Aurelius Aurelius

Daniel Vincent

November 2013

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"I checked it very thoroughly," said the computer, "and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never actually known what the question is."

"But it was the Great Question! The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything!" howled Loonquawl.

“Yes,” said deep Thought with the air of one who suffers fools gladly, “but what actually is it?” A slow stupefied silence crept over the men as they stared at the computer and then at each other. "Well, you know, it's just Everything . . . Everything . . . " offered Phouchg weakly. "Exactly!" said Deep Thought. "So once you do know what the question actually is, you'll know what the

answer means." Douglas Adams, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Life is a four-letter alphabet

So, this is what I'm learning, fundamentally; we can look up, on a clear unspoilt night, away from artificial lighting, when the clouds are at bay and the moon is yet new, and gaze into the inconceivable enormity of the star-speckled universe, of which we occupy the teensiest tiniest corner, and realise just how insignificant we are, mere mortal specks of organic matter on a mote of cosmic dust. Or we can peer inwards, at any one of the 100 trillion cells of which we consist, and see another universe at play, a dynamic world as busy and complex as the most vibrant of cities, as intricate as any system yet devised by human hand, with mitochondrial powerhouses, protein sorting stations, an internal immune system to police unwanted pathogens, and a constantly adapting infrastructure of microtubular scaffolding and semi-permeable membranes. Look upwards and look deeply and we see our material origins, in nebulae and plasma clouds, in ancestral echoes of the ancient big bang. Look downwards and look deeply and we see the material processes that give rise to complex life, the conversion of nucleic information into flesh and blood and bone.

Our increasing understanding of biochemistry is steadily chipping away at the mystery of life, yet only adding to the wonder. How amazing that a simple four-letter molecular alphabet can be transcribed (and it literally is transcribed) into RNA, and that RNA can then be translated (and via the genetic code it literally is translated) into thousands of proteins, each with a particular shape and set of properties, each with a different job to do, combining and communicating with one another in a myriad ways, first to form single-cell organisms, then growing gradually more complex, eventually resulting in the dizzying richness of life on Earth. Roses, monkeys, bacteria, Londoners, birds, mosquitoes, grass: we all share the same small lexicon. At a very basic level, we are code. Great long helical ribbons of the stuff.

And how is this ticker-tape packaged? The study of DNA topology is gradually allowing us to disentangle the knotty conundrum of how two metres’ worth of double-stranded DNA (in the case of humans) can fit inside the microscopic nucleus of every single one of the cells that make up our bodies (excepting the ovum and sperm). Those two metres, with their six billion A's and T's and C's and G's, are wound up and coiled in the most fiendishly clever and functional way, unspooling particular stretches of themselves in response to chemical messages entering the nucleus, messages which announce that this protein is needed or that, whereupon the double strand unzips itself to expose the relevant instructions for the proteins to be copied, and which then, when done, neatly zips itself back up. How astounding is the machinery that then kicks in to read the copied code three letters at a time – this three, then that three, then this three, then the next – machinery which matches each triplet to a corresponding amino acid, which is thereupon snagged, dragged and locked into place along a growing chain, not unlike beads of different colours being threaded on a string : thousands of beaded amino acids which then, released from the machinery that assembles them, neatly twist and fold themselves with stunning precision into the protein being called for. And all this without mentioning how the entire six-billion letter genome replicates and rearranges itself into twenty-three pairs of chromosomes whenever the cell divides. There are even mechanisms in place that proofread replication, ensuring an incredible degree of fidelity, akin to a single typo per three thousand sets of the Bard’s entire works (but oh, what a difference a mutation can make).

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And yet what does it mean that we – builders of grand civilisations, brave explorers of the seven seas – consist of a mindless code? Are we really nothing more than temporary vessels to enable selfish genetic information to pass itself on? Even if we resist the idea of being such containers, and talk instead of art and beauty, love or the divine, of life being infinitely richer than the sum of its chemical parts, what does it mean that human nature, encoded in our genes, drives us to combine our individual lives into families, clans, tribes and then societies, which in turn give rise to cultures, and that our cultures are themselves a kind of vessel for the transfer of accumulated information – language, knowledge, wisdom, facts and understanding – information that, if anything, allows us to further the cause of our own survival, and thus, ultimately, the survival of our genes? And what does it mean that our innate curiosity spurs us on to understand our own biological workings, that it is in our genes themselves to uncog the cellular machinery that encases them and decipher what’s inside? Is this a case of information trying to read and make sense of itself? Or is the self-awareness that seeks out meaning merely a happy by-product of an otherwise meaningless set of physical processes?

Does it, in fact, “mean” anything at all? Or is life to be read between the lines? Can the sweetness of a strawberry be tasted in a code? Can the thrill of a drum be heard? What happens when we think? Or dream? Remember? How can four letters spell joy? If we were one day able to fully describe the biochemical processes that result in the experience of, say, alcoholic intoxication, to fully map the neurological pathways involved in first being tipsy, then merry, then sloshed, would we be any more able than we already are to describe to an inveterate teetotaller, such that he truly finds the experience staggering, how it feels to be blind drunk? Or to someone whose feet have so far never met the corner of a doorframe how it feels to stub a toe? Or to a youngster whose slumbering heart is yet to be pulsed into that grand romantic swelling how it feels to fall in love? And let’s say we were able to describe those experiences, how far would our deoxyribonucleic alphabet allow us to spell out a warning or give advice to someone who found themselves in the midst of them? How do you tell someone in genetic code what I can here spell out to other English speakers in the twenty-six letters of the Roman alphabet, that there’s a hangover round the corner, a nasty throbbing only seconds off, inevitable heartbreak on its way, but that the pain of each will pass? How do you encode optimism? Or anticipation? Or humour? How could we ever encrypt the jubilation felt by Watson and Crick when they burst into the Eagle pub in Cambridge with the stirring cry of, “Gentlemen, we have discovered the secret of life!” or the satisfaction of the pint that undoubtedly followed?

Surely what matters is that which is lost in translation? The freshness of ice cream on a hot summer’s day or the tingle of sherbet as it tickles the tongue; the fragrance of old memories, the whistle of trees in winter, the sincerity of a dear old friend’s embrace. Surely these are the things which mean the most? The warmth of coming home after a long time away, of an unexpected lie-in and the pillow’s cooler side, or the excitement of a sudden bolt of lightning, shredding the sky into halves, and then counting off the seconds to the thunder; the physical delight we take in dancing, skipping, fits of giggles, naps in a hammock on a faraway beach; the roar of the crowd when the ball goes in, or the giddying fun of a merry-go-round, of punchlines and pop songs and parties; the pleasure of doing cartwheels, seeing rainbows, having snowball fights and picnics, of fountains and symphonies and the crunchiness of apples. Or the feeling of awe that overcomes us when we peer into the heavens and shiver to think how alone we may be, alongside the comforting sense of belonging when we soften to the cadence of a lover’s midnight sigh. Surely these are the things that no amount of code can ever capture: the felt life as we live it, an entire universe of libraries stacked miles high with volumes of untranslatable experience; the ineffable information that makes us more than mere machines.

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A splerk by any other name “’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe.” Lewis Carroll, Jabberwocky “I know you think you understand what you thought I said but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.” Alan Greenspan

What happens when we speak? Patterns of neural activity representing the concepts we wish to express are converted into the linguistic forms that represent them; that is, abstract ideas are turned into semantics and grammar, which in turn are converted into the sounds necessary for their vocalisation via the coordinated articulation of the larynx, glottis, tongue, lips and jaw. On a purely physical level, breath is converted into vowels and consonants and the atmosphere vibrates. Taking the entire process more figuratively, thought becomes air. But if I think of a cat in a hat on a mat, and tell my friend to do the same, there is nothing inherently feline in the voiceless velar plosive, the front unrounded vowel or the alveolar stop which together signify the animal in English (and in that order alone – after all, a cat is a very different thing to an act or a tack, just as blogs are not globs, and chicken flesh is not a kitchen shelf). Nor is there anything especially catty about the two syllables ne and ko in Japanese, or anything four-pawed, furry and whiskered in the Wolof equivalent muus. Hindi calls them billi, Turkish goes with kedi, popoki’s the name in Hawaiian, they’re goyang-i in Korean, while the Polish word is kot. The phonemes themselves are mere referents. Of course, not all words are made up of arbitrary sounds. Etymologically there is a likelihood that all language can trace its origin back, at least to some degree, to an early kind of onomatopoeia. Indeed, onomatopoeia is a rich source of word formation, with dogs going woof, bombs going bang and rappers going bling. Sometimes it contributes to whole families of words. The consonant cluster at the beginning of the words sneeze, snort, snigger, snooze, snot, snuffle, snore and snivel clearly suggests something sniffly going on, and there’s something about bringing the lips together that sounds just right when we whistle, whisper and whine. Nevertheless, onomatopoeic words still only approximate the sounds they represent, as evidenced by the fact that they often differ between languages. English speakers don’t really hear knock knock when someone’s knuckles rap a door, any more than a Danish speaker hears bank bank. Spanish klaxons don’t really go pi pi. Indonesian pigs don’t really go grok grok.

