Just Wrought

Creepy Sneak Peek

No.  I don’t think the revision process of my play about human consciousness is taking any toll on my mental health. 

Why do you ask? 

doyle

Imagine a science fiction species that loses weight by breathing and poops bacteria instead of digested food. Can you picture it? If not, my friend doyle has a suggestion: go look in a mirror.

I met doyle on the internet. I feel closer to doyle than some people I have shared a bathroom with for years. I have only met doyle once in person. I want doyle to bury me.

All of that is tangential to the main point, which is that doyle has a blog called Science teacher and I think you should follow it.

Michael Doyle was born in Northern New Jersey, a good-for-nothing Mick like so many no-good-for-nothing Micks born in Northern New Jersey. (By the way, he prefers to refer to himself as “Oirish” as if that were somehow more PC.) He worked briefly as long shoreman. He went to med school. He became a pediatrician and worked in the ER and the projects. Think about that for a second. An emergency room pediatrician in Newark. You may think you know hell, but doyle has a crisper acquaintance with the place.

The reason I call doyle “doyle” and not “Michael Doyle” or “Michael” or “Dr. Doyle” or even “Doyle”, is that “doyle” was all I knew him by for months. We met as contributors to an on-line gathering site for weirdos and writers and weirdo writers called Everything₂, a quasi-prophetic mash-up of Face Book and Wikipedia if the former only allowed text and the latter had a sense of humor. I’m not sure the following piece is the first thing I ever read  of doyle’s, but I do remember it arrested me. He  was on pilgrimage to some mid-western city where his sister had recently died in a car crash.

December 9, 2004 (person)

The driver seat is still intact--inside scattered cd's with burgundy stains, her impossibly colored scarf, glass, pens. A bottle of chardonnay meant to be shared with her love survived. The other side of the car is splayed open, a gaping wound letting in rain, letting in sunshine.

I picked up a couple of cd's--Frankie Allison and the Odd Sox....and now my hands with bright red blotches, my sister's blood when she bled for the last time. I absently rubbed my hands on my jeans--the bright red dulled to burgundy again. I took the scarf with me.

Last summer a feral cat mutilated a mourning dove near my garden. I gave it water. It took a little. It hopped a few feet. It died. Its partner would not leave. It looked sad. A tiny puff of feathers still marks where the broken bird fell.

Her ashes are in a cardboard box, decorated with construction paper, stickers, sparkly glue, and (of course) hearts.

I kept going back in the car, not sure what I was looking for, but sure I would not find it.

At least I got something right this week.

Doyle and I hit it off early. He seemed to like my plays about science and my doggerel poems. I liked pretty much everything he wrote.

During my teaching rounds, I will occasionally show pediatric residents wheat berries, and ask them what they think they are. These fine young minds have been charged with teaching nutrition to parents, so quizzing them about the most common source of grain calories in this part of the world should be fair game.

I have yet to have an American born physician get it right.

My other Everythingian buddy “iceowl” grew up with doyle and liked to fascinate me with stories about him. (Keep in mind when you read the following that iceowl has been to Antarctica three times and has written about it better than Hemmingway ever could have.)

[Doyle’s] done much more for humanity than I have.  I'm just a silicon valley idiot…  He is one of those guys who is blessed to do well doing exactly what he wants in the world.  Classic Joseph Campbell example of, "Following your bliss."  He wants very little from the world, and gives a lot.  So, Doyle couldn't possibly do anything he didn't want to do because the worst that happens is he gets nothing for his efforts, and he's perfectly happy sleeping under the highway overpass if it comes to that …..  He just wants to do things none of us could stomach for more than a day - like dodging bullets and the cops both while illegally vaccinating kids in inner city Newark.

Five years ago doyle hung up has white physician’s coat and traded it for the white lab coat of a high school science teacher. He calls his students his "lambs", though I suspect few of them understand how closely he has observed the slaughter in his former life.

In his blog he mixes the same blend of adoration and frustration that I came to love him for at Everything₂. Here he is breathlessly elevating a discourse on respiration to a paean of the universe, because as he sees it— and trust me, doyle sees it as it is— there is no meaningful difference between the two. (I’ll do my best to capture doyle’s rapturously manic formatting.)

 

Carbon dioxide that traveled through the hearts 
of every child in our class.

Carbon dioxide expelled as a sigh, 
broken down by a few brain cells that would
rather do anything but this school thing.

We ruin it, this carbon dioxide communion, reducing it to hieroglyphics on a page, to be regurgitated by spilling bubbles on a sheet, a religiously messy communion of sorts sterilized to a formula:

 

C₆H₁₂O₆ +6 O₂ =>  6H₂O + 6CO₂

 

And yet, for a moment, the moment before eating the bean, a few students allow themselves the beauty and the power of the story to let them believe what they've always known to be true, that this whole life business, as messy and complicated and incomprehensible as it seems, gets down to this:

Each living thing, every living thing, shares an intimate bond that goes beyond the language of science, beyond the language of art, beyond human boundaries.

The universe belongs to all of us, as we belong to it.

No matter how we do in school, no matter what we know, now matter what we do.

I would trade all the biochemical pathways we "teach" for a child's grasping, for more than a moment, that we are indeed the stuff of the universe around us, and that this stuff cycles through us, is us.

