The Origin of Consciousness
-Porges, et al. "Thinking About Thought"

How does consciousness arise? It is a widespread belief that we, as individuals, are not born conscious, and life, as a natural phenomenon, was not originally conscious. If these beliefs are correct, when and how does consciousness arise?

One problem is to assess where consciousness is "located" in the brain. A related problem is to understand how it is generated by brain processes. And that may be reduced to the "ontogenetic" problem of how consciousness "grows" during the lifetime of an individual. Another problem is to figure out what has it and what does not have it. This may be related to the "phylogenetic" problem of how it was created in the first place: did it evolve from non-conscious matter over million of years or was it born abruptly?

How and when and why did consciousness develop? Opinions vary. Julian Jaynes believes that it is a recent phenomenon, Eccles thinks that it arose with the advent of mammalian neocortex, about 200 million years ago, the biologist Lynn Margulist things that it was a property of even simple unicellular organisms of several billion years ago.

There is growing consensus that it somehow owes its existence to the fact that humans evolved in a highly connected group, that it is related to the need to communicate with or differentiate from peers.

The idea that consciousness is closely related to language is pervasive.

The influential Austrian philosopher Karl Popper thought that, phylogenetically speaking, consciousness emerged with the faculty of language, and, ontogenetically speaking, it emerges during growth with the faculty of language.

Michael Arbib advanced the hypothesis that first language developed, as a tool to communicate with other members of the group in order to coordinate group action; then communication evolved beyond the individual-to-individual sphere into the self sphere.

Their intuitions and findings are consistent with the view held by the American biologist George Herbert Mead, that consciousness is a product of socialization among biological organisms. Language simply provides the medium for its emergence. The mind is socially constructed, society constitutes an individual as much as the individual constitutes society.

The mind emerges through a process of internalization of the social process of communication, for example by reflecting to oneself the reaction of other individuals to one's gestures. The minded organism is capable of being an object of communication to itself. Gestures, which signal the existence of a symbol (and a meaning) that is being communicated (i.e., recalled in the other individual), constitute the building blocks of language. "A symbol is the stimulus whose response is given in advance". Meaning is defined by the relation between the gesture and the subsequent behavior of an organism as indicated to another organism by that gesture. The mechanism of meaning is therefore present in the social act before the consciousness of it emerges.

Consciousness is not in the brain, but in the world. It refers to both the organism and the environment, and cannot be located simply in either. What is in the brain is the process by which the self gains and loses consciousness (analogous to pulling down and raising a window shade).

The philosopher Daniel Dennett offers an even more detailed route to consciousness: consciousness evolved from non-consciousness to reasoning and then to deal with memes. Again, memes represent culture.

The psychologist Nicholas Humphrey agrees that the function of consciousness is that of social interaction with other "consciousnesses". Consciousness gives every human a privileged picture of her own self as a model for what it is like to be another human. Consciousness provides humans with an explanatory model of their own behavior, and this skill is useful for survival: in a sense, the best psychologists are the best survivors. .

Humphrey speculates that, by exploring their own selves, humans gained the ability to understand other humans; by understanding their own minds, they understood the minds of the individuals they shared their life with.

In 1985, the anthropologist Kenneth Oakley speculated that there may be three level of consciousness, corresponding to the three evolutionary layers of the brain: awareness, controlled by the older part of the brain and related only to conditioning; consciousness, controlled by the cortex and the hippocampus, and related to internal representation of the world; and self-awareness, due to the most recent layer of the brain and related to the internal representation of one's internal representation.

The American anthropologist Terrence Deacon takes a "semiotic" approach to consciousness. He distinguishes three types of consciousness, based on the three types of signs: iconic, indexical and symbolic. The first two types of reference are supported by all nervous systems, therefore they may well be ubiquitous among animals. But symbolic reference is different because, in his view, it involves other individuals, it is a shared reference, it requires the capability to communicate with others. It is, therefore, exclusive to linguistic beings, i.e. to humans. Such symbolic reference includes the self: the self is a symbolic self. The symbolic self is not reducible to the iconic and indexical references. The self is not bounded within a body, it is one of those "shared" references.

With very few exceptions there seems to be general consensus that consciousness arose with the need for communication.

A minority sees consciousness as useful to find solutions to practical problems. The philosopher David Malet Armstrong, for example, argues that the biological function of consciousness is to sophisticate the mental processes so that they yield more interesting action.

The truth is that today consciousness hardly contributes to survival. We often get depressed because we are conscious of what happens to us. We get depressed just thinking of future things, such as death. Consciousness often results in less determination and perseverance. Consciousness cannot be the ultimate product of Darwinian evolution towards more and more sophisticated survival systems, because it actually weakens our survival system.

