At this point I was convinced he wanted something from me, but I looked up from my book, and into his eyes for the first time, and we began to talk. It went very nearly like this.

I said, “Well, it’s actually not my normal fare. I mean, it’s good writing, but the story—”
“What’s your normal stuff, then? What you usually read.”
“Science fiction. Lots and lots of science fiction.”
“Oh yeah? What’s that? Like, what kind of books? Which ones?”
“Well, have you ever read the Dune series, by Frank Herbert?”
“I’m not sure. Yeah, I think so. I think I did.” (Here I could not quell my smile.)
“Check it out. I guarantee it’ll treat you well.”

We were above ground by this point, and discovered to our mutual pleasure that we were serendipitously walking in the same direction. (West on Girard Ave from Broad St., for those interested.) Something else was said, and I asked him where he went to school. He lifted up his jacket, which he wore unzipped, and showed me the emblem on his shirt.

“HOPE. It’s a charter school.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard of it.”
“Man, it sucks there. It’s a terrible school. I got all As and Bs, but it’s not hard. I’m in the highest grade—well, not the highest grade—I’m in ten—but they just go over the same stuff all the time. For everybody else, it’s like they don’t get it or something. Maybe it’s because most of them smoke weed.”

Yes, there’s likely an association there, I said. I told him to stick to his studies. I started in talking about work—I’m that person, all of a sudden—and gave him some stories about adults I know who have spent too much time with drugs and regretted it, and are only now going back to get a GED, at 35 or 45. That seemed to validate his perspective, and he smiled at me.

I said, “Don’t ever stop learning. When I was little, I read a lot. My mom worked a lot when I was little, so I would read. She’d come home, pretty tired, of course, and I’d ask her about some words. I wanted to know what they meant. Every time, she told me the same thing: ‘Look it up!’ Every time!”
“She wouldn’t tell you? Really?”
“Yeah. But she was right, because now I feel like the only mistake I haven’t made is being sure that everything—that thing over there, or this, whatever—is learnable. I can learn that. I can learn this. You know?”
“Yeah. Sometimes, like if I’m at the library or something, I like to sit there and just think. I don’t always read, sometimes I just listen to music and think.”
“It seems to me that very many people are terrified of situations where all they can do is think. Sometimes people structure their life in activities so that they don’t have to think, and when they’re confronted with a situation where thinking is all they can do, they get scared. No one personality flaw hinders a person more than this, but everybody has it! It’s just a matter of when you shed it. I don’t know, but it seems to me like maybe you shed it a while ago.”

It was around this time that we’d reached an intersection where he needed to turn, and he asked for my “card.” I laughed and said that I had none, but that I’d happily share my email address with him. I did so, and he thanked me. He said he knew someone with my name who went to another high school in Philadelphia. I said I thought that was cool.

“Well, you brought some magic into that little life,” said Albert, as the next child was hurried away.
It’s the expression on their little faces I like, said [Death].
“You mean sort of fear and awe and not knowing whether to laugh or cry or wet their pants?”
Yes. Now that is what I call belief.

Indeed!

The backstory for this excerpt is that a Marxist revolution (called in this book an “Odonian” revolution) led to the forced exile of the revolutionaries by the dominant political forces of the planet. After the establishment of the colony on the moon, all contact with the planet was severed, and no communication passed between the two civilizations for over a hundred years. In this excerpt, the protagonist Shevek discusses how good can come of their suffering in exile.

(Please note that the typo “principal” for “principle” is not an error in my transcription, but rather preserved from my edition of the book.)

“Suffering is a misunderstanding,” Shevek said, leaning forward, his eyes wide and light. He was still lanky, with big hands, protruding ears, and angular joints, but in the perfect health and strength of early manhood he was very beautiful. His dun-colored hair, like the others’, was fine and straight, worn at its full length and kept off the forehead with a band. Only one of them wore her hair differently, a girl with high cheekbones and a flat nose; she had cut her dark hair to a shiny cap all round. She was watching Shevek with a steady, serious gaze. Her lips were greasy from eating fried cakes, and there was a crumb on her chin.