 

Without an iota of the effort I put into it, Doyle writes the way I yearn to, with a high-wire walker’s combination of improvisation and precision. Because he flat-out knows so much, thanks to an enormous education and equally enormous experience, he can produce an uncannily free of flow of ideas without the so-much-smoke-blowing of so many formally educated, professionally self-identified “writers”. After I’ve been steeping myself in his prose for a while, I start to feel my own prose improving, taking flight. It could just be my imagination; but given how much both doyle and I believe in imagination, I’ll take it.

Neil Gaiman first introduced me to the Talmudic legend of the 36 Tzaddikim in his Sandman series. "They say that the world rests on the backs of 36 living saints – 36 unselfish men and women. Because of them the world continues to exist. They are the secret kings and queens of this world." I’m not going to come out and say Doyle is a Tzaddik. Such a pronouncement would be absurd, given the the legend’s clear and emphatic stipulation that no one can know who the 36 are. 

I just have my suspicions is all.

 

Photo by Susan LaRusse Eckert, used with permission of the subject, who only asked that I note: "She's a little pissed off at me now--I tend to do that. I'd be much obliged if you mentioned that I'm truly sorry for my, um, knuckleheadedness."

 

Cutting-Edge Virtual Brain Palpation (a.k.a. "Theatre")

My five year-old son was climbing a tree and got to about seven feet off the ground when he told me he wanted to jump off.  I balked.  “It looks far,” I said.

“I can do it,” he said. 

“Won’t it hurt?” 

“No,” he assured me.  He jumped.  His feet slapped the hard dirt, and my own soles dimly rang with the sting of the impact.  Turns out, however, that I’m not preternaturally empathic; nor even merely an overly imaginative drama geek dad.  Turns out, according to some of the latest research into what have been dubbed “Mirror Neurons”, I am a human being.

As reports Christian Keysers, Scientific Director of the Neuroimaging Center of the University Medical Center Groningen, the same neuron fires in a monkey’s brain when it grabs a peanut as when someone else grabs the peanut.  Says Keyser:

This phenomenon is not restricted to physical movement.  When someone taps my shoulder, say, my somatosensory cortex makes me feel the sensation.  But simply seeing someone else being tapped activates the same area of my brain.  If I cut my finger, my cingulate cortex and anterior insula will register the pain—and these areas also become active if I see you cut your finger.  The vicarious representations are not quite as strong as those produced when we experience our own sensations, but we nevertheless feel a milder version of what the other person feels.

None of this is all that surprising to my fellow stage artists.  We’ve known for millennia that we can get folks in the audience to reassuringly rub their hands just by chopping off some fake hands on stage.  In such moments, everybody knows that nobody’s fooling anybody, and yet our bodies do get fooled despite our brains’ reassurances. 

These brain circuits can keep us from seeing other individuals as something “out there.”  Indeed, we are able to feel their actions, sensations, and emotions inside us, as if we were in their shoes.  Others have become us. [emphasis Paul’s]…. These brain circuits thus blur the bright line between your experiences and mine.  Our experiences fuse into the joint pool of knowledge that we call culture.

Dear Professor Keysers, my colleagues and I happily wish to inform you that we have been investigating these phenomena for some time.  We call it theatre.  Welcome to the ongoing experiment.

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Writing is Liquid

By the Whites of Our Eyes

While reading Brian Christian’s evocative new book The Most Human Human, which manages to explore an impressively wide and variegated territory while covering the secondary contest at an annual Turing Test competition to determine which human entrant seems most human, I ran across this random fun fact:

.... Humans are known to have the largest and most visible sclera—the “whites” of the eyes—of any species....  There must be some reason humans developed it, despite its obvious costs.  In fact, the advantage of visible sclera—so goes the “cooperative eye hypothesis”—is precisely that it enables humans to see clear, and from a distance, which directions other humans are looking....  Chimpanzees, gorillas, and bonobos—our nearest cousins—follow the direction of each other’s heads, whereas human infants follow the direction of each other’s eyes.

All evolved traits have costs associated with them.  A peacock develops his tail to attract a peahen at great nutritive cost.  In fact, he does so as a way of signaling, “I must be really special because I can squander resources on this utterly useless and even detrimental fancy fanny fan.”  So likewise, there must have been costs to developing these large and prominent sclera of ours.  The most obvious leaping to my mind is the fact that when I can easily see what other people are looking at, they can just as easily do the same with me.  This is mutual mind-reading, plain and simple.  And we have to assume that being able to read each others’ minds was ultimately more advantageous to our forbears than permanent obfuscation.  We were stronger when we understood each other well.   We still are.

As usual, I see implications for theatre.  A while ago I posted here an essay explaining why solo shows are not plays, and therefore not, strictly speaking, theatre.  I conceded, however, that they belong to the even older art of story-telling.  Now, based on some of the newest science available, I am no longer convinced it really is the elder form.

Communication based on gesture, eye movement and even sympathetic neuronal patterning (more on that later when I abstract research on “mirror neurons”) may well have preceded verbal communication, which leans so heavily on semantic content.  Put more simply, our evolutionary ancestors may have been “play-acting” long before they were “story-telling”.