What happens when we listen? The air turns back into thought. The vibrations created by my vocalisations disturb the tiny bundled hair cells of my friend’s attentive ear, the movements of which trigger electrical signals to be sent along the auditory nerve to specialised regions of the brain, where the grammar and semantics are decoded, reconfiguring the incoming signal into a pattern of neural activity that matches the original. The headgear-wearing kitty I envisaged reappears inside the mind of my friend, and thus the elaborate system of symbols and processes that we call language has managed, rather wonderfully, to transmit from my mind to my friend’s mind an entire idea. Unless of course she understands no English, in which case all she will hear are meaningless vowels and consonants.

Nevertheless, we must ask ourselves this; even if we do share a language, how much of the idea has really been conveyed? What if I picture a black cat wearing a blue beanie, lounging on some tattered old damp grey bathmat, none of which detail is conveyed in the original sentence? My friend, for her part, on being told to picture a cat in a hat on a mat, might visualise instead a tabby cat in a dainty lace bonnet sitting upright on a welcome mat of rough brown jute. Or I might say the phrase to a Kenyan in Kiswahili, using paka, which may then, for all I know, conjure up a tiger or a lion. What if my friend is congenitally blind? Does she instead feel the animal’s fur, the hat’s brim, the weft and the weave of the

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mat that it’s sitting on? What if (though unlikely) she’s never seen a cat before, and only knows it from description as a four-legged furry mammal good at hunting vermin and popular in internet memes? What then does she see? I could instead tell her to visualise a member of the felis catus species of the Felidae family, wearing a covering for the crown of the head, resting its body with the torso upright and the hind limbs bent upon a rectangular piece of thick woven fabric used to cover a section of floor. Such a dry, lengthy sentence might be more exact, but those aren’t the words I used. Indeed, they hardly succeed in conveying an image at all, and they certainly add no detail. Nevertheless, as far as the original phrase is concerned, my friend and I both understand it perfectly; the core idea is fully conveyed. Very often such a degree of generality is all we need; we communicate largely in categories. If I tell my friend I’m thinking of buying a new bike, I might have in mind the nifty road bike with the silver frame that I saw in the shop by the station, but she doesn’t need any of that detail to understand ‘new bike’. All she needs to know is what a bike is and what it means for an object to be new. Likewise, she might tell me she went to the cinema last night, but I don’t need to know what the building looked like, what colour the seats were or how big the screen was before I can ask what film she saw. Generality is necessary in jokes as well – the man who walks into a bar, the chicken that crosses the road. Nobody needs to know what kind of bar or what kind of road to get the respective punchlines. And if I tell my friend I have an allergy to cats, I don’t even need to visualise any in order to be able to utter the sentence, or she to see me red-eyed and sneezing to understand what I mean.

But what then is communicated when I tell my friend to visualise the cat? What exactly is it that is stored in our brains as the concept of ‘cat’ that enables the language to work in the first place, that gives it something to symbolise? The concept must precede the language. After all, if I see a cat on the street I recognise it as a cat without language even entering into it. I don’t make my way to work every morning identifying everything I see or hear or feel, even inwardly to myself, even though I register the church on the corner, the rumble of traffic along the main road, the breeze against my face. There are plenty of things that we come across in life that we don’t know the names of (at least not until learning them), but we have a mental representation of them all the same. We may easily be able to work out their function, or guess at their provenance, even use them, without ever knowing what they are called. That little plastic tube at the end of your shoelace, for example, the thingummy that stops them becoming frayed… Or the cardboard holder for a takeaway beverage that has no handle, the whatjermacallit that keeps your fingers from getting burnt… We don’t need to know that the first is called an aglet in order to make our own out of sellotape, or that the latter is called a zarf in order to wish we had one when we hold an unprotected cup of boiling coffee.

In conceptualising ‘cat’, do we extract all the similarities from all the cats we’ve ever known and codify them into some mental rendering of a kind of model or prototype, which in English we label cat, in Japanese neko and in Wolof muus, and against which we cross-reference every sighting or mention of a particular cat that we come across (the one on the street, the one on the mat)? Features of this general cat might include: being smaller than most dogs but bigger than rats and mice, being furry and fourlegged, having whiskers, purring when content, meowing when hungry, not really known for donning headwear (beanie or bonnet or otherwise) and with a tendency, whenever the mood might take it, to be decidedly aloof. Colour-wise, the brain might generalise by settling on a common colour for a cat, say black, or else blending all the possible colours into a kind of muddy brown. For such a rendering to work, however, surely the brain needs to cross-reference everything mentioned with all the other concepts involved; with the concept of fur, for example: a coating on the skin of soft, thick hairs; or with legs: a limb that supports and moves the body; or with black: the colour of coal and the sky at night; and then those in turn with their respective features, some of which lead back the way we came, so that the whole thing ends up circular; coal: a black material used for burning; soft: not hard, stiff or rough, but yielding readily to pressure, like a pillow, a ripe banana, or the fur of a cat.

Is this really what happens? It would indeed seem to be the case if I invent an animal and describe it to my friend, requiring her to do a similar mapping to the conceptual cross-referencing above. Let’s say I tell her that zoologists have just discovered a hitherto unknown animal in the depths of the African hinterlands which they’ve named the African splerk. This four-legged creature is bigger than a dog but smaller than a horse, has a thick hard skin like a rhino, but with yellow and white stripes, has a mane

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like a lion, a trunk like an elephant and dinosaur-like plates along its back. Assuming my friend is reasonably good at drawing, she should then be able to produce a picture of this bizarre creature without ever having seen it before – indeed, without it even existing. Would this image of a splerk be a kind of equivalent, at least as far as the visual aspects go, of our conceptual general cat? Can it really be so cartoonish? Surely, given that we see real cats from all angles, it can’t be two-dimensional? Or is there a kind of holographic generalisation going on? And if indeed this is the way abstraction works, why does my friend, when I tell her to visualise the cat in the hat, not visualise the generalisation? Why does she instead picture a particular example (even though it may well be imaginary and little more than a vague image in her mind’s eye)? And how can it be that if I ask her if she knows the word for cat in Wolof, and she replies that funnily enough she does, it sounds a bit like ‘moose’, how can it be that neither of us need to visualise either of the creatures involved, or even really think about them, for the communication to take place? Clearly, we can store the purely phonological aspect of words without knowing their meaning. Let’s say I’m in Senegal myself, and keep hearing the word xarit. I don’t have a clue what it means, but there it is, bantered back and forth by the Wolof speakers around me, a string of disembodied phonemes drifting around my mind in search of a concept to cling on to. Xarit. Xarit. Xarit. Maybe it means market (after all, that’s where I hear it first). Maybe it means customer (the man in the restaurant uses it when speaking to me). Xarit. Xarit. Xarit. Maybe it’s a kind of greeting; people seem to smile a lot when they say it. Who knows? It’s only later that I learn the word means ‘friend’. But how can we possibly divorce the sounds of words from the concepts they represent, such as cat and mouse, when we do know what they mean? If I say to my xarit, “Does the word ‘splerk’ sound hard to you?”, do I really expect that she will hear nothing but the sounds alone, and not have any notion whatsoever in mind, visual or otherwise, of the creature she earlier drew?

Besides, how far can this kind of mental modelling be applied to less concrete entities such as groups, meals, days, dreams, noise or even friends? Or to actions? Sitting, buying, cooking, deciding, falling or investigating, for example. How are they represented in the brain? What about relative concepts such as big and small, or purely abstract concepts such as beauty or wrongdoing? What about grammatical concepts, such as tense and aspect, modality or negation? After all, if I suddenly blurt out, apropos of nothing, “I would if I could but I can’t so I won’t”, my friend will not have the foggiest idea what I’m referring to, but she’ll know that it’s neither possible nor going to happen. Likewise, if I suddenly announce “It isn’t!”, she may not know what ‘it’ is, or even what it isn’t, but she’ll certainly know that it’s ‘not’. We can even understand a sentence grammatically when there’s gobbledygook involved. If my friend tells me that “The floober plengled a quirp last night”, I won’t have a clue what a floober or a quirp are, or what it means to plengle, but I’ll be in no doubt whatsoever as to which of them did what to which. How does the brain do that?

One day, it seems likely, neuroscience will map the wiring of the brain as comprehensively as the geneticists have sequenced the coiled double-helix of our precious DNA, at which point we will be able to describe exactly what goes on inside those lumpy folds when I utter the sentence “the cat, getting bored of being talked about, took off its hat and left”. But even then, tracing circuitous routes around the rich resulting cartography of abstraction, surely we will still be left confronting an unbridgeable gap between our knowledge of the biological mechanisms that produce the image, and our experience of the image itself. No amount of data about the genes, the synapses, the signals and the networks, no matter how detailed or voluminous, no matter how complete, can ever amount to that experience. My friend, for all the accrued knowledge and understanding, will still find herself looking at a discarded bonnet on a welcome mat, while all that remains in my mind’s eye will be a bathmat and the beanie left behind. The splerk by then will have joined a herd of other fantasies and figments, while the cat, having crawled off down some neural back alley, will be nowhere to be seen. And when that time comes, we may yet be none the wiser.

