How High We Go in the Dark

 

At the top, I can feel my body wanting to shoot upward into the black sky, as if a puppet master is pulling on marionette strings. Two hands grasp my ankles as I nearly lose my balance. But even at this height, the force is not enough to fully lift me. I unwrap the infant from the jacket and hold them tight to my chest. Breathe in the smell of innocence and youth.

More a collection of related short stories than a traditional “novel”, How High We Go in the Dark explores many cool sci-fi ideas as people in our near future attempt to deal with climate change and the attendant release of a deadly virus as the Siberian permafrost begins to melt. The jumpy format, however, doesn’t really allow for the ideas — or the characters — to fully develop (to my satisfaction, anyway), and as author Sequoia Nagamatsu is Japanese-American, this is, at its core, an examination of the pressures (to succeed, to honour family, etc) within his culture that could have been set anywhere/anywhen. I was entertained throughout, eager to see how Nagamatsu would pull it all together, but this won’t stay with me.

Maksim assured me the quarantine was precautionary since the team had successfully reanimated viruses and bacteria in the melting permafrost. He said government officials watch too many movies. Standard protocol. No one at the outpost seemed sick or concerned.

The story begins in 2030 with an archaeologist arriving at his recently deceased daughter’s remote worksite, where he hopes to understand what compelling mysteries were keeping her from returning to her home and young daughter back in the States. As he reads her journals and examines the fascinating burial site of a Neanderthal girl (whose presence was uncovered by the melting permafrost and resulting sinkholes that are currently appearing in the Russian north), Cliff will feel closer to his daughter, even as the virus the dig has unleashed begins to take a devastating toll on people — and especially children — around the world.

“Have you heard of a euthanasia park?” he asked. It was early in the morning. I was pulling on my janitorial coveralls. I paused. Of course I had.

The next chapter begins with a young man (an aspiring comedian who needs to take odd jobs in this near future of empty nightclubs, unemployment, and widespread homelessness) who gets hired as a mascot at The City of Laughter: a theme park built on the site of a former penitentiary, where terminal children can go to have their last, best day. Each chapter that follows focuses on someone who works a new job in this new, bleak reality — a concierge at an elegy hotel (“We were just glorified bellhops for the mountains of Arctic plague victims awaiting cremation, for the families who wanted to curl up in a suite beside the corpses of their loved ones and heal”), a forensic pathologist studying the decay of plague victims on a “body farm”, an artist who lands a berth on a spaceship leaving Earth in search of a new planet — and death is so prevalent in this new world that the mortuary business has taken over the banks, with people paid in funerary tokens (“mortuary cryptocurrencies tied to ad-ridden phone apps”) and empty apartment towers are turned into high tech columbaria for the storage of millions of urns. And throughout, the main character in each story is a Japanese-American, who sounds the same no matter their sex or age, and who is somehow estranged from their family. Characters interweave throughout the stories — the artist who leaves on the spaceship is married to the archaeologist in the first story; one of her paintings hangs on the wall of the girlfriend of the elegy hotel concierge, etc — and there’s a mysterious something (hinted at in my opening quote) overhanging everything that threatens our basic understanding of reality.

Lieutenant Johansson, the navigation officer, was telling me there’s an invisible web that ties the stars and planets and galaxies together. We don’t know what it is or how it works, but it’s out there, all around us.

In the first story, the archaeologist remembers how his daughter had a “UFO stage” and dragged him to a Bigfoot convention and liked to watch Ancient Aliens, and here’s the thing, I like to watch Ancient Aliens, too. I like hearing the stories of ancient mythologies from around the world and watch as people explore those sites today; and when each episode inevitably leads to a wacky conclusion, I can turn my brain off and still feel like I had enjoyed the journey, if not followed all the way to the destination. And Nagamatsu gives us the same sort of format here: there’s a bunch of interesting stories that describe a new future world, and then the final chapter ties it all together, wackily. And you can either enjoy the journey and be wowed by the destination, or, like me, appreciate elements of the journey and turn your brain off as you reach the end. This wasn’t a waste of my time, but it wasn’t much more than a time-waster for me.

Death on the Nile

 

Silence fell on the three of them. They looked down to the shining black rocks on the Nile. There was something fantastic about them in the moonlight. They were like vast prehistoric monsters lying half out of the water. A little breeze came up suddenly and as suddenly died away. There was a feeling in the air of hush — of expectancy.

I read some of my Mom’s Agatha Christie mysteries when I was a teenager — and I can’t say for sure whether or not I had read Death on the Nile before — so perhaps that’s why the solution to this whodunnit wasn’t much of a surprise to me. What was a surprise: how sentimental the great Hercule Poirot is about love, even allowing a subplot’s jewel thief to go free without incident because he had found love aboard the Nile cruise, and it seems this sentimentality is what Kenneth Branagh most wanted to play upon in his recent (awful) adaptation of the book for film (I found it interesting to read that Dame Christie removed Poirot from this storyline when she adapted Death on the Nile for the stage — not wanting the character to overwhelm the mystery — and yet Branagh made the opposite decision). So, yes, there is a closed room mystery for the little Belgian detective to solve as death visits the Nile steamship The Karnak conveying a group of the idle rich through 1930s Egypt, and while, with an oddly Shakespearean twist, several suddenly engaged couples among former strangers will disembark at the end, Poirot himself seems more concerned with the fate of a killer’s soul than the actuality of a dead body. This is a satisfying enough mystery (albeit one that I may have read before and therefore unknowingly spoiled for myself), with what I found to be odd subtext, and all I can say for sure is: read the book for some light entertainment, skip the Branagh adaptation.