“It exists,” Shevek said, spreading out his hands. “It’s real. I can call it a misunderstanding, but I can’t pretend that it doesn’t exist, or will ever cease to exist. Suffering is the condition on which we live. And when it comes, you know it. You know it as the truth. Of course it’s right to cure diseases, to prevent hunger and injustice, as the social organism does. But no society can change the nature of existence. We can’t prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. A society can only relieve social suffering, unnecessary suffering. The rest remains. The root, the reality. All of us here are going to know grief; if we live fifty years, we’ll have known pain for fifty years. And in the end we’ll die. That’s the condition we’re born on. I’m afraid of life! There are times I—I am very frightened. Any happiness seems trivial. And yet, I wonder if it isn’t all a misunderstanding—this grasping after happiness, this fear of pain. . . . If instead of fearing it and running from it, one could. . . get through it, go beyond it. There is something beyond it. It’s the self that suffers, and there’s a place where the self—ceases. I don’t know how to say it. But I believe that the reality—the truth that I recognize in suffering as I don’t in comfort and happiness—that the reality of pain is not pain. If you can get through it. If you can endure it all the way.”

“The reality of our life is in love, in solidarity,” said a tall, soft-eyed girl. “Love is the true condition of human life.”

Bedap shook his head. “No. Shev’s right,” he said. “Love’s just one of the ways through, and it can go wrong, and miss. Pain never misses. But therefore we don’t have much choice about enduring it! We will, whether we want to or not.”

The girl with short hair shook her head vehemently. “But we won’t! One in a hundred, one in a thousand, goes all the way, all the way through. The rest of us keep pretending we’re happy, or else just go numb. We suffer, but not enough. And so we suffer for nothing.”

“What are we supposed to do,” said Tirin, “go hit our heads with hammers for an hour every day to make sure we suffer enough?”

“You’re making a cult of pain,” another said. “An Odonian’s goal is positive, not negative. Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it’s merely destructive.”

“What motivated Odo but an exceptional sensitivity to suffering—her own and others’?” Bedap retorted.

“But the whole principal of mutual aid is designed to prevent suffering!”

Shevek was sitting on the table, his long legs dangling, his face intense and quiet. “Have you ever seen anybody die?” he asked the others. Most of them had, in a domicile or on volunteer duty. All but one had helped at one time or another to bury the dead.

“There was a man when I was in camp in Southeast. It was the first time I saw anything like this. There was some defect in the aircar engine, it crashed lifting off and caught fire. They got him out burned all over. He lived about two hours. He couldn’t have been saved; there was no reason for him to live that long, no justification for those two hours. We were waiting for them to fly in anesthetics from the coast. I stayed with him along with a couple of girls. We’d been there loading the plane. There wasn’t a doctor. You couldn’t do anything for him, except just stay there, be with him. He was in shock but mostly conscious. He was in terrible pain, mostly from his hands. I don’t think he knew the rest of his body was all charred, he felt it mostly in his hands. You couldn’t touch him to comfort him, the skin and flesh would come away at your touch, and he’d scream. You couldn’t do anything for him. There was no aid to give. Maybe he knew we were there, I don’t know. It didn’t do him any good. You couldn’t do anything for him. Then I saw . . . you see . . . I saw that you can’t do anything for anybody. We can’t save each other. Or ourselves.”

“What have you left, then? Isolation and despair! You’re denying brotherhood, Shevek!” the tall girl cried.

“No—no, I’m not. I’m trying to say what I think brotherhood really is. It begins—it begins in shared pain.”

“Then where does it end?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know yet.”

It’s difficult to begin talking about what this passage means to me. I believe this is enough for now.

Kéri examined a gene involved in brain development called neuregulin 1, which previous studies have linked to a slightly increased risk of schizophrenia. Moreover, a single DNA letter mutation that affects how much of the neuregulin 1 protein is made in the brain has been linked to psychosis, poor memory and sensitivity to criticism.

[...]

People with two copies of the neuregulin 1 mutation – about 12 per cent of the study participants – tended to score notably higher on these measures of creativity, compared with other volunteers with one or no copy of the mutation. Those with one copy were also judged to be more creative, on average, than volunteers without the mutation.

Now, this is obviously a very new study, and as such shouldn’t be taken to confirm or refute anything yet. But its findings are so in line with what I’ve naively believed for years that I can’t help but jump on board.

Lately I’ve been reading a gross amount of Terry Pratchett books, as a feel-good kind of escape from the jobhunt, as a retreat from academic reading, and as a study in how to structure a novel. If you’ve ever read a Terry Pratchett book, then you probably see my point already. For those who haven’t, his books are so disjointed, with artful hairpin turns to crack a joke, and so off-the-wall with the subject matter, that the only reasonable reaction for a reader to have is: “This man’s brain is not right.” It simply must be broken somehow.

I believe that.

