We went to America and stayed in the Plaza in New York. It was an amazing hotel.
We had a great advanced team. Cherry Vanilla, who’s a famous groupie, and Leee Black Childers, who was a Warhol actor. They would go to the next town, go to the gay clubs, and create fervor. It was really a good idea, because it got the kids to the gigs.
I met Iggy Pop in California. We stayed at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and Iggy wanted me to dye his hair blue, and I obliged.
I said to him, “You know, you might want to wash that a couple of times before going back in the pool.”
Of course he paid me no mind, and by the end of the afternoon there was a blue streak from one end to the other of the Beverly Hills Hotel pool. (I think he was asked to leave after that.)
We went to Japan, and I met Kansai Yamamoto, and I picked up some more wonderful costumes for David. It was exciting. Suddenly I was cool: the girl with the thick hair and the thicker glasses was in a world where everybody wanted to be.
I went back to Beckenham, and I walked up and down the High Street, looked through Evelyn Paget’s windows—my God, it looked so small, I was so glad I wasn’t there.
Nothing had changed in Beckenham, nothing had changed at home, but I was so changed, I was a million miles from here.
The last show that David ever did as Ziggy Stardust was at Hammersmith Odeon in July 1973, and he just stood on the front of the stage and said, “This is the last show we’re ever going to do.” Then he played “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide.”
I was sad to say good-bye to Ziggy, I think we were all sad to say good-bye to Ziggy, but I didn’t go home. I went to Italy and fell in love with a guitar player and moved to London with him.
I’m so grateful for my luck. I’m grateful I met Mrs. Jones and Angie, grateful I gave Angie that telephone number—otherwise somebody else might have been living my life. Thrilled that I met and married the late, great Mick Ronson and had a lovely daughter with him.
And, of course, I’m so grateful to David. He took a chance on me, changed my life completely.
My haircut’s on British currency now—the Brixton ten-pound note.
Now, who would have thought I could have done that?
SUZI RONSON has worked in various capacities for well-heeled individuals as a household manager, music producer, and consultant in New York City, the Hamptons, Florida, and Tortola in the British Virgin Islands. She is a singer-songwriter who performs only for friends. She also loves horses and traveled on the horse-riding circuit in the United States with a young girl who was competing. Suzi lives in the West Village of New York City, while her daughter and the rest of her family live in London. She swears she’ll go back one day.
This story was told on April 11, 2016, at Union Chapel in London. The theme of the evening was Coming Home. Director: Meg Bowles.
It was the 1990s, and I was course director at the Marine Biological Lab in Woods Hole on Cape Cod, directing a class on how computers can be used to learn about the brain.
We were celebrating with a boisterous evening—a big dinner party and a live rock and roll band. And I’d really indulged in dancing and drinking.
But then I grew restless. I’d spent my previous evenings reading the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche writing about how modernity had killed God, divine putrefaction, and how we’re all God’s gravediggers. This had reawakened this long-simmering conflict I’d had between my religious upbringing and my profession as a scientist.
So I left the party, and I wandered off through the forest to the beach. When I arrived at the beach, there was a crescent moon, which was partly obscured by the clouds that were being chased across the sky by the wind, which had picked up.
The storm had also driven the white of the waves towards the land, and it was this desolate, empty beach with just a couple of boulders. In the background there were trees, and they were swaying—very menacing.
And I went through this existential crisis, and I shouted out to the sky, “Gott, wo bist Du?”
See, God speaks German, of course.
I was shouting for God to reveal himself. Here I was, trying for many years to desperately believe in him, but I never had a sign of his existence. So I was debating with him, in what was a very one-sided debate.
I wanted him to show himself. I needed a booming voice from the sky. I wanted a burning bush. I wanted some sign. And because I had drunk a lot, I was increasingly insistent and bellicose, shouting into the wind at the top of my voice for God to show himself.
Then suddenly the earth erupted in front of me, and there was this bright light that dazzled me. A very angry form materialized right in front of me.
And it was shrieking and yelling, “Get the fuck off this beach!”
God had metamorphosed into an angry camper who was trying to sleep there. I hadn’t noticed him before, and I’d awakened him.
I grew up happy, raised by my parents in the best liberal Catholic tradition, where, by and large, science—including evolution by natural selection—was accepted as explaining the facts of the world.
I was an altar boy. I learned to say the prayers in Latin, and I loved the Masses and the passions and the requiems of Orlande de Lassus, Verdi, and Bach.
When I was a teenager, my dad gave me a five-inch reflector telescope, and I still very viscerally remember the night when I—on the top of my house—calculated where the planet Uranus should be in the sky.
I pointed the telescope at the azimuth and the elevation, and right there it appeared, and I remember this incredible feeling of elation. What a terrific confirmation of order in the cosmos. I felt this lawful universe that I found myself in, where I could actually compute things like the position of this blue planet that gently drifted into view.
Over the years I began to reject a lot of the things that the Catholic Church told me. I was taught one set of values by my parents and by my Jesuit teachers, but I heard the beat of a very different drummer in books, lectures, and the laboratory.