“What a lot of enemies you must make, Linnet.”
“Enemies?” Linnet looked surprised.
Joanna nodded and helped herself to a cigarette.
“Enemies, my sweet. You’re so devastatingly efficient. And you’re so frightfully good at doing the right thing.”
Linnet laughed.
“Why, I haven’t got an enemy in the world!”

Linnet Ridgeway has it all — beauty, poise, an immense fortune which the twenty-year-old is currently using to renovate an English country home she recently bought from the bankrupt Sir George Wode — and although she has received an offer of marriage from the very eligible Lord Windlesham, Linnet concludes that she would rather think of herself as the queen of Wode Hall than queen consort of Windlesham’s family seat: the even more impressive Charltonbury. Linnet is used to getting everything she wants, so when she is helplessly lovestruck while being introduced to an old friend’s fiance — the “big and square and incredibly simple and boyish and utterly adorable” Simon Doyle — it is perhaps unsurprising that in the next scene, Simon and Linnet Doyle are arriving at the Cataract Hotel in Assuan for the Egyptian leg of their honeymoon. What is surprising: Simon’s former fiance Jacqueline de Bellefort also checks into the hotel and we learn that she has been hounding the couple throughout their honeymoon, showing up wherever they go, hoping to spoil their happiness by her mere presence. And although the Doyles will attempt to give Jackie the slip by surreptitiously boarding The Karnak, she will appear onboard, along with a vacationing Poirot, his colleague Colonel Race (who is investigating an unrelated case), and an assortment of fellow travellers (a romance novelist and her daughter, a sick old woman with her nurse and a poor relative companion, a rich widow and her son, a doctor, an archaeologist, a Communist agitator, Linnet’s business agents, etc.), and death and romance and investigation ensues.

Despite being set in one of the world’s most intriguing locales, Death on the Nile could have happened anywhere (the group does visit Abu Simbel and a bit of its history is shared, and there is the usual racist-ish Christie denigration of the locals [in this case, children hawking goods and asking for “backshish”] which Poirot dismisses as a “human cluster of flies”, but there’s not much singularly Egyptian about the story). Its setting in time is interesting, however: Published in 1937, the Communist agitator’s views — declaring that all rich people should be eliminated with a bullet to the brain — were considered impolite for general conversation, but they hadn’t yet been challenged by the real world application of Stalin and Mao. Poirot correctly surmises that Linnet’s trustee was worried about handing over her inheritance early (due to her surprise marriage) in light of the recent Depression. And this was maybe the last era that saw the shabby-genteel following the sun on trust fund interest. Time was better captured than place for me here.

Once I went to an archaeological expedition — and I learnt something there. In the course of an excavation, when something comes up out of the ground, everything is cleared away very carefully all around it. You take away the loose earth, and you scrape here and there with a knife until finally your object is there, all alone, ready to be drawn and photographed with no extraneous matter confusing it. That is what I have been seeking to do — clear away extraneous matter so that we can see the truth — the naked shining truth.

So, with a fairly large cast of characters — many of whom had motive for murder — and various unrelated subplots, Poirot spends more time publicly clearing away what isn’t germane to his case than discussing the proof that he says he held from the beginning. (Branagh handles this by eliminating subplots, amalgamating characters, and adding in Poirot’s backstory to stretch his pared down mystery to a two-and-a-half-hour-long film; it’s a different story altogether.) And in the end, love will be shown to be the greatest force of all; another fact that Poirot knew all along. Liked, not loved, by me; but I find myself satisfied to have read (re-read?) this.

Yeah, this is me posing with the novel while on a Nile cruise:

Shy

 

He leaves the room dark. Shy’s room minus Shy. Eve 1965 carved in the beam. A wonky heart carved in the beam. 1891 carved in the beam. Shy 95, fresh and badly scraped in the beam, with a jagged S like a Z. Couldn’t even get that right.

For such a short work, I found Shy to be incredibly affecting. Centred in the brain of a disturbed and confused young man as he sneaks out of a reform school in the dead of night, the story and the sentences and the tone are all off-puttingly disturbed and confusing. We wincingly watch Shy struggling under the weight of a flint-stuffed backpack as he effects his escape, and the many questions that that initiating scenario brings up will eventually be answered by the thoughts and memories and jumbled emotions that swirl uncontrollably through Shy’s mind. His memories are filled with rage and violence and uncontrollable tears; he suffers terrifying dreams and waking shame; every bad thing he’s ever done plays on an unbidden loop in Shy’s mind and he responds with aggression and destruction that he neither understands or attempts to control. I was similarly affected (mentally and emotionally) by Max Porter’s Lanny, but while that novel was luscious and enthralling in its fabulous language, Shy is abrupt and confrontational; perfectly capturing the experience of being trapped inside the disturbed mind of a young fella who can’t control his thoughts, emotions, or actions. Captivated, and disquieted, throughout. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final form.)

I said to him, there’ll be rapists, violent offenders, not murderers I don’t think, but some very disturbed young men, and he stood up, came round the table and said, Mum, I’m a very disturbed young man, and I said, No poppet, you’re lost, that’s different, and he said, Mum, listen to me, I know you love me, but it’s not different. I’m not lost. I’m right where I got myself, and I said Oh, darling, no, and he said, Mum, shh. Whatever. A new school. My last chance. I’m going to take it.

