Houghton, snow and brains

When we look out the house windows tonight, the lights across the Portage are faded, soft, and diffuse, one indication of snow; another is the pickup truck sliding backwards down our street's little hill (the truck and driver are okay; we made sure). When we first moved here, a night like tonight would have had us excited and happy: nothing like this ever happens in Los Angeles. After some years, though, our comments tonight are along the lines of "It's about time!" There is, finally, snow, and so the world moves as it ought and we can fit more easily back into the expected time zone and place.

And because I now can live here again without being distracted by my body clock, I spent the part of the day when I wasn't in meetings thinking about brains: last night I finished Powers's The Echo Maker. I have read almost all of Oliver Sacks's books, and knew about Capgras Syndrome from my reading about visual processing, where some explain the syndrome by speaking of how visual neural processing passes through the amygdalae on its way to the more visually focused parts of the brain; if the amygdalae are damaged, then the emotional connotations of all sightings can be damaged. The emotional tenor of involved in seeing one's parents (for example) will be missing, and so those people will look like the familiar parents but seem like impostors -- until one speaks to them on the phone, when emotion and sensation are once again linked. If one sees them again, however, they are no longer emotionally shaded people, but rather just people with whom no one feels any connection.

But the Powers's book -- like Sack's writing on neurology -- raises another linking (or dislinking) for me. When I read The Man Who Mistook... upon its first appearance (I remember speaking to Art Quinn about it, so this is back in the early 80s, sigh), I remember sensing a tension for Sacks: the people about whom he writes are lively and present, with quirks and unpredictabilities and intriguing characters; his writing is about how character is neurology. Sacks does not write about how his research suggests such a reduction; reading him is instead for me like reading through two different eyeglass prescriptions at once, one view of neurons linking to others, another of people linking to each other. And just as I have trouble with quick changes between prescriptions...

So: thinking out loud:

I have no problem conceiving of the overlapping -- and experientially incommensurate -- worlds of (for example) microbes and me: I have seen enough science visualization films to be able to imagine how a tabletop (for example) would simply not be a surface to a microbe but rather a permeability. I can start to imagine -- and understand some of the limitations of the imaginings -- moving through the world with an other-than-human sense apparatus, such as has a fox or tree, because their sensing/responsive structures are identifiable in their processes and recognitions; the fox or tree or slime mold, however, inhabits a different world than I do precisely because its sensing/responsive structures are not the same as mine. It is, however, when I try to do the both-at-once -- I am neurons and other cell types and mitochondria! I am a funky messy human not purposefully stepping on ants! -- that I have some translation anxiety. When I consider the neurons, whose actions make perfect sense and are a pleasure to contemplate, I am fine; when I consider the human scale, I am fine. But how can I be both at once? To whom am I both at once? Is there a scale at which I can be both at once?

This is, perhaps, the tension that implodes the Sacks character at the end of Powers's book, when the character tries to live both at once. This is more than "Two, two, two mints in one," more than Faye Dunaway's head snapping back and forth -- sister, mother, sister, mother -- in Chinatown or River Phoenix's rotting trailer flat stare -- brother, father? -- in his own Idaho. This is not the duplicity of Heraclitus or Hegel, where the other -- the opposite -- defines me because I can tick off what I am by negating each item of what the other is, where I can delineate my spatial location and shape because I am the space unfilled by the other. But the both-at-once definition instead rests on two beings not being present to each other in shared space and time, because their spaces, times, scales, and senses are not the same: they are not in the same world; their worlds are exclusive.

This is perhaps a little like the Eames's Powers of 10, I guess, the moving out and in from the couple in the park in Chicago to the edges of the then known universe and then out and in to the atomic level: everything contains everything else and the story could be a circle instead of a pendulum. What you see just depends on where you stop. But this implies a gradation from one perspective to the next -- and is that what differentiates the slime mold from me or a seedling from a city?

I should get on to the letters of recommendation I have to write tonight. Thanks for the fun.