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Something it is that isn’t, which doesn’t quite add up

How utterly bizarre that nature should offer up a key to her understanding which does not, in any material way, exist. Mathematics. The universal language. Not only implicit in the very laws of physics, but also explicit throughout the natural world, manifesting itself in the symmetry of snowflakes, the crescent of a sand dune, the angles in crystals, the fractals in frost, the patterning of ripples and the spiralling of storms. And yet entirely without substance. What, for example, is three, if not defined in respect of its equally insubstantial neighbours? Not three people or three days, nor three marbles or three tales, but three itself? 3. The very number. We know beyond doubt that there is such a thing as ‘three’, that ‘three’ as a concept exists, but can we weigh it, measure it, hold it delicately in the palm of our hand, grip it, squeeze it, turn it over, knock it down? Is it any more physically real than pi? Any more rational than the square root of two? What is one, for that matter? Or zero? Infinity? What does it mean when we actually count? Has the human mind invented maths, or was maths just awaiting discovery? After all, the universe would still run exactly as it does were there no conscious minds to analyse it. Energy would still equal mass times the speed of light squared. Pythagoras’ theorem would still hold true. Two halves would make a whole.

But if numbers and equations are the foundation on which reality is built, and those numbers and equations are immaterial, why does the whole edifice not come crashing down? Why does it not un-be? This, to my feeble mind at least, defies understanding. How can an abstract construct of the mind so perfectly match the unmindful workings of reality? The universe may operate mathematically, but it has no need of maths. And yet man, set apart from his fellow creatures not only by the opposable thumb and the endless versatility of human language, but just as much by his innate propensity to calculate, has done the sums and worked some answers. We’ve described gravity, predicted black holes, measured the age of the universe, computed the patterns in ocean currents, solved the riddle of the planetary ellipses, unpacked the atom, mapped the inside – the quarks and leptons and bosons – extrapolated the potential existence of other universes, which theory posits may be infinite in number, and now go on seeking a unified model that will explain, mathematically, everything. Even the brain appears to run on mathematics; equations describe the electrical firing of neurons, and the spikes in activity that propagate signals between synapses encode the very stuff of thought and memory. That we should understand any of this is astonishing. That it can be understood at all is mindboggling. Is the only reasonable response to this conundrum to say that nature itself is maths? That all we see, and all we are, is the expression of a highly ordered unreality? Is that what reality is, the mirror image of a fiction? And what does it mean that in a calculable universe there should evolve, alongside self-awareness, not only the insatiable curiosity that keeps us gazing up in wonder at the stars, but also the compulsion to count them and find patterns in their size and distribution? Perhaps it means nothing at all, and numerate observers are merely a chance but by no means inevitable product of the combination of physical constants out of which our universal weft is woven. Perhaps it means this: that mathematics, as the pattern in the fabric of reality, must by default come hardwired into intelligence. Or maybe it means this; that what our minds so hungrily mistake for divinity is really a set of fundamental equations. After all, both are abstract, both are within and beyond us, both are perfect, both are pure, and we know maths to be true.

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Me, my self, and I “I wonder if I've been changed in the night. Let me think. Was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I'm not the same, the next question is 'Who in the world am I?' Ah, that's the great puzzle!” Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland “The memories fade/Like looking through a fogged mirror” MGMT, Kids

I am walking through a windy park in Tokyo where an exhibition of empty wooden panels has been set up. Suddenly a friend from my teenage years comes running up to me and asks how I got that scar. Not knowing what scar he’s referring to, I nevertheless ask him if he really thinks I got it accidentally or if he hurt me there himself. Unoffended by the question, he turns me to face a mirror and I am no longer in Tokyo but a shop I once worked in, and a sudden feeling of sadness has swept over me. The scar forms a shallow trench across my cheek, as if someone has rolled the edge of a burning disc against it. I tell my friend it has always been there, but he’s gone.

I don’t have any such scar, but I did have such a dream. It happened. I was there. Disjointed and improbable though it was, it had a logic of its own that made complete sense to me while I was dreaming it, and even though my surroundings were quite unlike their more familiar embodiments in the material world, the sensations I had were real: the cold wind in the park, the firm grip of my friend as he turned me towards the mirror. What’s more, the emotions I felt were entirely authentic. There was also a kind of personal honesty to the entire sequence, in that everything sprang from my own memory and imagination. Is it meaningful to ask if the dreaming me is the same as the day-to-day me? After all, it is my mind and my mind alone that processes my waking reality, and my mind alone that has my dreams. Both experiences are true; indeed, all experience is true to itself. But am I less of myself at night, or simply a different version, and if so, in what way?

Sitting here now, fingers at the keyboard, eyes on the screen, I am intuitively certain that the perceptions I am having are clear and accurate, that the room and the things on the desk are solid and real, and yet I am also aware that everything – the walls, the books, the pens and the computer, even the invisible air – is nothing but sub-atomic particles interacting with one another, or even more weirdly, energy at play. Nothing is exactly as I experience it. The black letters on the screen are no more than the absence of light. The smell of the coffee wafting up from the cup beside the computer is no more than certain molecules interacting with olfactory receptors in my nasal tract. Neither the colour nor the odour is strictly real. They are my brain’s interpretation of the data produced by my eyes and nose. At the same time, with every tap of a key, my fingertips feel a momentary resistance, while my ears pick up the attendant click of the mechanism. But the atoms of my fingers never actually touch the atoms of the keyboard, not in any conventional understanding of the word, and what I interpret as the sound of typing is actually just the air vibrating. Moreover, what my senses detect from the scene in which I find myself is just a very narrow selection of the total information coming at me. I do not, for example, see any light beyond the visible spectrum, even though there is infrared and ultraviolet all around me. Nor do I hear any sound beyond the range of frequencies audible to humans, although there may well be ones that a cat with its sharper ears would pick up.

What, then, exactly is this reality of which I feel so completely assured? Is it a stretch to say that it is, to a very large extent, a mere construct of my brain? And if so, then how, fundamentally, does it differ from a dream? Admittedly, the waking me is interacting with the world outside my own head, however elusive a world that might be, whereas the dreaming me is interacting primarily with itself, ignoring the outer world, if not completely then at least by incorporating unavoidable elements into the dream itself:

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the bark of a dog that becomes the growling demon in the nightmare, the peal of church bells that becomes the orchestra in concert. But the fact remains that in both modalities my mind, a separate entity to matter, and as yet inexplicable, remains both in and of itself. What, then, changes? The self? How does the one differ from the other? Being amorphous, it – the mind, the self – cannot be said to physically shrink with the onset of REM sleep or with tranquilising medication, any more than it can be said to expand with meditation or distort with hallucinogenics, not in any way we can materially measure. But clearly something does change when we’re in those different states. True, I don’t reflect on what is happening to me in a dream while I’m in it; I’m not aware that I’m dreaming in the way that I am aware of being awake, so we might say that the faculty of introspection is muted during a dream. Nevertheless, I’m still me. Perhaps I first need to ask myself: what is my self? Of what do I consist?

A man falls badly asleep, or is knocked right out, and in a manner of speaking dies. When he comes round some time later, he’s on a beach he’s never been to, wearing clothes he doesn’t recognise, without the faintest idea how he came to be there. Slowly, as if stirring from the deepest stupor, he realises that he cannot remember anything at all about yesterday, or the day before that, or any other day for that matter. He cannot recall a single detail from his past, nor anything about himself, not even his own name. The accumulated pages of his inner narrative have been totally wiped clean. He doesn’t yet know it, but he has been struck by a very rare and extreme form of amnesia that robs the brain of episodic and autobiographical memory. As the sun makes its presence known through the early morning clouds, he sits up, looks anxiously up and down the beach, as if some remnants of his story might be lying on the sand, realises there’s nothing there, and begins to panic. He searches his pockets for ID or a mobile, but the pockets are empty, save for a set of keys and a few stray coins. The keys look like they’re for a house or a flat, but he has no idea where he lives. For all he knows, he has been this way for ages.

Later, after the police find him wandering dazed and confused around town, he is taken to a nearby hospital where he is sedated, cared for and examined. Tests indicate that his other mental faculties are unimpaired. There is nothing wrong with his verbal abilities, and he can still read and write. He knows what things are. His spatial awareness has not been damaged, and his procedural memory is still intact; he remembers how to shower and shave; he can dress himself; when shown a computer, he has no trouble using it. He even says he remembers how to drive, and the doctors believe him – although they don’t put the claim to the test. Only his personal memory has been affected, but the effect has been devastating. He is unable to answer any of the questions put to him that might give some indication as to who he might be. He simply does not know. He cannot recall what work he does, or what his address is. He has no idea if he is married, divorced or single, or has children of his own. He cannot remember if he has any siblings. Nor does he know if his parents are alive, or even what their names are. He knows nothing about himself. Nothing.