Shy’s brain pings around through disjointed thoughts and scenarios as he makes his way across the grounds of the Last Chance school; pinging from his earliest to his latest memories; pinging from first person, to third person, to transcribing a documentary made about the program at his school. We learn about Shy’s long-suffering mother and stepfather (who seem to have tried everything to help their son, not understanding what might have hurt him along the way); we learn about his cousin Shaun introducing him to “jungle music” and drugs; we learn that Shy has had friends and a girlfriend and is capable of academic success, but he just can’t help blowing up the good things in his life. The Last Chance school seems to be staffed by extraordinarily caring and capable teacher-councillors, but despite their efforts to share calming techniques and forge understanding between the boys with group therapy sessions, every small slight drives Shy to respond with his default rage. Weary of his own violence, plagued by nightmares and shame, Shy struggles under the weight of his flint-stuffed backpack as he heads through the fields for the nearby pond.

His thoughts are lopping along in odd repetitive chunks, running at him, stumbling. Feels brave, feels pathetic, feels nothing. Panic. Calm. Mad clatter in the roof of the break like machine guns then swirling calm, home, school, years ago, yesterday, his mind all tight, then slackening, then something buzzing under like a tectonic plate, then marching, then pure noise, then snapping traps, then humming, bassline in his migraine, under the bathwater private time, then a dancey synth part in the clear sleepless noise of his insomnia, piano choon, one step forward two step backward, building a real thing, into the movement, which is like, oops, slippery on the leaves here, haha nearly went down.

The jumbled storytelling can be hard to follow, and the violence and mental illness don’t make for a “nice” story, but it feels like Porter has captured something true and worth considering from the inside of a disturbed mind. Shy might not be likeable or relatable, but he’s a broken teenager and it’s provoking to be asked to care about him and his fate. I was correspondingly provoked and captivated; I couldn’t ask for more from a novel of triple the length.

The Berry Pickers

 

The day Ruthie went missing, the blackflies seemed to be especially hungry. The white folks at the store where we got our supplies said that Indians made such good berry pickers because something sour in our blood kept the blackflies away. But even then, as a boy of six, I knew that wasn’t true. Blackflies don’t discriminate. But now, lying here almost fifty years to the day and getting eaten from the inside out by a disease I can’t even see, I’m not sure what’s true and what’s not anymore. Maybe we are sour.

To be honest, I was a little disappointed with The Berry Pickers: Somehow both highly melodramatic — with multiple misfortunes befalling one undeserving Mi'kmaq family — and completely unsurprising in its predictable plotting. But I’ll also add that I found this to be overdramatic and predictable in the vein of Nicholas Sparks and Jodi Picoult — both highly successful authors with big fan bases — so I don’t mind concluding (and especially in light of this novel’s high rating on Goodreads) that this just wasn’t a fit for me personally and I wish much success to debut author Amanda Peters. Slight spoilers beyond here (but as everything is given away in the first chapter, I wouldn’t consider them plot-ruining).

In the years since Ruthie went missing, Mom had come to a soft understanding of the situation. She would try her damnedest to not be sad. She couldn’t promise complete happiness or fully rid herself of the anger, no matter how many times a week she put on those shoes and walked to the big stone church in town, but she would harness the sadness. She would harness it and tame it and keep it still and quiet. And she did this by believing that Ruthie was out there somewhere, growing up, eating ice cream, reading books and remembering her mother. We let her. But we still looked.

In 1962, while her family was working an annual blueberry harvest in Maine, four-year-old Ruthie disappeared; and although her family would eventually be forced to go home to Nova Scotia without her, the tragedy would go on to affect her parents and siblings for the rest of their lives. As The Berry Pickers opens, the story of her disappearance is told from Ruthie’s brother Joe’s perspective as he lies dying of cancer in the family home in the modern day. Perspective in the next chapter shifts to that of a young girl named Norma narrating her unhappy life with cold and overbearing parents in the 60s, and it’s immediately clear that this is Ruthie growing up in the family that snatched her. POV rotates between Joe in the present — mostly telling the story of his hard life to his estranged daughter — and watching Ruthie/Norma grow into adulthood, always feeling a sense of disconnection from her ersatz parents. (And as the prologue ends with Joe and Ruthie’s sister Mae saying, “There’s someone here to see us. And I think we might have some catching up to do.”, there’s no intended surprise that Ruthie/Norma will eventually learn about her birth family and go to see them. There’s truly no narrative tension in the plot.)

As a Mi'kmaq, Joe experiences episodes of racism throughout his life, but I don’t know if Peters did the character any favours by portraying Joe — despite coming from a stable, loving family — as an angry and violent heavy drinker (which another character defends as understandable for someone with a history of intergenerational trauma which we just don’t see: Joe’s parents are hard-working, church-going, family-first and thoroughly present and supportive; the loss of Ruthie and other family drama notwithstanding). And when two major episodes of systemic racism are faced by the family — the local sheriff in Maine won’t help search for Ruthie, and when they return home, the local Indian Agent wants to take away the remaining children for their supposed protection — the family’s dad is aggressive and defiant without consequence (which on the one hand feels like grandiose wish-fulfilment, and on the other, makes it sound like if only more fathers would have levelled shotguns at the authorities, fewer children would have been stolen and sent off to the Residential Schools.) Despite some very dramatic events in the life of this family, this novel didn’t give me any feel for what it was like to have lived through those events as First Nations people. (And there were some logical inconsistencies, as with Joe concluding on his deathbed, in the quote I opened with, that maybe his people are “sour”, despite twice agreeing with a stranger over the years that that’s not true; it seems like Peters liked the sound of that sentence, without really believing it, so put it there.)

