4. Vacation & Imagination

Let us not now speak of how I got my copy of Vacation Stories by Santiago Ramón y Cajal. What matters is that I got it, and I am so, so glad that I did. A legendary genius scientist's attempts at the feat of literary fiction make for a truly fascinating book. The compilation containing five meaningful stories but, in fact, Cajal wrote twelve tales, all early in his career; but seven were lost. The remaining pieces went unpublished for twenty years on account of their author's insecurities, both professional and personal. For example, Cajal thought that his deployment of rebellious themes might disqualify him from funding in the blind eye of bureaucracy, and, moreover, he insisted they were wholly without literary merit. Santiago Ramón y Cajal is the first author I have ever read wishes his own work to a mythical sleep of oblivion. In the preface to the collection, he rationally criticizes his own work like a thorough doctor. And he is right to do so; his novice narratives lack technique and craftsmanship. But, nevertheless, they are intensely thought-provoking pieces of science fiction in which the author's genius is a bright and radiating fluorescent glow. In the 1905 publication of Vacation Stories, Cajal called himself "Dr. Bacteria." That was one year before he won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine. Apparently, he was a polymath with a sense of humor. This, it is fair to say, was a rare and brilliant man.

Of course, a rare man would write a rare preface. The preface to Vacation Stories indeed is unlike any other preface I have ever read. Essentially, in his pre-performance speech, Cajal forgoes grandiloquence, speaking instead softly. He restrains himself from using any rhetoric; I am especially struck by the absence of hyperbole. On the whole, his writing is eminently controlled. The result is a relentlessly honest voice that speaks about itself and the world in the same, smooth tone. Sometimes, harshly but beautifully, like a gust of wind, he sings. The following is his sweetest verse:

"In human consciousness, as in the heavens, stars seem to keep shining even after they have been extinguished for some time"[14].

No, the words are not precious. Sure, the poetry could use polish. It is simply a statement. But the words are but a vessel for the idea, which is itself translucent and celestial. For feelings persist even past reason's argument, Cajal explains. I sense fertile soil of metaphor beside that delta of truth. For as we walk forward through life, in a shadowed valley or anywhere, we are at times inclined to look up at our emotions, those burning but noble human phenomena, those distant lights of loving memory. Perhaps New York City is a harsh place because its people cannot feel the stars at night.

In the preface, instead of unduly magnifying his own or anyone else's literary achievement, Cajal trains his microscope onto the nature of art. Here, his scientific description of the creative process sounds rather unspectacular. It is "the exclusive work of a few wheel in the cerebral mechanism, or in other word," Cajal writes, "the motor discharge of some neglected fallow fields in the brain"[1]. "Neglected, fallow fields." I cannot wait to read the line in Spanish; I am curious to hear it as lyric, to see if Cajal was a musical thinker and writer. After all, I cannot check his iPod playlist. There must also be connotative layers. But what the line appears to mean is, despite what so many have said, art is not eternal. There is no possible immortality this way, the way that a writer such as Faulkner suggests when, in his 1949 Nobel Prize banquet speech, delivered after decades of apocalyptic human devastation, he powerfully asserts that the soul of man will endure. What a speech; his Southern voice, like a death row inmate's last glass of bourbon, chills the spirit. I, for one, am happy that Faulkner was not too drunk to give it. But although beautiful, the central idea is not materially true. It implicitly assigns evolutionary meaning to art, referring to it as a survival mechanism. Is he scientifically correct? Some seek to prove so. Brian Boyd, Nabokov expert, wrote a book called "On the Origin of Stories," which just arrived at my home. In it, he argues for art as an adaptive human behavior. The scholarship falls within a theoretical segment sometimes called "literary Darwinism." I have not heard good things. Like most theorists, who float so far from any textual tether, these folks appear to be light on fact and heavy on theory, which is only ever as heavy as hot air. I may not read a word of it, but rather look towards more serious scholars, of which Boyd happens to be an example. His epic, two-volume biography of Nabokov ["The Russian Years" and "The American Years"] is as scrupulous as the picky subject himself would have demanded.

