“Oh no, he’s not a preacher,” she corrected them. “He’s an evangelist.”
The great literary scholar and surrealist Jorge Luis Borges was a master at revealing the subtle ways we are not who we think we are. In Borges and I, he writes of the “other one, the one called Borges” whom he knows “from the mail” and whose name he sees “on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary . . . but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. . . . Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him. I do not know which of us has written this page.”
In The Other, Borges depicts himself in Cambridge, Massachusetts, stopping to sit on a bench on the bank of the Charles River. Already on the bench is a well-dressed man who seems to him familiar. The older and the younger man have a refreshingly literary conversation, touching on, among other things, the use of the doppelgänger in the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe. At some point the older man realizes why the younger man looks so familiar; it is his younger self whom he, at first, did not recognize.
I had the exact opposite experience when I recognized myself, not on a bench as another body but as a voice from another time. My mother had picked up me and my girlfriend Natasha Myers, a professor of anthropology at York University, at the airport and insisted we listen to an essay of mine, part of an anthology that had just been released as an audiobook. The reader, Pamela Ward, was espousing views using my exact words but in prose that ran strongly contrary to some of my current opinions critical of critical theory, epistemological relativism, abstract jargon, and postmodern academic fashion.
Not only was she confidently using French philosophy to deconstruct the notion of discrete identity, I was the source of the voice and its mannered attack on the recent positions I held so dear. I shrank in my seat. Natasha, a frequent interlocutor with whom I had espoused my current opinions, was in the backseat, laughing.
The essay in question, “The Uncut Self,” appeared in the anthology Dazzle Gradually: Reflections on the Nature of Nature, published by Chelsea Green. I had written a draft of it over twenty years ago for Fred Tauber of Boston University and his conference there, “Organism and the Origins of Self,” on biology and philosophy. I was under the spell of Continental philosophy in a big way, quoting Michel Foucault, thinking with Jacques Derrida, and in general making the same sort of arguments that I now objected to when Natasha made them to me, accusing me of scientism, biological reductionism, and a naive belief in reality free of social constructions.
Dazzle Gradually comes from Emily Dickinson’s line “The truth must dazzle gradually / or every man be blind.” Well I was dazzled all right. And all would have been well had not my mother, the evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis, coauthor of the essay and lately taken by it in audio form, insisted on playing it loudly for Natasha in the backseat.
Natasha could no more control the volume than I could, as my mother told us to “shhh” and listen, wondering what was so funny. My laughter was more subdued. I was being schooled by my younger self.
NATASHA AND I TRY not to make a habit of arguing, but when we do, our intellectual arguments seem to follow the script from an Ian McEwan novel, with me defending the “rational male” view of classic scientific objectivity and her assuming a more “generous” view (popular today in humanities departments) that highlights the role of culture and history in creating what we naïfs consider culture-free facts.
Part of the disorienting effect of the essay is that it begins midsentence:
full circle, not based on the rectilinear frame of reference of a painting, mirror, house, or book, and with neither “inside” nor “outside” but according to the single surface of a Moebius strip. This is not the classical Cartesian model of self, with a vital ensouled res cogitans surrounded by that predictable world of Newtonian mechanisms of the res extensa; it is closer to Maturana and Varela’s conception of autopoiesis, a completely self-making, self-referring, tautologically delimited entity at the various levels of cell, organism, and cognition (Maturana and Varela 1973). It would be premature to accuse us therefore of a debilitating biomysticism, of pandering to deconstructive fashion, or, indeed, of fomenting an academic “lunacy” or “criminality” that merits ostracism from scientific society, smoothly sealed by peer review and by the standards of what Fleck calls a “thought collective” (Fleck 1979). Nor would it be timely to label and dismiss us as antirational or solipsist.
What was “I” thinking? Where was “I” going with this? Well, apparently back to the beginning, because the essay ends: Topologically the self has no homuncular inner self but comes . . . thereby beginning the sentence with which the essay starts.