If you’re a Terry Pratchett fan, it also won’t come as news to you that he was recently diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. From his speech to the Alzheimer’s Research Trust Conference:

I’d like a chance to die like my father did—of cancer, at 86. Remember, I’m speaking as a man with Alzheimer’s, which strips away your living self a bit at a time. Before he went to spend his last two weeks in a hospice he was bustling around the house, fixing things. He talked to us right up to the last few days, knowing who we were and who he was. Right now, I envy him.

It’s a very moving speech, and I recommend reading it in full. But I find this tragic news intriguing because to me it confirms what I’ve always wondered about the man: that his brain operates fundamentally so differently that it could be called pathological.

Now, although I have no scientific background whatsoever, I do have Google Fu, and so I should say that it appears that at present the academic consensus is that there is no link in cause between schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s. From one such paper (available in full!):

This study provides evidence that elderly patients with schizophrenia showing Alzheimer’s disease neuropathology in the brain have increased levels of Aß0. Thus, cognitive impairment in these patients could be related to the dementia-associated amyloid ß-peptide pathogenicity in the brain. However, the larger group of elderly patients with schizophrenia, who were comparably demented but did not evidence Alzheimer’s-related histopathology, did not show significantly elevated levels of amyloid ß-peptide. Analysis of the total brain amyloid ß-peptide content in the present patient cohort showed that the occurrence of cognitive decline in the course of schizophrenia is distinct from the neuropathologic or molecular processes linked to amyloid ß-peptide in Alzheimer’s disease.

From what I’ve read, that basically means that schizophrenia is not considered to be related to Alzheimer’s in terms of cognitive impairment because different factors seem to be causing the impairment in each disease. It helps to read the Wikipedia entry on amyloid ß, which explains:

Amyloid beta (Aβ or Abeta) is a peptide of 39–43 amino acids that appear to be the main constituent of amyloid plaques in the brains of Alzheimer’s disease patients. Similar plaques appear in some variants of Lewy body dementia and in inclusion body myositis, a muscle disease. Aβ also forms aggregates coating cerebral blood vessels in cerebral amyloid angiopathy. These plaques are composed of a tangle of regularly ordered fibrillar aggregates called amyloid fibers, a protein fold shared by other peptides such as prions associated with protein misfolding diseases. Research on laboratory rats suggest that the two-molecule, soluble form of the peptide is a causative agent in the development of Alzheimer’s and that the two-molecule form is the smallest synaptotoxic species of soluble amyloid beta oligomer.

That’s about all I know so far, and I wanted to share. I realize like it might sound like I crudely accept the trade-off of having brilliant people suffer, as long as they keep making pretty things for me to passively enjoy. I don’t want to sign off on anyone else’s pain, but I would like to encourage a mindset of critically assessing what is called bad and what good, at least when it comes to brain function.

I don’t know how all this stuff works, but I guess that’s my point. I don’t even know if I want to understand it one day. At this point I feel I’d be better off just closing my eyes and gritting my teeth when I’m drawing the straw of reincarnation—or of aging, if there’s any difference.

In the time leading up to my recent graduation, I’ve been doing landscaping work on weekends in order to pay the bills. I took a few weekends off to graduate, but I’ll be picking it back up this weekend to keep myself afloat economically, until something bigger and better comes along.

There is something unreal about this type of work. Work of the hands. Moving earth. Touching all different types of life and telling them where to go, where they can best be provided for. Although all of this stuff is unquestionably grounded in the real, it goes—for me—beyond the physical form and instills meaning. There is a reason that the gardener is, as a character, a literary device unto itself, and I’m just beginning to understand that.

A few weeks ago, while working in a housing development, mulching beds, an old man came outside to make some special requests. I obliged, and he came out again and tipped me $20. Later, he yet again came outside, and sat down to watch our crew working. He asked me how long I’ve been doing this type of work. I said, oh, I don’t know, that it’s seasonal work and altogether maybe ten years, just over the summers.

He told me a story about how, when he was “my age,” whatever he took that to be, he had a job working a combine harvester. Made a dollar an hour, I’m pretty sure he claimed. He loved that job. But eventually he found a better job in a glass factory, making three times the money, with benefits, too. He took it without hesitation. He worked the new job for three days, then quit and went back to manning the combine.

“So, I understand why you do the work you do.”

He seemed to think there was great wisdom in there somewhere.

I don’t yet pretend to appreciate the depth of what that man was trying to communicate to me, but flavor of the message is still with me. It’s as though I entered the room during the dying fall, and while I don’t have a prayer of knowing on what chord the piece ended, the overtones haunt me. In the old man’s words I heard the memory of still older words:

My words have ancient beginnings.