I’ve always wondered at the secrets the dead take with them. Some are unintended secrets, things they never got around to saying, like “I’m sorry” or “The money is hidden in the shoebox at the back of the closet.” Some secrets are so dark that it’s best they remain buried. Even people who exude light and happiness have dark secrets. Sometimes, the lie becomes so entrenched it becomes the truth, hidden away in the deep recesses of the mind until death erases it, leaving the world a little different. Secrets and lies can take on a life of their own, they can be twisted and manipulated, or they can burst into the world from the mouth of someone just as they are starting to lose their mind.

Overall: This was interesting enough, and plenty happens — and I was not entirely unaffected emotionally — but The Berry Pickers was a middle-of-the-road read for me (but highly rated, so take my opinion for what's it's worth).

The Pole: A Novel

He is a Pole, a man of seventy, a vigorous seventy, a concert pianist best known as an interpreter of Chopin, but a controversial interpreter: his Chopin is not at all Romantic but on the contrary somewhat austere, Chopin as inheritor of Bach. To that extent he is an oddity on the concert scene, odd enough to draw a small but discerning audience in Barcelona, the city to which he has been invited, the city where he will meet the graceful, soft-spoken woman.

The Pole, if I’m understanding it correctly, is all about what’s lost in translation between people: from what’s lost by an author as he attempts to translate his nebulous ideas into words on the page, to what’s lost when two strangers are forced to resort to “global English'' in a necessarily superficial effort to understand one another. And as this comes from J. M. Coetzee — a native of South Africa who does not consider English to be his mother tongue, and who has released his last two novels first in Spanish after having them translated from his English originals — there are layers of meaning and irony beyond what might appear to be a simple girl meets boy story. This is about art, and the effort to use art to transcend what can be put into words, and about the basic impossibility of any two people understanding one another at all; if I’m understanding this correctly. I loved every bit of this short novel. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Producing a concert, making sure that every thing runs smoothly, is no small feat. The burden has now fallen squarely on her. She spends the afternoon at the concert hall, chivvying the staff (their supervisor is, in her experience, dilatory), ticking off details. Is it necessary to list the details? No. But it is by her attention to detail that Beatriz will prove that she possesses the virtues of diligence and competence. By comparison, the Pole will show himself to be impractical, unenterprising. If one can conceive of virtue as a quantity, then the greater part of the Pole’s virtue is spent on his music, leaving hardly any behind for his dealings with the world; whereas Beatriz’s virtue is expended evenly in all directions.

As it opens, we meet Beatriz: not exactly beautiful, but graceful and well-built; a wealthy banker’s wife, approaching fifty, who organises events for the Concert Circle in her native Barcelona. At the last minute, Beatriz is put in charge of entertaining the visiting Maestro, whose name has “so many w’s and z’s in it that no one on the board even tries to pronounce it — they refer to him simply as ‘the Pole’”; and as she has no idea if he speaks any Spanish, or even simple English, Beatriz invites an elderly French-speaking couple along for a post-concert dinner; after all, Chopin spoke French, didn’t he? Conversation at dinner proceeds in basic English, with imperfect understanding, and although Beatriz assures the reader that she is not “chatty”, she can’t help but confront this Witold Walczykiewicz over what she thinks is his improper interpretation of Chopin, even if Witold has been widely celebrated for his “controversial” efforts. After they part, and Beatriz files the evening away as unremarkable, she will begin to receive emails from Witold in which he proclaims an undying love for her — referencing Dante and his Beatrice in the old Italian — and she then proceeds as though she doesn’t even understand her own mind: “I’ll certainly not email him back,” until she does; “I’ll certainly not go to Mallorca when he’s playing there,” until she does; “I’ll certainly not invite the Maestro to visit our family vacation home after my husband leaves,” until she does. Long after these events, after Beatriz has filed them away as ultimately unremarkable, she will come into possession of a series of poems that Witold has written for her, and as she tries to have them appropriately translated from Polish to Spanish (discovering along the way that computer programs have no sensitivity for the task), she will need to confront the fact that maybe she never really knew Witold at all.

Years later, when the episode of the Pole has receded into history, she will wonder about those early impressions. She believes, on the whole, in first impressions, when the heart delivers its verdict, either reaching out to the stranger or recoiling from him. Her heart did not reach out to the Pole when she saw him stride onto the platform, toss back his mane, and address the keyboard. Her heart’s verdict: What a poseur! What an old clown! It would take her a while to overcome that first, instinctive response, to see the Pole in his full selfhood. But what does full selfhood mean, really? Did the Pole’s full selfhood not perhaps include being a poseur, an old clown?

As for the layers of what’s lost in translation: The first chapter, in its entirety, reads 1. The woman is the first to give him trouble, followed soon afterwards by the man. And who is the “him” who is given trouble? Coetzee himself. He never lets us forget that we are reading a novel — a later passage reads: It is only a matter of chance that the story being told is not about Loreto and her man but about her, Beatriz, and her Polish admirer. Another fall of the dice and the story would be about Loreto’s submerged life. — so it’s interesting to begin with the notion that getting first the woman, and then the man, “right” had given the author some trouble. Coetzee is said to have released his most recent novels first through an Argentinian press, after having had them translated into Spanish, as an effort to combat the cultural hegemony of the English language and the Global North. For The Pole, I read (in The New Yorker ) that Coetzee even followed the advice of his Spanish translator, Mariana Dimópulos, and her suggestions for how a Spanish woman like Beatriz would actually “think, speak, and act”. So not only do we have a male author writing from a female POV about her inability to understand a foreign man’s intentions, but this male author enlists the help of his female translator to get his female character right — before she alters it all into a different language with its different shades of meaning. (I also found it nicely ironic that in a Dutch publication [netherlands.posten.com; the website won’t let me link it] — the language in which Coetzee previously had first released some novels — the English translation has the title of this novel as “The Pool”.) Beatriz and Witold not only face the barriers of sex and language, but there's a generational gap as well — the Maestro having been born in Poland at the height of WWII might explain his old-fashioned infatuation — and when Beatriz eventually travels to his apartment in Warsaw to retrieve the poems, she'll realise that she never asked him one question that challenged the way that she imagined he lived.

