I wonder if my empathy has always been this, in every case: just a bout of hypothetical self-pity projected onto someone else. Is this ultimately just solipsism? Adam Smith confesses in his Theory of Moral Sentiments: “When we see a stroke aimed and just ready to fall upon the leg or arm of another person, we naturally shrink and draw back our own leg or our own arm.”
We care about ourselves. Of course we do. Maybe some good comes from it. If I imagine myself fiercely into my brother’s pain, I get some sense, perhaps, of what he might want or need, because I think, I would want this. I would need this. But it also seems like a fragile pretext, turning his misfortunes into an opportunity to indulge pet fears of my own devising.
I wonder which parts of my brain are lighting up when the med students ask me, “How does that make you feel?” Or which parts of their brains are glowing when I say, “The pain in my abdomen is a ten.” My condition isn’t real. I know this. They know this. I’m simply going through the motions. They’re simply going through the motions. But motions can be more than rote. They don’t just express feeling; they can give birth to it.
Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us—a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain—it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It’s made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse. Sometimes we care for another because we know we should, or because it’s asked for, but this doesn’t make our caring hollow. The act of choosing simply means we’ve committed ourselves to a set of behaviors greater than the sum of our individual inclinations: I will listen to his sadness, even when I’m deep in my own. To say “going through the motions”—this isn’t reduction so much as acknowledgment of the effort—the labor, the motions, the dance—of getting inside another person’s state of heart or mind.
This confession of effort chafes against the notion that empathy should always arise unbidden, that genuine means the same thing as unwilled, that intentionality is the enemy of love. But I believe in intention and I believe in work. I believe in waking up in the middle of the night and packing our bags and leaving our worst selves for our better ones.
Leslie Jamison
OB-GYN
SP TRAINING MATERIALS (CONT.)
Opening Line: You don’t need one. Everyone comes here for the same reason.
Physical Presentation and Tone: Wear loose pants. You have been told to wear loose pants. Keep your voice steady and articulate. You are about to spread your legs for a doctor who won’t ever know your name. You know the drill, sort of. Act like you do.
Encounter Dynamics: Answer every question like you’re clarifying a coffee order. Be courteous and nod vigorously. Make sure your heart stays on the other side of the white wall behind you. If the nurse asks you whether you are sure about getting the procedure, say yes without missing a beat. Say yes without a trace of doubt. Don’t mention the way you felt when you first saw the pink cross on the stick—that sudden expansive joy at the possibility of a child, at your own capacity to have one. Don’t mention this single moment of joy, because it might make it seem as if you aren’t completely sure about what you’re about to do. Don’t mention this single moment of joy, because it might hurt. It will feel—more than anything else does—like the measure of what you’re giving up. It maps the edges of your voluntary loss.
Instead, tell the nurse you weren’t using birth control but wasn’t that silly and now you are going to start.
If she asks what forms of birth control you have used in the past, say condoms. Suddenly every guy you’ve ever slept with is in the room with you. Ignore them. Ignore the memory of that first time—all that fumbling, and then pain—while Rod Stewart crooned “Broken Arrow” from a boom box on the dresser. “Who else is gonna bring you a broken arrow? Who else is gonna bring you a bottle of rain?”
Say you used condoms but don’t think about all the times you didn’t—in an Iowan graveyard, in a little car by a dark river—and definitely don’t say why, how the risk made you feel close to those boys, how you courted the incredible gravity of what your bodies could do together.
If the nurse asks about your current partner, you should say, We are very committed, like you are defending yourself against some legal charge. If the nurse is listening closely, she should hear fear nestled like an egg inside your certainty.
If the nurse asks whether you drink, say yes to that too. Of course you do. Like it’s no big deal. Your lifestyle habits include drinking to excess. You do this even when you know there is a fetus inside you. You do it to forget there is a fetus inside you; or to feel like maybe this is just a movie about a fetus being inside you.
