The Blazing World: A Novel

by Siri Hustvedt

  Harriet Burden

  Notebook T

  May 24, 2001

  We have made the pact, or at least I think we have made it. He looked into my eyes and he said it would be fun.

  I have bought a Rune multiple—a video work. The New Me. I am curious to see how it holds up over time.

  His apartment: a plumber’s dream of Baroque splendor. I didn’t dare ask him if the gold tassels were tongue in cheek or not, but he is too smart not to know. He indulges himself in contradictions and expects everyone to go along with him; and this is paradoxically charming because it is childlike. Look at my toys. Aren’t they cool? He strutted through the rooms, giving me the tour, as his arm shot out in the direction of each object, but he did not pause to examine a single trophy: “pot from Cambodia, 2000 B.C., Diane Arbus photo—killed herself in ’71,—the shoes Marlene Dietrich wore in Morocco.” When a girl with a pixie cut suddenly appeared in a doorway, he flung out his arm and barked “Jeannie,” after which he grinned at me to make sure I understood he was joking. An “assistant,” one of a team of “helpers” roaming about, mostly competent-looking young women with telephones.

  Robot photos in heroic display, taken in various labs around the United States and in Geneva, but also “filmbots,” imaginary machines, a movie still of Hal from 2001 and Woody Allen as the robotic waiter in Sleeper. Give me Woody Allen’s bumbler any day, I said, but Rune did not smile.

  He has ideas, but they are jumbled. He never read a single page of the books I recommended. But a demon called the Singularity has possessed him, the grandiose offspring of one Verne Vinge, mathematics professor and science fiction writer, who in 1993 predicted a monumental, revolutionary shift in time, the moment we poor mortals will manufacture machine intelligences greater than our own. Our technical devices will race ahead of us, and a posthuman, postbiological world will dawn. We will all be machine-organic hybrids. We will “upload” ourselves and become immortals, although the trick remains elusive. Vinge, a techno-Frankenstein, writes: “Large computer networks may ‘wake up’ as a superhumanly intelligent entity.”I

  Wake up?

  I grunted and guffawed and waggled my finger, but Rune tells me with a straight face that it will all happen by 2030. How I would love to bet on it, but I’ll be dead. Harriet Burden will be dust, bones ground to ashes. Does Rune really believe it? Has he really embraced this article of faith founded on a false theoretical model: computational theory of mind?II The boys in the labs and some of their cohorts in analytical philosophy have been kneeling in obeisance to the sacred machine that processes information at ever-increasing speeds, that plays chess well but translates from one language to another so badly it hurts, and which doesn’t feel anything at all. Don’t you know that others are writing about paradigm change, that information processing as a model for brain function fails at many levels? Rune wants to believe. It is a form of salvation.

  The Singularity is at once an escape and a birth fantasy. I said to him: A Zeus dream that avoids the organic body altogether. Brand-new creatures burst forth from men’s heads. Presto! The mother and her evil vagina disappears.

  I pointed out that his crosses are fertility symbols.

  I don’t know how much of what I say goes in. Deafness is part of his being. And it helps him, helps him assert himself as the young Wonder Man.

  But there is an undertow, and it is personal. He is trying to leap out of his biography. Maybe this is where we overlap. I would like to leap out of my story, too.

  Today, after my tirade on CTM and its fatal flaws, he told me a story about his mother, now dead and buried. I see the woman in my mind in baby-doll pajamas teetering around in backless slippers with high heels and a puff of feathers at the toes. He did not include a description of what she was wearing, but from his stories I have invented a vain, troubled, pathetic creature. I have made her the seductive mother, a crazed and scary beloved for the boy child, a woman who lunges between tearful clinging and crushing rage. She is a cliché, a feminine mess from a 1950s movie, one of those Technicolor tarts, drunk and disorderly with lots of cleavage. We are all guilty of types. But the story is grim, and as he tells it, his eyes are cool and empty. Rune’s sad, mad mother takes in a stray cat and feeds it. One day, the pregnant cat gives birth in the family’s hamper, a warm, soft, dirty, smelly bed. But his mother becomes deranged when she discovers the kittens and wails, No babies, no babies. She drowns the newborn kittens in a bucket in the garage as Rune and his sister watch.