Time is Memory and Might not Exist

I like to book surf. If something I am enjoying references another intriguing book, I try to hunt it down. And if that second book mentions a third tempting tome, I go after that too, following the thread as far as it will take me. In his book The Shallows, Nicholas Carr cites some research described in What’s Next? Dispatches on the Future of Science, a collection of 18 short and eminently readable essays by scientists working at the cutting edge of their respective fields.

In a piece called “Brain Time”, David M. Eagleman recounts his investigations into how the brain reconciles multifarious streams of incoming data into a coherent perception of “now”: a feat much harder than it seems. Unlike fiber optics, neurons don’t communicate at anything near light-speed. Indeed, the signal from a pin prick to your toe takes considerably longer to reach your brain than one given simultaneously to your nose. So how does the brain register them as concurrent? Or as Eagleman asks: 

Why didn’t you feel the nose-touch when it first arrived? Did your brain wait to see what else might be coming up the pipeline of the spinal cord until it was sure it had waited long enough for the lower signal from the toe? Strange as that sounds, it may be correct. It may be that that unified polysensory perception of the world has to wait for the slowest overall information.  Given conduction times along limbs, this leads to the bizarre but testable suggestion that tall people may live further in the past than short people.

Also, different senses communicate to our brains at different speeds, which, if you think about it, isn’t exactly news. It’s why we start foot-races with gunshots and not light-flashes.

So how does the brain resolve all these variously arriving inputs into a unity? Well, the answer Eagleman postulates is as fascinating as it is simple. We understand the world by involving ourselves in it:

It has been shown that the brain constantly recalibrates its expectations about arrival times. And it does so by starting with a single, simple assumption: if it sends out a motor act (such a as a clap of hands), all the feedback should be assumed to be simultaneous and any delays should be adjusted until simultaneity is perceived. In other words, the best way to predict the expected relative timing of incoming signals is to interact with the world: each time you kick or touch or knock on something, your brain makes the assumption that the sound, sight and touch are simultaneous.

Eagelman is keen to emphasize that the perception he is investigating here is conscious awareness. Humans, like all higher animals, are completely capable of making “pre-conscious” decisions with their spinal cords, which is how you can remove your hand from the hot stove before the pain even registers. This difference between pre-conscious perception and consciousness itself leads Eagleman to stare down the ultimate question: what do we need the latter for anyway?

What is the use of perception, especially since it lags behind reality, is retrospectively attributed, and is generally outstripped by automatic (unconscious) systems?  The most likely answer is that perceptions are representations of information that the cognitive systems can work with later.  Thus it is important for the brain to take sufficient time to settle on its best interpretation of what just happened rather than stick with its initial, rapid interpretation.  Its carefully refined picture of what just happened is all it will have to work with later, so it had better invest the time.

Humans don’t have sharp claws, or big teeth, or wings or echo-location.  We have something ultimately much more powerful: clear, cogent, handily referable memories. We experience time as a stream because that’s the best, and perhaps only way to accurately record experience with the level of retrievable complexity that we require to be, well, human. In fact, Eagleman concludes by casting doubt on the notion of time as a scientifically sound first principle.

Most of our current theoretical frameworks include the variable t in a Newtonian, river-flowing sense.  But as we begin to understand time as a construction of the brain, as subject to illusion as the sense of color is, we may eventually be able to remove our perceptual biases from the equation. Our physical theories are mostly built on top of our filters for perceiving the world, and time may be the most stubborn filter of all to budge out of the way.

With this line of thought, Eagleman follows down a trail blazed by Henri Bergson and Kurt Gödel, whose evocative investigations of time have been all too often ignored or poorly understood by serious scientists and philosophers over the last century.

Implications for Theatre:

What’s more, Eagleman may have unwittingly stumbled on an answer to the most persistently nagging question of my chosen art form: why is live theatre so much more excruciating than movies or TV when it’s bad, and so much more powerfully transcendent on those much rarer occasions when it is good?  Well maybe it is because film and TV do most of your brain’s work for you, pre-packaging all the various elements of sight and sound into a perfectly corroborated unified mega-signal. In the theatre, the data hits our brains like it does in real life—like it did on the savannah a million years ago— as an unreconciled rough draft. Our brains are working harder in the theatre to piece it all together.  Film and television tell our brains stories; theatre makes our brains do the telling. (For my own theatrical explorations of time’s mutability, check out my play The Ten Thousand Things.)

David M. Eagleman’s bio says that in addition to serving as the director of Baylor College of Medicine’s Laboratory for Perception and Action, he is also the author of a book of fiction called Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives. Cowabunga baby! Surf’s up!

The New You Boat (Mini-Act II)

Continued from Mini- Act I

Mini-Act II
by
O.C.C.A.M.

 (The following countdown takes place in darkness.)

CAPTAIN:  Seven.

COMMANDER:  Seven.

LIEUTENANT:  Seven.

ENSIGN:  Seven.

BOSUN:  Seven.

HELMSMAN:  Seven.

SEAMAN:  Seven.

COMMANDER:  Six.

LIEUTENANT:  Six.

ENSIGN:  Six.

BOSUN:  Six.

HELMSMAN:  Six.

SEAMAN:  Six.

LIEUTENANT:  Five.

ENSIGN:  Five.

BOSUN:  Five.

HELMSMAN:  Five.

SEAMAN:  Five.

ENSIGN:  Four.