The nurse will eventually ask, How do you feel about getting the procedure? Tell her you feel sad but you know it’s the right choice, because this seems like the right thing to say, even though it’s a lie. You feel mainly numb. You feel numb until your legs are in the stirrups. Then you hurt. Whatever anesthesia comes through the needle in your arm only sedates you. Days later you feel your body cramping in the night—a deep, hot, twisting pain—and you can only lie still and hope it passes, beg for sleep, drink for sleep, resent Dave for sleeping next to you. You can only watch your body bleed like an inscrutable, stubborn object—something harmed and cumbersome and not entirely yours. You leave your body and don’t come back for a month. You come back angry.
You wake up from another round of anesthesia and they tell you all their burning didn’t burn away the part of your heart that was broken. You come back and find you aren’t alone. You weren’t alone when you were cramping through the night and you’re not alone now. Dave spends every night in the hospital. You want to tell him how disgusting your body feels: your unwashed skin and greasy hair. You want him to listen, for hours if necessary, and feel everything exactly as you feel it—your pair of hearts in such synchronized rhythm any monitor would show it; your pair of hearts playing two crippled bunnies doing whatever they can. There is no end to this fantasy of closeness. Who else is gonna bring you a broken arrow? You want him to break with you. You want him to hurt in a womb he doesn’t have; you want him to admit he can’t hurt that way. You want him to know how it feels in every one of your nerve endings: lying prone on the detergent sheets, lifting your shirt for one more cardiac resident, one more stranger, letting him attach his clips to the line of hooks under your breast, letting him print out your heart, once more, to see if its rhythm has calmed.
It all returns to this: you want him close to your damage. You want humility and presumption and whatever lies between, you want that too. You’re tired of begging for it. You’re tired of grading him on how well he gives it. You want to learn how to stop feeling sorry for yourself. You want to write an essay about the lesson. You throw away the checklist and let him climb into your hospital bed. You let him part the heart wires. You sleep. He sleeps. You wake, pulse feeling for another pulse, and there he is again.
BROOKE JARVIS
The Deepest Dig
FROM The California Sunday Magazine
ON THE NIGHTS before a dive, Cindy Lee Van Dover likes to stand on the deck of her research ship, looking down into the water the way an astronaut might look up at the stars.
She’s preparing herself to do an extraordinary thing: climb into a tiny bubble of light and air and sink to the bottom of the ocean, leaving the sparkling waters of the surface a mile and a half above her.
She makes the trip in a three-person submersible called Alvin, famous for discovering the underwater hot springs known as hydrothermal vents and for exploring the wreckage of the Titanic. Alvin sinks for more than an hour. The view from its portholes moves through a spectrum of glowing greens and blues, eventually fading to pure black. The only break from the darkness comes when the sub drops through clusters of bioluminescence that look like stars in the Milky Way. They’re the only way for Van Dover to tell, in the complete darkness and absence of acceleration, that she’s sinking at all.
At last, as Alvin approaches the seafloor, th
e pilot turns on the external light. Van Dover peers hard, eager for her first glimpse of a strange land of underwater volcanoes and mountain ranges, of vast plains and smoking basalt spires.
It’s the spires—the teetering chimneys that top hydrothermal vents—and their inhabitants that Van Dover has come to see. The animals that live on vents fascinate biologists like her because we understand so little about them. Scientists call them “alien” with only slight exaggeration: their most basic functions are unlike those of all other life on Earth, and astrobiologists study them to make better guesses about where to look for extraterrestrial life and what it might be like. “It allows us to see how life plays out on the next best thing to another planet,” says David Grinspoon, chair of astrobiology at the Library of Congress.
But scientists aren’t the only ones attracted to this strange world. The same vents that support colonies of undulating tubeworms, giant clams, eyeless shrimp, and hairy, tennis-ball-sized snails are also conduits for valuable metals fresh from the earth’s interior. Vents form where seawater seeps into fissures in the earth’s crust and reacts with the heat of magma, emerging transformed: acidic, boiling hot, and laden with chemicals and minerals. As the water cools, those minerals precipitate out, leaving behind concentrations of metals—gold, copper, nickel, and silver, as well as more esoteric minerals used in electronics—that make the richest mines on dry land look meager.