  The father was passive. I see him, too, sitting in a chair, a long, pale, beleaguered face. I could draw him. Where do these pictures come from?

  “I’m happy to be you,” Rune said, “or rather happy to be you as me or me as you.” He stood on his hands and walked across the floor, only a few steps, but I was impressed. As I looked on, I had a moment of flight, a sense of losing me and looking at the world as if it had just been made, then and there in all its strangeness. It used to happen to me when I was a child. I would discover noses all at once and find myself fascinated—nostrils, for example, some with hairs, pale and waving or coarse, black wires. What were these two holes in a face of multiple openings? Some tight and narrow—mere slits that hid the channel that led up into the unknown; still others flared and round or great and gaping or inflamed and moist with mucus.

  It might have been his upside-down posture that brought on the thought. I used to dream of turning over my room and walking on the ceiling. When I told him, he stared at me. Kirsten and I used to do that, he said. Kirsten is his sister.

  * * *

  I. Vernor Vinge first presented his views on the Singularity at the Vision-21 Symposium sponsored by NASA, March 30–31, 1993. For a review of the continuing discussion, see “The Singularity: Ongoing Debate, Part II” in Journal of Consciousness Studies 19 (2012), nos. 7–8.

  II. Computational theory of mind (CTM) advances the idea that the mind works like a computer through rule-based symbol manipulation. Hilary Putnam, “Brains and Behavior” (1961), in Readings in Philosophy of Psychology, vol. 1, ed. Ned Block (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), 24–36, and Jerry Fodor, The Language of Thought (New York: Thomas Cromwell, 1975). In Notebook T, Burden criticizes the scientists and philosophers who have adopted the model, because it doesn’t account for “the brain as a wet organ of the whole body” and it “leaves out guiding emotional knowledge.” She also calls CTM “a surreptitious form of Cartesian dualism” and cites Hubert Dreyfus’s critique of the theory in What Computers Still Can’t Do (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1992).

  Harriet Burden

  Notebook O. The Fifth Circle (discovered by Maisie Lord, June 20, 2012)

  June 5, 2001

  On Nantucket alone, and I miss Bruno. He is with his “girls.” The wary Jenny, the pregnant Liza (bearing first grandchild), and the adoring Cleo. They keep their distance from their father’s lover, and I realized a few weeks ago I don’t care. They do not have to like me. Maisie and Oscar and Aven will come next week. Ethan may come. My son: Mr. Maybe. I long for signs of affection from my buttoned-up boy. I imagine the great long hug, a sudden blurting of love and admiration for me, his ma, but that is not his way. I cannot remake Ethan. Like me, he reads. He reads all the time, and he reads women these days, Simone Weil, Suzanne Langer, Frances Yates. Hope for the earth. But he is severe, an avenger of the downtrodden, an enemy of the system. Sell the Nantucket house! Sell the art! Divest and scatter the funds for redistribution. Ethan Lord in sackcloth and ashes. There are days when he reminds me of a Jesuit priest performing the spiritual exercises over and over as purification. And I founder and fall, unclean and guilty. Mercifully, today on the phone, he hopped off the track and asked me if I’d ever read Bachelard’s The Poetics of Reverie, and I quoted a line to him: “Then words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young.” And Ethan chuckled and said, But I think you have to be old to know that. And I received the chuckle as love.

  Little Ethan marches in
to the house after a day at kindergarten. I see him carry a stack of puzzles into his closet, turn on the light, sit down, and close the door behind him. I know what he is doing. He begins one, finishes it, and starts the next. After half an hour, I knock gently on the door and call out to him in my cartoon voice, Any reports from the closet? Twelve, he sings back at me, or fourteen, or sixteen.

  Felix speaks in the darkness of the bedroom: “Do you think the child is normal?”

  Yes, yes, yes, I would say. He just has a different pattern of mind.