Consciousness' apparent uselessness for survival could be easily explained if we tipped our reference frame. It is generally assumed that humans' ancestors had no consciousness and consciousness slowly developed over evolutionary time. Maybe it goes the other way around: consciousness has always existed, and during evolution most species have lost part of it. Being too self-aware does hurt our chances of surviving and reproducing. Maybe evolution is indirectly improving species by reducing their self-awareness.

i remember all the different kinds of years.
angry, or brokenhearted, or afraid.
i remember feeling like that
walking up the mountain along the dirt path
to my broken house on the island.
and long years of waiting in massachusetts.
the winter walking and hot summer walking.
i finally fell in love with all of it:
dirt, night, rock and far views.
it's strange that my heart is as full
now as my desire was then.

-linda gregg

it's funny how when you finally make a commitment to something big, other things just fall into place. here i was in the same city at the end of '99 and all i wanted to do was leave. now i just want to find a way to stay, forever-ever. at my job, i'm going through the routine, like deja-vu, moving stuff around, interacting with people; the milieu has changed, but people are the same, over and over. it is me, who has changed. i see the forest where once was leaves of grass, and i see it like a zen garden, remaining steadfast over the history of time. now all i seek is security, and i have a chance to buy my dream home, and i hope against hope that i can be content within myself.

i'm standing at another crossroads. my boss thinks i'm selling myself short, settling, but she doesn't realize that i have no other options, or that i do not want to make the effort to compete for the sake of ego. her vision of my life does not take into consideration all my emotional baggage. after talking to the people at the pinnacle of their profession at work, i recognize their quality of life is horrible. i've reached a point where i have committed to a zip code, and do not wish to travel elsewhere, even for four years, which seems a long time now. she thought i was younger than i am. most of all, i am laterally ambitious, not vertically. i shall list my goals:

1. buy and refurbish a brownstone
2. make bank to do so
3. have a job which affords me time to goof off
4. goof off
5. make art
6. learn to write
7. do habitat abroad
8. reconcile with the parentals
9. have or adopt babies
10. be happy

Robert Delaunay, letter to August Macke, 1912

Direct observation of the luminous essence of nature is for me indispensable. I do not necessarily mean observation with palette in hand, although I am not opposed to notations taken from nature itself. I do much of my work from nature, "before the subject," as it is commonly called. But what is of great importance to me is observation of the movement of colors.

Only in this way have I found the laws of complementary and simultaneous contrasts of colors which sustain the very rhythm of my vision. In this movement of colors I find the essence, which does not arise from a system, or an a priori theory.

For me, every man distinguishes himself by his essence his personal movement, as opposed to that which is universal. That is what I found in your works that I saw this winter at Cologne. You are not in direct communication with nature, the only source of inspiration directed toward beauty.' Such communication affects representation in its most vital and critical aspect. This communication alone, by the comparison of the antagonisms, rivalries, movements which give birth to decisive moments, permits the evolution of the soul, whereby a man realizes himself on earth. It is impossible to be concerned with anything else in art.

I say it is indispensable to look ahead of and behind oneself in the present. If there is such a thing as tradition, and I believe there is, it can only exist in the sense of the most profound movements of culture.

First of all, I always see the sun! The way I want to identify myself and others is with halos here and there halos, movements of color. And that, I believe, is rhythm. Seeing is in itself a movement. Vision is the true creative rhythm. Discerning the quality of rhythms is a movement, and the essential quality of painting is representation the movement of vision which functions in objectivizing itself toward reality. That is the essential of art, and its greatest profoundness.

I am very much afraid of definitions, and yet one is almost forced to make them. One must take care, too, not to be inhibited by them. I have a horror of manifestoes made before the work is done.

-have begun pontificating a new scratchboard series

Of all the scribbled sentences that have converged to create the Valerie Plame affair, the most remarkable, in literary terms, may belong to Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney's recently deposed chief of staff. "Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them. Come back to work--and life," he wrote in a jailhouse note to Judith Miller. Meant as a waiver of confidentiality, the letter touched off the sort of fevered exegesis more often associated with readings of "The Waste Land" than of legal correspondence. For even more difficult prose, however, one must revisit an earlier work. "The Apprentice"--Libby's 1996 entry in the long and distinguished annals of the right-wing dirty novel--tells the tale of Setsuo, a courageous virgin innkeeper who finds himself on the brink of love and war.

Libby has a lot to live up to as a conservative author of erotic fiction. As an article in SPY magazine pointed out in 1988, from Safire ("[She] finally came to him in the bed and shouted 'Arragghrrorwr!' in his ear, bit his neck, plunged her head between his legs and devoured him") to Buckley ("I'd rather do this with you than play cards") to Liddy ("T'sa Li froze, her lips still enclosing Rand's glans . . .") to Ehrlichman (" 'It felt like a little tongue' ") to O'Reilly ("Okay, Shannon Michaels, off with those pants"), extracurricular creative writing has long been an outlet for ideas that might not fly at, say, the National Prayer Breakfast. In one of Lynne Cheney's books, a Republican vice-president dies of a heart attack while having sex with his mistress.

It took Libby more than twenty years to write "The Apprentice," which is set in a remote Japanese province in the winter of 1903. The book is brimming with quasi-political intrigue and antique locutions--"The girl who wore the cloak of yellow fur"; "one wore backward a European hat"--that make the phrase a "former Hill staffer," by comparison, seem straightforward.