The effect of calm intellectual self-annihilation was complete. “I” had proved to “my” own satisfaction that there are no absolute borders around the self-referring, operationally closed but multiply constituted self. If God, as Meister Eckhart said, is a being whose center is everywhere and whose periphery is nowhere, so the self was not a skin-encapsulated ego separate from the rest of the universe.
I guess this also included separate from one’s former self. I shrank from the auto-onslaught, but there was nowhere to go in the auto. The effect was worsened as Natasha alternately told my mother to turn the sound down and shrieked with delight in the backseat at my anticipatory self-destruction. The irony was that the self on the CD was deconstructing the older-me listening even as it embarrassed me with its jargon bomb of jejune enthusiasm. If the old young me was right, the new old me was wrong.
I thought of Nietzsche’s comment about how juvenile his earlier writings seemed until he got older and considered that critique juvenile. Not only did Ward’s reading of my essay embarrassingly reproduce Natasha’s side of the arguments we have over “epistemological relativism” and “postmodern jargon,” but my younger self argues against the notion of stable biological identity (the “rectilinear self” in that essay’s jargon!). It was a one-two punch I gave to myself, and there was nothing much I could do but stay slumped in the front seat, pummeled in part by my own embarrassed laughter. Of course my mother still wanted to know what was so funny, as she thought the essay was “just great.”
So, who are we?
I believe we are distributed identities, Möbius strips (okay, younger self, don’t gloat) that turn back on ourselves to see that we are not the isolated simple identities we thought we were. We are members of families, tribes, nations, age groups, sexes, trades, and classes that may and are in complex conflict with one another. Navigating these multiple assemblages is an invitation either to contradiction or to denial; political coherency becomes impossible.
The multiple alliances go still farther. You are not just a political animal but a differentiated clone of nucleated cells, a collection of microbes. You are a lineal descendant of the first life, recycling a water-based chemistry full of hydrogen-rich compounds, like methane and sulfide, characteristic of the inner solar system four billion years ago at the time of life’s origin, soon after the Sun turned on.
Atomically, you contain elements like carbon and oxygen, made not here but on the inside of distant stars that ultimately exploded. Your lineage escaped several serious mass extinctions, not including the global pollution crisis precipitated by the first water-using photosynthesizers that toxified the entire planet, but whose air you now breathe. Physically, you may only be a tick in time and a speck in space, but ultimately you are part of the evolving universe itself, much bigger than humanity and its current crop of madmen.
If you look on the Internet you will see that Julian Assange’s last name is that of his stepfather, a theater director his mother married when Julian was one, and that several years later she married a musician who Julian himself says may have been part of the identity-destroying Santiniketan Park Association, a bizarre Australian cult run by Anne Hamilton-Byrne, who fed her children LSD, starved them, provided them with a rigid regimen of yoga and ear
ly rising, and made them repent for their sins as well as call her God. The children’s hair was dyed platinum blond, the boys were given bowl cuts, some of them disappeared, their names and birthdates underwent capricious changes, and they often had multiple passports. Julian’s mother was so intent on escaping her second husband that she took Julian and his half-brother into hiding, and by the time Julian was fourteen, they’d moved thirty times.
It has been suggested that the cult was an MK-ULTRA operation, a covert, illegal CIA human research program, run by the Office of Scientific Intelligence, and that WikiLeaks is a “limited hangout” in CIA jargon, that is, something that seems bad but is really good (for them).
I would like to suggest that the Department of Defense created a monster in helping form the Internet (in the late 1950s, partly to have a decentralized communications network that could survive a nuclear war) that they can never stuff back in their Pandoran box; that our complicity with the military industrial complex, reinforced whenever we drive down the street or use a MasterCard, seems to be under control of the paranoiac-conspiratorial-realistic “They”—some of whom really do fashion themselves to be in control—but that if we look farther into the future, complicity with THEM pales next to the power wielded over us by nature.
