“It was terrifying last night, Aunt Becca. I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. I got up because I heard her. I wondered what she was doing at two o’clock in the morning. I know she hasn’t been sleeping well. She went down the stairs She looked like she was floating in that pale green nightgown. I followed her. I don’t think she knew herself what she was doing.
“Maybe she was walking in her sleep. She stopped just in front of the big living room window and looked out over the rhododendron bushes onto the front lawn. I stood behind her watching. The moonlight was shining down on the snow. It was so bright you could see the shadows of the branches of the trees.
“Then she turned to go back upstairs. She saw me. Maybe she recognized me. I’m not sure. It wasn’t as if it made any difference that I was her own mother. No, I might have been a stranger on the street, a statue. She would have said what she said to the wall or to a chair if I hadn’t been there. Her voice was so soft it could have been a ghost’s.
“‘Look at me,’ she said, not a trace of an expression on her face, ‘I’m already not here.’
“When I told Eddie about it, he looked at me like I was nuts. ‘Are you sure it wasn’t a dream?’ he asked me.“
“‘No, you idiot,’ I was tempted to answer him. ‘I’m not sure it wasn’t a dream. That’s why my blood ran cold. Because I was wide awake in the middle of the night and I wasn’t sure that it wasn’t a dream.”
“She went back up the stairs. I followed her. She didn’t say another word. I hardly dared breathe. She climbed into bed, grabbed hold of her teddy bear, put her bottom up in the air just like she used to do when she was two years old and fell asleep. I stood there in the doorway and looked. I haven’t been able to get her words out of my head.

On a recent visit to Cleveland we met with Paul Voorhies-Meerschaum, the chairman and chief executive officer of Creative Forgetting Technologies. Voorhies-Meerschaum greeted us in an old warehouse in the flats. In the heyday of steelmaking, it had belonged to Republic Steel.

A pudgy, rumpled man in his middle forties, Voorhies-Meerschaum did an eighteen year stint with TRW before leaving to start his own company. He had a reputation as a software and development whiz there. The tag was that he knew what a program wanted to do and how it wanted to do it long before the program had any inkling of its own style and possibilities.

"We got this building cheap," Voorhies-Meerscahum told us. "We got it dirt cheap. We got it because nobody wanted it. This might be the exact center of the rust belt right here. We've fixed it up a little bit, but not too much. We like its flavor. Although it doesn't know it, it has its own kind of wisdom and experience. We've got two hundred and fifty people working here and the place is so huge, it's no trouble fitting them in.

"We had a hell of a battle with the city about it, but that was actually fun in its own way. They try so hard to pretend that they don't need jobs, employers and investments that you wonder if they haven't convinced themselves. That's a little scary. They woke up when we told them we'd pay cash for the building and we'd pay the full assessed value on the books. They never expected to get anything.

"We're concerned with pollution. We think of ourselves as a clean-up company. We're trying to learn how to clean up messes that most people don't yet recognize exist. If you remember, a few years back the Cuyahoga was so filthy from all the industrial waste that it caught fire. That's where we get our logo from. We're concerned with information pollution.

"We think there is so much useless information around that it's getting harder and harder to use information at all. It's getting harder to think. You can't find the good stuff. The information explosion is presented as providing extraordinary new vehicles for thinking. There is certainly truth in that. But it is also an obstacle to thinking. Every vehicle is an obstacle. Anyone who has been in a traffic jam knows that.

"Our logo shows a man with a burning river in his head. We think that this already is happening. There is so much wretched senseless information and so much misinformation that it begins to have an incendiary quality. Just because we can collect information, we do. Just because we can store information, we do store it. We take foolish actions because we don't have the sense to say, 'No', to our own information. The information is using us, if not abusing us, more than we're using it. It's really more deforming than informing at many points.

"We hear stories over and over again of businesses making bad decisions because they believe their own numbers, even when they know these can't be true. It happens in engineering. It happens in medicine. It happens all the time in government where implausible statistical surveys set the stage for reruns of programs that have already failed three times in three different disguises. Ideas are drowning in data at least as much as they are being born from them. Even the idea of ideas is getting lost.

"A scientist friend of mine told me that he couldn't possibly keep up in his field because there was so much nonsense being written and published that he couldn't even imagine a procedure for sorting through it to find what he needed. He said that the farthest he had gotten was the idea that, if Alexander the Great had been asked to search for needles in haystacks, he probably would have torched the haystacks.

"The tail is wagging the dog and the dog hasn't even caught on enough to what is going on to get seriously exercised about it. We're not in favor of letting sleeping dogs lie. If they refuse to tell themselves the truth, they're going to get caught dangerously off guard. Everyone's obsessed with accumulating information, with possessing it and not worried anywhere nearly enough about being possessed by it.

"It's much like material greed. It's a less literal form of acquisitiveness, but moved along by exactly the same kind of inner dynamics. It's really not so different than the plight of King Midas. I don't think Midas was a bad fellow, even if he did come to a bad end. The poor guy accumulated so much gold, he couldn't eat or drink. He mistook the medium of exchange for the sum of the goods on which it depended for its existence.

"But," said Voorhies-Meerschaum, "I've strayed a little bit past my point. Let me say it again. We're indiscriminately accumulating so much low grade information that we're in serious danger of being unable to think. It's a major mental dietary problem that threatens us with intellectual and, above all, imaginative sclerosis. We have to learn how to forget so that we can find new patterns.

"Now forgetting involves letting go. It takes confidence to let go. It takes confidence to forget. This is a place where Freud gave all of information science, probably all of our culture a weird twist. He emphasized forgetting as a way of excluding something threatening from awareness.

"There's another kind of forgetting which expresses an inner accord which is not really 'mastery' but something more profound than 'mastery.' We can let go of the pieces once we have the shape. Anyone who has paid attention to learning physical skills knows this. The same is true for mental skills. What we've forgotten is what guides us.

"We don't have to keep it buzzing around in consciousness like a cloud of so many annoying gnats or mosquitoes. Awareness is only a halfway station. It's not the end of the trip. We think in order to get beyond what we think about. We may think in order to get beyond thinking altogether. I don't pretend to know.

"So what we've done in the software we've developed is to focus on letting go and forgetting as creative processes. We want to build in to programs what we call high order sieve functions. These are really ways of guiding forgetting. The genius of our own mental functioning is what we are able to forget, what we can let go of, the way in which we can make up at a moment's notice very complex pictures out of rather simple elements.

"We make so much out of so little. Being unable to forget is a tremendous handicap. Also, there are as many different kinds of forgetting as there are kinds of memory. You just can't have high quality memory without high-quality forgetting.

"I can get all revved up about these things and talk for hours. My wife says I'm a solipsist and that solipsism is the ultimate failure of imagination. She says I can't imagine how little other people are interested in what I'm interested in.

"Once she told me, quite bitterly, that she thought the only other person I'd ever known was myself. I took that as a compliment, because I don't see how you can change unless you become an other for yourself. I think any change depends on self-forgetfulness. Now, can you forget yourself and still be a solipsist?

"Ah," said Voorhies-Meerschaum with obvious relish, "now I've managed to locate myself by forgetting where I was. Here I am. I wanted to give you a practical example of how urgently forgetting is needed. This is a low level example, but it is the kind of thing that grips you. Fifteen years ago, a printer in South Euclid made an error on his income tax return. He changed one digit of his Social Security number. I think he substituted a 7 for a 3. He did it only once.

"Unfortunately for him, and for many years unbeknownst to him, there was a man in California with this Social Security number who never paid his taxes. As a result, the man here in South Euclid, call him Louis X, was harried unmercifully by the IRS. They went so far as to garnishee his wages four times over a ten year period. Each time it cost Louis X a bundle.

After the fourth time, the IRS explained to him that they regretted that they could not guarantee that it would not happen again. The computers talk to each other. Lists of tax evaders pass electronically from here to there according to programs whose precise workings no one any longer understands. No one knows the many addresses of this false bit of information in the vast electronic world of the tax collectors' musing. It's like a chronic infection which may flare up again at any time.

"We are all familiar with the adage that those who forget history are condemned to repeat it. In this case, we have a counter-example, namely, that those who have no idea how to forget history are doomed to repeat it. It's a very subtle question as to when perseverance, a virtue, passes over into perseveration, a vice. It's a matter of degree, of balance, of emphasis. We're seeking a big contract with the IRS to help them write programs that forget creatively instead of remembering destructively. I keep reminding them that amnesty and amnesia are related and that both have their wonderful aspects. Here, in this old warehouse, we're trying to redress a balance. When it comes to memory, it is often the case that less is more.

"We think that there is a market of billions of dollars for our products. We're even talking with the Pentagon about what we have to offer. I'm not sure where this will go. They have one of the biggest problems with not being able to forget appropriately. It extends into so many different areas, from ruminating endlessly about how to prepare for the last war to being unable to let any project go because they are afraid that, if they let it go, they will lose one precious bit of technical, tactical or strategic advantage. Our way of thinking is so strange to the folks there that watching them struggle with it is quite fascinating.

"This," Voorhies-Meerschaum told us, "is really the crux of it. Forgetting is a way. It is a way of going about things. It is a method. How we can use what we have is defined by what we choose not to have. To catch on, you must let go. We think that, if you want to see the light, it's important to travel light. Forgetting is the way we have of unloading. We need to respect it more and cultivate it more.

"Of course, this becomes paradoxical. What I'm saying is that we've forgotten about forgetting, not in the way we forget when we've reached an inner accord or some harmonious inner arrangement, but in the way we do when we're frightened of some aspect of ourselves that is out of place or out of proportion. I think we're onto something here in the heart of the rust belt. Or is it that we've gotten off something? Or is it that we're getting off on something?"