But this novel is about more than what’s lost in translation (or omitted) with the spoken word: Witold interprets Chopin “austerely”, which Beatriz doesn’t understand or like. We see Witold literally evoking Dante and Beatrice as a parallel for their relationship (which Beatriz does not understand or like), while in the background, we are to understand that their meeting in Mallorca metaphorically parallels events in the relationship between Chopin and George Sands. And when Beatriz attempts to get Witold’s poems translated — by a person from the university who usually deals with legal documents, and who warns that she can translate words but not a poem’s meaning — Beatriz does not understand (or like) them either. How much of this misunderstanding, through multiple art forms, is due to what is lost in translation, and how much of it simply represents how unknowable we necessarily must be to one another? This is a long review of a short book because it gave me so much to think about. Totally recommend it, rounding up to five stars for the extended experience.

The World Behind the World: Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science

 

It’s a civilizational achievement to be able to extrinsically see the universe “from the outside.” It is also a civilizational achievement to be able to intrinsically see the universe “from the inside.” The two perspectives are the sources of our greatest triumphs, like our ability to observe galaxies light-years away, and also the elegance and beauty of the stories we tell. Although not technological marvels we can take a picture of, the intrinsic and extrinsic perspectives are conceptual marvels, and took as much intellectual work to create as our greatest institutions and constructions. They are, if judged by their fecundity, the cognitive Wonders of the World.

What a crazy trip is The World Behind the World: Dr. Erik Hoel, a Forbes 30 Under 30 scientist, starts this history of scientific navel-gazing in Ancient Egypt (handily disproving the misconception that they had no understanding of stream of consciousness and believed that all interior monologue came from their gods) and ends with modern efforts with Artificial Intelligence (making the case that machines will never gain true consciousness). Quoting from poets, philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists throughout the ages, Hoel presents equal parts narrative and theory to explain why Neuroscience is in need of a paradigmatic shift (along the lines of Relativity’s impact on Physics or the double-helix structure of DNA on Genetics), because as it stands, the field is “floundering”, and “secretly, a scandal.” Hoel writes, for the most part, at the layperson’s level (I have no background in Neuroscience and could follow along), but I got the feeling that he was maybe not writing for me: this has the feel of a disruption, a wake up call for the small group of researchers and their post-docs who control research into the nature of consciousness, and more than anything, the narrative-lover in me would like to know how this disruption plays out. Fascinating, beginning to end. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Who am I to write this book with such a span it involves not just history, but literature and neuroscience and philosophy and mathematics? It is impossible in scope. But if not me, then who? For I have lived for years ensconced in both perspectives, and feel, at a personal level, the tension in their paradoxical relationship. I grew up in my mother’s bookstore and, later in life, became a novelist. Yet I am also a trained scientist. And in graduate school for neuroscience I worked on a small team advancing the leading scientific theory of consciousness. So for decades I have lived in the epistemological hybrid zone where the intrinsic and extrinsic perspectives meet. What I saw nearly blinded me with its beauty and paradox. This book is an expression of what I’ve learned living in the hybrid zone.

Basically, the question is: Can we understand how the brain works only using tools developed by that same brain? Poets and novelists have long attempted to describe the interior (“intrinsic”) experience of humanity, but starting with Galileo — who argued that science should concern itself only with those properties (size, shape, location, and motion) that can be described mathematically — a “serious” study of any phenomena (from human consciousness to the speed of light) was to be considered solely from this “extrinsic” perspective. As far as Psychology is concerned, Hoel names B. F. Skinner as the “villain” of the story: Failed novelist, rejecter of the intrinsic perspective. Due to the popularity of his (black box) approach consciousness became a pseudoscientific word and psychology was stripped of the idea of a “stream of consciousness,” stripped of everything intrinsic, for almost a century. In order to survive as a science, psychology only kept the reduced elements of consciousness — attention, memory, perception, and action — while throwing out the domain in which they exist, the very thing that gives them form, sets them in relation, and separates one from the other.

In the middle of the twentieth century, modern research into consciousness divided into two camps which continues to this day: the empiricists (following in the footsteps of Francis Crick), “who focus on brain imaging and finding the neural correlates of consciousness”, and the theorists (following the work of Gerald Edelman), “who make quantitative and formal proposals to measure the content and level of consciousness”. With regard to the empiricists, Hoel doesn’t have much respect for their reliance on fMRIs to map brain functions (In a notorious study in 2009, a dead salmon was put in an fMRI scanner and shown the kind of standard fMRI task of “looking” at photographs that depicted humans in social situations. The dead salmon, quite obligingly, showed a statistically significant response to a common analysis pipeline. Also: I was stunned to read that my mental picture of neurology is all wrong – neurons are actually “squishy quark clouds”?) And as for the camp of theorists: Hoel did his postgraduate work with a leading neuroscientist who had studied under Edelman — Giulio Tononi — and although Hoel had been captivated by Tononi’s integrated information theory (IIT), Hoel would eventually co-author a paper that demonstrated the theory’s shortcomings.

