3. Declaration & Advice

I know that I want to spend my life studying and writing, as independently as possible.

In my second post, I explained the origins of my current project, which concerns the legendary Spanish neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal. After I learned the most basic information about Cajal, I thought to write down the following question: HOW DID HE SEE IT SO CLEARLY? Camilo Golgi, distinguished and respected Italian scientist who shared the 1906 Nobel Prize with Cajal, looked into his microscope at a brain tissue sample and believed he saw a cytoplasmically continuous cell network from a single source. Cajal looked at the same material and correctly discovered neurons. How might one explain his clarified vision?

With this question firmly in mind, I began Cajal's Advice for a Young Investigator [Bradford, 1999]. The cover is a dark photograph of the stern scientist. His white hair-and-beard, unified at his temples, is interrupted only by a few fine black hairs around his small mouth. One side of his face is, on my copy, inscrutibly shadowed. But, almost exactly in the layout's center, his right eye stares out, directly at me.

In Advice, Cajal outlines how to become and be a successful scientist in nine chapters. The thin volume contains incentive and instruction, poetry, polemic, and proverb, warning and wisdom. One might call Advice "The Scientist's Bible." Cajal directs his words at the neophyte scientist, simultaneously explaining and fulfilling the important role addressed in his last chapter, "The Investigator as Teacher." Immediately, at the start of the work, Cajal states that the sources of all knowledge include "observation, experiment, and reasoning by induction and deduction"[1]. His main target in this, the introductory chapter, is the study of metaphysics. "When the human intellect ignores reality and concentrates within," he writes, "it can no longer explain the simplest inner workings of life's machinery or of the world around us"[2]. He is concerned with that which is material and dismisses that which is spiritual. "Chimera" is a favorite word of his; he uses it more than once in both Advice and Vacation Stories. Indeed, Cajal has a well of classical knowledge from which he draws throughout the text.

I was not surprised, then, to find that Cajal shares an aspect of the worldview of Heraclitus. "Nature is a harmonious mechanism," the Spaniard writes[17]. He later describes the feeling of scientific discovery as "the supreme pleasure of experiencing how the wings of the spirit emerge and develop, and how when working harmoniously we overcome difficulty to dominate and subdue elusive nature[49]." Interestingly, and quite beautifully, Cajal here employs Biblical vocabulary in order to describe the ideal relationship of man to nature. The word "dominate" [as a noun, beedgat] and "subdue" [v'kheevshuah] famously appear in The Book of Genesis[1:28]. That passage has been highly controversial because of its potentially destructive interpretations. In Biblical Hebrew, one of the two terms connotes rape. Yes, this is an over-reading, because Cajal here refers only to the tame, theoretical realm of ideas. But his unconscious incorporation of Biblical language is nonetheless noteworthy. The generation of that language from within his brain indicates at least a traditional religious influence and at most a traditional religious belief. More data will show me exactly where he exists on the spectrum of faith.

The comparison between Advice and The Bible is surely valid, though. After all, it is a Western work. Moreover, there is evidence of far more than intertextual borrowing from religion. In the chapter titled "Intellectual Qualities," Cajal describes the scientist in many different and quotable ways. He is, Cajal writes, "minister of progress, priest of truth, and a confidant of the Creator"[49]. The scientific intellect must be "devoted entirely to understanding something of that mysterious language that God has written in nature"[ibid]. Cajal even offers a vision of what I think it is fair to call the anti-Apocalypse, in other words Utopia, our special triumph: "when science has been completed," he predicts, "each phenomenon will have its correct name, after its relationship to general laws has been firmly established[54]. In Genesis, God allows Adam to name all of His creations. Does Cajal think that Adam did so incorrectly? When the prototypical, symbolic man [adam] "Adam" becomes the ideal scientist, humanity may enjoy a Paradise. There, we might plant our own Tree of Knowledge. I do not yet have any knowledge about Cajal's opinions towards Christian doctrine, but I can infer that he perceives divinity in our universe: Truth.

Truth seems to be Cajal's God. In the fourth chapter, "What Newcomers to Biological Research Should Know," he provides a sublime description of the moment of discovery, which might be called revelation. "It seemed as though a veil had been lifted from my soul," Cajal writes[64]. This line made me shiver; I know that the scientist understands the beautiful poetry of emotion. Indeed, Cajal frequently addresses and alludes to art and artists. "All outstanding work," he writes, "in art as well as in science, results from immense zeal applied to a great idea"[7]. Later: "scientists like artists are judged by the quality of what they produce, not by the speed of production"[24]. Yet, over and over, he disparages art, calling it essentially ephemeral and abstract. Cajal is a devotee of the "religion of detail," as was Nabokov, I would argue[22]. I do not necessarily agree, therefore, with Cajal's cruel casting of artists as Pharisees. But I must find out what accounts for his low opinion of the realm of art, especially if I am to discover some deep connection between it and the firmament of science.

In terms of creative connectivity, I consider the literary equivalent of Cajal's Advice to a Young Investigator to be Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. Rilke was Cajal's contemporary. A comparison between the two works would be fruitful, I believe. Do their worldviews have anything at all in common? I read Letters on a Mediterranean ferry from Athens to Santorini, Greece, where Rilke's words changed my emotional life as they have for so many readers. People love that book. I know because somebody stole my copy. I can now say, however, that Cajal's Advicechanged my intellectual life just as considerably.

When one enters the house of a religious man, he must respectfully follow the customary rules. While I investigate Cajal, I will try as hard as I can to conservatively obey the "Scientist's Bible" despite the fact that I am uncomfortable with parts of it [i.e. his views on marriage "if women are evil . . . then" and his views on writing "achromatic over chromatic"]. Because then, after I thoroughly analyzed the data, I may tackle my big questions.

Cajal explains that there are two types of hypotheses: legalistic and mechanistic reduction. "The new observation can be dealt with logically in terms of pure mechanism," Cajal explains, "and entered humbly into the equations of dynamics." He writes that this method is common in physics, chemistry, and astronomy. Or, in material terms: matter/energy/force, substance, and space. One more translation, an approximate one, to literary language: people/experience/relationships, emotion, and God. I feel that if I explore these three definitive areas of Cajal's life with focus and discipline, following the man's own code of life, then I will be able to plug the data into the equations of dynamics. In my language, words, Heraclitus offers the most fundamental axiom: "All things change." Hopefully I can illustrate Cajal's role in the cosmos in order to answer my two real, burning questions: How should one use a brain? How can one live an intelligent life?

Thanks for reading. I will post later this week about Cajal's work of fiction, Vacation Stories.