A Conversation With D. V. Oistrin

We talked with D. V. Oistrin in his apartment on Central Park West
overlooking the park in the seventies. We found Oistrin, for all
of his 84 years, vibrant with life.

"People want to talk with me about understanding. They think that
since I am so old, I should understand something. It is an
understandable wish, I suppose, that someone should understand
something. I cherished it myself for many years. The first step
in understanding is not to understand. The second step in
understanding is also not to understand. The third step as well is
not to understand. And so on and so forth. Can we pass to a limit
at some point? I'm not sure.

"Thirty years ago, even twenty years ago, maybe, I used to think
that if you understood something, then you had a degree of control
and that that was good. Now, at some level, I'm sure that is true
and all well and good. But there's another side to it, which is
that when you understand something, then you have been possessed by
a certain way of thinking. This way of thinking has control of
you. You may not even be aware of it. You think you're exploring
what you can do with this way of thinking, when actually it's
exploring what it can do with you. It's very hard to develop a
critical attitude towards your own thinking, because you don't want
simply to be critically uncritical. This isn't easy to express or explain. I think a person has to have made a lot of mistakes
before all this begins to mean something."

We reminded Mr. Oistrin that J. Robert Oppenheimer had described
him as one of the most profound and profoundly modest minds that he
had ever encountered.

"Ach," D. V. Oistrin sighed, "J. Robert Oppenheimer was a very
complicated and profound man. I think what J. Robert Oppenheimer
said about me was really about an aspect of himself that made him
very uncomfortable. You always had the sense that there was more
to him than he could bear. He had so many different facets.
Sometimes I think it got away from him. He was very courteous to
me and I enjoyed talking with him very much. I would describe
myself more as cowardly by instinct than as profoundly modest. I
try to avoid compliments as much as I can because I experience them
as obliga¨tions in statu nascendi. I don't want to promise what I
can't deliver and I can't deliver very much.

"Maybe the nicest thing J. Robert Oppenheimer did for me was not to
ask me to be part of the Manhattan project. I had done some
thinking about Einstein's work and I had arrived at some fairly
peculiar theoretical ideas which don't seem anywhere nearly as
peculiar now as they did at the time. I became diverted into an
odd branch of mathematics which has now come to be known as the n dimensional theory of recursive and non-recursive strings, harmonic loops and knots. I spent many years involved in it. I might even say
that I spent many years lost in it. Being lost is not really such
a bad thing."

A smile played across Mr. Oistrin's features, so that his face in
the bright autumn sunlight streaming in the window looked for a
moment for all the world like a bright red apple.

"I have to tell you a little about being old, about being eighty-four, soon eighty-five. As usual, the numbers don't mean much in
themselves. They're just ways of pointing towards a flavor or form
of experience. I was born in 1906. Like all people of my age, I
was born into a world that no longer exists. So loyalty, which is
always dependent on context, becomes a very complicated question.
I love poeple who are not so much dead as alive only in my head.
They grow old along with me and converse and chuckle and have
little fits of temper and help me sometimes to restrain my impulses
and sometimes to indulge them. Sometimes they help me out with an
idea, an odd association, a fragment of a memory.

"When you're old it can be very complicated inside. You can even
appear to yourself sometimes in the guise of say, your own great
grandfather. So many different costumes in the closet. I dimly
remember mine from when I was a little boy in Lithuania. He was
about the age that I am now. Another thing about being old is that
sometimes it can be very hard to express a thought. It's not that
you can't think. But it's as if, in order to express the thought
in a satisfactory way, you had to persuade a whole collection of
fireflies to assume just the right positions in the dark to outline
a shape and then to flicker all at once on command. It's not easy
to get them all to do what you want. They have very limited
patience and very limited capacity to accept instructions."

Mr. Oistrin made a mock sour face.

"I realize I've just expressed a fairly complicated thought in a
fairly graceful way. What doesn't show is that I've worked on it
for a month. It started when I was up in Vermont in June watching
the fireflies flicker. It was very hard to say what stirred inside
me. Ideas most often come to me in the form of perceptions that
trouble me, as if I were aware that what I was seeing or hearing
actually concealed something else not yet visible or audible. In
any case, I am getting older and older. I'm aware now that
thinking is no very serious business, but a department of mischief
making. I try to approach it in that light.

"I wanted to tell you about my mathematical work. I came here from
Lithuania in the early twenties. I was a sickly teen-ager, but I
had a knack for languages and the public schools had libraries. So
I read. I came with my older sister. She was a firebrand and had
played a real part in the Russian Revolution, but got disgusted with it very quickly. It wasn't safe for her to stay in Europe, so
we came here to stay with one of my father's older cousins.

"He was a terrible man and tried to rape my sister. Everyone
involved is dead, so there's no point in not telling the truth.
These things are nothing new. They've been going on forever. It
was a great sorrow. We went to live with another cousin, who
treated us badly in another way. My sister got married and settled
down to just the kind of life you never would have dreamed she
could tolerate.

"I took to physics and to mathematics. I always have thought of
physics and mathematics as the study of the mysteries of the
obvious. The thirties were very bad and the forties were worse.
My parents and all my brothers and sisters who stayed in Europe
were killed. I don't know the details, but I think I have a good
idea of how it happened. Even though I had a family of my own and
I hadn't seen them in years, when they died a large part of me died
along with them. I don't mean to be sentimental about it, but in
many ways it was true. I regretted very much that I had made only
the one trip back. That was in 'thirty-one. I had no idea what
was coming. No one did.

"Losses are very strange, because they make your heart at once too
crowded and too empty. You have to find a place inside for
everybody you've lost and it's hard to find a place for yourself.

‘Really, once I was done with all the work on the theory of strings
and harmonic loops and knots in n-dimensions, I saw that what I was really
working on was connection and disconnection. To put it into simple
words, what fascinated me was that to represent disconnection
called for a more complicated space in which to represent a whole
array of potential or virtual connections. To be able to describe
disconnec¨tions, you had to be able to wrap the space you were in in
another kind of space. So there was a dynamic for producing more
and more complicated and encompassing spaces.

"I got to be very interested in the theory of wrappings. When some
artists started wrapping things a few years back, I thought they
were started on the same track. I liked it. They were young
people and there was an exuberance to what they did. I found it
charming that they seemed really to believe that they were just
involved in doing something silly. I don't think they were aware
of what an abyss might open up under their feet. But perhaps my
life experience had made me only too aware.

"I'm not convinced that more convoluted is better. Certainly our
brains, both in their structure and in their function, illustrate
terribly intricate and complex issues in the theory of wrappings.
But when things get terribly complicated, there is usually
something very simple at work beneath the surface. That simplicity
will give way in its turn to new complexity. It oscillates back and forth. It's very hard to find a framework within which to view
both poles of the oscillation.

"My wife, Esther, died three years ago. The thing I was always
most grateful to her for was that she would listen to me in the
middle of the night. It didn't seem to bother her. In fact, she
always said that she enjoyed it. It took me forty years to begin
to believe that. I'd ramble on with barely any idea myself who was
talking or what I was talking about. It was like being a mad
inventor down in a dark workshop where there were occasional
flashes of light. It was the flashes of light that were most
disconcerting. I was often very frightened and often very sad. I
would cry and cry without even knowing what I was crying about.
All I knew was that I had to cry.

"The shocking thing is that life stops. Some people say that it's
not possible to imagine our own deaths. That may be true, in that
thought and imagination are themselves life. But our deaths are in
us. As you get older, you can feel the presence of your death.
You can feel that there is a term to everything. This heightens
the beauty. Sometimes, I'm very primitive about words. So I can
think, for example, that the theme of mathematics is a maternal
creative developing presence that envelops each and every one of
us, giving us form. I am back now, I know, to questions of
wrapping. But it is very hard to stay away from the preoccupations
of a lifetime.

"I have been among the most fortunate and yet the misfortunes of
our times have had their impact on every breath that I've taken.
If there is any hope to be had from understanding, I think it's in
the nature of understanding our way into our predicament. I have
not done any disciplined scientific work in the past two or three
years. I sit and listen to music and watch the light. I think I
can also say that I enjoy the company of people, even sometimes my
own company, although I am by now such a peculiar multitude that I
hardly know what to call myself. So I'm sure you haven't got what
you came for. But we never do, do we?"

"I don't know why it took me so long to do it. When I look back,
I realize that I'd been dreaming about it my whole life. I never
liked to take baths. I felt about myself the way other kids felt
about their favorite blankets or their teddy bears. I didn't think
that I smelled right after a bath. I didn't really know who I was.
I guess it was shocking.

"I had the thought that, if the big people could do this to me,
then they could do anything they wanted. Of course, I had a vivid
imagination about what they might want to do. I also worried a lot
about going down the drain. Maybe I wanted to go down the drain,
because I wanted to see what was down there. Or maybe even then I
wanted to get away from it all.

"It's a basic difference in temperament, I guess. Some people want
to get away with things and others want to get away from things.
Would I recommend what I've done to anyone else? Not exactly. I'm
not into recommending things. That's precisely what I've been
trying to get away from. But, for a certain kind of person, this
might be something to consider.

"I don't think that I'm the only person in the world like me. I
don't think that I'm unique at all. When I started having sex, it
shocked me that I could do it. I think I was secretly hoping that
I'd be impotent so that I wouldn't have to be bothered. I enjoyed
it, but there was terror in it, too. I had a hard time acknowledging
the terror. I was too timid to let myself know how afraid I really was.
I didn't want to be responsible for creating or recreating the world.