The biosphere has other plans for the Internet, a kind of global neuronal intelligence, that even the criminalocracy can’t stop or control. Even billions of military dollars could not reproduce something as simple and lovely as Smith College’s greenhouse across from Paradise Pond because that greenhouse is a very specific growth form, produced not just by humans but by plants in interaction with them for over 150 years.
We are complicitous with the forces we detest, but those forces are complicitous with still greater powers we may admire. The great heterobiographies of our protean selves have yet to be written. We are all triple agents now.
CHAPTER 7
OF WHALES AND ALIENS
The Search for Intelligent Life on Earth
HALF MY LITTLE LIFE AGO, under the influence of P. cubensis—aka psychedelic mushrooms—I, and two of my reprobate friends, found ourselves among a sea of tourists in Quincy Market. After overhearing a mini Sopranos-style imbiber declaiming loudly upon the niceties of female lace, frilly clothing, and all things that tied, we shambled on through the colorful commerce toward nature, or what was left of it down near the harbor.
We found ourselves noses to Plexiglas at the outdoor tank of the Boston Aquarium, attempting to make “Hoover,” the great bull seal and for us the aquarium’s main attraction, speak. Hoover was a character: After diving and holding his breath, he’d release spiral swirls of air bubbles like rustling aquatic theater curtains, building suspense for the performance just to come.
Then he would emerge and bellow such gems as “urgh-urgh-urgh hell-hell-Hell-HELLO How AH ya?” or “Guh-guh-guh-GUH-GUH-GUH-GEHT-outta-HEAH.”
This time, however, although we would dearly have loved to have seen the best free show in town, the talking seal, despite our loud imprecations, did not respond, preferring apparently to wait for a larger audience or to slumber amid his substantial and slippery harem.
Our efforts did not go unnoticed, however. A drunk on his bench awoke from his slumber. “Hey-ya,” he yelled, “get offa ThEAH!”
While Hoover got his Boston accent not from that drunk who slept on a bench near the tank but from the Swallows, the Maine couple who named him for his vacuumlike capacity to down fish—and then, when he grew too big, gave him to the Boston Aquarium—there was something enchantingly kindred about him, so much so that he received a human-style obituary from the Boston Globe.
With such intelligent mammals in the oceans that cover two-thirds of this watery orb we land animals have christened Earth, I wonder why, for the first time in twenty-four years, the International Whaling Commission has found it necessary to attempt to roll back the ban on commercial whale hunting. Even the hunters of whales realize they are tempting fate. Moby-Dick tells us of the Nantucket legends of the first indigenous harpooners, rowing toward the legless Leviathans of the deep. By Herman Melville’s time, the industry had become both lucrative and romantic, attracting young men from across the continent to the urbane port of New Bedford, then a most cosmopolitan city itself coursing—with a questionable captain—through the greater ocean of space. Before setting off, Ishmael takes in a sermon for sailors delivered by an ex-harpooner priest. As he listens, the wood of the pulpit reminds him of a ship’s prow:
Then God spake unto the fish; and from the shuddering cold and blackness of the sea, the whale came breeching up towards the warm and pleasant sun, and all the delights of air and earth; and “vomited out Jonah upon the dry land”; when the word of the Lord came a second time; and Jonah, bruised and beaten—his ears, like two sea-shells, still multitudinously murmuring of the ocean—Jonah did the Almighty’s bidding. And what was that, shipmates? To preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood! That was it!
And in guiding the young mariners, Father Mapple, the ex-harpooner cleric, seems himself to lose his moorings: “He said no more, but slowly waving a benediction, covered his face with his hands, and so remained, kneeling, till all the people had departed, and he was left alone in the place.”