Like his predecessors, Libby does not shy from the scatological. The narrative makes generous mention of lice, snot, drunkenness, bad breath, torture, urine, "turds," armpits, arm hair, neck hair, pubic hair, pus, boils, and blood (regular and menstrual). One passage goes, "At length he walked around to the deer's head and, reaching into his pants, struggled for a moment and then pulled out his penis. He began to piss in the snow just in front of the deer's nostrils."

Homoeroticism and incest also figure as themes. The main female character, Yukiko, draws hair on the "mound" of a little girl. The brothers of a dead samurai have sex with his daughter. Many things glisten (mouths, hair, evergreens), quiver (a "pink underlip," arm muscles, legs), and are sniffed (floorboards, sheets, fingers). The cast includes a dwarf, and an "assistant headman" who comes to restore order after a crime at the inn. (Might this character be autobiographical? And, if so, would that have made Libby the assistant headman or the assistant headman's assistant?)

When it comes to depicting scenes of romance, however, Libby can evoke a sort of musty sweetness; while one critic deemed "The Apprentice" "reminiscent of Rembrandt," certain passages can better be described as reminiscent of Penthouse Forum. There is, for example, Yukiko's seduction of the inexperienced apprentice:

He could feel her heart beneath his hands. He moved his hands slowly lower still and she arched her back to help him and her lower leg came against his. He held her breasts in his hands. Oddly, he thought, the lower one might be larger. . . . One of her breasts now hung loosely in his hand near his face and he knew not how best to touch her.

Other sex scenes are less conventional. Where his Republican predecessors can seem embarrassingly awkward--the written equivalent of trying to cop a feel while pinning on a corsage--Libby is unabashed:

At age ten the madam put the child in a cage with a bear trained to couple with young girls so the girls would be frigid and not fall in love with their patrons. They fed her through the bars and aroused the bear with a stick when it seemed to lose interest.

And, finally:

He asked if they should fuck the deer.

The answer, reader, is yes.

So, how does Libby stack up against the competition? This question was put to Nancy Sladek, the editor of Britain's Literary Review, which, each year, holds a contest for bad sex writing in fiction. (In 1998, someone nominated the Starr Report.) Sladek agreed to review a few passages from Libby. "That's a bit depraved, isn't it, this kind of thing about bears and young girls? That's particularly nasty, and the other ones are just boring," she said. "God, they're an odd bunch, these Republicans." Unlike their American counterparts, she said, Tories haven't taken much to sex writing. "They usually just get caught," she said.

-- Lauren Collins

if there were a word that meant
thought, mind, spirit
and wish, desire,
appetite.

                    and memory,
and recall. and finally also
will, purpose, intention,

we might have it down:
the impatient child
filled without being filled,
filled despite

                    the longing, being just
sated enough. pears poached long enough,
making their long, light syrup.

and if we did have the word?
not just one thing alone,
and not just longing.

-elizabeth macklin

my boss remarked to me today, good naturedly, "aren't you supposed to be doing interviews now?" i wanted to yell at her, "$#@*!" (this is the one i like). and people wonder why i would want someone to break my foot.

bunion surgery (BS) log (aka, my right foot):

things you learn at the doctor's office-
1. how it is to be a hermaphrodite
2. how to pick up britney spears
3. byos (bring your own starbucks) for after surgery, a very good thing

during surgery-
me: i wanna watch
doc1: okay i'll wake you up (injects anesthesia)
me: (2 sec later) hey, i feel it already (buzzing in my veins)....ZONK ...
me: hey doc, move over i can't see nuthin'.
doc2: i''ll move when i feel like it, the moniter is for me (thinking--this the most annoying patient i've ever had...) ....
me: is that vibrating i feel in my foot normal? (hear cracking bones, but no pain!, see blood squirting, but no pain! drugs are amazing!)
nurse: looks like red toothpaste

night after surgery-
i'm alive...feel nothing in my foot...is that a good thing?

day two-
hmm...tingling means time to take drugs
hopping on left foot around the apt to alleviate ants in my pants....oops, almost fell, put my bad foot down a little suddenly, feel something rip in my toe...(not good)

(phone rings)
me: hey doc!
doc: ev'rything alright?
me: uh...sure, just a lil' pain.
doc: ice and elevate! ....
drugs making me feel a little nauseous, or is it squinting at the tv screen watching a bootleg dvd? time to take a lil' nap ....
hungry...when is my roommate going to wake up and cook me something to eat? .....
what's that smell? oh, i guess it's time to take a shower (strap on high tech plastic baggie to my foot and secure with rubber band, provided by the nice doc)

day three-
now i know what great-grandma went through with the foot-binding business (is my foot swelling or is it just my imagination?) ....
ahhh....pain...eek, eek (throb, throb) .....
the poor bag of okra i've been using to ice my foot looks sad and abused, time to exchange it for another, good thing i bought two ....
want to make a painting, but not mobile enough, time to pop some vicodin

day four-
ice
pop pill
nap
(rinse and repeat)
cancel that regime. time to be useful. no more pills, making me nauseous...
fashioning a cane for future use, left leg is feeling the pain of hopping around, resort to strapping on skater knee pads and crawling on all fours, communing with the dog at his level, new nickname: senor squeaky...
made a painting, very spontaneous, more dramatic and forceful gestures, with leftover housepaint, happy with results, takes my mind off my foot. sitting around is making me constipated...
wondering if i can actually go back to work on monday as planned...