I had one explanation for things in the world for Sunday, and then I had another explanation for the rest of the week. There was a sacred explanation, and there was this profane explanation.
On the one hand, I was told my life was given meaning by putting it in the context of the large scale: there’s this large creation of God, and I’m just a puny part of it. On the other hand, science actually explained facts about the real universe I found myself in. And so for many decades, I had this profound split of reality.
And then I met Francis Crick. I first encountered Francis under an apple tree doing what he loved best, which was discussing biology. Francis Crick was the physical chemist who together with James Watson discovered the double-helical structure of the molecule of heredity, DNA, the discovery for which he was given the Nobel Prize.
It was really to him and his guiding intellect that the field of molecular biology looked for guidance in the giddy race to discover the universal code of life. And when that goal was achieved in the late sixties, he shifted his interest from molecular biology to trying to understand how consciousness arises out of the physical brain.
That’s when I encountered Francis, and we grew quite close and fond of each other. We worked together for close to two decades. We published two books. We wrote two dozen papers, and he dedicated his last book to me.
Francis also epitomized the historical animosity between religion and science. This grew legendary in 1961, when Francis resigned from Churchill College at Cambridge University in England to protest plans to add a chapel to the college grounds. Francis felt that a new college dedicated to science and mathematics and engineering was no place for superstition.
Winston Churchill, in whose name the college had been founded after the war, tried to appease Francis, and wrote him a letter pointing out that the financial means for the construction of the chapel would be raised entirely by private means. It would be open to people of any faith, and nobody would be forced to attend.
Francis
replied by return post, proposing the construction of a brothel—a bordello. The construction of the bordello would be financed entirely by private means. It would be open to all men, no matter what their religious conviction, and no man would be forced to attend.
Included in his letter was a check for a down payment.
So ended the correspondence between the two great men.
By the time I knew Francis, his animosity vis-à-vis religion had become muted. Although he knew I was raised Catholic, and I sporadically attended Mass, he never probed. I think he was a kind man, and he wanted to spare me the embarrassment of groping for an explanation—especially since my belief didn’t interfere with our quest to understand how the conscious mind arises out of the brain within an entirely natural framework.
For emotional reasons I wasn’t ready to give up my faith, but I was afraid that his searing intellect couldn’t be matched by anything I could say to explain why I believed certain things.
Many years into our collaboration, when I visited him in San Diego, where he lived, he told me in a very matter-of-fact tone that his colon cancer—he had a previous bout with colon cancer—had probably returned. He was expecting a call from his oncologist later on that day to discuss the results of some tests they’d run.
I was actually with him in the study—that’s how we worked, in his study at home—when the call came confirming that the cancer had indeed returned with a vengeance. He put down the phone and stared off into space for a minute or two, and then he returned to our conversation about brains.
At lunch he discussed his diagnosis with his wife, talking about what needed to be done to accommodate him. But for the rest of the day, we worked.
That was it. There was no doom and gloom. There was no gnashing of teeth. There were no tears. It impressed me immensely, this living embodiment of an ancient stoic dictum: accept what you can’t change.
A couple of months later, when again I visited him, we went, as usual, through his large correspondence pertaining to consciousness. There was a personal letter from a famous British philosopher confessing to Francis his abject fear when faced with the idea of his own mortality.
The philosopher wrote, “I feel like an animal cornered, absolutely terrified, panicky, unable to think clearly when contemplating my own demise.”
I finally found the strength to ask him, apropos that letter, “Francis, how do you feel about your diagnosis?” (Studiously avoiding any mention of the word death.)
Here again he was very much down-to-earth. He said something like, “Everything that has a beginning must have an end. Those are the facts. I don’t like them, but I’ve accepted them, and I will not take any heroic measures to prolong my life beyond the inevitable. I’m resolved to live my life out with intact mind.”
And so he did. Over the next two years, as the cancer weakened his body, but never his spirit, we continued to write. We finished my book. I was just immensely impressed by how he could deal with this. I, of course, reflected on my own future demise, and whether I would be able to have this calmness, this composure, to meet my own end.
When he was suffering from the debilitating effect of chemotherapy, I overheard him one day on the phone talking with somebody who was trying to convince him to sign off on the construction of a bobblehead of him. (Because Francis Crick is a very famous figure, they wanted to construct a bobblehead doll of him.)
At some point I heard him put down the phone. He shuffled past me on the way to the bathroom. When he returned several minutes later to resume the conversation, he just sort of dryly remarked to me in passing, “Well, now I can truly say this idea made me throw up.”
Then one day he called me to say, “Christof, the corrections to our paper we’re working on—they’re going to be delayed. I have to go to the hospital for a couple of days, but don’t worry.”
In the hospital he continued to dictate corrections to this paper to his assistant. Two days later he passed away, and his wife, Odile, told me how on his deathbed he had this hallucinatory conversation with me involving neurons and their connection to consciousness.
A scientist literally to his last breath.