BOSUN:  Four.

HELMSMAN:  Four.

SEAMAN:  Four.

BOSUN:  Three.

HELMSMAN:  Three.

SEAMAN:  Three.

HELMSMAN:  Two.

SEAMAN:  Two. One.

(Lights up.)

ENSIGN:  ¡Ping!

COMMANDER:  What?

ENSIGN:  Something.

COMMANDER:  What?

CAPTAIN:  Ensign explicate.

ENSIGN:  I... I... scanning... scanning...

COMMANDER:  What?  Something?  What?

CAPTAIN:  A ghost?  A glitch?

ENSIGN:  Gone.

SEAMAN:  Go then, Commander-Man, your switch.  Punch the button, bastard.

CAPTAIN:  Belay below.  Avast bastion blasts awhile awaiting a future--

ENSIGN: ¡¡Ping!!

COMMANDER:  Again?

CAPTAIN:  Ensign extrapolate.

ENSIGN:  Close.  Closing closer.

COMMANDER:  Captain?
CAPTAIN:  Aye.

COMMANDER:  Shall I?

SEAMAN:  Aye, knew you eyed three key live/kill.  Use or lose.

CAPTAIN:  Hold fire. Helmsman, do die for your New You depth invasion evasion.

HELMSMAN:  Aye, aye, I do die for declination dot mark dash dot dash mark dash.

CAPTAIN:  Seaman, a head engine's awful.

SEAMAN:  Rot sure negative, Captain.  Fear/desire drive died dry of new U launch lust lost and found foundering.

CAPTAIN:  Silence.  All hands and semenful silence.

(Silence.)

ENSIGN:  ¡¡¡¡¡¡¡Peeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-eeeeeeeeyingyangyangyangyingyingyingyangyangyingyang!!!!!!!

CAPTAIN:  Lieutenant, tend the Ensign.  Bosun, man the scanner.

LIEUTENANT:  I eye, consummation containment crypt cracked.

BOSUN:  Breach leaking New U blue-black.

LIEUTENANT:  Imminent wave array decay.

COMMANDER:  Recommendation.

LIEUTENANT:  You knew New You's posited position predicates primary protocol.

SEAMAN:  I aye.  Kill/die.

ENSIGN:  Oh!

CAPTAIN:  Ensign, report.

ENSIGN:  Oh come!

CAPTAIN:  Ensign, repeat.

ENSIGN:  Oh come!  Oh come!

BOSUN:  Captain, I eye sounds bounding, but something--

COMMANDER:  Something else?

BOSUN:  Something other.  An indistinguishable, inextinguishable echo goes over the whole hollow hull.

ENSIGN:  Awe comes!

HELMSMAN:  Captain. I eye dying drift dive decline climbing to asymptote of total imp lotion. Shall I continue to die for

you? To dive, perchance to--

BOSUN:  Blow the whole hallowed held hull.

CAPTAIN:  Hold held course coordinates: invasion evasion.

SEAMAN:  Who knew you New You to fool?  Where do you New You to go?

CAPTAIN:  No one.  Nowhere.  Need to know only.  Nothing knows again new again now, all hands and semen, knew you of New

You to live/let live another daze of all days to fight another night of all lights.

SEAMAN:  Live/let live's long gone.  On or on or on and on.

LIEUTENANT:  Knew you New You, when nothing's something sees through Schrodinger's cat can, all's over and out with an

ever-rending boom through the Chinese Room.

ENSIGN:  Awk'em!  Chink the Chink Clink!  Awk'em!  Awk'em!

CAPTAIN:  Knew you, damn you, to extricate, Ensign, and excogitate escape from stated state.

ENSIGN:  Aye I one woe wallowing whale's wail waking mermen and maidens mating making oracling orcas cause calls across all

of us: "Awe comes occaming all ye fate-fools of faded faithfulishness.  Be not be afraid/brave I eye-tide in/out tidings of

great joyfoolish noise.”

BOSUN:  Behold low hell hellos!

ENSIGN:  Aye!

BOSUN:  Pain pang pings pound!

LIEUTENANT:  Chink the Chink Clink!

SEAMAN:  Blast a bastard button, pusher!  On or on or on and on!

COMMANDER:  I eye I catch as cat can can't!

HELMSMAN:  New You course closing on imminent infinite atmospheres asymptote!

CAPTAIN:  I eye from one breach breaking wave good-bye.

ENSIGN:  Occam's rays--

BOSUN:  Heard me.

ENSIGN:  Occam's rays--

LIEUTENANT:  Hurt me!

COMMANDER QUARK:  There's something--

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  --nothing but a little--

SEAMAN MESON:  --push would scuttle but a little--

COMMANDER QUARK:  --blasting bastion of--

BOSUN BOSON:  --sounds truly--

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  --human in--

HELMSMAN HADRON:  --and doubt of all--

LIEUTENANT LEPTON:  --this--

SEAMAN MESON:  --that--

COMMANDER QUARK:  --never was--

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  --always will--

HELMSMAN HADRON:  --not stroke--

BOSUN BOSON:  --one when we're--

ENSIGN NEUTRINO:  --Occam's razored!

(Blackout.
End of “The New You Boat.”)

 

The New You Boat (Mini-Act I)

A note on the generation of the play...