day five-
massive bruising on kneecaps, sore all over
finally unclogged myself, what a relief...
last day in prison, gotta break out tomorrow, fo' sho', even if it takes me one hour to walk three blocks to the subway...

Artists themselves tend to take absolutist and unhelpful positions
when addressing themselves to questions of content, pretending with
Degas that the work has nothing to do with ballet dancers, or
pretending with James Agee that it has nothing to do with artifice.
Both positions have the virtue of neatness, and allow the artist to
answer unanswerable questions briefly and then get back to work. If an
artist were to admit that he was uncertain as to what part of the
content of his work answered to life and what part to art, and was
perhaps even uncertain as to precisely where the boundary between them
lay, we would probably consider him incompetent.

I once heard William Eggleston say that the nominal subjects of his
pictures were no more than a pretext for the making of color
photographs - the Degas position. I did not believe him, although I
can believe that it might be an advantage to him to think so, or to
pretend to think so. To me it seems that the pictures reproduced here
are about the photographer's home, about his place, in both important
meanings of that word. One might say about his identity.

If this is true, it does not mean that the pictures are not also
simultaneously about photography, for the two issues are not
supplementary but coextensive. Whatever else a photograph may be
about, it is inevitably about photography, the container and the
vehicle of all its meanings. Whatever a photographer's intuitions or
intentions, they must be cut and shaped to fit the possibilities of
his art. Thus if we see the pictures clearly as photographs, we will
perhaps also see, or sense, something of their other, more private,
willful, and anarchic meanings.

Photography is a system of visual editing. At bottom, it is a matter
of surrounding with a frame a portion of one's cone of vision, while
standing in the right place at the right time. Like chess, or writing,
it is a matter of choosing from among given possibilities, but in the
case of photography the number of possibilities is not finite but
infinite. The world now contains more photographs than bricks, and
they are, astonishingly, all different. Even the most servile of
photographers has not yet managed to duplicate exactly an earlier work
by a great and revered master.

It is not easy for the photographer to compete with the clever
originality of mindless, mechanized cameras, but the photographer can
add intelligence. By means of photography one can in a minute reject
as unsatisfactory ninety-nine configurations of facts and elect as
right the hundredth. The choice is based on tradition and intuition -
knowledge and ego - as it is in any art, but the ease of execution and
the richness of the possibilities in photography both serve to put a
premium on good intuition. The photographer's problem is perhaps too
complex to be dealt with rationally. This is why photographers prowl
with such restless uncertainty about their motif, ignoring many
potentially interesting records while they look for something else.

It is not easy for the photographer to compete with the clever
originality of mindless, mechanized cameras, but the photographer can
add intelligence. By means of photography one can in a minute reject
as unsatisfactory ninety-nine configurations of facts and elect as
right the hundredth. The choice is based on tradition and intuition -
knowledge and ego - as it is in any art, but the ease of execution and
the richness of the possibilities in photography both serve to put a
premium on good intuition. The photographer's problem is perhaps too
complex to be dealt with rationally. This is why photographers prowl
with such restless uncertainty about their motif, ignoring many
potentially interesting records while they look for something else.

In practice it works like this: the photographer cannot freely
redispose the elements of his subject matter, as a painter can, to
construct a picture that fits his prior conception of the subject.
Instead, he discovers his subject within the possibilities proposed by
his medium. If the broad landscape refuses to compose itself
economically within the viewfinder's rectangle, the photographer
contrives a different but consonant subject, composed perhaps of two
trees and a rock.

Gifted photographers, learning from the successes of their
predecessors, quickly acquire the ability to recognize and anticipate
certain aspects of subject matter, situation, perspective, and quality
of light that might produce effective pictures. Original photographers
enlarge this shared sense of possibilities by discovering new patterns
of facts that will serve as metaphors for their intentions. The
continuing, cumulative insights of these exceptional artists have
formed and reformed photography's tradition; a new pictorial
vocabulary, based on the specific, the fragmentary, the elliptical,
the ephemeral, and the provisional. This new tradition has revised our
sense of what in the world is meaningful and our understanding of how
the meaningful can be described.

n the past decade a number of photographers have begun to work in
color in a more confident, more natural, and yet more ambitious
spirit, working not as though color were a separate issue, a problem
to be solved in isolation (not thinking of color as photographers
seventy years ago thought of composition), but rather as though the
world itself existed in color, as though the blue and the sky were one
thing. The best of Eliot Porter's landscapes, like the best of the
color street pictures of Helen Levitt, Joel Meyerowitz, Stephen Shore,
and others, accept color as existential and descriptive; these
pictures are not photographs of color, any more than they are
photographs of shapes, textures, objects, symbols, or events, but
rather photographs of experience, as it has been ordered and clarified
within the structures imposed by the camera.