Given the forty-year age difference, we fell into this very natural father/son relationship. We became very close intellectual companions, and he became my hero for the unflinching way he dealt with mortality and aging.
With a view towards the inevitable, he gave me a huge life-size portrait of himself sitting in a wicker chair, gazing out at me with a twinkle in his eyes, signed, “For Christof—Francis—keeping an eye on you.”
And so it does today in my office.
I’ve never had another encounter with God, nor do I expect to, for the God I now believe in is much closer to Spinoza’s God than the God of Michelangelo’s painting or the God of the Old Testament.
I’m sort of saddened by the loss of my belief in religion. It’s like leaving forever the comfort of your childhood home, suffused with the warm glows and fond memories. But I do believe we all have to grow up.
It’s difficult for many. It’s unbearable to the few. But we have to see the world as it really is, and we have to stop thinking in terms of magic.
As Francis would have put it, “This is a story for grown men, not a consoling tale for children.”
And so here I am seven years later. I’m a highly organized pattern of mass and energy, one of 7 billion. In any objective accounting of the universe, I’m practically nothing, and soon I’ll cease to be. But the certainty of my own demise, the certainty of my own death, somehow makes my life more meaningful, and I think that is as it should be.
I find myself born into this universe. It’s a wonderful place. It’s a strange place. It’s also a scary and sometimes lonely place.
And every day in my work, I try to discern through its noisy manifestation, its people, dogs, trees, mountains, stars—everything I love—I try to discern the eternal music of the spheres.
Born in the American Midwest, CHRISTOF KOCH grew up in Holland, Germany, Canada, and Morocco. He studied physics and philosophy at the University of Tübingen in Germany and was awarded his PhD in biophysics in 1982. In 1986 he joined the California Institute of Technology as a professor of biology and engineering. In 2013 he left academia to become the chief scientific officer and then the president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, leading a ten-year, large-scale, high-throughput effort to build brain observatories to map, analyze, and understand the cerebral cortex. He loves dogs, Apple computers, climbing, biking, and long-distance running. Christof has authored more than three hundred scientific papers and articles, eight patents, and five books. Together with his longtime collaborator, Francis Crick, Christof pioneered the scientific study of consciousness. His latest book is Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist.
This story was told on June 1, 2013, at The Players in New York City. The theme of the evening was What Lies Beneath: Stories of Discovery at the World Science Festival. Director: Meg Bowles.
For many years I worked along the northeast coast of Japan, and when assigned there I would frequent this one particular restaurant, five, six nights a week. Over the years I came to grow very fond of the older woman who owned and operated it. She didn’t speak any English, and I didn’t speak any Japanese, but we shared a friendship just the same.
Upon arrival I would always slide open her door, and take a half step in, and look at her as if to say, Hey, Mom, I’m home!
And she would greet me with this warm and welcoming smile, and she was always happy to see me. She knew what I was there for, the same thing every time—her amazing pan-fried chicken dish.
She was a motherly figure to me as well. She was always giving me extra things to eat, and was just genuinely a very nice woman. I would stop there so often after work just to rest and relax, yet I never knew her name or the name of her restaurant. We all referred to her fondly as the “Chicken Lady.”
Her restaurant was located just south of t
he Fukushima Daiichi nuclear generating station, where in 2011 I was working as a field engineer.
When you walked through the gates of the Fukushima nuclear generating station, it resembled a botanical garden. The landscaping was immaculate. There were well-manicured lawns everywhere, and the trees were pruned to perfection to resemble these large bonsai. The reactor buildings themselves were painted sky blue with white clouds on them, and it was always my favorite place to work.
March 11, 2011, was a beautiful sunny day there. My crew and I were working inside of the Reactor One turbine building, a huge, rectangular-shaped building similar in size to an international airport hangar.
At 2:46 in the afternoon, I had a young man overhead in the crane as an operator. Ten of us, including myself, were in a very well-defined contaminated work zone, dressed from head to toe in our protective clothing, when suddenly it felt like someone took a very big hammer and hit the foundation of that very big building.
I turned to my crew and I said, “Earthquake!”
This powerful earthquake caused these massive upheavals of the earth, and then these dropping sensations. It was taking the entire structure we were in with it, it was very violent, and it was just starting. I was trying to navigate my way around my crew, the whole time keeping an eye on this young man in the overhead crane. He was taking the ride of his life as this crane hopped on its tracks and crabbed, and it was really difficult to watch.
The concrete floor and walls around us began to crack, and sections of ductwork were coming down, and the lights, the lights were dropping everywhere. The huge, vast space that we were in quickly filled with what I first thought was smoke, but was actually a thick cloud of dust that was being thrown airborne from this huge structure getting the living hell shook out of it.
We were all right there on the borderline of panic, and then the lights went out, and we were in the pitch-black. This really scared the crap out of all of us. Two young Japanese boys came to me, and grabbed a hold of me in the dark. I had this one tall kid on my left, and he had his arm around my shoulder, and I had my arm around his back. The other guy was on his knees, and he had his arms around my waist, and I had my hand on his shoulder.
The Moth Presents All These Wonders Page 5