This was translated from 言有宗, literally “words have ancestors.” I’ve found myself over the past year or two becoming so open-minded and philosophically promiscuous that I think I’ve crossed back over into conservative territory. I seem to believe that at some remote point in history or prehistory, some person, whether mystic or shaman or prophet or scholar, did indeed figure out the nature of reality, or at least came damn close. The odds that I’ll encounter such an individual in my lifetime, face-to-face, are rather slim, though, so I’ve turned to exegesis.

And landscaping.

In spe (και ημέρες)

The title of this post comes from a short essay by Denise Levertov, in which she discusses the process of nurturing belief through the carrying out of good deeds. At least, that’s what I think it’s about—I only read the first page of it. It was enough to inspire me. I suppose you could say I believed it.

What speaks to me about this philosophy is that I genuinely believe that certain types of work will sustain and satisfy, and others will not. Others can even lead one far astray.

Where I’m at right now is the first time I’ve ever really had to decide how I can best interface with the world. Is it wrong that I don’t really care whether Verizon uses Twitter to provide better customer service? Is it illogical that I’d sooner work for a major marketing firm than canvass for Greenpeace? I have substantial misgivings about even the Peace Corps.

It seems the only option left open to me is graduate study. I want to be a professor. To put it quite simply, I can’t imagine any other job allowing me to keep up the ritual of reading and writing I’ve envisioned for myself as necessary for cultivating a healthy soul. So I’ll spend the next year or so piecing together journal articles with the sundry professors who will hire me a month at a time to edit their work.

Who knows? Maybe I’ll even get my hands dirty one of these days.

In the excerpt below, the character Shevek talks with his hosts on the planet Urras. The twin planets Urras and Anarres have had no communication with each other for more than a century, since the Urrasti insurrectionists were exiled to Anarres. Shevek is the first visitor from Anarres since the exile.

Shevek felt extremely uncomfortable. He got up and went over to the windows. “Your world is very beautiful,” he said. “I wish I could see more. While I must stay inside, will you give me books?”

“Of course, sir! What sort?”

“History, pictures, stories, anything. Maybe they should be books for children. You see, I know very little. We learn about Urras, but mostly about Odo’s times. Before that was eight and one half thousand years! And then since the Settlement of Anarres is a century and a half; since the last ship brought the last settlers—ignorance. We ignore you; you ignore us. You are our history. We are perhaps your future. I want to learn, not to ignore. It is the reason I came. We must know each other. We are not primitive men. Our morality is no longer tribal, it cannot be. Such ignorance is a wrong, from which wrong will arise. So I come to learn.”

That says rather succinctly what I was trying to convey about feeling culturally challenged.

Somehow, I have nothing more to say on the matter right now.

I had my first class of the day cancelled, so I lay out on the grass, in the sun, and examined the veins inside my eyelids. There was a breeze, and big tree near me, and irritating dance music blaring from the quad.

After an hour and a half of lolling, I convinced myself to get up and spend some time in the library.

The chemistry textbook I needed was checked out, so I read for pleasure. And it was grand.

Something about him must emanate this Mr. Potato Head plasticity. Chief of Surgery Burgress, dying a slow, half-century death in this city where reading span is sorely stretched by the instructions on microwave popcorn, instantly imagines that in Kraft he has found a kindred literate spirit, a simile son. Dr. Purgative, as Plummer rechristens him, keeps farming out these convoluted, espitemological novels by Kraft’s obscure, young contemporaries. Plow through and report on, over sherry this afternoon, a postmodernist mystery thicker than the Index Medicus where the butler kills the author and kidnaps the narration. Damn thing includes its own explanatory Cliffs Notes halfway through, although the gloss is even more opaque than the story. What the hell; it’s a break from booking for the next wave of board exams.

I smiled much while reading that. It’s extra juicy sweet because I first discovered Powers through a rather postmodernist trip of a book of his that actually references the plot of the one I’m reading now. Cute, no?

For the record, the first book by Powers I read was Galatea 2.2—read a thoroughly competent, and thus not overly flattering, review here. A small quote regarding Powers’s writing style:

Galatea 2.2 isn’t verbally dense in the way that, say, Gravity’s Rainbow or Ulysses are, requiring a semester of study just to wade through the mud-thick pool of rhetoric; still, it manages to be extraordinarily complex in the way that Powers spins his words into complicated webs. It’s not quite verbal masturbation, but a precise, intricate sort of narration that is both constantly self-referential and maddeningly allusory.

Word.