"Somehow this all has to do with privacy. I was a lonely kid and
every success was a disappointment to me, as if I were trying to
smuggle a message out from inside, but lost my nerve at the last
minute, so that I just went on doing what was expected of me. It
was like struggling against an occupyiny army that knew all my
hiding places. I can tell you that there's no such thing as a
lonely person who isn't also damn mad.

"Now success is like any other addiction. You get used to it. You
give it human qualities. You make a relation¨ship with it that's
really nothing more than a series of bad bargains. You try to
pretend that it isn't happening. You try to pretend that what
you're doing suits you.

"I went on like that for a long while. I don't know what set it
all off finally. Maybe it was a smell. Or a look on a face while
I was walking down the street. All I know is that there was a
change. My imagination changed. I became more fretful at work.
My mind wandered. I tried to keep it under control by working more
and more. Nobody seemed to notice, probably because they were all
doing the same things. The worse I did inside, the better things went at
work. I can't explain that period at all, except that it was very
alarming to have the sense that, as I felt worse and worse, wilder
and wilder, wider and wider of some barely perceptible inner mark,
what I did won more and more approval.

"Every smile seemed part of a plot. Each reward made me more
uncomfortable. The worst was to look around the office and see
that the young people admired me. I had become a sort of cult
figure. Two different and incompatible processes were taking place
within me. I remember wondering if I was trying to get myself to
snap.

"I realized that for years I had been sailing off farther and
farther from myself. Where do you go when you do this sort of
thing? I guess it's into a kind of dream world, but one that isn't
well thought out or worked out. It's monotonous, repetitive and,
for all its allure, really very threatening. When you get back,
it's damn hard to describe where you were.

"I sometimes wonder whether the life I had before ever really
happened. It had so little genuine connection with me that I wonder
if I didn't make it all up. I guess I did make it all up in a
certain way. What I'm saying now is that the fiction was of very
low quality. I'd lost track of myself. I'd lost the scent of me.
It was bad craftsmanship.

"Or perhaps all this has nothing to do with it. I walked out the
front door of my house and came here one smiling May day. Maybe
that was my way of putting out a Mayday call. I've been here in
this big ramshackle dump somewhere north of New York and south of
Boston for a little over three years now.

"I go for months and months without even seeing anybody else. I've
mostly lost track of the calendar, but I do keep track of the
seasons. It's astonishing what ends up in the dump. I found an
entire semi load of instant ramen noodles the winter before last.
I ate them for a long long time.

"I live in an old mobile home. What's nice about this old mobile
home is that it isn't going anyhere. I don't have to worry about
its getting wanderlust on me. This dump is on the outskirts of
what used to be quite a large stand of oaks edging into pines. I
suppose the dump smells bad to other people, so nobody wants to
build much near here.

"To me it smells fine. It has a richness and complexity, a depth
and texture of scent that has a symphonic allure for me. In a dump
there's no pretending about decay. Things go to pieces in all
different ways and at all different paces. Things crack in the
winter and rot faster in the summer. Flocks of seagulls come here.
That means there's probably a coast nearby. I like their screams and
the way the wheel in the sky. I get red raspberries and black caps in
the woods. I eat fiddleheads in the spring. I even found a small patch
of morels. I may have lost a little weight, but not very much. I've grown
a long long beard. I cut my hair with a scissors from time to time.

"I don't know why I bother, but I do. I guess it's a whim. I
haven't been sick a day since I came, which surprised me. It may
actually have disappointed me, because I'm not sure that this dump
wasn't really a compromise, a halfway point along the road to the
underworld. When you want to get away from things, there's always
a part that wants to get all the way away.

"I don't know if it was exactly lonely at first. I was very aware
of my own presence. Sometimes that was painful and sometimes that
was exhilarating. I can't exactly say what became of the time. It
wasn't broken up into little ticks and tocks. It wasn't digital
time. It was like golden rich molasses sometimes and like a cold
clear rushing river other times.

"There were rapids and chutes and foam and spray and eddies and
swirls and long clean currents in channels that had been there a
long time. Sometimes time flowered and sometimes it flaked,
sometimes like snow and sometimes into flecks of gold. It wasn't a
nything separate from me. I didn't experience it as an enemy
making demands on me the way I had before.

"I've made friends here in the dump. The first came on a moonlit
late summer night. The dew shone in the grass. Clouds floated
like veils in the sky. It had been hot for a long time, so that
the nights came as a welcome relief. I was sitting on a pile of
old railroad ties in the midst of a patch of moss in a stand of
pines just at the edge of dump.

"Two small animals came waltzing by in black furs with white
stripes down their backs. Their walk had such a graceful silent
rhythmic lilting tilt to it that it sent shivers down my back.
Imagine my surprise and delight when one spoke to me.

"Hello," it said, "you sure look like a newcomer to these parts.
We don't see too many like you at night. Most of the ones that
look like you are bad news, so we try to stay away from them. But
you look a little different."
"I am a newcomer," I said. "I can't say exactly how long I've been
here, but I'm getting used to it and I don't mean anyone any harm.
May I ask your name?"
"My name's Loser," it said in a voice that was rich and caressing.
"Loser," I repeated. "How did you get that name?"
"I don't know," it replied. "I'm just a loser. That's all. It
seems like a perfectly ordinary name to me. It's always been my name.
After all, if you're not a loser, then that must mean that
you've never had anything at all, because if you have anything,
then, sooner or later, you're bound to lose it. You might as well
enjoy it while you've got it. Among us skunks, Loser is a very
common name. It's a name to be proud of."

I hesitated for a moment. I didn't know how to respond to such a
thoughtful creature at the edge of a dump on a moonlit late summer
night. The timbre of Loser's voice was such that I couldn't be
sure if I was talking to a male or a female. I don't know why this
seemed important to me, but it did.

I cleared my throat and said, "Excuse me, Loser, I hope you're not
offended by my question, but are you a he or a she?"

Loser laughed and looked at me, as if just beginning to realize
what an odd character I was.

"Well," said Loser, "if you can't tell that by smell, then you must
be a pretty sorry creature. It's a wonder you can get around at
all, especially at night. But you're certainly not embarassed to
admit your weaknesses and I like that. I'm a he, and she's a she.
Her name is Halcyon."
"Pleased to meet you, ma'am," I replied, not so much amazed to find
myself talking to a couple of skunks in a dump on a summer's night,
as wishing that I had a hat, so that I could get up and tip it.

Mostly with her hips and tail, she made a ravishing little gesture
of pleasure at making my acquaintance and said, "We certainly are
glad to meet you as well. Life in these parts can get a bit
monotonous, not that we're particularly interested in anything new.
We've found our niche."

Loser and Halcyon have become close friends of mine. Their
perspective on the world is so different than mine, refreshingly
simple, but also so straightforward. Actually, Loser is a skunk of
the world. He's been around, ranging to the north and west of the
dump as well as to the south and east. He says he was born within
two miles of the dump and always comes back to it.

"We know a lot of skunks around here," he said. "It's a good place
to live and to raise children. Ours are all grown up now. We've
had several sets and they're all gone. What's left to us is just
ourselves. The dump gets bigger each year. We don't know why, but
there sure are a lot more skunks around than when we were young."

They were often curious about people and yet, the more I told them,
the less they seemed to understand. I always noticed that their
curiosity turned to polite attention in relatively short order.
Finally, after I'd known them more than a year, which for skunks is
a very long time, I asked them what seemed so strange to them about
people.

"First, there is no such thing as normal grief. Each grief is not
only original but as much originating as commemorative. Second,
grief never resolves. It simply becomes a tributary stream of the
mighty river of memory which is what gives presence its flavor.

"Youth may be intense, but experience twines together more strands
and weaves a more complicated fabric, full of figure and ground
reversals. That's not an accidental figure, either. As we lose
those we've truly loved, we can identify with the ground. We
become for ourselves figures who are on the way to the ground. We
may even find some real ground to stand on.

"It's an adventure in which pain has a leading part to play, not
only as nemesis but as guide. To grieve is not only to read the
book again knowing the ending, but to discover that the book is
rewritten as we reread and that it richly repays the work of
rereading not once and for all, but over and over again. Grief
makes links of our losses.

"In the intensity of our griefs we are intensely alive. Grief
complicates us and the complexity points paths beyond what we have
been. These paths point forward to our loss of ourselves and to
degrees of healing renunciation along the way."

Benjamin Aaron Midbar stopped, arresting the torrent of words, with
a movement of his whole body that culminated in a lift of his
eyebrows upwards.

"What is so often forgotten is that what is helpful to the grieving
person is his grief. Efforts to forestall it, to limit it, even to
channel it, to moderate it are attacks just where the bereaved
person is most sensitive. There is no comfort. Was it real? Did
I have ever what I now have lost or was it all some sort of
delusion, of which I should now be ashamed since it no longer has
a place?

"These are dark and deep questions that trouble the mourner's soul.
His grief is the guarantor of his capacity to have made what was
good good and so to have put himself in the position of being able
to lose it and so to engage in the struggle to reclaim that part of
him of which it was made. The mourner has to rebuild his house
from the ashes of his devastation to accommodate more of himself
than he knew existed.

"He is left squarely with the choice between self-creation and
self-destruction. That is why the struggle goes so deep and
arouses so much anxiety in the spectators. We all either recognize
ourselves in it or shrink from the self-recognition. Every
rethinking of ourselves shows us a stranger where we thought ourselves
most familiar and familiar where we found ourselves previously
most estranged."

"I don't know how to describe B.A. Midbar," said Ralph Seligson of
the Union Theological Seminary Graduate Program. "Half truck
driver, half-metaphysician doesn't get it, because if you put B.A.
at the wheel of a big rig, you might suiddenly discover that it
seemed to be turning into the chariot of Ezekiel. You do know that
he was a football star in high school, refused to play in college,
married a ballerina, had two daughters, got divorced and took to
the road as a truck driver for the next fifteen years?