And where there’s metal, there are miners, even at the bottom of the world.
As an industry, deep-sea mining is brand-new. The International Seabed Authority (ISA), which oversees all mining in international waters, was formed in 1994, but by 2011 it had issued only seven exploratory licenses. By the end of this year, it believes that number will jump to 26, with the first license for commercial mining expected as soon as 2016. Only one country, Papua New Guinea, has issued a permit for commercial-scale deep-sea mining in its own waters, though India, Japan, China, and South Korea also have projects in the early stages, and more than a dozen Pacific island nations, whose tiny populations and bureaucracies are dwarfed by their massive marine territories, are scrambling to figure out how to manage mining. Even for an industry that’s seen plenty of false starts, says Michael Lodge, deputy to the secretary-general of the ISA, there is now “a hell of a lot of activity.”
It’s not news that we’re looking beyond the usual places to find the things that power modern society: oil from the Arctic and bitumen from the tar sands, coltan mined by hand in the heart of the Congo, and natural gas fracked from beneath suburban backyards. We’re even talking seriously about mining asteroids.
Still, there’s something pause-worthy about mining the deep ocean. Literally unfathomable, the deep sea is still the most remote and least understood environment on Earth and perhaps the closest thing to a final frontier our beleaguered planet can claim. Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo built the Nautilus, he declares, because the sea is the world’s last refuge from humankind: “At thirty feet below its level, their reign ceases, their influence is quenched, and their power disappears.”
Or maybe not. The first company to receive permission to mine the deep sea is called Nautilus Minerals.
Captain Nemo called the undersea world “the land of marvels.” That’s how Van Dover, growing up examining horseshoe crabs on the coast of New Jersey, saw it as well. From the moment she first read a scientific paper about hydrothermal vents, she became fascinated with the real-world denizens of the deep. She wrote to the paper’s author, a scientist at the Smithsonian Institution, and he agreed to send her a small vial of vent-crab eggs to dissect and analyze. It arrived in the mail “as valuable to me as a moon rock,” she says. Later, with the same scientist’s help, she talked her way onto one of the first biological expeditions to hydrothermal vents. She was too junior to get a spot on a dive, so she busied herself studying dead squat lobsters that the pilots removed from the sub’s exterior.
Van Dover eventually got her first dive in Alvin (she landed next to a bloom of crimson-plumed tubeworms known as the Rose Garden) and later earned her PhD in biological oceanography, but she realized that she craved more time on the seafloor than academia could offer her. So she took on the long, grueling process of training to be an Alvin pilot, becoming the 25th person and the first PhD-level scientist to do so. She was also the first—and is still the only—woman.
These days Van Dover is the chair of Duke University’s Division of Marine Science and Conservation and the director of a lab that studies the population dynamics of organisms from hydrothermal-vent fields around the world. She’s also something she never expected: a scientific consultant to Nautilus Minerals.
A Canadian company, Nautilus has obtained the mining exploration rights to nearly 200,000 square miles of territory throughout the Pacific, including in the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone, a vast region of international waters southeast of Hawaii that’s known to be rich in polymetallic nodules. Nautilus’s first-in-the-world deep-sea mining permit gives it permission to dismantle a hydrothermal-vent site known as Solwara 1, located nearly a mile deep in Manus Basin in Papua New Guinea’s Bismarck Sea.
Nautilus’s plan for Solwara 1, which the company intends to begin mining in 2017, is to use two large robot excavators to remove chimneys and the first 160 feet of the seafloor. Other specially designed machines will grind this material to slurry and pipe it to the surface. There solids will be separated out and excess fluid (acidic and full of chemicals not ordinarily found in the upper ocean) will be pumped back down to the deep sea. The remaining material will be shipped to China, where a company called Tongling will extract gold, silver, and copper. Within the mined area, the vent structures and the animals that once lived on them—examples of which fill jars in Van Dover’s lab—could disappear.
