B. I. #54 09-08: Halfway along the seven hundred steps leading to the Gate of Deeper Slumber.

 

Ultimately, I have to say this: “I am surprised by everything that happened.” A laconic phrase—not the sort of thing for which I am known, I suppose, but what I’m known for and what I am are two different things. One would hope so, right? Until just now, in fact, I would have argued till I was blue in the face that there could be no worse fate than being known for exactly the sort of person you actually are.

Q…

The Midwest. Of America. The country, not the continent. Of the North American continent. The middle west of the country that is itself the middle of the upper half of the landmass on the Western hemisphere—the one we cut a little sliver of the canal through right at its narrowest point, to stimulate trans-Oceanic trade, but then again you probably know all about oceans, don’t you? There was a book I read once—a kid’s book, but I read it recently, not during my own childhood, as I had found a dog-eared and wrinkled copy of it in a classroom—in which the main character receives a postcard from… Was it her brother? Or maybe she sent the postcard. Anyway, the postcard depicted a lake scene, and the brother, or maybe the character herself, wrote over the lake image: “Wish you were here—glub glub!” That still strikes me as funny, even now, but only because there is sufficient distance between the character discussing the postcard and the actual terror of drowning that I am able to crack a smile at the thought.

Does my laconic nature—as opposed to my loquacious demeanor, anyway—come from my life in the Midwest? Far from water, far from the natural centers of trade and traffic, places where it makes sense to develop polylingualism[1], or at least the gift of gab? Well, the word “laconic” comes from “Lacedaemon,” the region of Greece whose capital was Sparta. It’s called Laconia now. By “now,” I mean up until a few minutes ago. There’s nobody left to call it anything, right? Right? The Spartans were rough customers, baby-killers and fascists to a man and woman. But they had a knack for turning an unadorned yet pithy phrase. When Lycurgus, the founder of Sparta’s militaristic society, was pressured to initiate democratic reforms, he told his interlocutor “Start with your own family.” My own family was rather democratic, at least early on, but I still think of myself as pretty laconic, in speech if not in writing.

Q…

Of course you end up becoming yourself. Humans are not shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, and though the human brain could be described as just that, there are some limits to neuroplasticity[2], and limits to how the social environment we inhabited until just a few minutes ago allow us to behave. Jon Kabat-Zinn put it well: “Wherever you go, there you are.” Or, to look at it from the inside out, that is, as though you have just turned me inside out, “neurons that fire together wire together.” That aphorism—yes, it is a laconic phrase—is from Canadian psychologist Donald Olding Hebb.

Q…

Yes, it would be fair to say that Canada and the American Midwest have much in common. I don’t know if it has much to do with Earth’s magnetic fields or longitude; my instinct is to say that there is no real electromagnetic influence upon human brains. That is, at least a Somali who moves to St. Paul, Minnesota doesn’t necessarily immediately take upon the attitude, affect, and idiolect[3] of a native-born American of Scandinavian extraction. For that matter, nor does a Swede emigrating to St. Paul, Minnesota.

Q…

That’s an interesting question, and by interesting I mean terrifying. I’m surprised at both my own terror and by my seeming equanimity in the face of the terror. A few possibilities come to mind.

It’s practically a cliché of pastiche for the author to make the false extratextual truth claim that fictional texts are true. One writes a Sherlock Holmes story by first deciding to tell the lie that Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation was not his creation, but an actual living person whose continuing adventures are discovered rather than created. It’s somehow less satisfying—postmodern pyrotechnics aside—when a character made flesh and blood by the collective imagination of millions turns to the reader and says, “Hey there, I’m just a number of black marks on white paper, and aren’t you the sucker for even pretending otherwise?” There’s an appeal to and request for sincerity of (suspension of dis)belief followed by a vicious attack on the reader once she or he surrenders the coin of sincerity. When I read that stuff, when Sherlock Holmes turns and winks, not at me but at the author who made him wink, and I get to be the butt of the joke for believing that Sherlock could wink of his own accord, I feel like I’ve just had a chair kicked out from under me.[4]