During the weeks that follow, the hospital publishes photographs of their befuddled charge in newspapers and on TV in the hope that someone might come forward and identify him. The man himself waits as impatiently for a response as the various specialists who have taken an interest in his case. Not knowing who he is, or anything about his life, throws up question after question after question, and living without the answers, he tries hard to explain, is an incredibly disorientating and lonely experience, as if he has fallen out of someone else’s dream. The answers must be out there; somebody must have them.

At length, a young woman makes herself known; it’s his sister, relieved at having finally found her brother, whom she had registered as missing and was starting to fear might be dead. But even having re-learned from her his name, age and other personal details, the man still has no recollection of anything that has ever happened to him. He doesn’t even recognise the woman, who now starts to keep him company in the hospital, and he sits patiently but uncomprehendingly as she tries in vain to elicit some emotional response by telling him about their parents, the house they grew up in, the various jobs he has done and the people he knows. She brings along photos to show him, hoping they might help jog his memory, but none of them mean a thing. He recognises himself in the ones he is in, but everyone else

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is a stranger: a group of people at a barbecue, another at a wedding on the steps of a church, a dinner party at a flat his sister assures him is his. So devoid of any autobiographical hooks are these pictures that he may as well have been photoshopped into them.

His personality, however, is much the same as it has always been; he’s shy with everyone, likes to keep his things tidy, and shivers his leg when nervous. To pass the time he sketches, and he sketches well. It is an ability that has survived the brain damage he has somehow suffered, along with some scattered expert knowledge about the work he used to do, which his sister explains was in graphic design – although he has no recollection of doing such work itself. He draws scenes from his new life: the doctors, nurses and specialists who attend to him, the view from the ward window, the hospital gardens with their little pond. He has no trouble forming new memories (the amnesia being retrograde only, according to the neurologist in charge), and little by little develops a routine: up early for breakfast, a walk in the gardens, some reading or drawing, then lunch, followed by another walk, then sessions – when necessary – with the various people who want to examine, test or interview him, then dinner, more reading, perhaps another sketch or two, then he tidies his things and it’s bed. He even befriends some of the other long-term patients. But he can never recall anything of his life before waking up on the beach, nor can anyone establish how he ended up there. All his sister can confirm is the date he went missing, two days prior to being found wandering around the streets. The guess is that he may have fallen awkwardly and hit his head, or else been attacked and punched, in just such a way as to cause the damage, but nobody can be sure.

Meanwhile, everyone tries to make his life as comfortable as possible as they figure out the gentlest way to reintroduce him into the world beyond the hospital precincts. He thanks them frequently for their attentiveness, but complains, and complains often, of a kind of barren sadness, as if grieving the loss of someone he never knew, and it is apparent to anyone who spends any time with him that the emptiness he must feel, though unimaginable to anyone else, is both profound and inescapable. There is no way his memory will ever return; despite everyone’s best efforts, the damage is irreversible. The past is gone, all thirty-one years of it. Still, his sister continues to visit, hope fuelled not only by love but by the impossibility of seeing the man in the ward as anything other than the brother she has always known. Sometimes she brings along his uncle, sometimes one of his friends. On one occasion she even arrives with an ex-girlfriend in tow. To all of these visitors he is unfailingly polite, even joking with them, saying he hopes he was a good nephew, a good friend, a good lover, but he fails to know a single one of them, an experience which is so heartbreaking for everyone involved but him that at length his sister stops asking others to join her and comes only on her own. One day, tired of trying to bring him out of his oblivion, exhausted even, she throws aside an old toy of theirs that she was hoping might stir some reminiscence of their childhood, and at which he merely shrugs, and accuses him of not caring at all, of deliberately wasting her time, of showing more affection to the hospital staff than he ever now does to her. The first two accusations are borne of frustration, but the last of the three is true; he does care more for the staff, and it shows. He apologises – politely, as one might to a stranger – and tries to explain that he cannot help it; the people at the hospital are all from his new life, the only life he knows, the only life that has any meaning for him now: the life he has led since coming back round on the beach. She, on the other hand, despite the stories and the photos and the friends and the apparent childhood relics, is from a past he doesn’t recognise and which subsequently means nothing at all. The past, he explains, in a voice not much above a whisper – his past, that is – is dead. On her way out, the devastated woman bursts into tears in front of one of the doctors, telling him that she feels as if she has, to all intents and purposes, lost her brother for good.

And in a manner of speaking, she has. We are, to a very large extent, the people we have been. Along with personality, that knotty combination of behaviour, attitude and emotional response that shapes how we react to the events of our lives, memory is a crucial ingredient in defining who we are as individuals. From very early on in infancy our memories accrue, feeding into our identity. And yet memory, even when we think we have its loyalty, is a shifty friend. We misremember details and conflate experiences all the time, and as such make unreliable witnesses to the events of our own past. And as we age, we increasingly become the stories we tell ourselves about our own past in an ongoing

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process of self-interpretation, stories which are not always strictly true to events as they actually happened, or even to how we felt and reacted at the time. We shape the themes of our narrative to fit our own personal theories of why our lives have turned out the way that they have, much like the CV we write that gives an impression of planned progression through education and work, eliminating the haphazard elements of luck, circumstance and opportunism that often take us from one place to the next. We sometimes see misfortune where maybe there was only poor judgement on our own part, or hard-won success where maybe there was a significant element of being in the right time at the right place. We often see circumstances as dictating the decisions we make at a certain time, and disregard the alternative attitude we could have taken towards those circumstances but didn’t. And in this sense, to the extent that memory is fallible and retrospection a very malleable tool in the hands of our present selves, we are very much not the people we have been. How far can we then say that the man in the hospital, having lost his imperfectly remembered narrative

but retaining the core of his personality, is still himself? Can we divorce personality from experience

without wading into the murky waters of the nature-nurture debate? For example, was his shyness

shaped by early childhood episodes, the memories of which may have vanished leaving only the result?

Or would he have been shy no matter what kind of childhood he had? Either way, is this all there is to

the self? An accretion of memory and a set of character traits? Surely there is more to us than that? What

about the inner dialogue we have with ourselves, the constant chatter of our own ideas, that carries on –

sometimes against our will – even when we are outwardly silent and still? What about imagination?

After all, we are as much defined by our ability to access the future through that creative faculty as we

are by our ability to revisit the past through memory. We are creatures that cannot help but plan, project

and look forward. Even in the closing moments of our lives, if we expire naturally, awake until the end,

and not as the victim of a gunshot, a car crash or an earthquake, surely the undrugged mind thinks into

the future still, towards the final, unreportable darkening? But the mind works sideways, too, into

neither the past nor the future but the re-invented present. A rich heady world of alternatives.

Something it is that wanders, something it is that dreams… Something it must be, anyway…

… anyhoo

Goodness me… For a few minutes back there, during the gap between the previous paragraph and this, and as a sudden storm began to hurtle raindrops at the window, my mind left the room. It made its way down the sodden street and out of the city, across the ocean and under the sky, landing gently on a hot sunny beach in the steamy South Pacific. For the space of an idle daydream the real world was at bay. I had nothing to worry about, all to enjoy. Palm trees swayed to and fro in the tropical breeze. Colourful birds sang love songs to one another as they flitted between the branches, while sailing boats bobbed lazily in the turquoise lagoon. The beach stretched off as far as I could fantasise, and where the surf met the shore a bevy of sleek young men went splashing and frothing around. I summoned up an ice-cold beer, took a generous sip, swung myself off the hammock I’d imagined into being, and joined them for a frolic in the foam. The next thing I knew –

A peal of thunder brings me quickly back to London. The foam evaporates, the lagoon drains away, at least until the next time I can conjure up its waters out of nowhere, and the men… the men just disappear. In another world entirely, Emily Dickinson sits at her tiny writing desk in the Amherst room that she seldom left and punctuates her seamless thoughts with dashes of urgent breath. The brain – she says – is wider than the sky, containing within its infinite capaciousness not only the entire universe but the whole of a person’s being, not only all we are and have been, but everything we can ever imagine as well. The sand on the Earth is countable, grain by grain by grain, but the beaches of my mind are filled to infinity. The walls of the narrow room give out. The poetry escapes. The man in the hospital falls into another night’s sleep. His sister, having dried her eyes and come back to the room, watches over him, almost as an adult would a child. On the cabinet by his bed is a rapidly