  Many shades of Felix in the house: both caresses and slaps. His wellies stand in the hallway, and I conjure his ghost heading for the beach in an icy rain, and I remember how it aroused me to see the Felix of suits and ties in an old sweater and blue jeans, that here on Nantucket he was nearly another man when he was not on the telephone. Today I touched the stones that are still piled in the wide, shallow crystal bowl on the dresser, a little dusty. He gathered them one by one over the years. He liked to cover them with water to bring out their color. Last year, I did not even notice them, did not think of them. This year I am all wounded feeling as I look down at the stones. I remember throwing a magazine at him and his surprised look. Pay attention! I yelled. It’s time you paid attention. The collage of photographs in the kitchen: Ethan and fish—the terrified six-year-old hoists a small bluefish in the air. A radiant Maisie in her father’s arms, her upper lip a little moist with dirt and snot. Felix is turned to her, reflective, soft, the corner of his mouth raised. This house. I am wading in the ruins of was.

  Rune arrives tomorrow. It would have been silly to keep the visit from Bruno, so I didn’t. A long weekend. Thursday to Sunday. Project talk. I want to study him further. He is right for the part, but I must discover the work.

  Remember: Straight Wharf tomorrow for swordfish, bluefish pâté, those little crackers.

  I’ve been watching The Diary. It goes on and on. There is too much to see. The visual glut of too much.

  A moment when I stopped the movie: a lackey is filming Rune at a party. That means there are two cameras. One seen. One invisible. Rune is smiling, gesticulating. His eyes narrow in interest as he chats up a woman with a magenta bob and narrow green glasses. He laughs, a big cackle, waves goodbye, and turns toward the unseen camera. But in his face there is no sign of the animation immediately past. The transition is too violent. Our feelings usually linger for a few seconds anyway. I ask myself what lies under his conviviality.

  Thursday, June 7, 2001

  I picked him up at the airport at 1:30, and his big smile and broad wave made me feel instantly guilty about the thoughts I had last night. He teased me about my truck, my beloved junk heap, but it runs and runs.

  Praise for the house—a real beach house, not a McMansion, not an overblown summer place like some of those horrors in the Hamptons. I showed him the studio. Showed him some of my little people in the chorus for Blazing. All their mouths are open in song.

  Ate the swordfish with relish and drank wine. We looked out onto the beach and the tall moving grasses that grew nearly black against the night sky, a cobalt blue—straight from the tube. Only a few moments of strangeness when I thought, What is he doing here? What am I doing? Maybe I am the mad scientist.

  I watched Rune move. I remarked silently on his grace. This is helpful in the world—grace. His left hand (I understood today that he is left-handed) flies out open-palmed for emphasis, and his speech rolls out of him, not too fast, and with little emotion. His voice is low and soothing, and he smiles only at long intervals, but when he does, it feels as if I am being rewarded. He is curious and has read all kinds of books, but it is not what he says that seduces. It is his belief in his own power to seduce.

  After dinner, we lay on the two red sofas in the living room. He smoked, and I inhaled the smell of cigarettes, an odor reminiscent of my marriage. I have learned that there is no debate of ideas with Rune, no point for a rational point to be made between us. He is a man of the scattershot and sporadic, of apt quotations, remembered dates, unlikely pairings, and non sequiturs. April 1938: Eight days after Austria voted for the German Anschluss, Superman made his first appearance on the American stage. The Marquis de Sade, he informed me, was born on June 2, 1740. The very next day, June 3, King Frederick the Great of Prussia ascended the throne and, as one of his first decrees, abolished torture. I am not surprised that Rune takes a fashionable interest in Sade, in desire as repetition, in bodies as machines, in the man’s bleak extension of Enlightenment clockwork to sexuality. Do you fancy yourself a libertine? I asked him. And he said no, just an information-processing machine with inputs and outputs attached to a potent sex drive. He quoted Nietzsche: “Man is something to be overcome.” (He is loose and fast with Nietzsche.)