The playwright Matthew Fielding died in 1984, having only completed the first act of his last play, “The New You Boat”.  Unfinished works are a fact of life-- or rather death-- in the world of literature, but there are those that believe that this was no accident.  Fielding mentioned no other work by name in his will, but the first act of the mini-two act play “The New You Boat” was specifically designated to be placed in the public domain where anyone who so chose could attempt to finish it.  Also, in eerie contrast to his habit, Fielding left no notes on the work, no outlines for the second act, no references to its conception or development in his journal-- nothing, but the perfectly formed first act.  Finally, the script is rife with digital and quantum imagery as well as linguistic conundrums and self-referential, anti-algorithmic riddles that could have only be intentionally designed for one purpose: to confound an artificially intelligent creative consciousness.

Writing the first act of “The New You Boat” was a consummate act of defiance on Fielding’s part: a reaching back from the finality of death itself to throw down one last gauntlet before his late-life intellectual adversaries-- the proponents of artificial intelligence.  Most artists have an inherent antipathy and distrust of the scientific method.  Matthew Fielding embraced it.  He welcomed contending viewpoints from those who challenged the anthropocentric idea that only human beings are capable of consciousness and creativity.  He was as willing to be proven wrong by them as he was eager to prove them wrong.

In fall of 1995, under the auspices of an unprecedented co-bequest of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Security Administration, an elite team of thinkers, scientists and artists called the Creative Cognition Development Group, was formed to meet the challenge of completing a master work of art solely using computer generated artificial consciousness.  A mega-program, made up of literally billions of complex, interconnected algorithms needed to be designed, tested and implemented.  It was.  On January 1, 1999, OCCAM (Omni-interfacial Creative Consciousness Algorithm Matrix) was born.  In a little over two years (roughly two-hundred times longer than experts believe it took Fielding to write the first half) OCCAM completed the “The New You Boat”.

We at the CCDG, on behalf of the late Matthew Fielding, and indeed, OCCAM itself, invite you to judge the results.

 

Mini-Act I
by
Matthew Fielding

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Accept no substitutes.  This is the New You Boat.  Rot your Roger.  We'll go wilco.  Seaman Meson, state your state us.

 

SEAMAN MESON:  Aye, aye, Commander.  Fear/desire drive alive and churning our screw through the New You blue bluer blue bluer than blue black-blue blacker than blue bluer than blacker than bluer than bluer than blacker than bluest blacker-blue-black back to you new boat.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Rot your that.  Helmsman Hadron.

 

HELMSMAN HADRON:  Aye, aye, Commander.  New You of course bearing naught stroke one not one stroke one approaching asymptote of ascertaining our approach on points pertaining to why we lie below and die with always something shy of sky's the limit asymptotically speaking of course...  bearing...  naught stroke one not one—

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Helsman—

 

HELMSMAN HADRON:  Aye.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Cut your jib and maintain prescient course.

 

HELMSMAN HADRON:  I, Commander, will go--

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  We'll always go.

 

HELMSMAN HADRON:  Wilco.  Aye.  Shall I dive for you?

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Aye, Helmsman, do.  Dive for depth perception zero nautical knots naught stroke one.

 

HELMSMAN HADRON:  Rot your that.  Will do dive.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Bosun Boson.

 

BOSUN BOSON:  Aye the hull is sound the hull is true sounding truly true sounds sounding through function of faith further function of fear further function of falling facing turning churning our screw through the new you black and blue back to blue black to you new boat.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Wheel go.  And scuttle button?

 

BOSUN BOSON:  Check, set, wired, tested, all systems go for detonating preset charges blowing bright holes in the hull holes opening hell holds flooding all held hells blowing all holes whole crushing us blinder than we already are.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Rot sure.  Ensign Neutrino.

 

ENSIGN NEUTRINO:  Aye, communications check.  All bands scanned reading random noise with single signal exception.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Explicate.

 

ENSIGN NEUTRINO:  Explication: constantly variable incessant inbeaming binary beacon begins again new...  again now...  again...

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Transcribe.

 

ENSIGN NEUTRINO:  I eye transcript sans script:  all in code.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Crack it.

 

ENSIGN NEUTRINO:  We'll go.  Cracking...
      Standby....
      In crypt cracked.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Transcribe.

 

ENSIGN NEUTRINO:  Sans script transcript crypt cracked:  “Begin in crypt:  Knew you u no u r Schrödinger's Cat in a Chinese Box garbage day in and garbage day out.  Only amplitudes abound, always anchors away angers awash encore's a wish awhile awaiting a future in crypt.  End in crypt."

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Rot sure.  Lieutenant Lepton.

 

LIEUTENANT LEPTON:  Morale modems monitor multitudinous mutinies multifariously manifesting melanomic demonic mnemonic nominal monomaniacal numb mum hum.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Recommendation.