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filling sketchpad, full of pictures of his new life. He is fast running out of fresh pages. But what fills the canvas of his dreams, she asks herself? Does she walk through that landscape herself, and if so how, given all that the tests have shown? Is there some lingering affection from before the incident that is accessible only when he is asleep, or is she now as new a visitor to his nocturnal world as the staff and other patients? More to the point, she wonders – and the doctors wonder, too – what went on in her brother’s damaged mind between the blow to the brain that knocked him out and his coming back round on the beach? Was it something akin to a coma? An anaesthetic slumber? Or did he dream then also, and if so, of what? Did he pass through a valley already denuded of autobiographical reference? Or did all personal meaning vanish as he slept, like a host of familiar phantoms taking turns to leave the room? Mind the gap “My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery – always buzzing, humming, soaring, roaring, diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What’s this passion for?” Virginia Woolf “The Brain is just the weight of God— For—Heft them—Pound for Pound— And they will differ—if they do— As Syllable from Sound—” Emily Dickinson, The Brain Is Wider Than the Sky

So how does it do it, the brain? How does the central organ of our nervous system contain the mind? We have neurons, about ninety billion of them, with their dendrites and axons, forming billions upon billions of synaptic connections with one another in a vast, unimaginably intricate neural network. Each of these neurons, like other cells, has a nucleus, cytoplasm, mitochondria and other organelles, as well as specialised neurotransmitters and chemical receptors, all working together to carry out the numerous tasks needed for signalling and survival. A biochemical computer, if you will – though such an analogy belittles its actual complexity. But we also have thoughts, perceptions, memories, dreams, ideas, beliefs, feelings and imagination. We can plan, analyse and introspect. We are self-aware. How? How do the workings of a material object the consistency of tofu and the size of a small melon result in these subjective experiences? How does consciousness arise? This is the so-called hard problem: how matter generates mind. Though housed within the brain, our conscious experience is neither walled in nor roofed over. Our memories push out against no barriers; our dreams are held by no restraints. Flights of fancy really do take off towards a sky that is not there. Likewise, I cannot measure my personality in millimetres any more than I can weigh my emotions in grams, or say my thoughts have this shape or that. But I can say what my neurons are made of, and when they fire, and how.

It seems clear that the mind arises – somehow – out of the complex interplay between individual neurons, the networks they form, and certain larger neural structures of the brain, such as the cerebral cortex and the thalamus, but not the organ in its entirety; much that goes on inside the brain, indeed the vast majority of it, is automatic functioning. Some scientists hold that there may be another, more fundamental, factor at play, possibly a biological aspect of the brain that we have yet to discover, or maybe even something at the sub-atomic level; some philosophers reject the idea that the physical aspects of the brain alone can account for conscious experience. But that the brain and the mind are inextricably linked is not in question. Many changes or abnormalities in the brain result in altered states of mind. Brain damage can wreak all kinds of havoc, from the kind of aphasia that takes away our words to the memory loss of the man on the beach, even to coma, or the horrifying locked-in syndrome. Dementia strips away the sufferer’s personality as brutally as a vandal might chip apart a statue, rendering all but unrecognisable the ruined person left behind. Schizophrenia results in people thinking

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thoughts they think aren’t theirs. Synaesthesia adorns C-sharps and F-flats in patterns and colours and makes particular phonemes taste of lemon or egg on the tongue. Then there are the psychoactive drugs that warp the experience of time and even self. But more prosaic changes also bend the mind. Sleep, for example, when it leads us through the alternative reality of dreams (through windy parks and shallow scars). Being drunk, for another. And what about general anaesthetics? Do they not, in effect, switch the mind off? Equally, the mind affects the brain and nervous system. If I decide to stand up, my body responds. How an intangible decision can be converted into the actions necessary to set me on my feet is quite bizarre. But the question that remains is not so much which parts of the brain are responsible for generating the mind, or even what purpose it evolved to fulfil, but rather, much more fundamentally, how it is possible at all. How can something as immaterial as a hunch, say, or an opinion or a nightmare emerge from the very material organ we carry around inside our skull?

When, amongst others, the neuroscientists, biologists, chemists, physicists, psychologists and linguists put their collective brains to work in search of an answer to this perplexing conundrum, essentially what is happening is this; the human mind is asking of itself the following: “How do I come to be?” Setting aside any philosophical musings on this elegant circularity, this bio-intellectual puppy dog chasing its own tail, we first need to clarify what exactly the mind is, and this seems almost as slippery a bar of soap in the rough hands of science as it does in the gloves of philosophy. Is it, for example, a processor of symbols? Do we experience the fluid integration of these symbols as the ebb and flow of consciousness, and if so, how exactly are these symbols created, stored and processed? Are there layers to the mind? After all, is analysing a theoretical problem in a maths class not a higher order of thought than merely letting the mind wander out of the window of the lecture hall and into whatever daydreams may await it? Or when a concert pianist plays, what are we to make of the brain’s delicate, accurate, automatic guiding of the fingers coupled with the deeply-felt interpretation of the score, a blending that flows forth as rich, wonderful music that can move us and inspire? Or when a player on the court, alert, ready, constantly in motion, notes his teammates’ and opponents’ positions and trajectories, plus the bounce and the arc of the ball, and then, with a split-second reckoning that precedes any decision, launches his attack? There’s no theorising going on there, no idle window-wandering, though there’s maths and coordination in both. Can we not say then that the mind is more alive than ever? Alive, truly, as fully engaged as it can ever be, melded to the body that transports it? Or is the mind the aggregate, at any one time, of the following: sensory input, the various short and long term memories being worked with, linguistic processing, the stored knowledge under access, plus reasoning and emotion? If so, how do these aspects combine to produce something which we experience as continually in flux and yet seamless and holistic? Is the disconcerting double-take of déjà-vu a glitch in this mental stitching? What about out-of-body experiences? Are they examples of the mind malfunctioning?

Whatever it is, the mind, it is private. It is impossible for us to know what it is like to be anyone other than ourselves, or for our inner selves to be externally known. We may tell each other our thoughts and feelings, but we cannot think the thoughts of others, or feel their feelings. We may even set down what we think on paper, for our perusal only, intended for a readership no wider than one, as is the case with Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, but even then, should our writings be discovered and pored over by other eyes, they would offer no more than a window into the inner world of the author. It is not the same as being in that world and looking out; feelings and thoughts, by their very nature, cannot even live outside the mind; they are aspects of the mind. Written words do not contain them. They may symbolise them, but when no one is looking they’re just ink on a page. And even once read, the original thought is not so much reconstituted as recreated in the mind of the reader, and even then not exactly, as there will have been, to one degree or another, an element of interpretation involved, especially if the author and the reader differ widely in time or culture, or there has been translation involved as well.

The fruits of creativity might also be said to offer us a direct insight into the cognitive workings of others, but the same holds true for a piece of art as it does for a private diary. When Hamlet deliberates whether or not to take up arms against a sea of troubles, we are, in a sense, privy to Shakespeare’s original thoughts as they were when he first had them, before the quill had touched the page. When the opening bars of Vivaldi’s Spring burst into life, the musical phrases that delight us are ones that budded

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and blossomed in that composer’s mind. But this is not to know how it felt to be those men, not even how it felt to be there coming up with that dark soliloquy or those sprightly notes. And besides, though set down on paper and played down the centuries on countless stages and violins, they are, in a manner of speaking, expressions of dead ideas, in that the brains that held the minds that first conceived them have now putrefied. The same is true of things more substantial than music and poetry, solid things in wood and brick and stone. When we stand on Primrose Hill and look across London at St Paul’s, the lead-covered dome we see in the distance was once an unconstructed notion in Wren’s head, but even though the cathedral still stands, all these hundreds of years later, the mind of the architect is as dead as his corpse in the crypt below. Only Wren knew what it was like to be Wren, only Vivaldi Vivaldi. No one but Shakespeare knew his own mind, none but Aurelius Aurelius.

Likewise, the mind of our closest friend is as impenetrable a universe as the minds of those dead and buried artists and that long-ago Roman emperor. We may know our friend’s opinion on every subject under the sun, his tastes, his fears and dreams, the way he reasons, the way he feels, the way he reacts to life’s events, even to the point of being able to predict his behaviour. We may empathise with his experiences, having had similar ones of our own. We may have in common all that makes us human – the same set of emotions, the same drives, the same basic neural patterning. But we still do not know what it is like to actually be him, to live with his eyes, his ears, his body, to experience the world with his particular brain.

On the face of it, this is manifestly obvious – we live our lives, ultimately, in lonely cages of subjectivity – but we are in fact so far away from knowing another person’s mind that we cannot even say with any certainty that what we assume to be shared perceptual experience is indeed the same for everyone. Take something as straightforward as red, for example. I know what red is, and what things are red. Red is the colour of strawberries, London buses, stop lights, the screen in the YouTube logo, the outermost arc of the rainbow. And I know what green is. Green is grass, go signs, celery and Spotify. But how do I know that my friend and I, each as far as the other is concerned, do not see these colours reversed? My red might be his green, his green my red. We have no way of knowing. Red is the word that describes the colour of strawberries and stop signs – on that we agree – but it’s impossible to ascertain if we actually experience the same colour. If he sees what to me is green where I see red, and what to me is red where I see green, and we ask each other the colour of blood and emeralds, we will both still say the former is red and the latter is green. And even though we can scientifically distinguish ‘red’ and ‘green’ light, and know how the eye works, this does not tell us if our individual qualitative experiences of these wavelengths is the same or not (any more than we can say why the processes that result in one qualitative experience should result in that particular experience and not another). For all I know, painting a description from my own subjective visual palette, my friend may walk through fields of scarlet grass, looking up into an orange sky, watching purple clouds float by.

