by John D'Agata
Over the past couple decades, however, our cultural use for screaming has dramatically evolved. These days, self-defense experts advise people to yell “Fire!” if they ever find themselves in danger. They specifically advise us not to scream. According to the producers of Just Yell Fire, a popular self-defense video aimed at teenage girls, most people don’t want to get involved with helping a stranger unless they think their own safety is also being threatened.
“Culturally speaking,” said Aaron, “this makes the biological instinct to scream ineffectual in modern life.”
Aaron’s field is an approach to psychology that believes that the human mind is a network of data-processing machines that were designed by natural selection hundreds of thousands of years ago. The purpose of these machines, according to this theory, is to solve the problems that were faced by our earliest ancestors. They weren’t developed, in other words, to solve the problems of today.
“We have equipment all over our bodies that don’t serve useful functions,” explained Michael Karnell, the director of Otolaryngology at the University of Iowa. “I mean, at one point they served a function, but we’ve since evolved away from needing what they do.”
The appendix is notoriously superfluous, for example.
So are some of our teeth.
Or the remnants of our tails.
“In my field,” Michael said, “it’s a part of the voice box that has become superfluous. Every larynx is composed of a series of vocal folds that close over airwaves to vibrate when we speak. That’s the useful part of the box. But each of us also has a whole other set of vocal folds that are called the ‘false folds,’ because they don’t really do anything. They’re really only used when we need to scream. Now, of course, there are always some people who find a use for these folds. Heavy metal singers, for example, can sometimes train their false folds to help them produce a kind of guttural rattle. But for the rest of us, these folds just sit there most of the time. They’re a very good example of how the human body hasn’t biologically kept up with the cultural evolution of the species.”
This is because natural selection, says Leda Cosmides, the founder of the study of evolutionary psychology, takes a long time to respond effectively to environmental change.
The time it takes to build brain circuits that are suited to particular societal needs is as slow as the time it takes for wind and sand to sculpt and smooth a stone.
“Even relatively simple changes can take tens of thousands of years,” she’s written. “And yet, the computer age is only a little older than the average college student. The industrial revolution happened 200 years ago. And agriculture appeared on Earth just 9,000 years before that. So our species has only spent about 1 percent of its existence living in any kind of modern world—roughly one-millionth of the time that we spent living as hunters and gatherers…. So there just haven’t been enough generations of us yet to allow natural selection to design the right brain circuits for the world we’re living in. Our modern skulls still house a fundamentally Stone Age mind.”
“But even though it’s no longer the most efficient instinct to have,” said Aaron, “screaming is still likely to happen when we find ourselves in need. You can’t fight biology. The body knows when it’s in danger, and it’s going to do what it has to do in order to survive.”
And yet, according to a study by the University of Chicago, only 39 percent of Americans believe that we’ll even survive this century. In another 10,000 years, Vega, not Polaris, will be our North Star. The space satellite Voyager, which was launched in 1979, and which has since been traveling 40,000 miles per hour, will be closer to the absolute emptiness of space than it will be to our home. Even the Earth’s continents, which have been migrating slowly since they initially were formed, will be 850 feet farther apart.
There will also be a new axial tilt in our planet. It will temporarily shift us away from the Sun, lowering global temperatures by as much as 50 degrees.
Around Yucca at that time there will be a grassy plain. Most of Russia won’t be inhabitable. Iran will be a ski resort.
A new volcanic island will appear beside Hawaii.
Plastic will be extinct because petroleum will be too.
And while we won’t be living longer than we currently are living, Frank Tipler’s book The Physics of Immortality says that if we’re wealthy we’ll be able to buy the brains of younger body donors, download our memories into their minds, and then live through them vicariously until we need another donor.
We will be living underground. Or we will be living in giant domes. Or we will be living in a single networked city that sprawls across the planet called “Ecumenopolis.”
Physicist John Fremlin believes, in fact, that the human population by the year 12,000 will be 61 trillion strong. Our food will have to be harvested from algae and cadavers and pumped into our homes as daily liquid rations.
Rodney Brooks, the director of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, believes however that humans are going to have such exquisite control over the genetics of living systems that instead of growing a tree, cutting it down, and then building a table from it, we ultimately will be able to just grow a table from scratch.
Yet as Warwick Collins explains in his book Computer One, most of the work on the planet by the late twenty-first century will be conducted by a giant global supercomputer that will relegate humans to the role of pampered pets. It will control the water supply, the food supply, electricity, transportation. It will be programmed to repair itself and to anticipate situations that might necessitate more repairs, and this is the reason why, 500 years after we invest in building it, Computer One will calculate the chances that human beings might interfere with the work it’s programmed to do. It will reason that interferences are a threat to its efficiency. And it will logically conclude that it could raise its productivity if humans were not around.
It will be quiet on the Earth.
There will be a lot of wind.
From the ridgeline of Yucca Mountain we might look down at “Black Hole,” one of the designs for a warning marker from the Expert Judgement Panel. Ninety thousand square feet of black basalt stone irregularly carved and cobbled onto the sandy ground.
