1. The Name & an Introduction

Last spring, I learned that my great-great-uncle on my mother's side was a famous Talmudic scholar in "the Old Country." He wrote prolifically, and pacifistically. His name was Shmuel Tamarit [Samuel Tomares], but his pseudonym was Echad Ha'Rabanim [One of the Rabbis]. He is so obscure that I cannot even find him on the Internet. If that is indeed the case, I am thrilled to bring him into the twenty-first century. I want to inherit and embody his peaceful humility. That is what he represents to me. Plus, his ideas must be kept alive.

I just finished reading the Fragments of Heraclitus [Penguin, 2001]. I will be reading it at least once a day until further notice. It is quite Talmudic in itself; the words, though few, demand intense study. Brooks Haxton, the awesome poet who teaches at Syracuse University [and is married to the sister of our dear family friend Vivian] translates:

63

While cosmic wisdom
understands all things
are good and just,
intelligence may find
injustice here, and justice
somewhere else.

I want to cultivate intuition that can can sense what is good in the universe. The question, of course, is how? Examples of successfully advanced men and women are rare and special. But there is no end. Goethe said that man is eternally striving. Brooks Haxton, in his poem "Thy Name," writes:

"OK. Let’s not call what ditched us God:
ghu, the root in Sanskrit, means not God,
but only the calling thereupon."

Ralph Bronner, son of the antibacterial idealogue Dr. Bronner, claimed to know an Indian gentleman who said "God is the search for God." One example of a legendary [but un-quixotic, more on that in the future] searcher of cosmic wisdom is the Spanish neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal [b. 1852 - d. 1934]. He sought the divine, and his story is so classically human.

Cajal received a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1906 "in recognition of [his] work on the structure of the nervous system." Actually, he split the award with an Italian named Camilo Golgi, who invented the silver nitrate stain that allowed human eyes, with the aid of a microscope, to access our brain cells. But when Golgi looked into the microscope, he believed that he saw a reticulum, or a net of cells connected to a single source. This was the prevalent view in the scientific community at the time. Cajal, however, had a slightly different, but infinitely clearer vision of the same samples. Cajal's findings, published in his Nobel lecture, confirmed a marginalized theory called the Neuron Doctrine, proposed by Heinrich Wilhelm Gottfried von Waldeyer-Hartz [or Heiny, I imagine, for brevity] in 1891. Our brains contain billions of independent and discrete cells, neurons, that receive signals and transmit information. In other words, there is no simple order determined by a single source. That causes tension in the brain [we surely know this experientially], but as Heraclitus writes:

From the strain
of binding opposites
comes harmony.

Cajal was also an extremely gifted artist. Moreover, he wrote a philosophical tract [Advice for a Young Investigator], a book of short stories [Vacation Stories], and a memoir from old age [Memories of My Life]. There are other books, and countless research papers written in Spanish and translated, in some fortunate cases, into English. Here are two of his sketches:











I will be in Chicago from October 17-20 to attend the annual Society for Neuroscience conference and to meet with Dr. Javier DeFelipe from the Cajal Institute in Spain before his lecture called "Cajal's Butterflies of the Soul: Science and Art." That is the very phrase that endeared Cajal to me when I first discovered him. He seems to possess the same fine, aesthetic sensitivity as Vladimir Nabokov, whom I studied tirelessly last year for my thesis paper. In addition to being a genius writer [and chess master], Nabokov was a renowned lepidopterist. He saw butterflies, too.

I am concerned with such unique combinations of scientific and artistic thought. I am so excited to learn more about a discipline, neuroscience, that I have never studied in school. I hope and expect that there will be some memorable lectures in Chicago. I have set up this blog in order to share the knowledge and experience that I will enjoy at the conference.

I will be posting from time to time, maybe once or twice a week. I will give updates on my Cajal project as it progresses. I am trying to move and shake.

I welcome any comment. I went through every setting to make sure that this might be a place for open communication. This is a forum for ideas.



First: Marc Chagall's "The Praying Jew," 1923. [Photo from the Art Institute of Chicago].
Second: Johannes Moreelse, "Heraclitus," who was often called "The Weeping Philosopher."
Left image: Cajal's drawing of a neuron [1899] © Herederos de Santiago Ramón y Cajal
Right image: Cajal's drawing of the six layers [A-F] of the mouse neocortes [1904]
Butterfly: Nabokov's drawing for his wife, Véra, in a copy of his second published work, Al'manakh: Dva puti [An Almanac: Two Paths], printed privately in St. Petersburg in 1918