Hoel goes on to explain that perhaps the nature of consciousness is unknowable. Referencing the 2017 paper, “Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor?”, I found it fascinating that, using the same methods they would to map out a human brain, neuroscientists were unable to locate any specific function in a 1980s era Nintendo-running MOS 6502 microchip (despite knowing its complete wiring diagram). Further:

No one knows how the large-parameter models that show early signs of general intelligence, like GPT-3 or Google’s PaLM, actually work. We just know that they do. And this is because there is often no compressible algorithm that an ANN is implementing. Applying this same reasoning to neuroscience leads to some uncomfortable conclusions. Neuroscientists often assiduously avoid such discussions, since asking “How does the brain perform this transformation between input and output?” is a far more complex version than that same question put to ANNs, and with ANNs we know that often in principle we can say very little about this (and that’s with the complete and perfect access to the connectome, or wiring diagram, of the ANN, unlike the brain, which comes to us piecemeal via invasive surgeries or coarse-grained neuroimaging). So it’s not a lack of data about the brain that’s the problem. It’s the approach.

Hoel spends a lot of time on mathematicians Gödel and Boole (and their realisation that “formal systems built on axioms are necessarily incomplete”), and eventually references Stephen Hawking as acknowledging that science — using as it does the language of mathematics — is, by extension, also necessarily incomplete. So maybe uncertainty is simply a feature of reality and neuroscientists are asking all the wrong questions (and it's this conclusion that feels disruptive for the gatekeepers of academia). From here, Hoel goes on to briefly explore the possibility of consciousness surviving death and presents an examination of the case against free will. All fascinating stuff and well worth the read.

We may be hairless apes, but we are conscious, and that is indeed something special and unique, as the paradoxes around it attest to. Studying consciousness scientifically requires exploring the hybrid zone where the qualitative meets the quantitative, a unique metaphysical ecosystem. And it is possible that this zone will never be resolved to our satisfaction in the way other fields of science are, that it, and therefore we, will always remain paradoxical, mysterious as a deep-sea trench.

I want to record here just a couple more interesting tidbits that didn't fit into the review. The field of Psychology (beyond Neuroscience) seems due for a shakeup as a whole. Not only does fMRI seem bogus, but Hoel writes:

For how many years have neuroscientists and psychiatrists told the public that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in serotonin levels? And yet there is no proven link, after decades of exhaustive research, between depression and these levels.  It was merely medieval humors, resurrected for the modern chemical age…The Stanford Prison Experiment, and so on, arguably either can’t be replicated or have only small effects once the data is analyzed appropriately. Even the supposed Dunning-Kruger Effect,  in which people with low knowledge or experience in a given area supposedly overestimate wildly their expertise, may be a statistical artifact.

And I liked this aside:

Both Einstein and Picasso had been influenced by Science and Hypothesis, a 1902 book by mathematician Henri Poincaré ( Einstein had read it with interest; Picasso seems to have had the book explained to him by a friend.) Notably, Science and Hypothesis contained within it meditations on how best to not only understand, but draw the fourth dimension: for Einstein, the fourth dimension was time itself, represented mathematically, and for Picasso, the fourth dimension became the out-of-time layered points of view of cubism.  

And I enjoyed Hoel's comparison of the intrinsic-focussed experience of novelistic storytelling vs the extrinsic focus of films:

I grew up in my mother’s independent bookstore, and came of age among its shelves, and worked there as a teenager hawking fiction to customers, and so feel that the novel is something special, and has been relegated to being an undeservedly less popular artform. I even think it’s arguable that this shift has changed our understanding of our own psychology. For instance, Freud was the best thing to ever happen to film and television. Of all the many ideas that Freud advanced, the most popular, even to this day, is the notion of psychological trauma being a central explainer of people’s behavior. This idea permeates our culture, despite research showing that even extremely traumatic events, like living through horrific earthquakes and disasters, leads only to a minority of victims experiencing predictable negative psychological effects like PTSD, and also, that people’s prior personality (to the event) has a strong effect on whether negative outcomes develop. This doesn’t mean trauma isn’t real, but I think it’s possible that trauma’s popularity as an explanation of behavior came about because traumas are extrinsic events — they are things that can be filmed, they can be seen, which in turn means they can literally be shown on-screen as flashbacks. I find it no coincidence that the rise of trauma as an explanation of human behavior just so happens to correspond with the rise of our dominant narrative artform, the extrinsic medium of film, and its replacement of the intrinsic medium of the novel. 

And reading that Erik Hoel considered himself a novelist, I went looking for what he's written and found the Goodreads reviews for The Revelations (Once a rising star in neuroscience, Kierk Suren is now homeless, broken by his all-consuming quest to find a scientific theory of consciousness.) This wasn't hugely well-received, but I found it very interesting to counterpoint a couple of the reviews. To quote "Vicki":

It is really hard to connect to a character whose entire personality is believing they're the sole proprietor to the solution for the most elusive human mystery, and acting as such. I think the main character is supposed to come across as complex and burdened by the weight of his genius, but he's just arrogant. The problem with writing a character closer to understanding the mystery of consciousness than any other person is that unless the author himself knows something that the scientific community doesn't, there is no way to make that character convincing while also sharing his theories. Almost every idea felt like a retelling of existing theories of consciousness, spun to sound inventive and groundbreaking.