It could be said - it doubtless has been said - that such pictures
often bear a clear resemblance to the Kodachrome slides of the
ubiquitous amateur next door. It seems to me that this is true, in the
same sense that the belles-lettres of a time generally relate in the
texture, reference, and rhythm of their language to the prevailing
educated vernacular of that time. In broad outline, Jane Austen's
sentences are presumably similar to those of her seven siblings.
Similarly, it should not be surprising if the best photography of
today is related in iconography and technique to the contemporary
standard of vernacular camera work, which is in fact often rich and
surprising. The difference between the two is a matter of
intelligence, imagination, intensity, precision, and coherence.

Preoccupation with private experience is a hallmark of the romantic
artist, whose view is characteristically self-centered, asocial, and,
at least in posture, antitraditional. If Eggleston's perspective is
essentially romantic, however, the romanticism is different in spirit
and aspect from that with which we are familiar in the photography of
the past generation. In that more familiar mode, photographic
romanticism has tended to mean the adoption and adaptation of large
public issues, social or philosophical, for private artistic ends (an
activity that might be termed applied romanticism, as distinct from
pure Wordsworthian independence), and it has generally been expressed
in a style heavy with special effects: glints and shadows, dramatic
simplicities, familiar symbols, and idiosyncratic technique.

One can say, to repeat, that in Eggleston's pictures form and content
are indistinguishable, which seems to me true but also unsatisfactory
because too permissive. The same thing can be said of any picture. The
ambitious photographer, not satisfied by so tautological a success,
seeks those pictures that have a visceral relation to his own self and
his own privileged knowledge, those that belong to him by genetic
right, in which form matches not only content but intent.

This suggests that the pictures reproduced here are no more
interesting than the person who made them, and that their
intelligence, wit, knowledge, and style reach no farther than that
person's - which leads us away from the measurable relationships of
art-historical science toward intuition, superstition,
blood-knowledge, terror, and delight.

These pictures are fascinating partly because they contradict our
expectations. We have been told so often of the bland, synthetic
smoothness of exemplary American life, of its comfortable, vacant
insentience, its extruded, stamped, and molded sameness, in a word its
irredeemable dullness, that we have come half to believe it, and thus
are startled and perhaps exhilarated to see these pictures of
prototypically normal types on their familiar ground, grandchildren of
Penrod, who seem to live surrounded by spirits, not all of them
benign. The suggestible viewer might sense that these are subjects
capable not only of the familiar modern vices (self-loathing,
adaptability, dissembling, sanctimony, and license), but of the
ancient ones (pride, parochial stubbornness, irrationality,
selfishness, and lust). This could not be called progress, but it is
interesting. Such speculations, however, even if not simple nonsense,
presumably relate only to Eggleston's pictures - patterns of random
facts in the service of one imagination - not to the real world. A
picture is after all only a picture, a concrete kind of fiction, not
to be admitted as hard evidence or as the quantifiable data of social
scientists.

As pictures, however, these seem to me perfect: irreducible surrogates
for the experience they pretend to record, visual analogues for the
quality of one life, collectively a paradigm of a private view, a view
one would have thought ineffable, described here with clarity,
fullness, and elegance.

-John Szarkowski

alan lightman and richard colton in SEED magazine

RC: ...gertrude stein belived that the first ingredient for creativity was boredom. you must trust that the mudane will lead to something interesting. john cage also taught that if you let the duration of a movement or musical phrase just keep going, it will almost always become more interesting, which is the exact opposite of carving something up into small increments. you will go through a period where the music seems boring, but if you let it keep going it can actually become quite interesting.

RC: science is at this particularly fascinating place. it may be more mysterious than anything we're doing in art at this moment in history. that's a tough thing for artists to feel--but nonetheless, i think artists continue having insights into the human condition that are invaluable.

AL: absolutely. i think that art influences science, too. especially in the twentieth century, science has gotten so far beyond human sensory perception that we're really talking about very abstract things--subatomic particles and wavelengths of light, which we can't see; the big bang, which we can't experience; and distant galaxies, which we really can't touch. and yet when we talk about physical phenomena, even in these inaccessible domains, we have to use language. because that's all we have. i think one of the things that art helps provide scientists with is the language--and the metaphors and the images--to describe what scientists are so desperately trying to understand. our instruments tell us that these toally unimaginable phenomena are happening, and yet we have no intuitive understanding of them. so we grope for language and pictures, and i think art provides some of these for us.

RC: would you define your novel-writing and science as two separate worlds, or are you holding them beautifully in balance? what is that relationship?