Of course, there is no good reason to think we do not see the colours as the same, only no way – at least as far as our current understanding and knowledge go – to ever prove it. But it tells us something fundamental about subjective experience; that it is ultimately unknowable from information alone. I could never explain red to someone with congenitally colourless vision such that they could experience it (any more than I can ever know how infrared light, invisible to humans, appears to those creatures that can in fact see it – would it be another shade of red, I wonder, or something entirely unimaginable?). I could tell the person in question that red is the colour of rubies and Coke cans and Santa and whatnot, but that would mean nothing to them in their monochromatic world, and even if they associated a certain shade of grey with those objects which we see as red, and could thereby distinguish which objects appear red to people with full colour vision (as totally colour blind people are known to be able to do), they still would not know red itself. I could tell them that red is the visual perception produced by light with a wavelength between 620 and 740 nanometers, and that it is a certain kind of photoreceptor cell known as the L cone cell which detects such light in the retina, but that wouldn’t help either. I could tell them all there is to know about red except, crucially, what red is like. And to a person blind from birth, I could not even tell them what it is like to see.

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But is this all we can say of the mind? That it is private? Is there not even a hint of a bridge to span the impossible gap between our formless ephemeral musings and the wet fatty cells that produce them? Is the mind, perhaps, a melding of information? Again, it would be a mistake to liken the brain too readily to the kind of computer with which we have grown so quickly familiar, the kind on which I am currently typing these ramblings and which is entertaining me through the fits and starts of composition with digitalised pop songs of someone else’s bliss and heartbreak. Yet in one crucial aspect the brain and the computer are the same; each is a material processor of immaterial information. Even the humblest of pocket calculators deals with the input and output of data. If I press the buttons to multiply two by three, the number six that comes back out of the computational circuitry does not actually exist there in any physical sense, but as information it certainly does, encoded in binary ones and zeros, or more precisely, in the off and on states of tiny semiconductor switches. Similarly, when I do the same sum in my head, the information is somehow contained and calculated within my neural wiring and the firing patterns of individual neurons.

The neuroscientists are busy trying to work out the so-called neural code that is supposed to underpin our cerebral workings, and which once deciphered (if indeed it ever fully is) will be added to our growing library of codes: not only the binary and hexadecimal codes that hold the data on our chips, but also the hieroglyphs, runes, kana, kanji and alphabets that transmit our words, as well as the Morse code we use in radio communication, the semaphore that aids shipping and air traffic control, and the genetic code that reads our genes. The existence of such a code would prove that the brain, though not akin to a computer in any conventional sense, does operate in such a way that its data can be read (and one day maybe written). Nevertheless, a calculator is not self-aware, nor is a laptop, not even the tangled internet itself. The brain, of course – even the brain of a mouse, let alone that of a human – is far more intricate and complex than even the most powerful supercomputer, but surely the mind must be something more than just the product of increasing complexity. Where does it start? There are animals besides us that have minds, albeit of a very different nature to ours. Other primates, certain species of bird, and even octopuses all demonstrate a range of intelligence, memory, tool manipulation and communicative ability that strongly suggest a degree of subjective consciousness, and it is clear that animals enjoy pleasure and suffer pain. But does a muus have an inner life? Or a mouse? Or a cockroach? What about a fish? Is there a threshold of neural complexity above which a creature can be said to develop a mind? Or does it depend on the type of creature, the development of sentience and self-awareness having conferred some evolutionary advantage? What about the development of an individual human being? Clearly a zygote does not have a mind; the brain itself is several weeks and thousands of cell divisions away from getting started. But once the brain does begin to grow inside the embryo, at what point does the mind come into being? At eight weeks? Twelve? Twenty-four? Does it come gradually, or at some point just suddenly kick in? Does it happen after birth, when the newborn takes its first gulp of air and awakens to the noisy world outside the womb? Is that when it begins? Or does it come on only later, during early infancy? And likewise, at the other end of the journey, do our minds flicker out and switch off? Or, like the digitalised love song I’ve just been listening to, with its yearning need for closure, do they simply fade away?

Ever deeper go the roots, ever wider spreads the canopy Maurice Sendak [to NPR’s Terri Gross, who is interviewing him live on radio over the phone]: I’m not unhappy about becoming old. I’m not unhappy about what must be. It makes me cry only when I see my friends go before me, and life gets... is emptied… I don’t believe in an afterlife, but… I still fully expect to see my brother again and… It’s like a dream life… I am reading a biography of Samuel Palmer, which was written by a woman in England. I can't remember her name. And it's sort of how I feel now, when he was just beginning to gain his strength as a creative man and beginning to see nature. But he believed in God, you see, and he believed in heaven, and he believed in hell. Goodness gracious, that must have made life much easier. It's harder for us non-believers. But, you know, it’s something I’m finding out as

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I’m aging – that I am in love with the world. And I look right now, as we speak together, out my window, in my studio, and I see my trees, my beautiful, beautiful maples that are hundreds of years old… and they’re there, they’re beautiful, and you see, I can see how beautiful they are, I can take time to see how beautiful they are. It is a blessing to get old. It is a blessing to find the time, to do the things, to read the books, to listen to the music… You know, I don’t think I’m rationalising anything, I really don’t. This is all inevitable, and I have no control over it. I have nothing but praise now, really, for my life. I’m not unhappy. I cry a lot because I miss people. I cry a lot because they die and I can’t stop them. They leave me, and I love them more. But I have my young people here, four of them who are studying, and they look at me as somebody who knows everything. Poor kids! Oh god, there are so many beautiful things in the world which I will have to leave when I die, but… I’m ready, I’m ready, I’m ready…. Terri: Well, listen – Maurice Sendak [interrupting]: You know, I have to tell you something. Terri: Go ahead. Maurice Sendak: You are the only person I have ever dealt with in terms of being interviewed or talking to who brings this out in me. There’s something very unique and special in you which I so trust. When I heard that you were going to interview me, or that you wanted to, I was really, really pleased. Terri: Well, I’m really glad we got the chance to speak, because when I heard you had a book coming out I thought, what a good excuse to call up Maurice Sendak and have a chat! Maurice Sendak: Yes, that’s what we always do, isn’t it? Terri: Yeah, it is. Maurice Sendak: It’s what we’ve always done. Terri: It is. Maurice Sendak: Thank god we’re still around to do it! Terri: Yes. Maurice Sendak: And almost certainly I’ll go before you go… so I won’t have to miss you. Terri: Oh, god, what a sw… Maurice Sendak: And I don’t know whether I’ll do another book or not. I might. It doesn’t matter. I’m a happy old man. But I will cry my way all the way to the grave. Terri: Well, I’m so glad you have a new book. I’m really glad we had a chance to talk. Maurice Sendak: I am too. Terri: And I wish you all good things. Maurice Sendak: I wish you all good things. Live your life, live your life, live your life. Maurice Sendak in his final interview with NPR’s Terri Gross

花のとき人来てもし問うなら

ば可松桜と名を知らせてよ When the flowers are in bloom Should someone come by and enquire Let them know the name: these are Kamatsu’s trees Poem engraved on a stone beside some four-hundred year-old cherry blossom trees in a garden in Yashima, Kagawa Prefecture, Japan

Gathering and schooling

I am falling in love with complexity. In the turquoise lagoon of my dream gather fish, then they dip, then they dive, then they spin. None collide, but all fins follow, turning thousands of tiny individual movements into dazzling formations, conferring safety and strength in numbers and confusing predators. Elsewhere, in a spectacular display of aerial dynamics, a murmuration of starlings bends and twists above a lake. One moment it’s a dense ribbon of flapping wings, curling and tensing. The next it stretches. The next it swells. Then it’s back to the ribbon again, tensing afresh and curling. But here’s the thing; no single fish by itself can synchronise the rapidly changing formations of the school. Each one detects the movements of its immediate neighbours and reacts accordingly, in keeping with simple

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rules to avoid those closest to it, to align with others somewhat further ahead, and to steer towards ones in the distance. From such basic interactions emerges the behaviour of the group. Likewise, a starling can’t murmur alone. The flock, often numbering in the tens of thousands, is not led by any particular member; each individual bird behaves in a localised manner, interacting only with its six or seven nearest flockmates. The starlings are not even fully aware of the wider group in which they fly, and certainly not of the collective choreography which to our pattern-hungry vision appears so beautiful. The flock self-organises.