"I can't get it out of my head that he once told me that he was
never interested in grief until grief got interested in him. The
thing about him is his weight, the bulk, the presence. It's
bodily, but it also has to do with the body of his experience, the
body of his capacity to experience. Above all, I think he is a
very shy man."

"What was it like to drive a truck? It's hard to say," Benjamin
Aaron Midbar mused. "I didn't really start thinking and feeling in
any way I could clearly know as mine until I was more than forty
years old. When I was driving the truck, I was just driving the
truck. It was dull, boring, tedious, just about getting this or
that from here to there. It was different each day, but monotonous, too.

"I might easily have driven the truck off the road. I think every
trucker thinks about it and some do it. When I thought about it,
it was without either passion or indignation. It was like trying
to think about righting a wrong when, not only don't you have a
clear picture of what's wrong, but you can't really allow yourself
to believe yourself.

"Why didn't I drive the truck off the road? Maybe it wasn't
anything more than inertia. One time I was making a run with some
equipment for a freezing plant in Wisconsin. I stopped in Chicago
because the rig needed some work. I went to the art museum. I saw
a Van Gogh painting of a circle of convicts exercising in a prison
yard. It was green.

"I stepped back from it and it seemed to me the circle of men were
all one flower. There was an image hidden in the painting that
organized all its parts. The freshness of the flower as against
the convicts' unvoiced despair took my breath away. I got to
thinking about Van Gogh and wondering why he cut his ear off.

"I never figured out why he did it. I don't even know if he knew
why he did. But whatever he meant to accomplish by it, it seemed
to me that he didn't get it done. That was when I stopped thinking
about driving the rig off the road and that was when driving the
rig at all started to become unbearable. Nancy was living with the
kids in England.

"I realized not only how much I missed them, but that there wasn't
a thing I could do about what I'd missed. There wasn't any way to
fill the hole in. It was a hole. That was all there was to it.
It was a hole and it was in me. I think that was when I first
realized that there was anything at all in me.

"I don't know if this makes any sense, but I felt the presence of
an absence, where before even the absence had been absent. That's
where I still am. I experience myself as the presence of an
absence, an instructive lack. It's not a question of getting rid
of the hole. It's a question of furnishing it so that it becomes
a home. Even then, it's open, so that we are never our own
masters."

"I've heard myself described as an expert on death. No. I'm no
more an expert on death than anyone else alive. Death is every≠where.
Death is in everything that lives. Each one of us is born
with clear title to a death. There is no challenging this title.
Yes, I work with people who are dying and with people who are
bereaved.

"But, if we scratch the surface just a bit, we realize that each
and every one of us works with people who are dying and with people
who are bereaved. We are all involved in the project of mourning
our own passing. Death is not a dirty word. Only we have driven
the culture of death underground. Then we are baffled by our
rootlessness.

Benjamin Aaron Midbar scowled. "What I am talking about are
practical matters. These are really the most practical matters
because everything we do depends on the attitudes on which we base
our doing. Even the meaning of the word 'practical' has been
uprooted to the point where it means 'material.' The sadness is
that most of us pass our lives in self-imposed internal exile.
This death-in-life is what makes it impossible for us to use death
to establish our own measure.

"I can't tell you the story of my life, because I can't tell myself
the story of my life. I can't tell you what I do, because I can't
tell myself. If I have anything to offer, then it is this
bafflement. I'm almost sixty-five years old and just as lost as I
ever was. But I haven't lost my sense of loss. The most complicated and vexing attachment is my vexed attachment to myself. There is a comfort in the
fact that it is not only temporary, butalso probably illusory."

"I don't know what ever possessed B.A. to go for rabbinical
training at age forty-five. I don't know why they threw him out,
either. All I've heard from him, though, is that, as he sees it, he was at fault. Personally, I think it made him. It removed an inhibition, without dislocating
him from the tradition," reflected Ralph Seligson.

"The thing is, Miriam," said Elise Notingahl, "you should never
count."

She cocked an ear, as if she were straining to listen to a soft
still voice just at the edge of hearing.

"That's it," she said out loud again, "the problem only begins when
you start to count. As long as you absolutely resist the urge to
count, there's no problem. When you give in to that temptation to
count, then there's trouble. I don't know who invented counting in
the first place, but it's vicious mischief.

"It was so hard to believe that I had to count on my fingers. I
did it six times. When I filled the first hand, I was astonished.
By the time I got to the ring finger on my left hand, it had gone
beyond astonishment. I just can't believe that I'm actually a
member of eight different car pools. I only have two kids. That's
four car pools per kid. When I got married I wanted to have four
kids. Now I wonder if that would have meant sixteen car pools."

She looked at Miriam Farlin with troubled eyes.

"I've never told this to anyone. I worry about having an accident
while I'm driving one of the car pools. No, it goes beyond that.
I have nightmares about having an accident while I'm driving one of
the car pools. There's a screech and then a slide. I can't
control anything. The slide goes on for a long time. It seems
like eternity.

"Then there's the impact. It's a relief, as if I'd been waiting
for the worst and it finally happened. The next thing I know I'm
outside of the car. It's all twisted up. I hear sirens in the
distance. I don't know how many kids have gotten out and how many
are still inside the car. I think there are two missing. I wake
up in a cold sweat. Sometimes I wish I didn't have a driver's
license."

"I know what you mean," Miriam Farlin agreed. "When I was at
Wellesley, I studied classics. 'Carpe diem' sure appealed to me.
But when 'carpe diem' turns into 'carpool diem,' that's ridiculous.
It's a malignant transformation. The malignancy is really in the
tedium. Sometimes I think that's the modern version of Te Deum.
We've made a religion out of boredom.

"I think if this had happened to someone else, I would be able to
step back and to see the wacky comic genius in it. What's
hilariously funny about it is that we do it with straight faces.
We do it so seriously. Driving around all day long from here to
there with a bunch of kids in the car.

"I'll be sixty next week," J.C. Keena, probably the nation's
leading authority on bridges, said over a cup of China Black tea
the other day. "It's very hard to believe. One of my friends told
me last week that he never thinks about things like birthdays, so
the big decade markers don't mean anything to him. If you're not
going to think about birthdays, especially the ones that mark the
change in decades, then I shudder to think of all the other things
that you can't think of.

"For me, the big thing about going on is that the quality of time
itself changes. It changes in ways that are so contradictory. On
the one hand it speeds up. That's a common¨place. Everyone talks
about how the record seems to spin faster as you get older.
Sometimes it even seems the earth is spinning faster so that the
days get shorter and shorter. You can get very dizzy.

"On the other hand, the viscosity of time can increase, so that
it's slow and sticky as molasses. It acquires a beautiful amber
hue. It's the wealth of memory that can bind it together like
this, slow it down and give it a rich elegaic tinge. When memories
interlace their fingers, a stray second can become palatial, much
grander even than Versailles or the Taj Mahal. We become bashful
in the face of the immensity of what we can experience."

"It was 1973, a pretty strange time. I was young and disgruntled.
I left school and was working concrete. We were using flying metal
forms, pouring the walls, letting them cure and then going on to
the next wall. We were going fast. We were up on the fifteenth
floor of an apartment building in Brooklyn. There were beautiful
views of the city and the water. I also liked standing and
watching the cranes wheeling through the air and the planes
overhead.

"Early one afternoon, a carpenter went over the edge of the
building. One step and he was gone. I'll never forget the look on
his face. It was a mixture of rapture and terror. I was pretty
upset by it. The thing I focused on was whether he knew what he
was doing. He was drunk, but I think he thought he was going
somewhere. I don't know where, but somewhere he wanted to go,
maybe even somewhere he'd been longing to go all his life.

"Maybe it was the look on his face that got me out of New York. I
drifted around the country, working when I needed the money. I
like buildings best when you can still see the sky through them.
I never have liked being shut up inside. I was working one cloudy
November day on a new Ramada Inn on Interstate 70 just east of
Columbus, Ohio when it hit me that we were a nation of nomads.
Only our tents are made of concrete. That changed how I felt. I
realized I was very mad. I realized nothing in the whole world
made me happy. Nothing

"I couldn't get the look on that guy's face out of my mind. It was
like he was trying to tell me something. Only I couldn't figure
out what it was. I never thought about him when I was at work.
But at night I'd think about him. I never have liked drinking, but
I always loved music, all different kinds. I could sit and listen
for hours. I'd close the place down, stone sober. I'd listen to
almost anything. Maybe I couldn't let myself think about him
during the day. It's scary to think how close to the edge we all
are all the time.

"I drifted around for almost five years. I worked in every part of
the country. I was good with concrete. I had a feel for it. It's
not so simple to guess how it's going to spread and dry and set.
The weather makes everything different. You just have to feel it.
It's not something you can teach or tell anyone. I don't know why
I got to wondering. Maybe it was all that music I listened to.
Maybe I'd always been wandering and wondering without even knowing
about it.

"Maybe it was the look on that carpenter's face as he went over the
edge. After a while, I stopped thinking he wanted to tell me
something. I started thinking he had a question he wanted to ask
me. One July in San Antonio we were pouring at night. We were

working on a bank headquarters and they were in a damn frenzy to
get the thing done. I think they needed to get it on their balance
sheet. It had been over a hundred during the day but now it was
cooling down. A whisper of a breeze had come up. A crane was
swinging a bucket overhead just beneath the moon. I could hear the
sirens of police cars caterwauling in the distance.