AL: certainly, i'm not holding them beautifully in balance. i'm struggling with them. but i've been interested in both the sciences and the arts from a very young age--and i've noticed there are a lot of similarities, and some differences, in a way that scientists and artists view the world, and the way that they work.

one of the differences is that scientists are always working on problems that have definite answers. even though science is constantly revising itself--you get new experiemental data and you change your theory--at any given moment, a scientist is working on a problem that has a definite answer. these are so-called "well-posed problems."

i think for artists and for most other people, there are a lot of interesting questions that don't have definite answers--like what is the nature of god? or what is the nature of love? or would we be happier if we lived to be a thousand years old? these are all terribly fascinating, important questions, but they're not scientific questions.

there's a wonderful quote from the poet rainer maria rilke, when another young poet wrote to him and said, "do i have what it takes to be a poet?" and rilke wrote back, "you should learn to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, or like books written in a very foreign tongue." i think that a lot of art is about the questions themselves.

the question is more important than the answer. so i think artists are much better at living with uncertainty. ambiguity is an essential part of art.

AL: i don't ever want to be finished. i would like to always be in the process of finishing myself but never complete the process.

it's like the concept of the beginner's mind in buddhism. the ideal is always to be a beginner at everything, because when you are a beginner, you are receiving the most. you're not coming in with preconceived notions.

RC: that's often true with artists, too. there's a quality of being outside something, so you're not pulled by a kind of herd mentality.

AL: i think we might be at the end here.

RC: they say that after three minutes you start lying anyway.

AL: i think three minutes is generous.

herein are kurt vonnegut's rules for creative writing 101:

1. use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. every sentence must do one of two things--reveal character or advance action.

5. start as close to the end as possible.

6. be a sadist. no matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them--in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7. write to please just one person. if you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. to heck with suspense. readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

to combat the forthcoming onslaught of rejection (the trickle so far has been unbearable enough), i am attempting to give birth to something meaningful, or at least a purposeful distraction. at the moment, my art is stalling (still don't know what i want to say, what i stand for), so i have decided to write a novel (a taiwanese-american historical epic, to be precise) in hopes of easing my perpetual state of emotional constipation. literary catharsis should be more satisfying, if not much cheaper, than an aloof therapist. besides, i don't understand how people can spill their guts to a complete stranger! at least i have already pinpointed my major problem: my deep fear of commitment to anything and everything. it is rooted in my mildly traumatic childhood (yes, i have a very sensitive ego), and though the other end seems now eager and willing to make amends, unless i am actually safely ensconced in the bosom of some medical school, facing her will be like diving into the sun wearing only sunglasses. at least in the desired case, it would only be the same, but i'd be wearing a wetsuit.

coupled with the ubiquitous malcontent, i am discovering perpetual human interaction to be quite tedious. a friend is currently attempting to move beyond her comfort zone, whereas i seem to be slipping back into my former anti-social, prickly self. for the past handful of months, i have been more open to meeting new people and attempted to consolidate relationships despite rebuff and extend them beyond the initial meeting, but now, the batting percentage continues to drop precipitously, and it seems more and more like another pointless way to while away the hours. it's also the ol' battle-weary ego cowering from the endless academic and personal blows. though i am not complacent, the motivation evaporates quicker than ethanol from a lab bench. i have completed my metamorphosis into a rattus laboratorius. danke franz kafka.

"I myself should always regret not being a doctor."
-Van Gogh, in a letter to his brother, Theo, 1889

I type "Matisse", and my spell check asks if I meant to say "madhouse." I try Pasteur, and it elicits an "OK." Apparently, my computer isn't enlightened, as I was, long ago, by Lionel Trilling's famous essay "Art and Neurosis," which convinced me that artists aren't crazier than anybody else; but I still believe their characters are often unfairly maligned.

When Matisse's paintings were derided at the New York Armory Show in 1913, he felt it necessary to write an open letter defending himself, not his work: "Tell the American people that I am a devoted husband and father, that I have three fine children, and a fine garden--like any man--that I am not a hoodlum." Janet Flanner, whose pen name was Gen?t, trying to make the same point, once described Matisse's studio as "tidy as a rich doctor's waiting room"--forgetting the saying, "One should never trust a rich doctor or a rich priest."

"Rich artist" is an oxymoron. The students in my high school writing class understand that; I know because, when I ask them to write their obituaries as they would like them to read in 60 or 70 years' time (my hope is to inspire them to think about their life goals), they often imagine themselves as dual careerists-- doctor/novelist is a popular choice, though none of them has read Walker Percy or even Ethan Canin. The medicine will pay their bills, while the art will nourish their souls is what they're thinking. Doctors whose waiting rooms are decorated with their own artworks--I've been treated by more than one--would probably voice something similar about everybody needing a creative outlet.

But what about those of us who have taken Ruskin's words to heart? To wit: "Art, properly so called, is no recreation; it cannot be learned at spare moments, nor pursued when we have nothing better to do. It is no handiwork for drawing-room tables; no relief of the ennui of boudoirs; it must be understood and undertaken seriously or not at all."