For Van Dover, that’s a heartbreaking thought. “Because these are my babies, right?” she says. “This is stuff I’ve always held and revered.” For years she and her fellow deep-sea scientists believed that the world they studied was far beyond the reach of industry. But as the most accessible land-based minerals are exhausted, those on the bottom of the sea are looking more like low-hanging fruit. “You have to go to more remote places,” Lodge, of the ISA, says. “You have to go deeper.”
In Tok Pisin, the lingua franca of Papua New Guinea (the country is home to more than 800 languages), solwara means “ocean”—sol plus wara equals “saltwater.” The ocean is integral to life in New Ireland, the island province in whose waters Solwara 1 lies. People here farm coconuts, bananas, sago, and taro, plus buai, or betel nut, to sell at the market. Many don’t use money for much beyond school fees, rides to town, and a few staple supplies. They raise pigs and hunt tree possums called cuscus. And they fish, sometimes far offshore.
Representatives from Nautilus have often visited New Ireland while developing plans for Solwara 1, but there’s still a lot of uncertainty about what the mining project will mean. In Kontu, a village known for its shark-calling festival, I asked a woman named Helen Joel what questions she’d asked the representatives. “We do not ask questions because we do not know,” she replied. During my three weeks in Papua New Guinea last winter, I repeatedly found people turning my own questions back on me: What should we think of the mine? What does it mean for the ocean? The one thing everyone seemed to know was that the mine would be the first, the very first, in the world.
January is the wet season in New Ireland, and the coastal road that edges the Bismarck Sea is unpaved. My rented Land Cruiser stalled repeatedly in deep water and was finally trapped between rain-swollen rivers in a tiny village whose name even my local companions didn’t know. “Ugana,” a man named Ray Wilfred told us. “Not Uganda. That’s in Africa.” Wilfred’s neighbor, Ambrose Barais, a thickset man with a close-trimmed mustache and a thin, dark line tattooed on his right cheek, invited us to dinner with his wife and six children. I asked one of their sons his age, and he looked at me blankly before I remembered the right way to ask. “How many Christm
ases?” “Seventeen.”
The rain poured without a break. Inside the house, by firelight, Barais’s wife fried whole reef fish and boiled rice. One of the kids asked me what the metals from the seabed would be used for. It struck me how unlikely they were to end up back here, where a family’s only metal possessions might be a few cooking pots and utensils, roofing, and sometimes a cell phone they charge when they have access to a generator.
Barais had been to Messi, a large coastal village less than 20 miles from the mining site, to hear a geologist talk about the project. He remembered seeing an image of a volcano on a laptop screen. “They said seabed mining cannot cause any damage, but people are not believing in what they are saying,” he said. “We heard that in the world, there is no mine like this.” How did he feel, I asked, about the mine being the first? “Scared,” he answered. “The sea might overflow and kill us.”
That concern may sound silly, but on New Ireland it—and the other mining-related fears I heard, ranging from earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions to massive fish kills and fundamental changes to the ocean’s currents—makes a certain gloomy kind of sense. Here the precautionary principle, summed up for me by one New Irelander as “better prevent than regret,” needs little explanation. The province has seen devastating landslides following logging, farmland rendered infertile by oil palm plantations, a steep decline in fish stocks after a land-based gold mine dumped toxic waste into the sea, and rising sea levels caused largely by the emissions of distant, difficult-to-imagine traffic jams and factories. New Irelanders also live in fear of the earth’s tectonic power. The largest city on a neighboring island, New Britain, was nearly wiped out by a volcanic eruption in 1994, and the island was hit by another eruption this fall. How much more mysterious and forbidding than these disasters are the dark, silent depths of the sea? I parroted the line I’d heard from so many scientists: that the deep sea is like an alien world here on Earth. “Is it true?” Wilfred asked me. “There are aliens?”
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2015 Page 17