Here in the city meanwhile, rain falls from the bellies of low-hanging clouds and soaks the life going on down below. Stormwinds blast the brick and concrete and do battle with the trees. Lightning tears up the sky and then – one, two, three, I count, four, five, six – the thunder cracks. But at the edges of the storm the winds are weaker. Sun is breaking through the clouds. Still further yet and the sky is blue, the air is warm, and mere breezes tickle the grass. The thing is this; out of breezes grow the storms. The report on TV shows first the weather over London (covered by cloud, predictably), then over the whole of the British Isles (predictably unpredictable); then it zooms out to show the wider picture of Europe (to the north: beer, blondes, fjords, Luther, techno, high taxes, log cabins; to the south: al fresco, olives, Latin, gilt, guilt, flamenco, sand); finally it takes a cursory look at several other locations around the globe: Los Angeles (sunny), Buenos Aires (also sunny), Sydney (unquestionably sunny), Bangkok (not so sunny), Mumbai (pissing it down), Khartoum (take a brolly just in case), Papeete (not at all what you’d expect). Then the graphics culminate in a picture of the glorious planet in full spin, wearing its coating with pride, the troposphere a-swirl with cold fronts and sunny spells and jet streams and cyclones, and it’s as clear as the light on a cloudless day in Keswick: the weather is fluid and borderless, complex beyond our easy comprehension. Simple factors combine into a remarkably intricate system: changes in the angle of sunlight, variations in moisture levels, pressure gradients, differences in surface features, human intervention – all of these interact in a manner which, albeit fundamentally deterministic, ultimately results in a whirligig of chaos. It’s not that the butterfly simply flaps its wings in Rio, stirring up tornados in Texas, but that the tiniest change in conditions at any one time can lead to enormous differences in the system overall.

I find great comfort in complexity and chaos, and not only because as words they alliterate (and I’m very f-fornicating fond of alliteration), but because they show us that there really is more to the whole than the sum of its parts. I don’t want to be reduced, to be dismantled into code and percentages; I don’t want to be diagrammed; I am not an equation; I refuse to be worked out. And yet we live in an age that holds fast to the promise of rational explanations and painting-by-number answers. We cannot help ourselves. Children of the Enlightenment, we always prefer to follow the arrow downwards, from observable phenomena into their ever-decreasing constituent parts. First the chemical elements, then the atom, then the electrons, protons and neutrons, then the other subatomic particles, the fermions and bosons, then the so-called strings, until we burrow down to the bedrock of immaterial energy itself. But there’s nothing in the elementary particles or the interactions between them from which one could go in the other direction and extrapolate something as vastly complex as the universe, let alone the emergence of life itself, the appearance of the mind, the meaning of the words I am writing now, or the disjointed pleasure of my sandy dreams. Nothing. And at this I rejoice. Yes, of course, the fruits of the scientific method are rich and rewarding. I would hate to give up my laptop, or spurn antibiotics, or unwatch all the documentaries I’ve seen. I would hate to be plunged into darkness, and thank the good fortune to have been born at a time when it is possible to know so much about everything, to have such incredibly diverse opportunities to learn, and to be accustomed enough to the accelerating pace of technological change not to find the future frightening. Day in day out, science closes the gaps in our knowledge of the fundamental laws and processes underpinning reality, and I for one would never turn away an answer at the door of my curiosity, no matter how many sacred cattle it might happen to overturn. Nevertheless – and this, I believe, is the crux – the gap is never fully closed; a lot still squeezes inside. You cannot find love with a microscope, or sing songs of its loss in numbers. And the city outside is more than the bricks it is built from, more than just a street plan, more than a tally of citizens. We are the city ourselves, and we gather and we swarm. We are birds and fish and breezes. Let it rain, let it rain, let it rain!

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Say cheese, Man – you never know who’s looking! Borman: Oh my God! Look at that picture over there! Here's the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty! Anders: Hey, don't take that, it's not scheduled. Borman [laughing]: You got a color film, Jim? Anders: Hand me that roll of color, quick, will you... Lovell: Oh man, that's great! The Apollo 8 Astronauts, December 24th 1968, in orbit with a camera around the Moon

Or else, we are dust. Thinking, dreaming, loving dust, admittedly, but dust all the same. We turn our eyes towards the stars through increasingly powerful telescopes – from early Dutch prototypes, through Galileo’s keen improvements, all the way up to Hubble – and peer into the darkness, just to satisfy our hunger for knowledge. But the deeper we peer, the tinier we become. It once shocked the Victorians to discover that the planet was far older than the four or five thousand years they had previously believed, and it shook the very foundations of their worldview to discover evolution. More or less overnight, man lost his presumed pre-eminence amongst the birds and the beasts, the cattle and the creeping things; Darwin had kicked the pedestal out from under our ignorance, leaving the other primates hooting and cackling at their cousin’s fall from grace. And as if this were not humiliating enough, our apparent day of earthly dominance, which we had arrogantly supposed to be ordained by the divine, dwindled to a fraction of a second in a geological timescale barely comprehendible to those who had earlier thought in terms that could be reckoned from the Great Flood, and which remains, in truth, barely more graspable to us today than it would have been to a caveman. Now our curiosity has gotten the better of us yet again; not quite killed the cat exactly (whatever bonnet it may have been wearing), but put us in our place. The universe, it turns out, is really, really, really big, far bigger than our forebears could ever possibly have imagined. So big, in fact, that the brain implodes just thinking about it.

Just months ago the Cassini-Hyugens Orbiter spacecraft swung under the rings of Saturn and turned her onboard lens towards the Earth. NASA told the people of the planet to wave at the sky and smile (though wars went on and children starved, and I for one was too preoccupied with my own trivial concerns to look up) and then the camera clicked. The resulting snapshot seems to me a kind of cosmic selfie by the whole human race, past members included, our collective arm stretched out almost one and half billion kilometres to take it. The image captured is one of a tiny number of photographs of our planet that have been taken from (relatively) deep space. In it, we occupy a handful of pixels. The moon can be seen alongside us. Still, incredible though it is to think about the centuries of scientific progress and technological inventiveness that went into making the whole thing possible, it’s not actually much to look at (not with Saturn’s rings upstaging us, anyway; they do look concentrically cool). But that’s only because at such a vast distance the face of the Earth cannot be made out. The true beauty of home is stunningly apparent in another picture, the one that made the world take a sharp collective breath of awe, and which became known as Earthrise, taken by the astronauts on the Apollo 8 mission on Christmas Eve 1968. In this incredible image the planet, one hemispherical dome in darkness, the other bathing in the sun, soars above the dry, pockmarked moon, completely outdazzling the stars. Clouds swirl across her brilliant blue seas and rich terrain, like a piece of breathing marble. It was taken before I was born, but there on the surface somewhere are my parents, there somewhere my older brother. All in all, not bad, I’d say: the great big family of man, and we’re looking pretty good.

But the Cassini-Hyugens image, like that other famous photograph of Earth taken from even further out in space, the 1990 image captured by the Voyager spacecraft on its odyssey through the Solar System, is certainly humbling. In both of them we are nothing more than what Carl Sagan called a pale blue dot. But at least we are a dot. In the bigger picture of the Milky Way, our sun itself would be no more than a flickering pixel, unremarkable amongst its billions of fellow stars, and the planets – even mighty, stormstained Jupiter – would be invisible. And the Milky Way itself is but one of countless galaxies in an inconceivably enormous universe, a single grain of sand upon a giant stretching beach. It is hard not to

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feel insignificant on such a scale, hard not to feel a sense of existential loneliness. But man needs answers, and cannot bear to be alone. So what do we do? We set up banks of giant telescopes and ask ourselves: are there other minds out there? Have distant alien telescopes swept our corner of the sky as their makers seek to satisfy their own unquenchable curiosity? Have they sent out any signals? Is ours but one of many planets not only to have the conditions suitable for the emergence of life, but to have brought forth life as well? Does intelligence develop on a regular basis? After all, given the vast numbers of stars in existence, there need only be a tiny percentage of them with planets in orbit, and a tiny percentage of those with planets at the correct distance and of the correct constitution, for there to be millions upon millions of viable earths out there, and there need only be a handful of those with intelligent, self-aware life forms crawling about on them for us to say that we have mindful neighbours, no matter how distant and different they may be. Surely, given the statistics, we cannot be the only ones to watch the skies and wonder? Or are we indeed alone, truly alone, the one-off result of a very improbable set of eventualities?

Whatever the truth of the matter, it is comforting again, after gazing into the bottomless darkness and trying to fathom the various answers, to close our eyes and remember that there is a universe within us as well as without. A universe of such wonder and invention that it can roam and frolic on non-existent beaches, dream up symphonies, soliloquies and cathedrals, play with numbers, pun with words; that can imagine the minds of others; that can paint, scribble, cook, sew, dance and juggle; that can send spacecraft out into the deep dark yonder, there to wander; that can ponder its own beginnings, muse on its own demise, and that is not only capable of counting the photons that come falling from the heavens, but that contains the very germ of curiosity that makes us look up in the first place. But then here we are again, confronted with that insatiable puppy-dog pet of ours, the one that goes maddeningly around and around in never-decreasing circles, trying to catch at its own tail. It’s a difficult ride to descend from, curiosity, and why on earth would we want to anyway? The alternative is unimaginable; find the point where the circle starts, or else stop asking questions.