“A crazy-quilt of parched land,” the panel describes it as. “Cracked, hard to walk on, projecting the image of nothing, a void, uselessness, a place that would seem unwelcoming and uninhabitable because the region will absorb so much heat through these stones that an intruder will simply not be able to stand being there.”
Or we might stand on Yucca Mountain and listen to “The Moans,” an echoing aural effect from a series of stone sculptures that would be carved to emit a single pitch in the wind.
“A minor D,” writes the panel, “because that note usually signals to our brains that it is sad.”
They will fill Yucca’s basin with a mournful constant cry, scaring off intruders through an effect that some theorize can be supported by biology, since “pitch extraction from music is accomplished in the inferior colliculus of the brain, which itself is situated in close proximity to other midbrain centers known to be part of mammalian reward systems,” according to a study by neuroscientist Martin Braun entitled “Inferior Colliculus as Candidate for Pitch Extraction.” “The pitches found in major chords may therefore have a direct or indirect influence on these reward nuclei, which could be one of the reasons why music can have so strong an emotional impact, and why major chords are regarded as joyful and minor chords as mournful.”
Or we may see “Forbidding Blocks.” Or we may see “Rubble Landscape.” We may see “Irregular Grid,” “Spikes in a Field,” “Landscape of Thorns,” “Tall Leaning Stones.” We may see a whole catalogue of visceral warning markers, artificially built environments we’ll be meant to enter into to help make their warnings work.
But these will be environments, writes the panel in its report, “that will exist without transmitting any gestalt for the intruder,” “without perceivable fo
ci,” “without the possibility of being understood.”
Why?
We must find ourselves, the panel says, having an experience: an essaying into the purpose of what’s apparently purposeless, an essaying that tries desperately to cull significance from the place, but an essaying, says the panel, that must ultimately fail.
“All human cultures,” writes the panel in its report, “have tried marking spaces that they have wanted to call ‘the center.’ It is an impulse to create order out of the chaos that surrounds us: the tribal fire, the village temple, the city’s clock tower. But this is why we must invert the symbolic logic of this site, establish a sense of meaninglessness around the entire mountain, suggest that there is no single place of value at the site…that the land itself is shunned…devastated by the Earth.”
But what we are likely to see instead, according to recent reports from the Department of Energy, is a small series of twenty-foot-high monuments at the site. They’ll be carved in the shape of pyramids and made from local granite. On their surfaces will be inscriptions in English about the site, plus the date the waste was buried, the date it will be safe, and a small engraved image in the apex of each stone that reproduces the anguished face from Edvard Munch’s The Scream.
“It’s the most recognizable painting in the world,” said a Department of Energy spokesman when I called to ask about it. “Human culture will probably change dramatically over the next ten thousand years, but human emotions won’t. So anyone who comes in contact with this face over the next ten millennia is going to understand what’s up with this site, that there’s something about it that’s dangerous, scary, and likely to make them sick. I like the idea of a design that just gives the viewer a ‘mood,’ but we’re dealing with life and death here. The most responsible thing we can do in this case is give easily interpretable information. We’re trying to help these people!”
What we know is that he probably left his house by five o’clock. Down the block on Pilestredet around the corner to the tram, or down the block on Pilestredet by foot to Karl Johan, he would have passed the place that’s now a bar called “Edvard’s Bar and Grille,” and then the all-day slices shop called “Edvard’s Oven Fresh,” and then a store across the street called “Scream If You Like Sweets!”
He could have cut through Grazing Place, where every citizen could keep cattle, and then walk across a bridge that linked the city to its shore.
But Edvard says he liked to walk—” I need to walk to think”—and knew a longer path up Ekeberg Hill and through its forest.
This was 1883, and it was very likely August.
Up the hill as Edvard walked he passed couples stretched on blankets, dozens of slanting bodies on the city’s Lovers’ Lane. Then he reached the forest once the meadow hillside leveled. And then he walked inside the woods, despite his father’s warnings.
“There is evil there,” his father said, “long forgotten curses from Norway’s pagan past.”
Edvard turned nineteen that year, and was living still at home. He would have needed his dad’s permission to have been out past six thirty. He would have needed to miss his dinner, retired early to his room, established two days earlier that he was feeling kind of ill. He would have needed three years earlier to have had rheumatic fever, and needed twelve years earlier to have almost died on Christmas Day. And then he would have needed a low window he could climb through.
There was a gray straw hat he wore “every single day that I knew him, from the time that he was fifteen until he left home for Berlin,” according to a memoir by Edvard’s closest friend.
He would have needed that straw hat.
Some good walking shoes.