Back to "neglected, fallow fields;" it is a prime example of an inconvenient truth. The quote describes that our essence is not pure white, or glimmering gold, or double platinum, Its color would not appear at all poetic unless someone is poet enough, as Rilke says, to call forth its riches. And that is what it will take, going forward truthfully. Because the fact remains that the most foundational column of human life, the cerebral cortex, supporter of consciousness itself and perceptive awareness, memory, attention, thought, and language, is weak and gray. But oh how it can light up! I just watched an incredible short movie by the scientists of the Blue Brain Project, a mission led by Dr. Henry Markram in Lausanne, Switzerland. Their models of Cajal's neurons are based upon algorithms of necessity, but from these root truths so much beautiful knowledge can grow. In the movie, a simulation swooped around and through the middle of a neuron, dense and complicated as a ball of rubber bands, each one lighting up a different color as its synapse fired. The music was Strauss's An der schönen blauen Donau op. 314 [a.k.a. "The Blue Danube"], a perfect choice, with its waltzing call-and-response, like the central system's reflex mechanism, from violins to winds [to my ear]. Never has strict and simple necessity sounded so wonderful. The movie was scientific art, certainly more advanced and sophisticated, but no more true or creative, than Cajal's drawings over one hundred years ago.

But Cajal himself refuses to acknowledge this greatness, instead he presents himself with old-fashioned humility. This honest and peaceful perspective informs everything Cajal writes. In the preface, for example, he completely unironically criticizes his own stories. It is not a hollow, postmodern joke; the man has respect for quality literature. He perceives ideal forms, they just exist materially. If Cajal was between Plato and Aristotle on Raphael's School of Athens fresco, in that scene at the vanishing point, the European intellectual Mount Rushmore, he would be pointing not at the sky and not at the ground, but at his own internal holy temple, his brain, with a curious finger [check out my profile picture. Finger at the side of the head! Is it a gun!? Oh my God! Should we be afraid? No, he is thinking]. But despite his belief, Cajal is nonetheless fascinated by the splendid mechanism that is art. This manifests itself in Advice, in the form of quotations from thinkers as oppositionally disciplined as Goethe and Sir Isaac Newton. Here, in the preface, Cajal even sticks his sniffing, but decidedly not upturned nose into a pile of literary theory. "Pure desire that the protagonists be more like real men than symbols," he writes, "and that they offer the passions, defects, and limitations of real flesh-and-blood people"[xxiii]. Thus, he exalts the realistic narrative as the conditioned choice of our natural will. Cajal's own mediocre work, of course, contradicts his qualitative artistic philosophy, but since he himself freely admits his flaws, there is no good reason for me to further criticize. There is so much more to analyze.

But allow me a brief digression for the sake of healthy argument [what can I say? I am trained]. Vladimir Nabokov famously said that "Art is a divine game." Being scientifically minded, he observed the material world in precise detail, down to the smallest, brightest butterfly's wing. His writing reflects this perfect understanding of appearance, microscopic in focus. He knew certain things about the world so intimately and well that hubristically he felt he could re-create them using the same mechanism, altered artistically. And, despite the mythologically advised-against Icarian danger, he managers to fly like a patterned kite, in my opinion. The kite is imagination, which "flies--we are its shadow on the earth," according to Nabokov, who, not surprisingly, is concerned with light. He is the boy who makes shadow puppets in the lamplight. To him, identities are not shades as in the Underworld, but shades of infinite color. Because of this possibility, it is a positive and healthy philosophy. It follows that Nabokov claimed, rather proudly, priggishly, even, to have never had psychotherapy. His particular algorithmic worldview worked for him. In Lolita, he invents love without age and, by humanizing Humbert Humbert, summarily offers a great, classic romantic novel. In Pale Fire, he uses words as self-reflective mirrors to set-up a show of bouncing, colored lights--characters, events, and actions, that change meaning with every turning page. In Despair, he gymnastically stretches the archetypal doppelgänger theme, a psychological one, thus making it as plastic as our brains themselves are. But in the end, just as each author before him, Nabokov based the plot on the timeless theme of plotting, in this case to kill. He did not need to worship internal structures in order to accomplish his aesthetic goal. Like the best jazz musicians, Nabokov quickly mastered the classical form, and then innovated. He ceased digging deep, like the hedgehog in Isaiah Berlin's famous critical scheme, in order to build and design in an individualized fashion, like a beaver. There are, then, three types of thinkers: the hedgehog, who knows one thing, the fox, who knows many things, and the beaver, who knows how to build things. I have heard and read that the beaver is perhaps the only animal, other than the human, who changes its environment to suit its personal needs. Call me crazy, go ahead, but does this beaver's face not look a bit like Nabokov's own?