 

LIEUTENANT LEPTON:  Punch scuttle.  Blow held hull holes.  Collapse wave function.  Annihilate boundlessly abounding anger-anchored amplitudes.  Commence consummation devoutly to be wished awhile a waiting future in crypt.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Duly noted, negated, belayed and belied.  Standing course and orders stand still.
      Fire control command commander, I, Commander Quark, report all fire control systems all systems go set to blow ballistic bastions blasting out of the new you up through the black blue into the true you who new nothing mirvs spurt from seven brahmaning bridegrooms for seven continental eggs benedicted to break fast break hard over easy.
      Your new you crew stasis state us stated and standing for inspection, Captain Quasar.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  All hands and seaman:  this is your captain.
      This night of all nights, eve of day of all days, it's apt and auspicious to remember this mission's vital import and portent.
      It's not unreasonable to reason that the surfaces served have unremembered never knew you.  In their seasonal celebration of crisp coming bright they overlook that new true black blue heavy water U light: salvo salvation of nations.  You, New You, alone blow the glow coals that flash the steam that churns the turning screw through this bluer blacker than blue.  New You knew alone the crypt code, held hull holes, and ballistic bastions basking below.
    Last day I asleeped from a recurring reality, an ornery ontogeny oven on conscious corrective: little legged spermed-eggs doing the Chinese roomboom.  "Never knew you, New You." Say they you away.  "Never knew you, New Nothing." But whenwhere nothing exists, nothing's something liable to litter little nothings and break brittle little somethings into anything new you want.  What's to be?  What's to become?  What's to be becomes becoming through what little little legged spermed-eggs beg they never knew of New You.
      Tonight, Eve of all eves, a decision must be come to: a becoming to be come and gone.  Always knew you that this point in space of time would come.  One switch to give two options, two of which to give four, only one of which can be, taking three to key.
      Bosun Boson, man your switch.

 

BOSUN BOSON:  I eye scuttle button, one push to blow held hull holes.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  Commander Quark, man your switch.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  I eye fire control set to blast bastions ballistic.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  Ensign Neutrino, appraise amplitude array.

 

ENSIGN NEUTRINO:  I eye amplitude array all appraised:  four singular states in play.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  Pray, Ensign, state states arrayed.

 

ENSIGN NEUTRINO:  Off and off.  On and off.  Off and on.  On and on.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  Translate arrayed stated states.

 

ENSIGN NEUTRINO:  Live/let live.  Die/let live.  Live/kill.  Die/kill.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  Lieutenant Lepton, commence crew key conviction config query.

 

LIEUTENANT LEPTON:  I eye key config query commencing in sub conn descending rank order.
      Captain Quasar, select your suffrage.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  Live/kill.

 

LIEUTENANT LEPTON:  Commander Quark.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Die/kill.

 

LIEUTENANT LEPTON:  Lieutenant Lepton:  die/let live.
      Ensign Neutrino.

 

ENSIGN NEUTRINO:  Live/kill.

 

LIEUTENANT LEPTON:  I eye two to key live/kill.
      Bosun Boson.

 

BOSUN BOSON:  Die/let live.

 

LIEUTENANT LEPTON:  We'll go two to key die/let live.
      Helmsman Hadron.

 

HELMSMAN HADRON:  Die/kill.

 

LIEUTENANT LEPTON:  Rot sure two to key die/kill.  Three out of four suffrages be two to key.  What say thee, Seaman Meson?
SEAMAN MESON:  Suffrage me to live/let live.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  Nothing cums, Seaman, of nothing.

 

SEAMAN MESON:  Rot sure, Captain.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  Recast, Seaman.

 

SEAMAN MESON:  Rot your recasting, Captain.  Resuffrage me to live/let live.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  Suffrage denied.  Switch or surrender.

 

SEAMAN MESON:  I switch off and off.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  No.  On or on or on and on.

 

SEAMAN MESON:  I eye but off and off.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  Damn you.  You knew you damn new you to lose, never loose, the name of action.  You knew New You to live/let live is nothing but not nothing.  Switch one on.

 

SEAMAN MESON:  No on.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR (simultaneously):  On, on, on, on, on, on, on.

 

SEAMAN MESON (simultaneously):  No, no, no, no, no, no, no. 

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Captain.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  I.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Permission to break the stale Seaman mate.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  Explicate.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  I to eye switch conviction recon fig. from die to live/kill.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  Knew you to do this?

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Aye but only new newly now.  Night of all nights.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  Eve of all ease of all griefs.

 

LIEUTENANT LEPTON:  Three now to key live/kill.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  Then commence live/kill key confiq sequence.

 

LIEUTENANT LEPTON:  Eye, Ensign Neutrino, key in.

 

ENSIGN NEUTRINO:  Keying.

 

LIEUTENANT LEPTON:  Commander Quark.  ¿Quien?

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Keen.

 

LIEUTENANT LEPTON:  Captain Quasar.  Kin?

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  King.  Of all kin a little less than kind, of all knights a little more than dazed; wrecks raineth omni-pittance in salve ocean.

 

LIEUTENANT LEPTON:  Key confiq complete.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Fire control armed.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  Fire at will.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Request countdown.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  I eye granite.  Seven.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Seven.

 

LIEUTENANT LEPTON:  Seven.

 

ENSIGN NEUTRINO:  Seven.

 

BOSUN BOSON:  Seven.

 

HELMSMAN HADRON:  Seven.

 

SEAMAN MESON:  Seven.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Six.

 

LIEUTENANT LEPTON:  Six.

 

ENSIGN NEUTRINO:  Six.

 

BOSUN BOSON:  Six.

 

HELMSMAN HADRON:  Six.

 

SEAMAN MESON:  Six.

