Author: Sue

Each little blue dot is a galaxy of stars like ours. (We are at the center of this cross-sectional splicing.) Ever since my formal education began, I was told that the light coming in from the stars was, in fact, old, stale, and thus full of sequestered, admirable charm. “You are looking into the heart of history itself,” they all would say. While delicately holding on to that fact, I always felt a magnificent desolation towards these bodies of luminescence, whistling with a blade of grass in my mouth while lying on the lawn and drinking in the marvel of it. It wasn’t until recently that I realized how geo or rather ego-centric this thought was. Taking it in reverse, light from us takes time to travel to other places and observers far away can only see us in the past. While standing at the circumference of this circle, an observer would see the earth one billion years ago. Since the beginning of modern man is estimated to be 200 000 years ago, divide this radius by 5000 and it is at this tiny circumference that an onlooker might first witness the first buddings of our civilization.

Thus, there is no useful simultaneity in such a universe; nobody can see the whole thing “now”. Our history literally spreads out around us like ripples in a pond.

Sue majors in Neuroscience & English and tends to lurk in bookstores.

In the neurobiology labs, technology is a requisite. A neurobiology lab by definition is pillared by electron microscopes, spectrophotometers, genetically enhanced bacteria that glow and survive and die on command (or by a well-designed experiment). Science and technology reciprocate each other’s ability to perpetuate onwards in this noble quest for the holy grail of knowledge. The superbly sophisticated equipment allow for novel questions to be asked – questions that perhaps even a decade before nobody had dared to pose because they did not have the means to answer it. Perhaps the ultimate emblem of technology in modern day science belongs to the physicists; their Large Hadron Collider on the border of Switzerland and France, which with the turn of a switch measures the trajectories of proton-proton collisions, strives to of course, out-think the philosophers in deciphering what reality really is.

I have no qualms with all of this.

Yet, technology has spawned, on the more commercialistic side of existence, items that allow for a higher efficiency lifestyle that have gone over the edge of superfluous. Unlike central heating, vacuums, and radios which are all technological advancements that justify themselves in some substantial manner by their larger degree of necessity, the Kindle, or the more generic notion of an E-book, is a (relatively) new device on the market that appears to be one of the grosser transgressions of our generation. I will overlook look the fact that the Kindle has been most insensitively, forebodingly anointed with a name that simultaneously is defined by the OED as “to set fire to, set on fire, ignite, light (a flame, fire, or combustible substance).” A paperback book would, yes, fall into the latter category of “combustible substance.” (A sadistic nod to Fahrenheit 451?) While the convenience of an E-book such as the Kindle is clear – carrying a bookshelf that would otherwise cumbersomely weigh hundreds or (for the bookish) thousands of pounds in a bag slung over your shoulder – what it asks for in exchange is an eventual self-induced literary ruin. That is not to say that it is that case now, but we have sown the seeds so that sometime in the far-flung future, second-hand bookstores with all their beautiful musky smells, with all their books blossoming sepia-toned fringes that accompany inscribed marginalia, with pages that hold both a story within the text and within its physicality of being passed from hand to hand up in time and finally (but not permanently) to land in your own, might very well become obsolete. Homer, Keats, and Woolf are instead impersonalized on a quietly glowing screen, a screen calculated by algorithms to best fool us into believing they are what they are trying to emulate: the papyrus, the paper, the ink, the textured print. With hard drives in the terabytes now, it’s not inconceivable to have all the words in the world compressed on a couple data chips. It’s phenomenal, really, that such a feat is well within the realm of possibility, but it is too, disheartening. Much like how it would be tactless to end a relationship through a text message, the same family of principles seems to apply and make it vulgar to consider digitizing all our literary heroes. The visceral quality of smoothing a book’s pages, the proportional weathering dependent on how much handling it gets, and the satisfying weight of it after it has been read will be what we pay for the convenience that we acquire with their new, weightless bodies.

Gone will be the days of wandering and discovering the unpredictable in libraries and bookstores, letting the unread waft through you, luring you to pull its spine from the shelf, dust off its jacket and earning a spot in your home. Instead, we will be targeted with “based on your purchase history” recommendations, although perhaps one day a program that simulates the random encounter with a new book will finally be accurately coded.

Granted, I am looking and predicting a future that is not within ten, twenty, fifty years from now, but hundreds of years (unless I am grossly underestimating the decline of our humanity). I desperately hope this will never be the case, but I must say that I am glad that I won’t be here to see how it plays out.

Sue majors in Neuroscience & English and tends to lurk in bookstores.