"I was twenty-eight then. I took in a deep breath and I held it.
I saw everything all at once, the crane and the bucket and the moon
and the stars and the city all spread out below and the lights
flashing down the highways and me. By the time I let that breath
out and the cold thrill of terror left my spine, nothing was the
same for me. I realized I'd been taking concrete too literally for
a long time, taking everything just plain too hard.

"Maybe I should say I realized that I was taking concrete too
concretely, like I was trying to bury myself in what was around me.
Only I could never get myself either to fit or to quit. I'd
written a few ballads before then. I'd write them on napkins or
the backs of envelopes late at night in some joint or other. I'd
sing them over a few times to myself. But I couldn't really hear
what I'd written. I mean I couldn't hear it in my own mind. Or I
was frightened of it. Anyway, after I'd sung them over a few times
I'd just toss the napkin or the envelope in a wastebasket and
forget about it.

How I Treated The Dalai Lama

Back in those days Cleveland was a steel town. It was before the
mills shut down. I was just starting out in private practice and
I still had an office at University Hospitals. It was down in the
basement in what used to be a broom closet twenty years earlier.
Even today, hospitals are busy converting broom closets into
offices.

I went there every Thursday for chest clinic. I saw all kinds of
strange cases. People with the fixed delusion that they had lung
cancer. "It's a way out, doc, ain't it? Good as any," said one
fellow who'd been working at Jones and Laughlin for forty years.
People who wouldn't stop smoking even when they were already on
oxygen. One lady actually did manage to blow herself up.

A young woman who had asthma and would put herself to sleep by
wrapping the belt of her bathrobe around her neck and then pulling
until she passed out. She told this story to one of the pulmonary
guys. He took her by the hand and led her to my office. I don't
think I've ever seen a more delighted look on a patient's face.

But all this is really beside the point, just background. It was
one of those cold days in November a week or so before Thanksgiving
when the year is beginning to wind down and the clouds off the lake
looked like they were freighted with lead. Pete McCorkle said he
had an interesting case for me to see.

Pete had a reputation as a pretty good diagnostician. He didn't exactly
think like the rest of the guys. He was a big fellow, about six feet four
inches, with a blank distracted look on his face, as if he were always thinking
about something else, not the matter at hand.

"Stay on the soft mushy ground," Pete used to advise the residents,
who had no idea, for the most part, what the hell he was talking
about. "When you retreat to hard ground, that's when you get into
trouble. That's when you start killing people."

Pete had even, if not a certain affinity for psychiatry, then at
least a tolerance for it, which, given the mind set of his medical
colleagues, already represented a real measure of social deviance.
Around this time he was going through a divorce, something no one
ever expected of him, behaving just like a teen-ager and romancing
three different women at once, including one who had been born in
Patagonia. So he was particularly open to the world around him.

Pete came slouching into my door. It was an impressive slouch, by
any standards, particularly when it was framed in the doorway of a
room whose true vocation was to be a broom closet. He didn't look
much different than usual, except maybe he was a tad more soft
spoken.

"Bernie," he said, "I've got one that's beyond me. It's probably
very simple. But I think it's too subtle for me. I can't even
tell you what it is that bothers me. He says he's got trouble with
his breathing. Then he told me, quite unprompted, that he has
trouble both with inspiration and with expiration, but that the
troubles are quite different. I couldn't find a damn thing. Not
even a hint of a god damn problem. I sat and listened to him
breath for twenty minutes.

"I listened all over the lung fields and I listened to his heart
and I felt his pulse. There's something odd about him. I can't
put my finger on it. You see, the damnedest thing is that I
believe him. Everything checks out and yet I think there really is
a trouble, some sort of a trouble that's beyond me."

"How old is he?" I asked Pete.
"A young man. I would say in his twenties. Really, it's pretty
hard to tell. He might be older. Maybe in his thirties. You
don't see too many Orientals here in Cleveland."
"What is his name?" I asked.
"Ted, or something like that. Ted Ing or something like that,"
Pete replied, as if the name had next to nothing to do with
anything.

He was about to slouch out of my doorway, when he stopped, still
chewing on a problem he could not adequately define. "It's the damnedest thing. I enjoyed listening to this guy's lungs. I really did. They sounded...well...different. I remember old Leon Stokoloski told me that the reason to become a pulmonary doctor was that there was a music to the lungs. Even in disease, he said, the music was still there.

"I thought of old Leon when I was listening to this guy's lungs. It was the most beautiful sound I think I've ever heard in a pair of lungs. It sounded too good, too clean, too clear. I thought of a mountain landscape, high, severe, serene, savage, wrathful but in a tranquil way. And I agreed with him that there was something wrong, but maybe something
that doesn't make it onto our lists of differential diagnoses.
This guy made me wonder what it was all about."

Pete stood in the doorway and shrugged. Only it wasn't exactly a
shrug. It was a spasm that had met torpor and gotten slowed down.

"I decided I was nuts. So, Bernie, when I decide I'm nuts I refer
the case to you, because I know you're nuts. It's your job to be
nuts and I think you're pretty good at it."

With that last rather fond slur, utterly in character, Pete
McCorkle was gone from my doorway, as if he had been only a vision
in the first place, so able to disperse as abruptly as he had
materialized.

I don't know how to describe the patient. As I seek for words, the
same peculiarly pleasant discomfiture I felt on first meeting comes
back over me and renders me more or less speechless, just as I was
then. What I first noticed was something about myself.

I became acutely aware of my own posture, how I was not only
constricted but twisted in the big tweed armchair I was sitting in.
I tried to straighten up, but I didn't know how to go about it. I
squirmed a couple times and got myself into a position that was, if
possible, even more awkward and uncomfortable than the one I had
started out in. So I gave it up.

He was sitting on a small metal chair with a black vinyl cushion.
He sat very lightly. He looked like even a small wind could have
blown him off the chair.

"How can I help you?" I asked him.

There was no reply, no change in his facial expression, which
remained at once kindly and detached, as if he had not heard me.
I thought perhaps he was deaf and had the impulse to repeat the
question in a louder tone of voice.

I looked at him. There was no discourtesy in his silence. I could
not tell if he was thinking or not. Time was passing. The seconds
had expanded, exploding each one into a world unto itself. I felt
very small, but not unpleasantly so.

I smiled at him, not for any reason. It simply happened to me that
I smiled. As it did, I felt my face in a different way, rather as
if it were most of the time a stiff iron mask in which I was
trapped not only by my will but against my will.

I began to have some sense of what Pete McCorkle was talking about.
In the initial silence, I got an inkling not only of the fascination but of the exhilarating distress that went with it. I also realized, with a detached rationality of which I have trouble being shed, that, if all this had to do with lungs and breathing, it was
in the broadest sense of that process of exchange.

Nothing is easier than to get lost in silence, in the midst of a
moment, in a place where a thousand thousand pathways branch off
each in the direction of a different nowhere which is also a
different somewhere. I knew this before that November afternoon,
but it was only on that Novemeber afternoon that I found where in
myself I knew it. I learned a new interior address.

"I am a deity," he said, very quietly, with nothing so simple as
either self-assurance or self-assertion.
"Oh, no," I thought to myself, "it is the quiet ones who are both
the loopiest and the most dangerous. You just never know what they
have stored up inside them and what they're going to do next."

I tensed. I said nothing. He said nothing. It went on this way
for five or ten or even fifteen minutes. Finally, the edge went
out of the room.

"I came here just to know people, to be among them and feel them
and their ways. It is a pilgrimage. I find that it is hard to
breath here. Especially on Carnegie Avenue. I saw a sign that
said there was a chest clinic here, so I came."

"Can you tell me," I asked, "more about this trouble you have
breathing?"

He did not bother to reply, but retreated into a silence I found
profoundly uncomfortable. Something seethed in that silence.
Only I could not tell what it was. Imagine my surprise when a
vision of a great white cloud-shrouded snow-capped peak surged
before my mind's eye. I had never had such an experience before.
Along its lower slopes, I saw a tiny black speck, the barest
outline of the shape of a man.

My heart rate picked up and I began to sweat. I was not used to
this sort of experience in the waking state. I could not say a
thing. For his part, he did not venture a word. We sat still
together.

Time was growing short. I had to be on my way to my private office
to see my next patient, a young lady named Judith Rosenthal who
never got either any better or enough worse to cause herself seriously
to reassess her own situation. She paid full fee.

"What's your name," I asked.
"Ted Zing," he replied, softly and sweetly, with just a slight
nasal quality.
"Ted Zing," I repeated, reaching for my prescription pad.

My eyes happened to fall on his gabardine trousers which were
frayed and on his scuffed shoes whose soles and uppers were just
beginning to detach, so that I could see a hint of white socks
through them. I realized it was absurd of me to write a prescription,
for he surely did not have the money to have it filled.

It was just around the time when thorazine was coming into wide use
for the treatment of psychosis. I rummaged around in the drawer of
my desk and found some samples. I poured the orange pills into a
plastic bottle which I thrust on him.

"Here," I said, "take one of these each night. I think they might
really help you with your breathing. Come and see me next week,
too, at the same time."

He took the pills and looked at them very appreciatively. He
seemed intrigued with them and with their near saffron color. Then
his eyes wandered to a Swiss musical clock that I kept on the top
of a bookshelf. My great-grandfather had given it to my father
when he was a boy. It no longer worked. In my lifetime, it had
never worked.

"Does it work?" he asked, looking at the clock.
"No," I said, "it never has."

This, of course, was not strictly accurate.

"I will fix it," he said. "Please. You will let me."

As he said this, he was already rising from his chair and making
his way towards the bookshelf. I don't know to this day why I did
not interfere with him. Far from having any urge to stop him, I
was quite pleased with the idea of getting rid of the clock, as if
it were an unwelcome presence that cast its infirm pall over me.