Of course, you didn’t ask about characters so much as circumstance. So am I a brain, disembodied thanks to an ice-cream scooper in a crustaceous-fungoid claw[5], now “living” in a canister the size of a cylindrical Dictaphone reel, being interviewed? Am I a library book simply being read by the post-human beetle with a Yithian library card? Or am I a nameless pawn[6] in Dallas Fort Worth, in 1958, being experimented upon by the same rogue cabal of scientists who would a few years from now use high-powered magnets to rewire Lee Harvey Oswald into a perfect presidential killing weapon. Is that why I hallucinated the prior exchange about magnetic fields, why the letters DFW seem compelling to me when I roll them over in my mind?

As long as it’s not one of those things where I wake up and it’s all a dream. I have to say I’ve always wondered what it would have been like to read, say, The Box of Delights, when it was first published, when that ending still had the power to amaze. These days, we’ve all been wired to despise dreamland narratives thanks to too much television-watching. Enthusiastic readers and viewers are neurologically hardened against being surprised or enthralled by cliché; we consume clichés for their soporiferous powers. I know I do. Did.

Q…

You’re right; you are the ones asking the questions here.

Q…

My philosophical training, abortive as it was, didn’t prepare me to answer any philosophical questions. Honestly, I doubt that any philosopher can really answer any philosophical questions; all they can do is use language to rephrase philosophical questions in such a way that preclude the answers they’ve already decided to dislike and distrust. The dislike and distrust of any particular answer probably comes from either early childhood training or experiences, or some intrinsic human loathing for the hidden implications of the answers. But I think I can give it the old college try, if I’m allowed to ask you one question.

Q…

I’ll explain why I ask even as I ask, all right? Let’s say I’m just having an NDE[7]—all I know is what I know, at most. Perhaps my brain cells are already dying from oxygen-starvation, so I actually know rather less now than what I would normally know. In other words, this isn’t a moment when I’d be able to experience some profound epiphany or even come up with a satisfying, if flip, answer. However, if you are who you claim to be, and if I am now where you claim I am, you should be able to answer the question I put to you in a way that is both sensible and elegant.

In At the Mountains of Madness, we are told that Danforth, like Lot’s wife, turns back toward the “upward seething, grotesquely clouded sky.” The sight, whatever it was, drove him utterly insane. And this is after Danforth had actually read the Necronomicon, cover to cover, with no more ill effect than deciding to continue to graduate school. I consider this lack of information, this unfilled possibility space, a very good move on Lovecraft’s part. Anything he described would be a letdown compared to what the fevered brain of the average teenage misfit could come up with. Lovecraft’s downfall was too-minute descriptions of every scale and tentacle. But tell me, what did Danforth see?

Q…

But what did he see?

Q…

Then show me. If you can’t tell me, show me!

Q…

Well yes, but doesn’t the continuum hypothesis assert that the continuum had the cardinality of—I mean, isn’t there a distinction to be made between point-set theory and abstract set theory. But doesn’t infinity mean that…

Q…

You’re right, you’re right. I was only supposed to ask the one question.

Q…

I can’t feel anything below my neck. My hands have been bound behind my back for a long time now. My arms, my shoulders, numb. Numbness, slowly rising up to my… What, my brain? Haha, but aren’t there an infinite number of points between there and here? Can’t I stay? Here with you? Forever?

Q…

Oh God. Yes yes, I understand now. Right. Here I go. It’s all perfectly reasonable. Thank you for everything. Goodbye.
 

Endnotes

[1] As opposed to “multilingualism.” Polylingualism implies an understanding that speakers use the features of the languages of which they are familiar—most Americans have encountered someone for whom English is a foreign language and who uses English vocabulary, but who may use the structure of another language when constructing utterances (e.g., the Greek immigrant father of an acquaintance of mine back in Boston used to ask the question “What time it is?,” which is sufficiently grammatical in his native tongue—ti wra einai?). Multilingualism as a term implies a construction of language in which a speaker expresses competencies in multiple languages. Centers of trade and colonialism—which tend to develop near large bodies of water for reasons both obvious and occulted—tend toward the polylingual and toward the development of pidgins (generally “simple” languages that develop when adults lack a common language with which to communicate) and, later, creoles (stable languages that evolve from intergenerational transmission of pidgins).