  In a single beat, he jumped to J. G. Ballard and the man’s 1970 exhibition of crashed cars at the New Arts Lab. Better than Duchamp, better than Warhol, he said. Crashed Cars is the art exhibit par excellence. Ballard’s book Crash heralded “the new sublime,” an erotic explosion of metal and glass and dismemberment. But more than the glories of the smash-up, Ballard was a soothsayer, a juggernaut, a harbinger of what was still to come. Hadn’t art museums become Disney palaces, just as he had predicted? Hadn’t the oracle said, “Sooner or later, everything turns into television”?I Hadn’t he said, “In the post-Warhol era a single gesture such as uncrossing one’s legs will have more significance than all the pages in War and Peace”?II When I wondered what the latter statement meant, Rune said, Isn’t it obvious? I said, Not at all, not at all, but he had moved on to Philip K. Dick and all things Phildickian, and how he loved him, too, another great shaman of our age, born in 1928, dead in 1982, still young, only fifty-four—a paranoid, addicted, five times married, hallucinating, quasi-religious maniac, but oh so wonderful. Hadn’t Dick said, “Everybody knows that Aristotelian two-value logic is fucked”?

  I asked him if Dick had advocated a three-value logic. Boolean logic has two values, too, I said, essential to computing. Three values includes true, false, and the unknown or ambiguous. Was that what he had proposed? Was he thinking larger? About Gödel’s incompleteness theory? Does he really understand it?III

  Rune is used to impressing people with such statements but unused to defending them. Despite his ignorance, he just grins, extends his open palm, and tells me I’m too serious.

  What if I were like that? What if I just waved contradictions aside? It would be pleasant to play the blasé hero, bloated with himself, collecting admiring glances for the half-baked and the ill-conceived.

  I see my father in my mind. Your logic, Father, was about the consistency of relations, not the murk of so-called real life. It was bounded logic. That was its problem. Your true and false propositions function perfectly in their own hermetic sphere.

  It is a mistake to apply logic to human life as a whole, to think logic will “wake up” machines.

  But then Rune relates that once upon a time there were two Dicks, Philip K. and his twin, Jane Charlotte, who died when she was six weeks old, and the little girl ghost haunted the brother’s writing. Philip K., it seems, blamed his mother for Jane’s death. The foul womb killed his sister? He had been in there with her, after all. The mother had neglected her for him? Alas, I didn’t get the details. Rune was on a roll.

  The dead girl child led us to mirrors and doubles and ghosts that never leave us, and the old story about the two sexes as the cleaved halves of a single whole being. He told me about his sister Kirsten, to whom he had always told his secrets. They had invented a code when they were children to send messages to each other their parents couldn’t read, and they called the code Runsten. They had built a fort from boxes and scrap lumber, and inside their fort they had dissected the body of a dead baby bird. And I told him about my mother’s miscarriages and that I had always wondered if my father hadn’t wanted a boy. Maybe one of those who had died had been a boy.

  Later, he rattled on about artists I’d never heard of, and I
understood he had an encyclopedic knowledge of the now—what’s in the Chelsea galleries this minute. It was impressive, but after a while my mind left his words for my own silent ones, the ones who think they have a right to be young and wander off to look for new meanings, and I interrupted him at one point to bring up our work. I said the project would have to disguise the line of suture, the incision between his art and mine. I had to know more about him. It was a question of becoming.

  Becoming me?

  No, I said to him, double consciousness. You and I together. I am hoping you will goad me into something else. My voice rose. Goad me into the dizziness of exile.

  His face went dead, blank, as I had seen him on the film. No answer.

  With your name on my work, I said, it will be different. Art lives in its perception only. You are the last of three, and you are the pinnacle. I could hear the cracking passion in my voice. I altered my tone to one of calm deliberation.

  He liked the idea of pulling a fast one, but my ideas felt outdated, a little lame to him. We live in a postfeminist age of gender freedom, transsexuality. Who cares which is which? There are lots of women in art now. Where is the battle?

  No, I said to him, it’s more than sex. It’s an experiment, a whole story I am making. Two down, one to go. After that, I retire from the game. We will find a project, I said. Hadn’t his work The Banality of Glamour focused mostly on women’s faces and bodies? Surely he knew that women face pressures men don’t. I had suffered from the cruelty of the beauty culture. I knew what I was talking about.