(There is something of that same attitude in this nonfiction treatment of what seems many of the same ideas, but perhaps Hoel really does know something that the rest of the scientific community doesn't). And to quote "Jeff":

When the primary character struggles with how to know anything, when he obsesses over the fact that everything he knows begins from the position of an observer... that has a double meaning. It's a book! The reader is the real observer. The characters can never know anything more than they've been allowed to know.

It's a perfect metaphor for how we can't understand consciousness from within consciousness.

We may not be able to solve the problem of consciousness in the real world, but in the book world... Maybe? Perhaps the main character is on the brink of solving it. But for him, solving the problem of consciousness means something different than it does for us, because he is actually a character in a book. That's a terrifying fourth-wall breaking discovery to make and perhaps what has happened at the end.

And these reviews seem to prove that Hoel really does live "in the epistemological hybrid zone where the intrinsic and extrinsic perspectives meet", and he might just be uniquely poised to use his hybrid tools to crack the whole mystery of consciousness wide open.

Organ Meats

 

When Anita cut her palm on the chain-link fence or bit herself in the forearm playing dog, playing dawn, she bled all the way home. Her bleeding was widespread. Once, when she cut herself picking windshield glass off the street, saying she was afraid the dogs would step on it or mistake it for sugar, her blood spread itself thin as steam, a red haze floating in the air for days. But I don’t even know what her other insides are shaped like, Rainie said, looking down at the table. Vivian said, Oh, I do. I go to the butcher’s all the time with Ayi, and the organ meats are always the cheapest. Have you had breakfast yet?

I really enjoyed K-Ming Chang’s previous works — the novel Bestiary and the short story collection Gods of Want — and especially because they were just so weird; combining Taiwanese mythology with the outsider SoCal queer immigrant child experience, the weirdness seemed the perfect way for Chang to capture that jarring outsider experience. Organ Meats continues in the same vein — with the maybe-more-than-friendship of two girls metaphorically tied together over time with the threads of their belief system — but whereas the previous books combined myth and magical realism to marvellous effect, this one stretches into full-on surrealism, and I found it challenging to follow. I continue to marvel at Chang’s imagination and bravura, but I didn’t feel very much for the story or the characters: like looking at a Dalí painting, I can recognise the skill without really liking the result; and while I might say that I didn’t really like this, I’m still rounding up to four stars and will read Chang again. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

We swim in the thickest cut of shade under the sycamore, smoking a cigarette each, slobbering like the dogs we are. Dogs can see the dead — we come from generations of canines, some dogs and some not, so we know their ways, we still use our hind legs — and they aren’t as interested in the living as you think. And we see the two girls, Anita Hsia and Rainie Tsai, red threads knotted at the plum of their throats, sitting together on the blanched roots of the sycamore, and we know after this summer they will never see each other again, not as daughters and dogs, and that only one of them knows this, the smarter one, Rainie, though both their mothers are fools, naming their daughters after singers, one of whom died early, and we know exactly the kind of woman who names her daughter in front of a TV screen or while dancing in the dark to nothing, and Rainie at least is better at belonging to her loneliness, inhabiting it like a house, ornamenting it with narratives of how she came to live inside it, her mother at work, her brothers out all night snipping the ears off dogs, her best friend belonging to a sycamore tree.

Anita and Rainie are ten years old, and at Anita’s insistence, have knotted red threads around their throats in order to tie themselves together, like dogs, for life. They spend their time interacting with a group of woman-faced stray dogs that laze between the roots of a dying sycamore tree in an otherwise empty lot, and if the day gets too hot in their parched urban environment, the girls will take off their clothes and stretch out on the concrete floor of the pesticide-filled garage on Rainie’s side of the duplex their families share. Through stories from their mothers and interviews with the dogs, the girls (and the reader) learn where they (and the not-quite-canine) dogs came from, and with pages filled with banana ghosts, pearls, feces, and red thread, a messy history and a mythology are invented for this pair. But when Rainie’s family moves away — mostly to get away from her friend’s strange influence — Anita loses herself in that mythology, and it will take Rainie a decade to follow the thread back to her lost friend.

As with her previous works, I enjoyed Chang’s strange metaphors in Organ Meats, as with: They tried to cut the thicket of hair off her skull, though the blade bent against her strands. Her hair had the tensile strength of time. and The moon dragged its tassels of light, licking the windows bright. But, as I wrote above, this stretches into surrealism and I was never quite sure what I was meant to take literally, as in:

Look, Abu said, scraping at the plaster walls of our house with her nails. Beneath the first layer was flesh. The wall licked her hand and gloved it in slobber. I pressed my hand to the opposite wall and felt it pulse and flex like a belly, and beneath it I could feel the snaking of intestines and the drumbeat of a tongue as the house swallowed and swallowed around us. One day when the plaster collapses like a broken wing and the wood beams rescind into the dirt, the house will finally succeed in digesting us, returning to its first life, lifting our beds like tongues and drooling all over our bones until we glow.

And I found the surrealism distancing: I don’t really understand what happened to Anita after Rainie left (what is written could be a metaphor for just about anything), and as the friendship seemed less important to Rainie, her return a decade later didn’t provide any emotional catharsis to me:

What she felt for Anita ran through the ground, beneath her feet, like those dogs racing on the underside of the pavement, erupting through a rain puddle. She wanted all the miracles of being near her. All the births she beckoned. I’ve chosen, was all Rainie said.