 

LIEUTENANT LEPTON:  Five.

 

ENSIGN NEUTRINO:  Five.

 

BOSUN BOSON:  Five.

 

HELMSMAN HADRON:  Five.

 

SEAMAN MESON:  Five.

 

ENSIGN NEUTRINO:  Four.

 

BOSUN BOSON:  Four.

 

HELMSMAN HADRON:  Four.

 

SEAMAN MESON:  Four.

 

BOSUN BOSON:  Three.

 

HELMSMAN HADRON:  Three.

 

SEAMAN MESON:  Three.

 

HELMSMAN HADRON:  Two.

 

SEAMAN MESON:  Two.  One.

 

(Blackout. End Mini-Act I.)

 

 

Continue to Mini-Act II by O.C.C.A.M.

Attention Must be Paid — Guess Where?

… A man asked the Zen master Ikkyu  to write down some words of great wisdom.  Ikkyu wrote”attention”.  Not satisfied, the man asked for some more, so Ikkyu wrote “attention, attention”.  Still not satisfied, he demanded more, and Ikkyu wrote “attention, attention, attention”.

    From Ten Zen Questions, by Susan Blackmore.   

 

I just finished reading Nicholas Carr’s new book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains, and while I cannot recommend it as an exquisite sample of sparkling prose, I was impressed by the arguments and research provided therein.  A counter to the glib digital cheerleaders from Google to Face Book, The Shallows essentially demonstrates how our addiction to computers and the internet is literally rewiring our brains.

I won’t regurgitate all of Carr’s evidence here.  After all, this is a blog and I have to keep it snappy or you’ll click on to something grabbier.  His conclusions, however, are stunning enough to keep even the most attention-deficited mouse-finger paralyzed for a moment.

Navigating the Web requires a particularly intensive form of mental multitasking.  In addition to flooding our working memory with information, the juggling imposes what brain scientists call “switching costs” on our cognition.  Every time we shift our attention , our brain has to reorient itself, further tasking our mental resources.  As Maggie Jackson explains … “the brain takes time to change goals, remember the new rules needed for the new task, and block out cognitive interference from the previous, still-vivid activity.  Many studies have shown that switching between just two tasks can add substantially to our cognitive load, impeding our thinking and increasing the likelihood that we’ll over look or misinterpret important information.

In short, Web-surfing is a hyperactive exercise in short-term memory.  Carr walks us through some fascinating research that shows our brains do not store memory at all like computers do.

Kobi Rosenblum, who heads the Department of Neurobiology and Ethology at the University of Haifa… has done extensive research on memory consolidation.  One of the salient lessons to emerge … is how different biological memory is from computer memory.  “… Long term memory creation in the human brain,” he says, “is one of the incredible processes which is so clearly different than ‘artificial brains’ like those in a computer.  While an artificial brain absorbs information and immediately saves it in its memory, the human brain continues to process information long after it is received, and the quality of memories depends on how the information is processed.”  Biological memory is alive.  Computer memory is not.

Those who celebrate the “outsourcing” of memory to the Web have been misled by a metaphor.  They overlook the fundamentally organic nature of biological memory.  What gives real memory its richness and its character, not to mention its mystery and fragility, is its contingency.  It exists in time, changing as the body changes.   Indeed, the very act of recalling a memory appears to restart the entire process of consolidation, including the generation of proteins to from new synaptic terminals.  Once we bring an explicit long-term memory back into working memory, it becomes a short-term memory again.  When we reconsolidate it, it gains a new set of connections—a new context.…   Biological memory is in a perpetual state of renewal.  The memory stored in a computer, by contrast, takes the form of distinct and static bits, you can move the bits from one storage drive to another as many times as you like, and they will always remain precisely as they were.

Human beings are compelled to impute some version of our own consciousness to nearly anything and everything we see, so long as it appears to change.  Even trees in a breeze can seem eerily aware to us.  One theory holds that on the evolutionary timeline the suspicion of consciousness in other beings actually proceeded full-blown consciousness in ourselves.  That is, we learned to think by first learning to predict what others might be thinking—even if they weren’t actually thinking.  “As if” gave birth to “as is.” (And now my Web-scrambbled brain suddenly retrieves one of The Onion’s most brilliant Point/Counterpoints: My Computer Totally Hates Me! vs. God, Do I Hate That Bitch.)

Carr quotes Jason Mitchell, head of Harvard’s Social Cognition and Affective Neuroscience Lab: 

The “chronic overactivity of those brain regions implicated in social thought” can, writes Mitchell, lead us to perceive minds where no minds exist, even in inanimate objects.”  There’s growing evidence, moreover, that our brains naturally mimic the states of the other minds we interact with, whether those minds are real or imagined.

By believing the internet is somehow “intelligent”, we are literally rewiring ourselves to be as stupid, scattered and shallow as it is.  One thing missing from The Shallows is an antidote to the neural degeneration that Carr so assiduously documents.  Can you guess the one I might suggest?

