I have several friends who are physicians and scientists and lots of friends and acquaintences who are writers. Sometimes the two groups meet in my presence like two wandering tribes who have been traveling a long way across the steppes of Russia. You can always tell these tribesmen and tribeswomen apart because the scientists dress like beach bums (many continue to wear shorts even in Iowa in January) and the writers dress entirely in black as if they’re all undergraduates at Bard College. There are some exceptions. A doctor I admire may wear a Republican blue blazer and chinos; a poet might wear a baggy sweatshirt declaiming Boston Celtics. Over time I’ve come to see that neither group has any taste. But this shouldn’t be a surprise since the life of the mind ought to be less commodified as Albert Einstein so aptly demonstrated every day of his life. That none of my friends resembles Albert Einstein might be a problem. I haven’t had time to consider this. I imagine we should all look like Einstein: both men and women. I think I would have trouble growing the moustache. Well that’s not quite true. I could grow it but I couldn’t keep it tidy. Einstein probably didn’t care whether is moustache was tidy. I care. I have to draw the line somewhere. I like having clean lips. A friend who belongs to the writer group once remarked that he thought he saw the living incarnation of Walt Whitman eating spanokopita at Roditi’s Greek restaurant in Chicago. The Whitman look alike had spinach pie all down his beard. I’m betting that the hirsute customer in Roditi’s wasn’t a poet or a scientist but was most likely a retired podiatrist. I can’t explain this. I know some things are true without further research.
Nevertheless I’ve come to see that there’s a philosophical difference between the scientists and the writers. This takes a little time to sus out because at first there’s the wine and the brie; the mutual curiosity about ideas; the discovery that the scientists read widely in literature; the finding that writers are fascinated by science and medicine. A young genetic researcher recites a long passage from Kipling’s “Gunga Din” which is meant to be heard not read and aside from all the colonial sentiments (admittedly a big aside) one feels suddenly disposed toward Kipling who one hadn’t thought about since the third grade when the saga of Riki Tiki Tavi was on one’s mind. (Personally I wanted to become a writer because of Kipling. I decided this when I was 8 years old. Many writers will tell you similar stories while substituting Booth Tarkington or H.G. Wells.
A doctor recites the prologue from “The Canterbury Tales” and we learn that he was long ago in a life before med school actually an English major. He makes no joke about having come to his senses. He knows the supple discriminations of lingo are central to the mind’s muscularity. He knows he’s a better doc because he’s carrying old rhythms and plots under his white coat and deep in his chest.
A writer says he likes Oliver Sacks and another says he is fascinated by the history of consciousness and the work of Antonio Damasio (who used to teach at the University of Iowa) and still another writer talks with affinity about the history of mathematics.
We talk about the importance of narrative both in scientific research and in figurative language. We talk about narrative medicine and how doctors especially young ones need to hear their patients.
And like Rousseau we drink bordeaux and nibble cheese and think of the mind as a fit gift to the world. We have a log on the fire.
When an evening like this is over I think (as we all do) that we need much more cross fertilization. I won’t say “in the university” because I think that the business of bringing parenthetically specialized people together is critically important in every social culture we can conceive of. Currently I’m just thinking of my own fireside.
In some respects I think the writers have more to learn from the scientists than they would easily imagine. While this is a generalization to be sure, I’ve seen over time that many writers (in all genres) are quietly and uncritically attracted to what I can only describe as a kind of amateur apocalyptic thinking. They imagine the world is ending. They have the evidence of course. The evidence is overwhelming. Everyone knows the evidence. A very limited undergraduate said to me once and without irony:”It’s all Al Gore’s fault.” He didn’t know what he meant any better than I do but its safe to say that he was talking about evidence. And the trouble with evidence as any reader of crime fiction well knows is that once you’ve dug it up you can’t bury it again.
The poet Wallace Stevens wrote: “The world is ugly and the people are sad.” He was incorrect about both the people and the world even as he was undeniably certain how he (as a singular man) felt about both the people and the world. That is, he was correct about some of the people some of the time and some of the world all of the time.
Some. Feeling. One spots the provisional quality of Stevens’ apprehensions. In English departments they talk of subjectivity not just as a condition of the individual but as an inheritance from cultural influences. We are reduced, isolated, made smaller within the mind by the predilections of organized politics, religion, education, and yes, literature.
Wallace Stevens had a lousy marriage, a boring job (he was an insurance executive “by day”), and he studied French modernist poetry and philosophy. Was he sad? You bet. And why not?
Trouble is: way too many American writers and especially writers who make their livings by teaching at universities think like Wallace Stevens. While they may understand the entrapments of subjectivity they easily give in to habits of imaginative limitations.
Part of the reason for this is that contemporary literature is driven by feelings. Fiction is more often than not concerned with failings of families or of communities; poetry is about spiritual loss or the maddening and inchoate quality of language.
It is hard to care about literature that isn’t about anything beyond the artful arrangements of its ingrown despairs but this is mostly what’s going around. I won’t bother with examples. Pick up any literary magazine. Go to a writer’s conference.
Its hard to imagine scientists who believe that the words “feeling” and “some” are sufficient to their work. If you want to cure diseases you are testing every hypothesis and challenging your assumptions. If you love literary language you love it for its aesthetics and you don’t confuse aesthetics with progress.
Of course some writers would tell you that “progress”is a bourgeoise notion thereby dismissing it. Well, one of my friends is close to curing blindness. Stick that in your poetry pipe.
SK
Planet of the Blind 