I think what prevents many people from making that kind of commitment isn't only fear of short funds. Fear of something else is a far stronger deterrent. As Roger Fry wrote in a letter to his father from Cambridge, in 1888, "...to fail in art is much more complete a failure and leaves one a more useless encumbrance on the world than to fail in almost anything else--e.g. to be a 4th rate doctor in the colonies."

Thomas Eakins, whose portraits did not flatter, and who experienced little success in his lifetime, would have strongly disagreed with the idea that even a bad doctor is worthy of more respect than a bad artist. "I presume my position in art is not second to your own in medicine," he wrote to Dr. J. N. Da Costa, who had asked the painter to alter his portrait because it had been adversely criticized by newspapers and friends, "and I can hardly imagine myself writing to you a letter like this: Dear Doctor, The concurrent testimony of the newspapers and of friends is that your treatment of my case has not been one of your successes. I therefore suggest that you treat me a while with Mrs. Brown's Metaphysical Discovery."

Fry, for his part, became neither artist nor doctor but art critic, thereby joining the ranks of a profession filled with what are called "failed artists."

"Failed" is a term that deserves scrutiny. My husband dropped out of pre-med, but that doesn't make him a "failed" doctor. In medicine, mistakes can be tragedies; and the reason we don't hear that a doctor is a "failed" one is because we leap right over that to calling him or her "disgraced"--possibly even "jailed." In art, failure can only occur when the artist has given up. They are "failed" only as parachutes are--because they fail to work at all.

Persevering, no matter how it's going, no matter how it's judged, is one thing; doing the same while your neighbor's house burns is quite another. (Never mind that you are equipped with neither hose nor ladder.) That is why, particularly in the opinion of our puritanical culture, "useless" can swiftly shade into "immoral." Samuel F. B. Morse painted his virtuosic Gallery of the Louvre, which includes replicas of 40 European masterworks in miniature, in the midst of a cholera epidemic. While Parisians were ministering to their sick and dying, shouldn't this crazy American have put down his paintbrush and helped them instead?

The question can only be answered by an anecdote, a fantasy that Auden once recounted, in which he found himself volunteering in a hospital, washing wounds. What do you think you're doing? a nurse asked angrily; why aren't you writing poetry? To which he replied: I will if I feel like it.

Which, of course, is both the key to art and the reason why we so often suspect its practitioners of being either indolent, if they can't work, or insensitive, if they can't stop.

Morse, familiar to more people as an inventor than as an artist, meant his painting to be a teaching tool, but when he brought it back home to the United States, it was not well-received. Bitter, he abandoned art for invention. The Morse code and the telegraph soon followed. Among the words he chose to transmit during trial testing were, reportedly, "Attention, the universe." Compare that to Emily Dickinson's "This is my letter to the World,/ That never wrote to Me"--she, who published few poems in her lifetime.

Van Gogh, as we all know, sold next to none of his works--he, who painted Portrait du Dr. Gachet but regretted not only not being a doctor but not being a preacher, too. That his doctor's portrait sold in May 1990 for $82.5 million--the largest sum ever paid for a painting--is beside the point.

Maybe if it were more difficult to declare oneself an artist, we all might get more respect. Medicine weeds out the amateurs far better than art does. Nobody does appendectomies for a hobby on weekends; or has an E.R. down in the basement. (At least I hope not.)

When I took up serious writing 20 years ago, nobody appointed me "artist." I appointed myself. All artists do, but for me there's no comfort in that knowledge. I often try to get around the unease by saying to myself and others, "Well, writing is what I've always done. Starting when I was a girl, I kept a diary, had pen pals. . . ." As if writing were an instinctual urge over which I've never had much control. But I haven't "always" tried to get my words published.

I've only gradually come to realize what an audacious act it is: to ask others to listen to me. Attention, the universe? How about, instead, another, more appropriate line from the Belle of Amherst: "I'm nobody! Who are you?"

It's hard to justify living the life of an artist, but self-doubt does decrease over time. Its diminishment doesn't have anything to do with success. Our society embraces its successful artists, but only briefly, and usually for the wrong reasons. It's no guide.

Where the conviction comes from is within. I can't be any more profound, nor any more specific. I'll leave it to scientists to give you hard facts, to save your labor, and to doctors to save your life. I can only interpret my life, my view of the world, and maybe inspire you to do the same with yours. And with luck, we'll both understand why it would be worthwhile for those doctors, if it ever came to that, to save our lives in the first place.