So, in custody of my Swiss clock, he disappeared. I was convinced
that I would never see him again. In the busy round of practice
and family responsibilities, not to mention subsidiary pleasures, I mentally quite lost track of him during the ensuing week.

I was taken by surprise when he appeared at my doorway the very
next Thursday, with the clock in hand. I ushered him in. He
placed the clock on the bookshelf. Quite evidently it now worked.
In the midst of our session it sonorously struck four. I was
impressed not only with the beauty of its sound, but also with the
steadiness of the ticking with which it now seemed to regulate the
atmosphere around us.

He pulled the bottle of pills from his pocket, demonstrated to me
that there were still just as many as before, as if to make it
clear that he had no intention of squandering my gift to him, but
rather meant to keep it whole and intact. He gazed on them with
benevolent pleasure for a long moment. Unconsumed, they seemed to
me to take on a livelier glow, to become not tranquilizers but
something more like vivifiers.

"How is your breathing?" I asked.

He nodded very softly and receded into silence. We sat there
together, until exactly at the same time that I had terminated the
interview a week earlier, he got up to go. That was the last I
ever saw of him.

In the intervening years, I have told this story to no one. I
misheard his name. It was not Ted Zing but Tenzin. I also know
from reading biographies of the Dalai Lama that as a child he had
a passion for mechanical devices and fixed a number of Swiss
watches and musical boxes which had been presented to previous
Dalai Lamas by foreign potentates.

I do not know what leads me now to write this story and expose
myself to the melancholy mockery of my colleagues and other
strangers. Perhaps, over the years, I have become ever so slightly
more brave, possibly even a bit more empty. I have, fortunately,
never wholly recovered from the shame of how I treated the Dalai
Lama. As I write this, the clock my great-grandfather gave my
father ticks steadily on. It has needed no subsequent repairs.

"The amoeba's a blob. Man's a blob with something missing. It's
this something missing running all the way through that makes all
the difference. The hole makes the doughnut. It's a topological
step up in complexity to go from being a spherical blob to being a
torus. Once the hole is there, there's orientation.

"Orientation gives a point to perception, to motion and to
motivation. Then you have emotion growing out of all that. Then
you have the tremendous problem of sorting and refining perception
in the service of purpose, that is, turning perception back upon
itself.

"I think there's a whole topological theory of biological development that
remains to be explored. I sometimes ask myself what lies
beyond the torus. Each new inclusion produces a more complicated
exploration of space and a more complicated space for exploration."

Cecil G. Wheatin grimaced.

"The point is so simple and runs so deep. We've got a piece of the
outside inside us. The digestive tract is organized around the
emptiness that fills us up. It's the emptiness we strive so hard
to fill because it fills us up. Mental function was born out of
the need for coordination in eating. That's where the appetite
came from. I'm not meaning to debunk thinking and feeling, but
their complexities were elaborated on a base."

Now Cecil G. Wheatin smiled, a huge ravishing smile that made him
look, even at 6'6" and 286 lbs., like an oversized infant.

"They've found most of the neurotransmitters in the gut. When they
did, it shocked them. The neuroscientists like to think of
themselves as high and mighty, somehow up above it all. They've
got it all backwards. What happened was that they found the gut
transmitters way up there in the brain doing what they've always
known how to do in kind of strange surroundings. The gut had a lot
to think about long before there really was any such thing as a
brain."

Cecil G. Wheatin smiled again.

"I've had kind of a strange life. I grew more than a foot when I
was thirteen years old. Boy, did I eat that year. I was so hungry
I couldn't think about anything else. When I grew so fast, I was
thinking that I was going to play football. I was a pretty good
athlete and I did like to hit people. But I got mononucleosis and
I spent the next year and a half being weak as a kitten. I could
hardly walk down the block. I tried to play football again when I
was sixteen and I wrecked my knee.

I read a lot of books and I got started thinking about worms.
Now, a worm is just a digestive tube that moves. Worms have
rhythm. They have to have rhythm. Their whole lives are built on
what I call the 'squeeze it and leave it' beat. Like most everything else,
the sense of rhythm starts in the gut."

Cecil G. Wheatin flashed his teeth.

"Even now, when I walk down the street on the way to my lab here at
Crockefeller, people stop me in the street and ask me if I play for
the Jets or the Giants. They seem to be evenly split as to which
team I should be on. I think a lot of my interest really was born
that year I was so hungry and I grew so much. It surprised me and
it surprised everybody around me. My father was barely six feet
tall and my mother was just 5'5".

"I don't know that I ever recovered from the shock. I had a
strange perspective on it. It seemed to me something that my gut
did to me. So I've always looked at things from a different
perspective, that is, not what the brain told the gut, but what the
gut had to say to the brain."

Cecil G. Wheatin chuckled.

"There's this great big highway that runs from the gut up through
the auxiliary organs like the kidney and the heart to the base of‘
the brain. We call it the vagus nerve because it wanders around
all through the abdominal and thoracic cavities. It's listening.
It puts its two cents in, but most of all it's listening. It
listens to the gut and it listens to the kidneys and it listens to
the heart. Of course, it talks to them, too.

"Most people like to think of the vagus nerve as a command
communication system coming from the brain back down, but I've
always been interested in traffic up the vagus nerve to the brain,
in other words, in what the gut had to say to the brain. I've been
interested in what the gut does to orient the brain."

Cecil G. Wheatin put his thumbs under his red suspenders.

"I am serious when I say that the inwardness we treasure so much
started in our guts, because they defined inside and outside and
started the whole process of sorting. Of course, the cell membrane
started on this task long before, but the gut brought it to a new
level of complexity by providing a higher order membrane that
conducted a whole different level of exchange.

"The gut knows what time of day it is, what season of the year it
is, how old we are, our habits and dispositions, if we happen to be
women, where we are in the menstrual cycle and how many of us are
aboard. In a most literal sense it is the gut that determines what
we take in."

Cecil G. Wheatin swiveled in his chair.

"The gut as a part of the nervous system, as an integrated sentient
organ has been terribly neglected. The Greeks who thought in terms
of exercise and diet knew something. Our molecular orientation has
been tremendously fruitful in one sense but impoverishing in
another, because it has dismantled our approach to larger patterns.

"Attachment and loss are mediated in the gut. Our moods are
colored by our eating. Our thinking is colored by the gut. I
think that, as we become more sophisticated in the study of the
gut, we will be able to diagnose and treat even some important
disorders of mood and behavior through the gut. We will see how
gut function sets the stage for learning and synthesis, for what we
call creative activity.

"We will develop a much better understanding of ancient systems of
diet. It's very hard to understand without appreciating. We have
to learn to listen to our guts, to hear what they're saying, not
just to talk down to them. We have to learn to enter into much
fuller feedback relationships with the part of us that we feed and
that feeds us.

"We're hard on the track of a dietary treatment and prophylaxis for
depression. We think that this is likely to be an illness that
wells up from the gut and so can not only be treated safely through
the gut, but can also be prevented through the gut. It's not just
what we eat, but how and when we eat and what we do before and
after. Depression is on the increase in all industrialized
countries. We think that has to do with what a hard time we are
having digesting our lives. There is so much that we can not
stomach and that we are right not to be able to stomach."

Dr. Ralph G. Primprop, the Acting Dean For Research at Crockefeller,
was high on Cecil G. Wheatin.

"I know," he said, "that it's a terrible pun, but you'll forgive
me, because it's apt. Cecil G. Wheatin has guts. He's taken a
different approach and it's starting to pay off. It's much like
basing your whole approach to understanding chess on thinking about
pawns.

"The problem in science is to take a fresh look over and over at
the simple things that are fundamental. It took us a while to
develop a taste for his originality, but I think we've got it.
He's no crank. I don't care if he is 6'6" tall and comes from
Texas and likes to wear red suspenders."

"I think," Cecil G. Wheatin told us, "that what we are really
talking about is what we might call a decolonization of the body.
It has to do with an entire approach. I think brain centered
rationalism is running out of rations. The gut is not just some
sort of a territory that works for the brain, performing a
subsidiary function in a a mechanical way. The gut has its own
organization and its own rhythms and its own orientation. It has
its own wisdom.

"We need to appreciate the gut on its own terms, as we need to
appreciate each organ on its own terms, so that we can open up
wider and more practical vistas in our living. We need to rescue
the brain from its own perverted imperium. It's a question of
loving to eat and eating to love, allowing for a back and forth."

With this, Cecil G. Wheatin allowed himself at last the pleasure of
pulling both red suspenders forward and then letting them smack
back with a resounding "Thwack" against his substantial chest.

"If it's alimentary, it's not just elementary but also elemental.
Or, to complete a loop, the mental arises out of the elemental
through the evolutionary good offices of the alimentary passage."

Cecil G. Wheatin licked his lips, leaving them so pink and shiny
that the fluorescent light fixture above his head was reflected in
the mucosal mirror.

Ludmilla Gribovaya

We managed to get ourselves invited to have tea with the legendary
ballet teacher Ludmilla Gribovaya at her Upper East Side apartment
the other afternoon. It was a cold dark Manhattan mid-winter day.
A desultory snow was falling, the flakes melting and immediately
turning to gray slush when they hit the pavement. It was about as
far from the enchantment of the ballet as we could imagine getting.

Yet, we found ourselves so excited during the elevator ride up to
Ludmilla Grobovaya's fourteenth floor apartment that we literally
could not stand still. We got off the elevator, made an effort to
still our feet, sighed and found her door. We rang, then listened
to the chime echo on the other side of the door.

