A Whole

You have to know someone really well to describe them. Everything else is lists. You only see the shape of a hand, hairs growing alone, the tiny point of an ear, you only see these things on a person you care for. You can only see these things with love. And moreover, it is only with love that you can put them together, only love that can make a whole from the parts, only love that can build a person from a pinky, a hair, an ear.

The Creepiest, Most Chill-Inducing Paragraph Ever

Recently I've been obsessing about this paragraph; I think it's completely brilliant. I've read this thing ten or fifteen times, and I still get chills:

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone. -- the first paragraph of The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (1959)

I think the chills usually come at "not sane" and "walked alone." The idea of a house being insane is....I am unable to pick an adjective. There's just something about it that is deeply unsettling, yet makes perfect sense. We all feel the energy of a place, whether it's good, bad, calming, exciting, or frightening. If places have these various feelings about them, they seem to be almost alive. I think what Shirley Jackson has done in her novel (which is amazing and you should read it if you haven't yet done so) is take that energy that a place can have and treat it as a living entity, one that is never seen but is constantly felt.

Anyway, that's my mini literary analysis. I've taken a break from finishing a gigantic essay for my literature course (not, unfortunately, on The Haunting of Hill House) and I was apparently unable to turn it off.

Ropes

If you reach the end of your rope, how do you keep climbing? Are you forced to stop? Or do you ask someone above you to throw down a new one?

Who is stealing my free will? Will they return it, please?

So, according to science, we have no free will. According to religion (sometimes) (sort of) we do. Do I have to pick a team? Can I pick neither?

See Radio Lab "Beyond Time" episode. Briefly, someone did an experiment wherein they asked people to wiggle their finger whenever they chose, and monitored their brian activity. They looked at two things: the decision (on the higher thought processes) to wiggle the finger, and the 'getting ready' or preparation to wiggle. Instead of seeing what you'd expect: first the decision, then the preparation, they saw the opposite: first the preparation, then the "decision." And they were like a second apart. So the people were preparing to wiggle, and THEN rationalizing it. And of course, the question becomes, WHO made the actual decision to wiggle the finger. Some part of the brain? God? Random forces of the universe? This freaks me out a little. Oh, and yeah, this wasn't so brief....

The Most Romantic Bit of Neuroscience

This weekend I've been doing too much origami and listening to Radio Lab, a wonderful radio show which has a free podcast on iTunes. The show is similar to This American Life: they start with a theme and try to come at it from multiple angles with different stories, except where This American Life is people-focused, Radio Lab is very thought-focused. The shows are more or less science-related, but they almost always take the science further, into the realm of philosophy. Shows I've listened to so far include “Sleep,” “Stress,” “Time,” “Zoos,” “Placebo,” “Who Am I?”(this was about the riddle of the self), and “Memory and Forgetting.”

(This way of dealing with a question or a theme, attacking it from many very different angles and points of view, it really strikes a chord in my brain. It just makes so much more sense to my way of thinking than formal arguments or theses or really any kind of certain conclusion. More on this later, and the subject of over-analysis, if I ever finish my conference paper.)

The last one contained the story of a man with such an extreme case of amnesia that he literally can't remember anything for more than a few moments. He will insist that he “has never seen anyone here,” and that he has not been conscious until this moment. But from moment to moment he can remember his feelings for his wife. He doesn't always even remember her name, but he always remembers her, always wants her to be with him. He'll call her and beg her to come visit him, and then call again fifteen minutes later, with no memory of the first call, and again an hour later, and she will listen to message after message when she arrives home from visiting him that day. This whole story was heartbreaking and beautiful. There's something else: the only things he remembers at all are his wife...and his music. He directed a famous choir before this happened to him (I believe he had an aneurism). He remembers how to read music and how to sing, and how to conduct his choir. Whether it is the structure or the rhythm or the emotion, whatever it is, he can remember music. He can be aware for an entire piece, and be completely, totally himself.

There is an idea in neuroscience (and this is the most romantic thing I've heard in a long time) that there is a deeper, older part of our brain where we store the most important memories. Our memories of pain, and love, and maybe (this is all me), our memories of our music. Our own particular art. Those things that come to us without our conscious minds, that become as natural as breathing. And I have to wonder if this is where our deepest self resides, where the fundamental things that make up each of us are kept safe.

Yes, I'm feeling a bit romantic today. So sue me.

On an unrelated note:

It's hot and humid here, still, at three-thirty a.m. and a thunderstorm has come and gone. A couple hours ago there were dozens of people outside playing slip-and-slide on the lawn in the rain. They were wearing bathing-suits and boxers and underwear and bras, and, in the case of one guy I nearly ran into in my hallway, a leotard. I was only out there briefly before security broke it up, but there was something elementally beautiful about all the rain-soaked, grass-covered college students. I really dislike heat (although I love thunderstorms) but it does sometimes seem to bring people together in simple, joyful ways.

All this is to say that I didn't get much homework done this weekend.

Check out Radio Lab here: http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/

or go to iTunes and search for "Radio Lab" podcast. I also whole-heartedly recommend the podcasts of "This American Life" and "The Moth" (this one is true stories told by the people they happened to, without notes, in front of an audience).

PS I am in no way a scientist. I merely hear things and go off on my own crazy tangents.

Writer's block should have a much nastier name. Something more like malaria, epilepsy, typhoid, chlamydia. Seriously, it sucks.

PS Today, I learned how to spell chlamydia. So has my day so far been completely wasted?

He who laughs, lasts.

--Mary Poole

It's on the wall.