Unlike our oceangoing legless cousins, we landlubbers are good at killing with our hands. Before their smiling visages became a fixture at SeaWorld and on the face of Flipper in the 1960s TV show, dolphins were disparaged as “herring hogs” for their tendency to rob fishermen’s nets. Sea mammals were hunted for lamp oil, for meat, and for “superior lubricant for precision timepieces.” While alive they could be feared, but in the main they were treated as resources, not beings. A member of the “toothed whales” (Odontoceti), which also include narwhals (Melville’s “sea unicorns,” which have big tusklike teeth jutting out of their foreheads) and beluga whales, in the suborder Delphinidae, which also includes “killer whales” (or “orca”), and beaked and pilot whales, dolphins—largely because of the militarily funded, brilliantly creative, and somewhat unhinged researcher John Cunningham Lilly in the 1960s—came to captivate the human imagination.
I HAVE A VERY EARLY MEMORY of being with my father, Carl Sagan, who was trying to talk to a dolphin as another man walked about. It was probably Lilly.
My mother, Lynn Margulis, who would have been divorced from my father at the time, suspects I did meet Lilly, although not in the Virgin Islands at his main lab, but in Boston or Cambridge or Florida. She herself met Lilly once through my father and instantly thought Lilly was “clever and self-centered, much like Timothy Leary.”
In his biography, William Poundstone writes of how my father, at a restaurant with Lilly, asked their pretty waitress out. Although she declined, she agreed to one of Lilly’s crazy experiments, sharing a special flooded living quarters with a dolphin—who happened to be one of the five that played Flipper on the TV show.
Apparently Flipper had needs. (He was not alone; according to Princeton University’s D. Graham Burnett, these “powerful sea mammals with fixed grins [that] now and again . . . rake, butt, and sodomize each other . . . have presented challenges to their keepers from the earliest days of captivity.”) The waitress-cum-interspecies-experimental-subject found herself following a path of least resistance that included acquiescing to Flipper’s relentless sexual advances, satisfying him with her hand. The dolphin was not, according to Poundstone, so lucky with my father, who in turn rebuffed the TV star.
Perhaps dolphins are not as smart, noble, or linguistic as we’d like to project. Dolphins, Burnett says, “though they can jump almost twenty feet in the air . . . very rarely sort out how easy it would be to roll over the top of an encircling trap.” But is it not also true, as the recent British Petroleum Earth Day oil spill suggests, that we are also in a kind of trap, one not confined to a little net in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean but extending across all the continents and the seven seas, into the groundwater and the atmosphere, a trap that may spel
l the demise of ourselves as well as the dolphins and whales we cavalierly kill?
The cosmologist Stephen Hawking has recently blitzed the media with warnings not only that aliens probably exist but that when they find us they’ll probably want to eat us. To me this also sounds like projection. Coming here for food is not like the harpooners setting sail to procure whale oil. Interstellar spaces are far greater, and the proteinaceous rewards far more meager. Distant aliens coming here for dinner makes about as much sense as flying a supersonic jet to Morocco for a garbanzo bean.
The physicist Michio Kaku counters Hawking’s surmise that aliens may prove as destructive as Christopher Columbus and company when they wiped out Native American populations. If aliens arrived, Kaku opines, it might be more like the United States’ experience during the Vietnam War, with the aliens wanting to get out ASAP.
To me, Hawking’s Columbus and Kaku’s “Vietnam” scenarios seem, to quote Friedrich Nietzsche, all too human. They relate our hypothetical meeting with aliens to other examples of human encounters within the history of our own dangerously self-absorbed species. Indeed, Hawking, bless his cosmic book-selling heart (in an interview on Larry King Live, he told King it was nice to see him after these ten years and closed by saying he hoped to see him again when his book came out), advised Larry that the invaders will “have a mouth opening because they will have to take in nutrition . . . and they will probably have legs because they will need to move around, and they will have eyes—but don’t expect them to look like Marilyn Monroe.” Whew—that would be scary—being eaten by an army of Marilyn Monroes from outer space!
Seriously, though, what is this obsession with hypothetical aliens when we are living among some of the most fascinating sentient beings in the universe and have only just begun to establish contact with them?
Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science Page 9