Ludmilla Gribovaya answered the door herself. She wore a plain
gray smock. She had her hair pulled back away from her face into
a bun. Without any further ado, she invited us in, settled us in
a comfortable armchair by the fireplace and got us tea.

Although we had trouble catching our breath, we plunged in and
asked her a series of questions that seemed foolish to us. After
a while, we found ourselves relaxing. We were able to diagnose,
then, that we had been in terror of her and that the depth of our
relaxation response was proportionate to the terror we had brought
along with us

"People talk about muscles. Yes, that is right. Muscles, yes,"
said Ludmilla Gribovaya. "But that is not enough. Only a part.
People talk about music. Yes, that is right. But that is not
enough. Only a part. Music makes a space for dancing. Music
makes a place for dancing. But dancing must find its own way.
Dancing must find its own weight. Dancing must find its own reach.
Dancing must find its own height. Dancing must find its own
points.

"All of dancing rests on the skeleton. The skeleton, yes. The
bones, that already know where they are going. In no other art, in
no other ritual, is death so present. Imminent. Immanent. It is
because of this central presence of death that, for all the
masculine flourish and bravado of a Nureyev or a Baryshnikov or
whatever name you choose (I myself remember so many others), dance
remains feminine.

"Our best choreographers, our geniuses know this. No, they could
not say it. They do not need to say it. They are women in their
hearts and that puts them at the heart of the dance. They can feel
the beat, the doomed fragile contractions trying to give birth.
All steps lead to death. Individual names, positions, gestures
mean nothing.

"In the first exuberance of our talent each and every one of us
knows we will fail. We know it. It is part of the talent. When
I work with a young ballerina, I always remember this. I always
respect this. Her pleasure is the same as mine. Her pain is the
same as mine.

"We can not get away from each other because we are trapped in the
same place by the same thing. She knows it in her heart as well as
I do. So, when we look at each other, we can look directly, not so
much pupil to teacher, but pupil to pupil, eye to eye.

"When I work with a young ballerina, I know she has already her own
way. I don't know what it is, but I know that she has it. I know
this better than she does. I have seen it before. I have felt it
in myself. She knows more about what her way will be than I do.
Of course, she does. Because she is her way. She was that way
from the time she first drew breath. Maybe from before that time.

"But she doubts and she worries and she frets. She tries to
distract herself. She has so many wishes and worries that I have
left behind. I know she has her own way. So she will hate me and
love me because she thinks I won't let her get away from her way.
It's silly. It's not me. But we play this game. It is a little
conspiracy we have between us and we must be very serious about it,
because we both know how foolish it is. I am stern. She sulks.

"I know how to sulk, too. She is really the stern one. She is
more cruel to herself than I could ever imagine being to her. I
know, because I was once that way, myself, to myself. I spared
myself nothing. First, you dance and then you teach. The wagon is
the same. The harness is the same. The difference is between
being a young horse and an old horse.

"You pull what you can. The old horse knows that the smell of
oats, even the memory of the smell of oats, is sometimes better
than the oats. The young horse has more energy. The old horse was
once a young horse. The young horse knows that one day, if she is
lucky, she will be an old horse. She watches the old horse out of
the corner of her eye. She knows that the old horse knows not just
this road, but other roads, too. She is too shy to admit how
carefully she is watching the old horse.

"The young horse dreams. The old horse remembers. Is there really
so much difference between the two?"

Ludmilla Gribovaya took a sip of her tea. Her gray eyes dipped
under the rim of the cup and came up twinkling, as if they were
still dancing.

"The dance starts from inside. The dance rests on the skeleton.
Yes, that is true. And the skeleton knows where it is going. It
yearns to go up, because it knows that it is going to go down. It
yearns to spin, because it knows it will be so still. The whole
weight of the dance rests on the skeleton. Yes, but what holds the
skeleton up?

"Dancing is thinking that moves. Thinking holds the skeleton up.
The skeleton rests in the flesh of thinking before it rests in the
flesh of the earth. What is this thinking? How would I ever know
in words? There is no knowing this thinking in words. It is a
different moving than the moving of words. It is that thinking
which can only be dancing. If dancing could be said, there would
be no dancing, because no need for dancing.

"The thinking that is dancing needs a mind that floats on the vast
lake of the heart, like, yes, a swan, landing, taking off, gorgeous
in flight, seemingly effortless. But always coming back to that
lake, resting there, its long graceful neck tucked against its
body, sleeping, all its knowing warmly tucked away beneath its long
feathers white as sweet cold new smooth snow.

"I started dancing when I was six. There was only dancing for me.
I was only good for dancing, not for anything else. So I was
lucky. That was lucky, to be good for something that actually
existed in the world and to find it. So many people are good for
something, only what they are good for has not yet been invented.
Or they never come into the same place as what they are good for.

"So they waste away. They pine without knowing what they are
pining for. Dancing can be about this pining, this longing.
Dancing can show what is not there yet, what does not exist, what
is missing, even though it should be there. Dancing can make what
does not exist almost come to be.

"The beauty and the heartbreak of dancing are in the 'almost,' the
way in which dancing always falls short. Because it always does
and it always must. The best dancing is dancing that already knows
this and accepts this and goes on with it. Who knows why we go on
with things? This is just the mystery of life, that we go on with
what is beyond us.

"A dancer dances because what a dancer is for is to dance. Not so
different than why a worm burrows through the earth. Or why a
mushroom pops up from the ground. You probably don't know that
that is what my name means. Mushroom. Such a funny name for a
dancer. In a way, like the mushroom, the dancer draws life from
death, breaking down what was already there, recomposing it,
knowing that what she does will break down, too.

"I did my best dancing, they say, after I was twenty-five. Ten
years. I stopped dancing when I was thirty©five. No, I didn't
stop dancing. I stopped performing in public. You know, my knees
hurt. They had started hurting before I was twenty. I remember my
old teacher Madame Sukaya said to me, 'Ludmilla, you are having
headaches in your knees. That's not such a bad place for a
ballerina to have her headaches.'

"She looked at me and smiled such a kind, teasing smile, more like
a fairy or an elf than a grand old terrible ballerina who had
become a tyrant and a teacher. The worse we are, she went on, on the outside,
some of us, the more gentle we are on the inside. We don't want
anyone to find us out. We try to keep the worst foot forward.
Yes, dancing is a way of hiding from yourself, if you find yourself
too much of a nuisance. Who wouldn't?"

Ludmilla Gribovaya looked at us and laughed a deep musical laugh
that had a teasing caress. We couldn't tell if she meant what she
said or if she was trying to pull our leg.

"The last ten years I danced, death was my partner. I thought
about nothing but death those ten years. I danced and I thought
about death and I longed for it. All this, without ever saying a
word to anyone about it. Maybe that's what they loved about my
dancing. I don't know. No matter how often you look in the
mirror, you can never see yourself dance. You are wrapped up in
your dancing. You feel it, but you don't see it.

"I didn't say a word to anyone because it never occurred to me to
say a word. My involvement with death was nearer than that. It
was so close. I got married during this time, to Ivanov. He never
knew. I never said a word to him, not even in the middle of the
night. I would wake up in tears and lie in bed and sob until the
first pale pink blush of dawn.

"It seems so foolish and so romantic. How much I hurt and how much
I suffered and how much I missed. How intense my suffering made
everything. And only now, afterwards, do I start to know about it.
I danced and the dancing cast its spell over me. I was famous and
a refugee all at the same time. I had no home and no country. I
danced and the audience clapped and shouted and threw flowers.

"How strange that was, the flowers flying over the footlights. I
never knew what the audience saw or what they felt. I only knew
that I danced with death, as if it were a bird, always close,
always singing, occasionally touching my cheek even as I danced.
How soft its feathers were against my skin. Sometimes the bird
sang its own song in the midst of the music and the motion and the
sweat and the pain.

"I listened and even as I moved it seemed to me that I was still as
stone. Oh, it's hard to talk of those days when I was so frightened
of life that I tried to put death between me and all the
living and all the tenderness and hurt and squalor there was around
me. Dancing, like so many other things, is an effort to make
things simple when they're not.

"I've changed. When I was dancing and performing on the stage. I
didn't talk. If I thought, I never let it get into words. I
didn't dare know what I thought. I was afraid that, if I let the
thoughts take hold of my tongue, all my limbs would go limp. I'll
tell you a secret. I never minded the pain in my knees. The pain
in my knees told me they belonged to me.

"They were my knees, when so much else did not seem to belong to
me. Sometimes I didn't feel it was I who moved my body at all. It
moved and I went along. I was carried along by something much more
powerful than I. When I wanted to die, it was the way a child
wants to run away from home. She needs something that is too big
for her to have and that she can't live without. So she runs away
from home because it's impossible. It's impossible to live there
and impossible not to live there.

Ludmilla Gribovaya shook her head. The head, like a gray flower on
the white stalk of her long neck, still remembered more than all
but a very very few people ever know about posture and address and
grace of carriage. Despite her years, her ballerina's body was
still slight and long and clean in its lines.

"When you work with a young person, a young ballerina, for even a
ballerina is somehow a person, if in a very indirect and peculiar
way, you must be practical. Not 'why do you do it' or 'when do you
do it', but always 'how do you do it'. And 'how' in the smallest
pieces you can imagine. The little things. These support the
larger movements.

"If you break things down into small pieces that are right, these
pieces have the architecture of the larger movements in them. The
pattern of the breaking down shows how to put it together. The
fracture points make a blue print. Otherwise, it is like building
with sky hooks. Nothing underneath.

"I am a teacher because I can't do it any more. I can't dance to
the standard I once reached. Yet, I once did it. It is not only
that I remember. No, I understand it more. Sometimes I think that
I experience it more now than I did then. Sometimes I think that
I am experiencing it now for the first time. I also feel that what
I am feeling is not new. Other teachers of ballet have felt it
too.