[2] Essentially, the more a certain neural pathway fires, the less plastic it becomes. Long-term potentiation is vital for memory, the formation of language, and personality. It might also explain the persistence of suicidal ideations, even if the circumstances the brain finds itself in—is the body-box it’s running around in wandering through a pleasant meadow, or is that same body-box being compelled, by other brains in other body-boxes, to consume a certain batch of chemicals that the other brains believe can “fix” the broken brain—change. Can a brain even be used to fix a brain? What is the reference point available for Brain no. 1 to repair Brain no. 2, especially as both are separated by layers of body-boxes, and can communicate only through the extremely awkward and vague tool of language, and the hyper-efficient and thus utterly complex and easily screwed-up tool of mathematics? And Brain no. 2 rarely knows sufficient math, much less biochemistry, to keep up with its doctor—Brain no. 1. So Brain no. 2 sometimes just keeps screaming, “Let me out of here!” no matter what sort of medical, psychological, and psychopharmaceutical interventions are available to it.

[3] The bog-standard definition of “idiolect” is the individual, even unique, use of language by a single person. But given that language is inherently communal—even the last surviving native speaker of the Manx language pleaded with the scholars who recorded him for corrections to his grammar and vocabulary—can idiolect truly be individual? Indeed, even if we were to assume axiomatically that idiolect was individual and unique, we’d simply be kicking a can down the road. What is an “individual” other than an abstraction based on observations of socially performed behaviors? You look at my bandana and decide that I am a “cool guy” or am trying to play the role of a “cool guy.” I look at my own bandana and think of myself as an ugly half-orc who sweats excessively and whom nobody could ever ever love.

[4] NB: playing it straight doesn’t always help when it comes to matters of pastiche either. Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838) ends rather enigmatically with the line “But there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.” There’s a rather enormous “possibility space” there—who was the figure? Why does the narrative stop there? Why does Pym, through Poe—in the sort of fictionalized textual claim of extratextual truth that undergraduates like to call postmodern though Poe doesn’t even qualify as modern—deliver the manuscript to the author without explaining his return to the mainland, and why doesn’t Poe himself either press the (imaginary) Pym or simply finish the “real” (“false”) story? Good questions all, which H.P. Lovecraft attempted to answer in his own work by filling the possibility space of the “figure [with] the perfect whiteness of the snow” under the Mountains of Madness with Aptenodytes albus—fictional six-foot-tall albino penguins. Needless to say, that was an extremely stupid move.

[5] Why would a Mi-Go want anything to do with a human brain? Consider the lobster. We put them into pots of boiling water despite what most human observers can recognize as the lobster’s natural preferences for dark places, cooler waters, and life. We even have developed narratives that disenfranchise the lobster, that rob it of its sensorium and its ability to suffer. It’s not a far extension to suggest that an alien would have similar narratives about us and our primitive, inarticulate mewlings about the body, about life, about liberty, about the pursuit of happiness here on the Planet of the Apes.

[6] Figuratively, not literally. It’s important to note when one is being figurative while experiencing a phantasmagorical psychodrama, as otherwise every utterance can be fruitfully, if inaccurately, read as a truth claim.

[7] Most reports of near-death experiences can be categorized into one of several types: the ascent into a beautiful, yet terrible light; the much rarer descent into a terrible, yet beautiful light; the experience of a “life review”—that is, one’s own already-lived life flashing before one’s eyes; and the experience of a “life preview”—that is, one sees how one will live out one’s own life if one agrees to leave behind the light and return to the world of matter. For this reason, I have to say that I don’t believe this interrogation to be an NDE. On the other hand, all the reports of NDEs are of themselves reports of only of one of two major types of NDE, specifically the NDE that doesn’t conclude with a DE. A N(DE) may be qualitatively different than a N(NDE)—>DE.