If an author lives in the philosophical, forested neighborhood, possessing a truly intelligent worldview, as Nabokov surely did, he may build his own damn dam/house. One may not care for Nabokov's design, but then, one can always go to Shakespeare's place. It is expansive and there is plenty of room inside. Cajal could not have anticipated Nabokov's innovations of artistic progress, and would have dismissed it, anyway, as artifice. But that is a matter of taste, and there ought to be no hierarchy in that individualized, sensory realm. Moreover, I disagree. Realism is not a necessity in art, but a style. Only neuro-realism is a necessity, a clear, consistent, and connective vision of the world as emanating from the material of one's unique brain, which is incessantly adapting but gradually evolving. Is there depth to that? Who knows, in truth. Depth, after all, necessarily has a subjective, relational definition. It depends where one is situated. The virtue, then, is not depth, but truth.

It must be said that one of Cajal's mental gaps is his lack of imagination. The characters, plots, and themes of his stories are unoriginal. But someone who is outdoors, as Cajal longed to be and often was in his developmental years, does not need to think about summoning it from within. Rationally, it makes sense that a materialist, brain dense with reality, would have this unnecessary impulse underdeveloped. But the British author Graham Greene wrote insightfully, in The Power and the Glory, that "hate is a failure of imagination." I believe this is true; a profoundly negative view of something, or someone, represents a lack of empathy. Without the tendency of empathy, a materalist cannot incorporate the foreign element into the realm of the possible. I do not yet know about Cajal's specific biases, but I am sure that he had them, as all human beings do. He himself understood the inescapable power of suggestion and followed the pseudo-science of hypnosis with great interest throughout his life. Cajal was an ardent nationalist, which makes his focus narrow and self-determined. And it must also be said that, in the Biblical tradition, Cajal does not appear to accept women as equals. He was married for fifty-one years, but in Advice he describes a wife as more or less a glorified laboratory assistant. While the specifics of Cajal's biography remain mysterious to me, his work contains some clues. I will not judge him until I have all of the facts of his life's case.

Some of these facts are hidden in Vacation Stories, a book in which Cajal keeps his tales true to his own life. Not surprisingly, then, all of his protagonists are scientists. Obviously Cajal knows the type. Allowing exceptions, he explains that the psychology of scientists is "essentially amoral and profoundly egotistical"[xxii]. This follows logically because if their truth is definitively material, not ideological, then they necessarily must believe in free will of tangible bodies because truth lives inside of them. It is in their brains, not in abstract relationships. But he could have merely said "independent," which would have subtracted the impulsive charge. There is intention here; Cajal knew the value of a well-chosen word. It is the currency in his scientific Utopia. But I believe Cajal's assessment is true because it matches my intuition; as a species, knowledge and experience tell me that we do tend towards selfishness [around New York City, anyway]. Since the end of the Victorian Era, on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, the institution of marriage has weakened considerably. Today, in America, fifty percent of marriages end up in divorce. Is this a manifestation of a selfish gene? In the future, there could be a "cure for selfishness." I could imagine a word in which a human being could perhaps choose his psychology pharmaceutically, if it has not already be irreversibly pre-selected by genetics. But with no moral imperative of kindness, no mitzvahs or "Golden Rule," this is no longer a traditional problem. I see no traditionally moral solution to the issues wrought by this inevitable progression. Perhaps morality has will be annihilated [or has it already been?], as Nietzsche suggested. Perhaps there we must indeed revaluate our values. The only ethic, going forward scientifically, appears to be truth. But I imagine that there will be blood in the process. Excuse me, but it is hard to read science fiction without thinking about ethics, especially if one went to middle- and high school"The Ethical Culture Fieldston School." But I am convinced that Cajal intended these questions.