Memory is that capacity within us that we desperately call forth in those last ten minutes of the exam, uncomfortably scanning and re-scanning that last question for which a haphazardly drawn together response was constructed from the faintest of impressions. Our bodies are paralyzed with concentration, yet our minds try at every door, turning knobs and hastily pulling open drawers and cabinets that lie within. Oftentimes, this is the case with voluntary memory — the facts, the abstract words or concepts that have no direct tie to a visual cue require deliberate attention to be committed in our repertoire of knowledge. They ask for much more of our internal resources as they do not automatically strike us in a way that makes them bold against the sea of other lingering thoughts.

Colter Jacobson explores, contrarily, on involuntary memory. He drew the above image, Love Rosie (2008) from a found photograph of a sailor and for a month following, would return to that image in his mind’s eye and regenerate it on paper. As the days pass, the sailor remains distinguishable as a sailor with the same general features — moustache, a sailor’s necktie, friendly eyes — yet his proportions waver relative to one another. The amount of variation is enough to make several of his drawings appear to be different men altogether, yet they all seem to retain the essence that had been most salient in Jacobson’s initial encounter with this man. Details and the diligent specifics might be lacking, but he repeatedly captures that playful, confident smile, the flirtatious edge beheld in his expression. His art piece is not necessarily the sailor himself, but his memory of the sailor and the aesthetic of its volatility, of its subtle inaccuracies. Change is inherent with our vision of time and as events occur – the shattering of a grandmother’s teapot, the acquisition a new job, the acquaintance of a new face — unawares to our conscious selves, our previous memories or at least our perspective from which we look to these previous memories move – liquefied, their edges shift ever so slightly. And of course, this is all coupled with disassembling of the memory itself. Though, like a deteriorating orbit, it never quite loses all trace but retains some essential center that involuntarily stays. This is especially true of visual memory which seems to be more Proustian than for, say, semantic memory.

Being a neuroscience major, it has come to my attention how little we do know about memory, let alone about the brain itself. Despite the acceleration of the sciences, there remains still a great degree of mystery left that cannot possibly be all “resolved” in our lifetime. But if it, by some miracle of human prowess, does, I wonder about the nature of the implications it clearly will have on philosophy and of course, on art.

Sue majors in Neuroscience & English and tends to lurk in bookstores.

Emerson, for instance, left his sick wife, Lidian, and their young children in Thoreau’s care to go to Europe in 1847, writing coldly to Lidian, ‘I foresee plainly that the trick of solitariness never can leave me.’

As suggested two posts ago here, it seems that companionship, or what the biopsychologists like to term as “peer-bonding,” has been cognitively advantageous. Our evolved intellect is bound to our sociality. Memory and the logical proceedings that come with attempting to troubleshoot relationships are augmented with every flex of the social muscle. It has been empirically shown that those older adults who engage in conversation, who are prompted to climb out into the world and sense it like their younger counterparts do, create themselves a sort of buffer against mental decline. And what are we if we do not hold our minds intact? (An entirely separate question to address on another date.)

While this is all well and good, you might be asking yourself, “So you’re saying I should join in with the bacchanals rather than lock myself in this room and in a gust of solitary spirit, finish this essay?” Well, you are talking to one of those curious people who have been wooed by the inexplicable allure of solitude — who desperately defends her own autonomy in spite of her acknowledgment of the inevitable importance of communities. I’d like to explore the other side of the coin in this post (completely contrary to what I had spoke of two weeks ago) and articulate the dichotomy that exists between individualism and social participation, and how this might begin to be reconciled.

Quotes that follow strike a note deep within my reclusive marrow.

In Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins, it is astutely said that it is “funny how we think of romance as always involving two, when the romance of solitude can be ever so much more delicious and intense. Alone, the world offers itself freely to us.” I nod in emphatic agreement. “Loneliness adds beauty to life. It puts a special burn on sunsets and makes night air smell better,” says Henry Rollins. Rollins brings up a good point: loneliness is charged with an entirely different sentiment, a sort of indignation with your rupture with the web society, a twinge of misery in accompaniment with your self-imposed isolation. Replace “loneliness” with “solitude” and I would be more apt to agree, although I am a proponent of exposing oneself to feeling a wide, wondrous spectrum of emotions. I merely enjoy hanging in existence between all the action, attempting to get to the bottom of things rather than bother, at critical moments, with the often frivolous requisites that waver at the surface of most civilized interactions. Now, you might be wondering what has happened in my biographical past that has made me so jaded, and perhaps even so selfish? Perhaps I deserve an end as miserable as Christopher McCandless, the youth that had passed in an abandoned bus in the novel-turned-movie, Into the Wild, in a stint that emblemized his distaste with civilization. “Didn’t you know that the tragedy was that he realized too late that true joy lay in the relationships that we cultivate?!” No, I think the tragedy was that he had foolishly eaten mold. That may be an extreme case, and I must clarify that I argue from the standpoint of the artist, the tinkerer with life, the one who capitalizes on consciousness in order to synthesize. Every great writer, scientist, musician needed to shut the door to their companions in order to fully, and hungrily take in the world from the vantage point of an outsider. The mark of a genius within any field is his or her innate devotion to the subject – their willingness to engage in investigative learning, and this often occurs on time away from others. The great physicist Richard Feynman, as a child, would watch a ball move in a wagon and found himself plagued with an unabating curiosity to know why it would move like that. He built radios and tuned them to programs, not because this was his part-time job and that money was the incentive, but because he wanted to understand how things worked and what would result if he played with the world out there. These people had that moment of peace within their minds that facilitated their noticing of a pattern, and oftentimes, this required at least a brief disentanglement with social relationships. Einstein said, “I lived in solitude in the country and noticed how the monotony of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.”

Like everything else that we know and do, the best results seem to come from abiding with the rule of moderation. It’s a delicate balance between understanding that we will ultimately have some dependence on others by virtue of the fact that we are human beings, by virtue of the fact that we need other people to register something as sophisticated and momentous as empathy — and embracing that other half of ourselves that rises to meet the world alone, to level our eyes with it in our own, solitary bodies, and to investigate it. Then, the next step is to take what we discover and present it to others in whatever manner we deem fit. Feynman became a renowned lecturer and teacher at the height of his career. Emerson’s influence had been felt by Thoreau and we all feel his presence in literature classrooms and libraries today. In all these situations, the key initial stimulus however was a moment of solitude — an aside and a breath on one’s own terms.

Sue majors in Neuroscience & English and tends to lurk in bookstores.

Ingredients for apple-pie filling
8 apples, sliced into bite-sized to half inch pieces (recommended for baking: northern spies but any tart/hard apples will do)
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup maple syrup (grade B)
cinnamon and nutmeg to taste
3 tablespoons corn starch or arrowroot powder
dash of vanilla extract

Since returning to Michigan after a spring semester in Maine, I’ve taken steps to become a pie boulangère, all in the interest of keeping the spirit of transcendentalism close against my mind and discerning, once again, its perceptible weight on my open hands. Thus, in every kitchen I step in, pies have begun to spring out of thin air. All sorts of pies. Apple pies. Cherry pies. Blueberry pies. My fall skirts are ornamented with patterned streaks of flour, now becoming a permanent fixture of my daily apparel, of my daily countenance.

Some of my friends think I have gone wide-eyed pie-crazy.

This may or may not be the case, but I would just like to add here that they are perhaps the primary beneficiaries of my pie-inspired neuroses. The number-of-pies-coming-out-of-the-oven to the-number-of-pies-that-I-can-feasibly-eat is a fairly high ratio and consequently, I have begun leaving pies, carefully wrapped in aluminum foil and with the tell-tale etchings of a lattice top, at my friends’ doorsteps. I’ve also noticed a change in my parents’ attitude towards me. I dare say that the atmosphere is merrier when we drive back to their house with a pie pan in my lap than without. (Perhaps a general rule of thumb in all scenarios.)
While most people around me have written me off as merely caught up in a fiery passion, clad in the flour emblazoned trappings of a pie enthusiast, clearly fueled by insomnia, stress hormones and oscillating Michigan temperature, I’d like to say that I have more reason than that.

Andrew Jackson Downing says, spurred by a quote of Emerson’s:

“Fine fruit is the flower of commodities.” It is the most perfect union of the useful and the beautiful that the earth knows. Trees full of soft foliage; blossoms fresh with spring bounty; and, finally, fruit, rich, bloom-dusted, melting, and luscious.