And yet: the banana ghosts and the woman-faced dogs and the bunks full of oyster shuckers on the underside of the home island give a sense of the pressures faced by Taiwanese women that might be hard to convey in a straightforward narrative, and I recognise the artistic skill that Chang has brought to bear here. I just wish that more happened on the page to make me understand and care about Anita and Rainie; I felt distanced and unconnected throughout. Still four stars.

Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians

 

Self-Made is an account of how we began to think of ourselves as divine beings in an increasingly disenchanted world and about the consequences — political, economic, and social — of that thinking. These consequences have both liberated us from some forms of tyranny and placed us into the shackles of others. It is a story, in other words, about human beings doing what we have always done: trying to solve the mystery of how to live as beings both dazzlingly powerful and terrifyingly vulnerable, thrust without our consent into a world whose purpose and meaning we may never be able to truly know.

The publisher’s blurb describes Self-Made as “a series of chronological biographical essays on famous (and infamous) ‘self-creators’ in the modern Western world”, and essentially, it reads like author Tara Isabella Burton is presenting a lecture series on our society’s evolution from enforced (cultural and religious) conformity to the pressures we feel today to each be striking individuals with marketably unique brands. Each chapter tells the stories of those who pushed the limits of what was acceptable in their day, and from these individual biographies to Burton’s overall thesis, I found this to be totally fascinating and readable. If I had a complaint it would be that this felt too comprehensive — there are so many stories here, spanning centuries, that I find it hard to sum up succinctly — but that’s hardly a complaint at all (if this had been a lecture series, I would have enjoyed taking it in over several weeks or months, but as it was, I still enjoyed reading this slowly.) Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.

All of us have inherited the narrative that we must shape our own path and place in this life and that where and how we were born should not determine who and what we will become. But we have inherited, too, this idea’s dark underbelly: if we do not manage to determine our own destiny, it means that we have failed in one of the most fundamental ways possible. We have failed at what it means to be human in the first place.

In opposition to Thomas Aquinas’ Prime Mover theory (which stated that in addition to creating the world, God had immutably “determined the shape of human life, including rank, blood, and station”), German philosopher Immanuel Kant would later write that the Enlightenment was “man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity”; no longer would men be “grasping at the leading strings” to follow the way of their parents. The Renaissance saw men (and it was always men with the opportunities) determined to reinvent themselves. This ranged from notorious self-creator Albrecht Dürer (“hailed as many things: one of the Renaissance’s finest artists, the inventor of the selfie, the world’s first celebrity self-promoter”) to Baldassare Castiglione (whose 1528 book The Courtier served as a guide for those who wanted to learn the art of “sprezzatura” and serve the royal courts) and Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince: a guidebook for the self-reinvention of would-be rulers. Burton shares the French freedom-seeking philosophies of Montaigne, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and the Marquis de Sade. She writes of Regency England and the “bon ton” of public figures like Beau Brummell and Oscar Wilde, and throughout, makes the point that in Europe, the quest for self-creation had an “aristocratic” bent: anyone could become princely, if not an actual prince, with the right attitude. (Burton intriguingly points out that this attitude inevitably led to the fascism of the Twentieth Century, with figures like Gabriele D’Annunzio, Adolf Hitler, and Benito Mussolini peddling “the fantasy of superhuman specialness to a population all too willing to treat their neighbors as subhuman”.)

If the social Darwinists had envisioned human progress as a linear march toward perfection, then the advertisers of the early twentieth century helped clarify what, exactly, that perfection looked like: a whole nation of stars, all expressing their own singular, unique personality by using the same few products.

On the other hand, the quest for self-creation in America had a more “democratic” bent: From Frederick Douglass’ pulling-up-of-the-bootstraps get-to-work philosophy to Phineas Quimby’s New Thought movement (“you can think yourself to wealth”), the American Dream, from the beginning, was thought to be attainable by anyone (and those who failed to attain great wealth had only themselves to blame: you only need to work harder; think harder). Between Hollywood and Madison Avenue, “It” (the ineffable sprezzatura and bon ton of earlier ages) was presented as desirable and attainable — for a price, anyway. And this attitude inevitably led to the rise of self-promoters like Donald Trump and the Kardashians, and today, the belief that anyone could become an internet sensation if they only found their niche and marketed themselves properly (Burton writes that “‘social media star’ is now the fourth most desirable career for contemporary teenagers”, and that just doesn’t sound attainable or psychologically healthy to my aged sensibilities.)

The story of self-creation, at its core, is not only a story about capitalism or secularism or the rise of the middle class or industrialization or political liberalism, although it touches upon all these phenomena and more. It is, rather, a story about people figuring out, together, what it means to be human. It is a story about trying to work out which parts of our lives — both those parts chosen and those parts we did not choose — are really, authentically us, and which parts are mere accidents of history, custom, or circumstance. It is, in other words, a story about people asking, and answering, and asking once again the most fundamental question human beings can ask: Who am I, really?

Burton concludes that the modern day answer to “Who am I, really” — “whoever I want to be” — is dangerous because it not only disregards very real limits to outward change and social mobility but it also discounts the fundamental truths (shaped by the environment, community, secret longings) we hold within ourselves: and why should the outer presentation be considered more authentically “real” than the inner experience? It’s undeniable that shaking off the yoke of Mediaeval-style societal/religious control is a boon for mankind, but why has public acclaim become the only marker of self-worth? Burton covers many more thinkers and their lives than I can recount in a review — making it slightly challenging to share her thesis and its proofs — but I can say that I loved every bit of this.