The light wool brown coat that all middle-class boys wore. He would have needed forty minutes to pass through Ekeberg’s forest, and would have needed to understand its ancient pagan history, the 3,000-year-old practice of bringing infants there to die, digging narrow graves over which boulders were then laid so that the child didn’t suffocate but rather starved to death—a practice that was so common by the early eleventh century that St. Olav, the Christian bishop who arrived to baptize pagans, wrote a letter to Norwegians enforcing three new Christian laws—
“There shall be no more folk singing in God’s northern kingdom, for these are not the sounds our Lord and Savior wants to hear…
“There shall desist immediately all the eating of horse-meat…
“And because all Christian lives begin with Holy Baptism, no longer may any child be left exposed if it’s unwanted”
—the last of which proved so controversial for the pagans that one decade later, in the famous Gulathing’s Law, a revision was applied in which “no healthy child may be exposed if it’s unwanted…except if his toes are in the place of his knees, whose chin is turned around and connected to the shoulder, the neck upon his breast…the skin on his legs turning scaley in complexion…his two eyes on the sides of the poor child’s head…or goat horns…a dog’s tail…. The child must be brought to the forest, therefore, and buried where neither men nor cattle ever go,” conditions which were apparently not uncommon at the time, for, as Jenny Jochens explains in Women in Old Norse Society, the low-valleyed villages and the high walls of mountains confined the majority of Norwegians to their homes, “forcing upon the culture a certain amount of inbreeding…and thus resulting in increasingly deformed infants at birth.”
He would have needed to know the phrase “I christen thee at random, Jon or Johanna,” the spell St. Olav wrote to ward off any utburd, the wide-eyed, pale, and hairless ghosts of Norway’s exposed children—the thin hairless shrieking souls who haunted Ekeberg’s forest, looking for their parents.
He would have needed to know that night, if one mistook him for its father, clinging to his back with a black and gaping jaw, that the only way to rid oneself at that point of an utburd is to convince the child to kill itself, and then bury it again.
But what he wouldn’t have ever known, during his walk there as a teen, is that his childhood friend in fifteen years would kill himself in Ekeberg.
Wouldn’t have ever known, once he had reached the other side, looking down the hill to the city’s ancient shore, that his sister would be committed, that he would never visit her, and that eventually she would die along the city’s shoreline, through the forest, down the hill, in a loud and red asylum, from which the screams that were heard were so consistently high-pitched that local residents never forgot that it had been a slaughterhouse.
Wouldn’t have ever known that this view he now walked toward would eventually be the city’s most famous for postcards.
Most famous for drug arrests.
Most infamous for rape.
Wouldn’t have ever seen, as he brushed off the forest leaves, the stone marker that the city will never place upon that spot, commemorating where Edvard first felt that he was hurt.
Won’t see the bench that’s there, the one turned the wrong direction.
Wouldn’t need to cross the highway, where there is no crossing walk, approaching the metal guardrail, which no longer is a railing.
Wouldn’t need to glimpse below to where the tracks are running now, to the service road, the power grid, the industry of concrete ports and forklift trucks and corrugated terminals for Unocal and Exxon and BP and Shell.
Didn’t have to reach the bottom of that hill among the rocks.
Didn’t need his parents dead, favorite sister, younger brother, older sister to be dead.
To help bleach their bloody sheets to light brown mottled spots with urine.
Didn’t need to hate his father.
Love with fear his smiling mother.
Never needed to kiss a boy before he’d ever kissed a girl, and then to go on living without anyone to kiss.
Didn’t need those critics saying that he’d invent something brand-new, that he would feel an ancient emptiness at the center of the world and then gather up that emptiness into something that had borders, a face, the ch
ance to see what’s wrong. Never needed someone saying that God is not in every detail, that God is sometimes in experience, someone to write letters to, from whom he could get letters back, take train trips with, and snuggle with, and then never to have met.
He didn’t need the Earth, 10 million years ago, to rumble from the bottom of its ocean floor a mountain, a 4,000-acre island in Indonesia called Rakata, one of 13,000 islands in the narrow Sunda Strait on which the fabled Krakatoa, a mountain on the mountain—a volcano whose eruption in 1400 BCE is said to have caused tsunamis that were so big they sank Atlantis, a volcano whose eruption in 537 CE is said to have clouded skies so thoroughly that summer that it snowed in Rome in June, that crops in Europe failed, that floods appeared in deserts, that wandering Mongolians, retreating from the weather, fled with tribal families west into Eurasia, ended the Persian Empire, and started modern Islam—a volcano that locals called the “pulsing heart of all the world,” never needed to erupt with so much power once again that on August 25, the week preceding Edvard’s walk, it practiced an eruption at 5:30 in the evening, then practiced at 6:40, then 8:21, then 10:00, 10:50, midnight, and 1:00, and then finally at 3:30 on August 26, it erupted with a force that razed 160 villages, killed 40,000 people, burst so loudly that radiometrists have called the mountain’s blast the second loudest noise ever heard by human beings, sending out concussive waves seven times around the world, and exploding up a mile high, and then exploding out: blanketing the atmosphere with 227 million tons of new debris, over two thirds of the island’s entire rocky mass, dust that drifted across the Earth so thoroughly and fast that by August 28 British offices in Delhi were reporting having seen a bank of yellow clouds at night, by August 29 they were orange in Madrid, and by August 31 they mixed with moisture over London from where a cold front pushed the dust and rain westward over Norway, where the nights were very windy, and where light revealed that dust as red in skies that bled already.