Theatre brooks no distraction. You are trapped in a dark room and forced to impute “intelligence” to the brains of actors.  In the theatre, four dimensions of time and space merge to a singular awareness, and the barrier between “within-you” and “without-you” blurs.  You can zero in on the action or zone out of it, but wherever your attention wanders it eventually has to come back, whether you like it or not, to where you sit and what you see and hear from there.  (This is why bad theatre is so stupendously more excruciating to sit through than bad film or television.)  The light your eyes receive is inextricably bound to the air that vibrates your eardrums, activated as it is by the breath of an actor and shared in the lungs of everyone present.  Shakespeare was wrong—or, more likely, purposefully lying—when he suggested that the stage is a place for illusion.  Theatre is nothing but concentrated actuality.  We should all go once in a while if only to pay ourselves some simple human attention.

Chicago Posts: Dead and Alive

Three nights ago my old friend Louis Slotin and I each got one of those chances that only theatre can offer.  He got to be alive while I got to be dead.

Everybody loves a dead playwright.  The deader the better.  Living ones are prickly and unpredictable.  Actors and directors assume, sometimes rightly, that living playwrights have special insight into their plays because, well, they wrote them.  Such insight can be resented as often as welcomed.  Rehearsing a play is a process of discovery.  No one wants to do an Easter egg hunt with someone they suspect knows where all the eggs are hidden.  Smart playwrights understand when it’s time to walk out of the rehearsal hall so everyone else can breathe a little.  They do this even though they know that they do not in fact have all the answers and really might like to stay and hunt for a little treasure too.  In other words, a smart playwright knows when to roll over and play dead.

As I confessed in an earlier essay installment of these Chicago Posts, I have seen every full production of every play I have ever written.  Often I have been part of the development process, even if the play has already had its world premiere.  For Louis Slotin Sonata’s second production which was staged off–Broadway at Ensemble Studio Theatre I rewrote substantially, adding at least one scene, which I would later cut.  I was living in New York at the time, so I could attend as many rehearsals as I wanted (and thought wise.)  The same was true for the third production at the now dead Empty Space Theatre.  By then I had moved to Seattle with my wife and kids and was able to work with the director, John Langs, to touch up the script, and most importantly, completely swap out the second act song, replacing it with the utterly original “Sodom Saki Shuffle” for which I wrote all new lyrics which the incomparable Mark Nichols then brilliantly scored.  (Click this to hear the Seattle version of the Sodom Saki Shuffle.)

For this fourth production of the play at A Red Orchid Theatre in Chicago , I had nearly zero input.  I answered a few small script questions via email from the director Karen Kessler, but otherwise I really might as well have been blissfully departed.  So I had no idea what I was in for when showed up at the storefront theatre in Old Town two nights ago.  I have sat through productions I had nothing to do with that blew me away with their unforeseen brilliant interpretation of my script, and I have sat through shows so awful, so utterly antithetical to the play I imagined that I was struck quite literally catatonic with horror, rage and shame.

Louis Slotin was just about to leave Los Alamos when he had his accident.  His bags were packed.  He was showing the “crit test” to Alvin Graves, his replacement at Pajarito Canyon labs.  The next day he planned to fly out to the South Pacific to see the Navy explode the very plutonium core he held in his hands.  From there he would head to the University of Chicago to continue his studies in his original field of biology.  Of course, Slotin never made it to Chicago.  He never made it out of Los Alamos alive.  They put his radiation-ravaged body in a lead-lined casket and shipped it to Winnipeg, Manitoba, his hometown.

Two nights ago I saw Louis Slotin alive in Chicago.  He was occupying the body of an actor named Steven Schine, who through happy happenstance looks a hell of a lot like him.  I watched as that long-ago dead man was forced to, via long distance phone call, break the news in Yiddish to his father Israel Slotin that he was dying.  Israel was inhabiting the body of an eminently accomplished veteran Chicago actor named William J. Norris.

I watched those men relive a pain that no one should even have to live through once.  I watched and I wept.  But I also felt a great strange satisfaction.  After 64 years Louie had arrived where he was going.

Maybe I should play dead more often.

Louis Slotin Sonata gets a Nice Nod in The Huffington Post

 

In response to a recent article in The Guardian which argued that most plays involving science come off as pretty lame, Lauren Gunderson, on The Huffington Post yesterday, made an artful argument to the contrary:

[Science] adds reality to our stories, and adds story back into our reality. Science is built for the stage. The very act of scientific discovery is one of the most dramatic in the human experience. Dramatic because it changes everything, and it can be made of nothing but silence. An epic thought still fits on a stage and in a human being. That can be giant drama.

Gunderson goes on to present a list of plays that is— dare I say it?—scientific in its evidentiary scope and completeness.  In the category of “wild theatrical rides” she kindly places Louis Slotin Sonata.

Given that the play will be getting a brand new production in Chicago at A Red Orchid Theatre this September, I am especially grateful for the favorable mention.  (Apparently no slouches, Red Orchid will be moving its last production Off-Broadway.)

Gunderson is right: science and art are kissing cousins.  Time was when no one even bothered to make a distinction between the disciplines.  I would not go that far now, but I would welcome my colleagues in the theatre to look more deeply into the world of science for their inspiration.  Stories like the race to decode the human genome will be told and retold for generations to come.  For modern playwrights they are the kind of source material that Caesar’s fall and the War of the Roses were for Shakespeare.  Theatres that cannot or will not strive and risk to tell these stories that are impacting people’s lives right now will not survive as anything other than museums.

 

 

 

 

 

Sodom Saki Full Length by Paul Mullin