I mean, for all we know I put you in danger every time I walk into your office.
And now, later, the wind has come up and blows snow against my window and I must turn on the light. I have nothing to read here but the cabin owner’s complete works of Mark Twain, MT embossed on the cracked binding. How MT dealt with life was to make a point of explaining children to adults, and adults to children. Isn’t that so? Or to write of his neighbors with amused compassion. He went to ridiculous church for the sake of his wife. Invested in an unworkable Linotype machine. Hobnobbed with the Brahmins of Boston. Slyly skewered the self-satisfied gentlemen enjoying his after-dinner speeches. Noted the anointed barbarity of kings. But always, always, it was to wrap himself in society. To keep himself snugly within what Searle, a guy whose work I teach, calls “the construction of social reality.”
And just now, loud as a clap of thunder, a poor dumb gull riding the winds has bashed his head against the windowpane. I exchange looks with his glazed eye as he slides a smeared red funnel down the snow on my window.
Another day: I see through the fog the humped green heron, out there on the piling. All huddled into himself, a gloom bird, one of us.
Now, later, the sky turned cold and clear, the wind cuffing the seawater, and I imagine a warm swamp somewhere filled with the jumping frogs of Calaveras County. I mean, you read him and he does put one over. But for me the intemperate ghost of MT rises from his folksy childhood and rages at the imperial monster he has helped create.
Andrew's Brain Page 3