This is one of the reasons I love to bake pies. When I pull out the pie pans and roll up my sleeves, I think about the seasonality of the earth, that serendipitous 23 degree tilt, and how we are inextricably tied to it. Fruits are tied to nature’s cycle, not the supermarkets’ and it is picked from farms, borrowed from your neighborhood’s hidden gardens, scavenged from the town’s public trees before they are crushed under pedestrian heels (my pie maestro and inspiration, Emily, calls it “guerilla urban berry picking”) these fruit are intimately bound to both coordinates of time and place. Fruits are one of the more edible, evident manifestations of the invisible, yet honest geometric reality of the earth. What’s more amazing is that not only does it call upon geologic traditions but human traditions as well: art and altruism (since they are constructed often with these in mind) and a history of refined practices (to make the perfect crust) passed through the fabric of time, pie by pie, until it reaches us, here, now, and when you think about it, we eat all of it — all of it collectively: time, place, history — and make it a part of us… literally! In baking a pie, you invite others to share in all of these wonderful abstractions with you as you sit around a table, on a blanket laid on a spread of grass, stand around a tiny college living room, and then you make it tangible. It becomes your body. It becomes your actions.

Or maybe it’s more aptly described as a rampant yearning for authenticity, to feel the texture of something real again. In acknowledging the most fundamental phenomena of the earth, listening to its rhythms that connect it to something much larger, we can begin to rediscover the value in our hands and what we can mold from the raw, most altruistic organism – the Earth. No matter how removed we now are, how civilized we are, no matter whatever socially constructed mannerisms we have acquired, no matter how deeply we’ve spiritually convinced ourselves that money is the pearl we orbit around, we are born from the earth, blossomed from its pieces. It amazes me to think that one day, far in the future, these things won’t be here anymore. This ground, all these books, my fingers that type… and what have we got to show? I’d like to spend my days rapt in life-affirming, actions. Because, once, life lived here. Not your car or your designer dress. Not resumes suggesting your estimated social worth. But pure, unadulterated, life.

Sue majors in Neuroscience & English and tends to lurk in bookstores.

The fall semester already begins to accelerate toward dazzling extremes — extremes of work load, extremes of red and gold, trickling in from the tips of the once temperate green leaves, extremes of cognitive activity and collegiate spirit, and of cold, and the extreme of being pressed to see and make choices, the vast number of choices that manifest on exam sheets in multiple choice bodies and choices that exist as real-life junctures where we stand in the crossroads. Everything is operating at this startling frequency industrious as ever, and this is how it is to be in college.

In order to make a brief escape from all the noise, I ventured to north campus to see the Engineering Social Change Fair, of which I was in part, initially attracted to because of the promised falafel and hummus pita spread. While the Middle Eastern food was exceptionally satisfying, this was to be expected. The presentation on the intersection between art and our immediate, present culture was one of those happy chance occurrences whose pleasantness becomes amplified by the fact it was unplanned. One of the keynote speakers for this event was Nick Tobier, an articulate associate professor of the School of Art & Design who spoke of his initiative of incorporating art into the arguably more “pragmatic” realm of people’s lives – that is, creating art that measurably betters a social group’s outlook on life. He recounted a story of being in New York, and being invigorated with excitement when he saw an elephant being paraded down one of the city streets after dusk. It was a miraculous sight, come to him during a stretch of his life when events more or less plateaued. Tobier said at the fair to an auditorium of students, that he knew in that moment that he “wanted to be someone else’s elephant.” And that’s exactly what he did.

Learning in college is being in classrooms and digesting theories and abstractions that require a great deal of working memory to hold in coherence. It’s like playing a game of chess, Tobier says, but how to extrapolate those rules that we twist and manipulate and are evaluated extensively on into the real-world? He began to create performing objects including a bicycle that channeled energy generated by the pedaling cyclist to light an overhanging chandelier. Additionally, he began spearheading larger scope community sustainability projects in Detroit — devoting his skills to develop a community farm in the cities and thus taking action to his belief of the right of access of all individuals to healthy whole foods.  (Click here for information on his other projects.) What interests him is the social-infused public spaces, and tangible interactions that occur between people. He is inspired by the power of social dynamism and the potential it holds. What he says to the room of students is that, being students, we are inherently already privileged. Tobier urges us all to turn our privileges inside out and build each other’s capacitance. Through art, or through whatever avenue of study that we have selected, we should seek to do this, to use our chosen craft as a conduit. This is wise advice. My mind couldn’t help but jump to my biopsychology lecture on theories that explained the evolution of the increasing human neocortex volume. The social hypothesis suggests that the reason our brain is so comparatively large to other mammals is because of our interactions with each other, our adaptive social inclination, and the necessary behavioral sophistications that come as a result. We are community creatures.

As the pace of the semester quickens, it’s easy to lose yourself in the stacks of readings and the numbers that culminate to a grade point average. Take a step back, and think of yourself not as a single unit, busying away into the depths of the night but an active participant in the communities you associate yourself with. Turn yourself, as Nick Tobier says, inside out and see what comes of it.

Sue majors in Neuroscience & English and tends to lurk in bookstores.