Six times nine comes out as forty-two, but let me always stand corrected

“Oh terrific,” muttered Phoucha, flinging aside his notebook and wiping away a tiny tear. “Look, alright, alright,” said Loonquawl, “can you please just tell us the question?”

“The Question?” "Yes!" "Of Life, the Universe, and Everything?" "Yes!" Deep Thought pondered this for a moment. "Tricky," he said. "But can you do it?" cried Loonquawl. Deep Thought pondered this for another long moment. Finally: "No," he said firmly. Both men collapsed onto their chairs in despair. "But I'll tell you who can," said Deep Thought. They both looked up sharply. "Who?" "Tell us!" “I speak of none other than the computer that is to come after me," intoned Deep Thought, his voice

regaining its accustomed declamatory tones. "A computer whose merest operational parameters I am not worthy to calculate. And yet I will design it for you. A computer which can calculate the Question to the Ultimate Answer, a computer of such infinite and subtle complexity that organic life itself shall form part of its operational matrix. And you yourselves shall take on new forms and go down into the computer to navigate its ten-million-year program! Yes! I shall design this computer for you. And I shall name it also unto you. And it shall be called . . . The Earth."

Phouchg gaped at Deep Thought. "What a dull name," he said.

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If not now, when?

When exactly is now? Is it this minute, this second, this very nanosecond? Is it the present in which these words are being written, or the one in which they’re being read? When we dream at night and roam untethered through that blurring landscape of memory and fantasy, can we really be said to be living in the present, even as the clock on the bedside table ticks towards the coming dawn? If not, and the electrical activity of our somnambulant neurons embodies some unsequential form of being, when-else are we? Yesterday? Tomorrow? Some other state of now? How do we pin ‘now’ down?

One answer would be to define it as the temporal point at which the future becomes the past. Common sense says this is the case. The day after tomorrow becomes the day before last, tonight becomes this morning, a minute from now sixty seconds ago, and ‘now’ is the point of convergence. But such an idea only deepens the enigma. How can there exist a junction between an unreal future yet to happen and an unreal past which is no more? If the future is a vast immeasurable nest of unhatched moments, and the past an ever-increasing graveyard of deceased ones, how do such moments occur and how do they expire? For every instant dies immediately upon its own birth, and the lifetime of ‘now’ is nothing. It doesn’t hang around, or grow, or in any way develop. It does not linger. It no sooner is than was. And even though a single minute can seem to last forever or otherwise fly by, depending on how we feel, we can never within that minute fix the exact present in which we find ourselves, the exact instant that is ’now’. We cannot say, “Here it comes, here it comes, any second… Look, it’s coming, it’s coming – it’s here!” Indeed, we do not even perceive the present as a fixed moment, but rather as something passing through us, or else something we are moving through. But from what into what exactly? Relativity tells us, and experiments have demonstrated, that time speeds up or slows down for different observers in respect of one another, according to their relative motion, yet for each observer the perception of time is the same, and were we able to measure their separate ‘nows’, insofar as they are experienced, it holds that each would last as fleetingly as the other, such is the subjective nature of the experience itself. All we think and all we feel, we think and feel within the present. Not only that, but ‘now’ is as true and current for me as it is for everyone else alive with me; our perception of self in respect of our breathing peers is founded on the notion that all our ‘nows’ are simultaneous, and that ‘now’, if I am Tom, is as immediate for Dick as it is for Harry. Indeed, as certainly as these incorporeal thoughts of mine are real, though I cannot weigh or touch them, this impossible point of existence must exist.

Or maybe not. Maybe ‘now’ is an illusion. Maybe in reality, the reality our limited perception is not privy to, all time exists at once, and in the same way that all steps along a path remain in existence even as we walk along it, both ahead and behind, our feet touching only one point at a time, every moment is happening now. Indeed, our understanding of physics tells us that time is simply another dimension, though distinct to the three spatial ones with which we are familiar, insofar as it has an arrow and we move along it in one direction only. But that hardly unravels the riddle of why now should be now. Would extra-dimensional entities see us complete in four dimensions, the three of space plus time, stretched out from birth to death like some overlapping montage, much as we see two-dimensional images come and go upon a length of film strip that has been slowed down, or one of those flipbook animations where little characters dance and run around the corner of the page? Could such creatures, to be fanciful, rewind or freeze-frame us? Could they focus on a single unflipped page? Are we always now? Or rather, though language here begins to fail me, is every one of our ‘nows’ always there, as current as the rest, the umpteenth image as alive as the zillionth? Though dead to us today, does some early human still peer out from her cave and survey the new day dawning in a prehistoric valley? Or is she truly dead, her impressions as voided as her bones are dust? Does Homer still enchant his first audience on some sunny Ionian hillside with songs of wanderings and war? Or is he really no more than today’s delightful echoes? Does the twentieth century planet still sit poised in front of a crackly television set, rapt and waiting – its collective breath held – for man’s first footsteps on the Moon? Is that happening still, that giant leap, visitable in theory were some time machine to allow it? And somewhere ahead of us along the temporal line of events, is the sun already swelling into the massive red giant that we know it will become? Is the Earth already consumed within its fires? Could we go

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there too, to that far-off cataclysm, and watch the final nebula expanding, then come back home and show the photos? And on a shorter, more personal scale, what about me? Insignificant me? Do I still come bawling and gurgling into the world of 1973? Do I still chase my younger brother endlessly around that long-ago East End lamppost, giggling after him as he giggles after me, killing time with unexamined life as we wait for mum to finish shopping? Do I still watch the world grow wider on the way up to Manchester in my dad’s old Volvo, eighteen summers into life, ripe with anticipation of the future? Am I here at this keyboard forever, in my older brother’s flat, thinking this same thought, at this same instant, this second, now, right now? Am I also eternally dying, my death, my very death – though at this point yet to happen – merely later along the footage, the final corner to be turned?

Indeed, let’s say we actually did have a time machine and were able to go back to the past, or travel ahead to the future, to flip and flicker through the footage, as it were. Would that not mean that we were simply leaving one present to visit another? In which case the past and the future must also be the present, or at least a present, and the nest and the graveyard, again, are one. But if every moment is happening now, point after point after point along the mysterious beaded line of time, then the present must be fixed, immutable, and that raises the larger, more disturbing question: are we fated in all we do? Is there no free will? Such a deterministic notion might seem intolerable to our sense of who we are, to our apparent liberty of thought and action. Delve deep, however, back into the biochemical workings of the nervous system, and it is hard to see how the fundamental laws of nature do not ultimately dictate our every concept, every move; that the lump of grey matter inside the skull, in spite of being the most complex object known to man, and despite containing the mind (insofar as it can be understood to be contained), really is no more than an extraordinarily elaborate machine; and even though we may not know everything there is to know about the state of the present, the position and trajectory of every particle in the universe, does it not hold true that nature is bound by her own laws to move in one way and one way only from this ‘now’ to the next? Or is that where the quantum comes in, and the cat leaps out of the box?

Or could it be, again as some theories posit, that the future exists as an infinite range of outcomes, and the present is the point at which just one amongst the many is selected, and that therein somehow lies free will? Or, in a myriad alternative universes, are there as many alternative me’s making as many alternative choices? In one such universe do I finish typing these metaphysical meanderings, shut down the laptop, snap shut the screen, and then, wondering how best to spend the hours remaining before my dreams again untether me, choose the pub over a quiet night in? And having done so, the Coach and Horses over the Spotted Dog? Then a lager over bitter? Then a second and a third over just the one, until the landlord calls out “time”? While in another universe I choose to stay in, then opt for music over a movie, then some punk over indie, some Clash over Jam? Is ‘now’ those many branching points? In fact, does it even matter what the nature of reality may be? Fixed or not, the future remains open to me as far as I experience life, contingent at least to some degree on what I seemingly choose to do, on how I navigate the present. So even taking onboard these abstract considerations, the question remains: what now? The cavewoman, meanwhile, ventures out into the valley, while Homer pauses to let his audience gasp before singing the song’s next line. An astronaut steps backwards off a ladder into that tranquil lunar sea, and the aging sun explodes. The clock on the computer says it’s almost ten to eight. The pub, I think, is beckoning…

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Quote, unquote: better the words of strangers, who speak with familiar tongues “The universal nature has no external space; but the wondrous part of her art is that although she has circumscribed herself, everything which is within her which appears to decay and to grow old and to be useless she changes into herself, and again makes other new things from these very same, so that she requires neither substance from without nor wants a place into which she may cast that which decays. She is content then with her own space, and her own matter, and her own art.” Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

© Daniel Vincent 2013