"Madame Sukaya knew about this. It was why she teased me. She was
trying to give me a hint. When you love something, it is like when
you love someone. You love it because you love it. You love it
because it is there to love. There is no reason or explanation.
Love can't explain itself, ever. Is it good, because I love it?
For me it is. It is the good I know because I love it. For me
that's enough. You see, what I tell the ballerinas I work with is
that I am very simple¨minded. It is true, too. I am very simpleminded.
Should someone else love what I love?”

Ludmilla Gribovaya looked at us again with the twinkling eyes.

"No, of course not. I am too greedy for that. Someone else should
only love what she loves. This is true of the dance. Another
ballerina can only dance her dance. We are so different, there is
never any reason to compete. Before we start competing, we have to
make the dance very small. But it is not small. It is very big.
As big as the night."

When we left Ludmilla Gribovaya's night was falling. The city's
lights showed the cloudy sky which screened the stars off from
view. We stood for a moment on the sidewalk, realizing we had had
a glimpse not just behind the curtain, but also far beyond the
clouds into a realm infinite of stars, each one unique, each one
lending its own distinctive heat to the region of cold space
surrounding it. We had been transported.

"I got into philosophy through cooking," said Sharon Fitzwater. "I
know it's not the ordinary path, but then I'm not sure any two
paths have much in common. Resemblance may be fundamentally
superficial. I certainly never expected I'd have so much to do
with Aristotle. It's as much talking with him as about him. Or is
it that I'm trying to talk with myself through Aristotle? It's
always been something of a mystery to me how I might go about
getting my own attention."

She pushed her long blonde hair away from her face. "Cooking
always fascinated me because I was so hungry. My father was a
machinist in Akron, Ohio. He was very good at what he did, so he'd
get called out of town often on quite short notice, sometimes for
as long as a month. I'd come home from school to discover that
he was gone. My mother was a different person when he was away.
Even before Andy Warhol, she had a love affair with
the Campbell Soup can. She'd take a can of tuna fish, add a can of
peas, pour a can of Campbell's Tomato Soup on it, heat it a little
bit and then serve it to us."

"I just couldn't get it down. My brother seemed to manage, but I
couldn't do it. So I got interested in cooking and cooking led me
to a wider world. I discovered French cooking and I discovered
Chinese cooking. I'd get cookbooks out of the library and try to
imagine what the recipes would taste like. I'd filch things from
the supermarket so that I could try a recipe. The first bottle of
red wine I ever had anything to do with I stole from Serankos Wine
And Spirit Shoppe not more than a mile from the Goodyear plant.
When I got it home, I had no idea how to get the cork out. That
was how I found out about the existence of cork trees.

"What interested me the most about recipes was what was left out.
A recipe is like a map. The recipe is not the dish. It abstracts
features from a landscape and is quite indifferent to the mode of
transportation employed. I am always amazed when I take a trip
that what the map promised is there. At the end of a recipe comes
a vision, a flavor, the road to a gustatory memory, which not only
is like no other, but transforms, to a greater and lesser degree,
all previous memories.

It acquires a life of its own in us. I stowed away on a ship to
get to France when I was seventeen. My mother who is now
eighty-eight and as full of complaints as ever claimed that by
disappearing I had taken twenty years off her life. I always tell her
that I've added two decades, not taken them away."

"I learned the language, which was no great trouble, since I've
always been an adept mimic, probably in service of the search for
an escape route from myself. But far more important than learning
the language was learning the taste. That changed everything for
me. I began to wonder why things tasted the way they did. I've
since been to China as well. I've studied chemistry, physiology,
neuroanatomy, botany, some zoology, even calligraphy and brush
painting as well as a host of theologies. I always could support
myself cooking. I never got fat, because I noticed that only when
I started eating did I miss people. So I resist until the very
last minute and savor what little I eat.

"Also, I can always make something like the flavor come back, not
that even in the closest approximation there isn't a haunting
difference that sounds the note of separation. My studies never
satisfied me. Perhaps I displaced my appetite. It's a matter of
how literal you want to be. I came to philosophy really out of a
kind of desperation. It wasn't enough to think and wonder about
flavor. I had to think and wonder about the flavor of thinking and
wonder. I confess I've never been able to follow a recipe
slavishly. So much makes a difference. The light, the temperature,
the amount of moisture in the air, the season, something as
difficult to put your finger on as the ambient mood.

"I was immediately attracted to Aristotle by what I like to call
his 'tangibility.' I was married and had two young children by
that time. I could get my teeth into Aristotle. He excited a
tingle in the buds of my tongue. I could relate Aristotle to
cooking. For example, his famous four categories of cause seemed
to me to have something to do with the act of making dinner. The
final cause of making dinner, the end being pursued, was nourishment,
not only in the caloric sense but in the relational and cultural sense.
The formal cause was the particular designs of the different dishes
and flavors being sought. The material cause was the ingredients,
whose evanescent specificity is one of the great glories of cooking.
The efficient cause was myself, the cook, my pounding, rolling,
chopping, heating, mixing, melding and so forth.

"And at each level of cause, there were peculiar fascinations, as
for example, the intrusion of urges to seduce or poison or redesign
or inspire into the realm of the final cause.

"Yet, for all my allegiance to Aristotle, the romance, the
intrigue, the body of his thought and my own almost explosive
relationship to it, I always felt there was something missing. As
I taught cooking, I observed others cooking and discovered just how
difficult it was to find the receptive moment when the other might
not only hear but grasp and receive what you had to say or suggest.
I noticed as well that the capacity to cook depended crucially on
the capacity to taste, which was highly idiosyncratic. Those who
had it in them to become good cooks were peculiar in another
respect, namely, that they neither exactly followed the recipe or
adhered to strict technique nor did they exactly deviate. They
seemed instead to alter the recipe as well as technique. They
presented it in a different light, redistributing the emphases,
participating in a sort of melding very much in the spirit of
cooking.

"This got me to meditating upon a particular passage in Aristotle
that had always troubled me. It rankled, rousing a negativism in
me that I have always been able to call to my aid but also have had
to watch carefully to see that it does not do me in by setting me,
against even deeper reaches of my will, in sterile opposition.
Aristotle says in the Nicomachean ethics that it is in the nature
of the good to be clear and definite. Now, I am not so sure of
this, for two reasons. The first is that evil can be especially
clear and definite. Certainly this fading century has been full of
examples of that. The second is that the good asks for an open
margin, a horizon, a place for rest, recuperation and surprise. It
plays tag with definition.

"This meditation led me to advance the notion that Aristotle's
account of the four causes is incomplete by reason principally of
its assertion of completeness. That is to say, since we are in the
business of putting things in words, that the four causes, final,
formal, material and efficient do not exhaust the question of
causes. I should say that before I ever even dreamed of putting
this into words it had entered into the spirit and practice of my
cooking, which had become at once more rigorous in execution and
more impromptu in the sense of being tied to the essential
accidents of circumstance, the spirit and flavor of a certain fish,
a certain region's crop of vegetables at a certain time in a
certain season, the composite vector of a certain group's appetite
and my own need and unease about pleasing.

"The fifth cause, whether unkown to Aristotle or simply neglected
by him, is the lost cause. It's what every project rejects. By
its very nature, the lost cause can not be found. Everything we do
or make is a lost cause. It eludes us. It misses the mark and we
have to remark this missing. Otherwise we end up with what I have
called a fetish of the product, while the process recedes into the
background, valued only for the product. But I don't want to
lecture. The lost cause has to do with the indefinite and the
dispiriting aspects of the infinite. It's not a matter of defining
it, but of pointing in its direction what will hopefully be a
liberating finger, not one that only confuses or misleads. Much to
my surprise, my machinist father seemed to get what I was talking
about and to welcome it. He chuckled ruefully and said that, over
time, he had developed tolerance for tolerances."

Sharon Fitzwater's face lit up. A handsome woman in her middle
forties, she went on, "What I really like to talk about is what a
lost cause the idea of the lost cause is. It gets talked about,
but mostly to be pulled apart in a thousand different ways. For
example, it has been put down as a cook's creation. Now that may
actually be a compliment, for what we cook lasts only a short time.
It is meant not to last, except in the process of human transformation.
That process for me is the most lasting form of lasting.

“What's eaten is lost, but also finds itself in new circumstances.

"I've also been accused of being a vengeful woman who wants to make
a hole in Aristotle. There may be some truth in that, too, because
I think it is holes that make us whole. It's a question of finding
a way to include the holes. That has been missing. We have to
organize the body of our thought. That takes a dash of the
indefinite. Or should it be a dot?"

"I'm intrigued," Sharon Fitzwater said crisply, "by the fact that
my hunger is changing, not that there is anything new about that.
My hunger, I would have to say, is getting wiser. I start now with
the idea that every dish, every hope, every holiday, every
appetite, every celebration is a lost cause. I really laughed when
they awarded me tenure. I think it was only because my colleagues
have no idea what to make of me.

"I've offered them free cooking lessons, but none of them has felt
safe enough to take me up. I think old Xenephon wouldn't have
hesitated for a moment. He knew his horses and his dogs. I've
told them I love Aristotle more than ever. The lost cause is like
the missing link. It's the impossibility upon which possibility
depends. When I see a Campbell's soup can, I don't know whether to
shudder or to be grateful. Maybe there is such a thing as the
shudder of gratitude. Now I've told you everything that I know
about my love life."

She smiled and we realized that she had the most complicated green
eyes that we had ever seen. We left with a pang, aware that
capturing her in words was, well, a lost cause, too.