-Jeanne Schinto

baby boy
dieing under hot desert sun,
watch your colours run.

did you believe the lie they told you,
that christ would lead the way
and in a matter of days
hand us victory?

did you buy the bull they sold you,
that the bullets and the bombs
and all the strong arms
would bring home security?

all eyes upon
dry drunk emperor
gold cross cross jock skull and bones
mocking smile,
he's been
standing naked for a while!
get him gone, get him gone, get him gone!!
and bring all the thieves to trial.

end their promise
end their dream
watch it turn to steam
rising to the nose of some cross legged god
gog of magog
end times sort of thing.
oh unmentionable disgrace
shield the childrens faces
as all the monied apes
display unimaginably poor taste
in a scramble for mastery.

atta' boy get em with your gun
till mr. mega ton
tells us when we've won
or
what we're gonna leave undone.

all eyes upon
dry drunk emperor
gold cross jock skull and bones
mocking smile,
he's been
naked for a while.
get him gone, get him gone, get him gone!!!
and bring all his thieves to trial.

what if all the fathers and the sons
went marching with their guns
drawn on washington.
that would seal the deal,
show if it was real,
this supposed freedom.

what if all the bleeding hearts
took it on themselves
to make a brand new start.
organs pumpin on their sleeves,
paint murals on the white house
feed the leaders L.S.D
oh, your fife and drum,
grab yor gold baton
and let's meet on the lawn,
shut down this hypocrisy.

-tv on the radio

i don't know how politicking works, but it seems that passing the buck is getting us nowhere.

"...But perhaps the most powerful response came from Kanye West, who ignored teleprompters during a live concert Friday night on NBC to vent his frustrations, insisting, to the shock of his co-hosts, "George Bush doesn't care about black people." "I hate the way they portray us in the media," he said, visibly shaken. "You see a black family and they say we are looting, you see a white family and they say they are looking for food. America is set up to help the poor, the black people, the less well-off, as slow as possible."

your love is different from mine. what i mean is, when you close your eyes, for that moment, the center of the universe comes to reside within you. and you become a small figure within that vastness, which spreads without limit behind you, and continues to expand at tremendous speed, to engulf all of my past, even before i was born, and every word i've ever written, and each view i've seen, and all the constellations, and the darkness of outer space that surrounds the small blue ball that is earth. then, when you open your eyes, all that disappears.

i anticipate the next time you are troubled and must close your eyes again.

the way we think may be completely different, but you and i are an ancient, archetypal couple, the original man and woman. we are the model for adam and eve. for all couples in love, there comes a moment when a man gazes at a woman with the very same kind of realization. it is an infinite helix, the dance of two souls resonating, like the twist of DNA, like the vast universe.

-banana yoshimoto, 'helix'

the subject of western versus eastern novels of the modern variety is unequivocally about love. in fact, within the entire pantheon of the arts: books, music, theatre, film, that is the common thread. but the approach is night and day. whereas western culture is ingrained with the idea of the physical pursuit of love, eastern culture is enraptured by the cerebral articulation of love. action vs. thought. maybe that's why i love murakami. i inevitably relate to some random detail he writes about his characters, a description of an earlobe fetish, something easily overlooked. but such is a metaphor for the way asians think. westerners prefer the grand gestures, huge cataclysmic declarations of this and that, life or death. but that stuff only happens in art. in real life, it's the minutiae that count, a turn of the brow, a whiff of an expression.

i once said to an acquaintance that the only criteria i have for a partner is someone 'who can get along with me.' i never thought it would be so difficult to achieve compatibility; the problem could be this clash of cultures, of what one values over the other. therefore, what is more important, having more similarities (goals, traits, interests) with the other person, or having the same open-minded outlook on life but vastly different personalities?

'henderson had always liked innards, but it was only as he began to cook that he came to recognize the absurdity of our usual meat eating, which clings to a few square feet of animal muscle near the skeleton, as timorous natives might cling to a few square feet of coast on an island while avoiding the volcanic mountains inland. "there were all these wonderful, splendid bits of the animal being wasted, thrown out, while we were eating nothing but the filet," he said, pronouncing 'filet' in the english manner, with a hard last consonant. "it seemed positively insulting to the animal that one had raised to treat it with such contempt. so many wonders there. spleen! spleen is a very fine, perfectly framed organ. in fact, your spleen swells when you're in love! how can you resist an organ that does that?"

-adam gopnik interviews fergus henderson, chef/owner of st. john, author of 'nose to tail eating'

as an aspiring foodie, i am instantly on guard whenever i meet a vegetarian or his evil cousin, the vegan. people who don't eat a whole category of the four basic food groups seem to been missing a key ingredient in their personality: fire and verve that comes from having energy from eating protein. sure there's the occasional soy connoisseur, currently touted to be the world's most perfect food, but for someone to rely on other flavors to impart its flavor to their main staple is quite telling of their general modus operandi: that they are perfectly willing to walk the middle of the road, to not sniff around and gobble up the outer edges of life, to seek out the strange and often wonderful suprises to be found in eating something unknown.

perhaps it is indicative of the direction this country is headed when kids are raised on pre-packaged food found in government approved boxes vacuum-packed and drained of its natural juices to the point of tasting like the cardboard it came packaged in. this is literally eating outside the box when you go in search of the best street vendor in manhattan, actually make plans to eat at some tiny hole-in-the-wall that is the destination for the evening. when done in moderation, eating is definitely one of the most gratifying experiences to be had in life, and to constrain yourself to something that has been cut up and manipulated into something so alien from its natural form is truly sad indeed.