After declaring his hypothesis of character, which necessarily includes the data of his own self, Cajal's first story examines a scientist's relationships. The thematic mode is romantic vengeance. The protagonist of "For a Secret Offense, Secret Revenge" is a half-of-a-hundred-years-old scientist who works for a vague laboratory called "Research." Again, I must note that Cajal has transgressed against himself. His character in this story if far from flesh-and-blood; he is barely bones. Yet the man is on fire. Cajal writes that "disquieted at night by the devouring fever of investigation and the desire to emulate glorious reputations." This idea of illness ought to be read in conjunction with the "Diseases of the Will" chapter in Advice. Cajal's father was a doctor who wanted his son to have his same career. His relationship with the medical profession is an interesting one that I hope to further explore. For Cajal studied anatomy at his father's university [Zaragoza]; the two worked together dissecting cadavers. Meanwhile, Cajal used all of his money to buy an old-fashioned microscope and used it to open up his own laboratory. When he had finished studying and working in his father's field, he got his license to practice medicine. I suspect that this was entirely ceremonial; Cajal never practice medicine at home [he was previously, however, a military doctor during wartime in Cuba 1874-5, but more on that in a later post], and probably never had such an intention. There must have been an emotional reason that he followed this course, and iteration of love for a father, perhaps.

Speaking of love, in "Secret Offense, Secret Revenge," Cajal calls making love the "perennial preoccupation in life"[2]. This is a perfectly rational statement that is flatly true. It even aptly carries subtly mountainous connotations of struggle, stress, and burden. But in my opinion, from where I am sitting, it lacks depth. Naturally, I believe we can experience love in two ways. I offer the Allegory of the Swimming Pool. In the shallow end of pool, all grown people can manage to keep their feet on the ground.  But superficial aspects of the body, above a certain point depending on height and posture, are easily discernible. Those people never get all wet, but always get at least a little bit wet because, after all, you cannot swim unless you are in the pool. That pool is clear and reflective; it is the gene pool.

The second type of lover will allow his feet to leave the ground. He is not flying and he never will, but he knows that. Nonetheless, he wades slowly towards the deep end. It is frightening but it is freeing. People in the deep end communicate more immediately but also more lastingly, with the sense of touch and the sound of echo. I remain amoral; neither lover is "better." Cajal seems to have a super-rational view of love and marriage. Again, I must learn about his life experience. For he says, shockingly, that for scientists "a woman represents at the most--a fleeting disturbing episode that occurred in their youth"[18]. Of all the emotions, love is the one most informed by experience. There must be something going on here, a combination of his genetics and his conditioning. I need to know the things that happened to him. For Cajal, in the voice of his narrator, which may or may not be his own, calls emotional, passionate love "irredeemable illusion." In this view, it is a natural chemical phenomenon that merely helps us pass along our genes. Scientists and lovers, he says, are motivated by personal gain, but in fact work only for the good and glory of the species. Of course, he is right, except for the rare but boring case of pure altruism [see: Dostoevsky's "perfectly good man," Prince Myshkin in The Idiot]. But I ask: What accounted for this understanding and acceptance? Did Cajal ever swim in the deep end? Let us not forget the young, fictional sage Michael "Squints" Palledorous from the movie "The Sandlot," who risked drowning for a kiss, a magic moment that lasted a lifetime. He and Wendy had nine children!

That is all for now. I am in New York City through the weekend. I am looking forward on Saturday to seeing Hamlet on Broadway starring Jude Law. I will write about the rest of Vacation Stories, and perhaps the Boyd book, if it is terrific, as theoretical criticism is once every Haley's Comet [see: George Steiner's Tolstoy or Dostoevsky]. Also, Boyd is coming to the 92nd Street Y for a joint lecture on Monday, November 16, the day before Nabokov's posthumous manuscript, The Original of Laura, is released. I am very excited to read that book, as well as Boyd's theory. I respect him immensely. I look forward to hearing him speak, if I can get a ticket.

It's all about the glasses.

Thanks for reading!