hey body

Hey body...

We took a field trip to Leiden yesterday, D, Timo and me. Everyone, including me, has been kind of spacey since Queensday. I didn't even ask why we were going until we were already on the train.

"There are lots of clever people in Amsterdam, but wise people are in Leiden." I'm sure Timo thought that would intrigue me, so I purposely let it drop. (Mind games/My claim to fame/I'm Michael Jordan to the hoop/You just a sucker in the lane. Los Altos, what?!)

When we got to the station, Timo went one way and D and I went the other. "He's going to the medical center", D explained, "He sees a doctor there."

"Does the doctor know?"

"Probably. Doctors notice things."

"Is Timo getting some kind of treatment?"

"No. You know he doesn't believe in that. Only liefdenken."

"Yeah, just like Rush Limbaugh. Okay, so where are we going then?"

"Research."

Which turned out to mean the Museum Boerhaave, the national history of science museum. Needless to say, I was happy. But once we got there, D was only interested in these little beauties:

My first guess (testicular watch fob) was wrong, but not by much. They're bezoars, basically gallstones from ruminant animals. They were supposed to be a universal cure for poison. (Apparently the fancy holders were so you could dip them in a suspect drink, like a tea bag. Filled with goat gall.)

I left him with his stones and wandered around the exhibits. The reconstruction of Leiden's 16th-century anatomical theater (there's an interesting phrase) reminded me of how people used to open up bodies and look for messages from God or Nature in the guts. But my father used to say, "The world is not an answering machine. There are no messages."

We hooked up with Timo a couple of hours later back at the station. Of course he didn't say anything about his  appointment, but he did spend the train ride back grilling me. He wanted to hear about The Queensday Incident yet again, but now he had a new question:

"Did the body say anything at all? Before or after?"

"No, I told you already. It just jumped me. Maybe it wheezed. There could have been wheezing."

"Whispering?"

"No wheeze. Like--" I exhaled from the back of my throat and there was something about that sound. I could feel it skittering like a bug in my ear. Just before Gemma pulled her off me, she was leaning down over me, like she was going for my neck. I thought, I wonder what will happen?, then I felt her lips brush against my ear and she...whispered.

"Effewa."

D looked at Timo. "Effe waar? Some truth? Tell the truth?"

Timo spoke to his folded hands. "Geen Nederlands. Engels. Overal. Everywhere. Is it possible that she tried to say everywhere?"

Hey body...

Yesterday was Queensday: a 24-hour flea market/street party where the already narrow streets are often so crowded it's like drowning in orange quicksand. My father would have collected data about crowd density (Where are the bottlenecks? How quickly does density change over time and distance?), human factors (average reach, speed of travel, state of health), initial distribution of bodies, density and virulence. All we had were pockets full of salt packets we'd liberated from restaurants over the past week. Salt sometimes calms them down if they're really freaked out or in extremely bad shape, like pre-Romerian. But really, it's like baby aspirin to plague victims.

And if I'd known in advance what complete pandemonium it would be, I would have just stayed in bed and bagged the whole thing. On the plus side, it's too cramped for a major feeding frenzy. But when the crowd is that packed, you could be surrounded by bodies and not know until you got home and discovered that "bump" you felt in the Leidseplein was not just someone lifting your wallet.

Also, I have a thing about crowds. When I was six, I got separated from my parents doing Christmas shopping in Union Square. They found me two hours later in Macy's security office. Apparently, I didn't even know my name when they picked me up. I was totally zoned. I still have no idea what happened during those two hours. It's happened a few times since then (Times Square on New Year's Eve. That was just dumb.) but mostly I know that crowd = blackout and I avoid accordingly.

None of which explains why she jumped me. The Vondelpark was packed with little kids doing dance routines or selling their old toys for a quarter. I hadn't seen any bodywork at all, kid or adult, when I met up with Gemma outside Vertigo, but after four hours of crowd life I was already seeing the black fireworks of imminent unconsciousness. We made our way off the path and into the bushes along the side of the park and there she was: a young woman lying on the ground. Through my sputtering vision I could just i.d. her Viktor and Rolf H&M raincoat and I thought, "She must have fought hard for that and now it's going to be all dirty". Then with no warning, no sound, she was on me. God, she was fast. Too fast and too pretty to be Romerian and too reckless to be anything else. She must have knocked me down because when Gemma pulled us apart, she just rolled over where she was on the ground and crawled deeper under the bushes, like a sick dog.

Why would a body attack another body? I must have asked that question a hundred times while Gemma  dragged me up out of the orange quicksand and then back underground to the monketerium. She just kept saying, "I don't know."

Hey body...

Bodies don't worry. It took me awhile to notice it at first. Like when someone turns off a television that's been blaring non-stop for hours and before you even know what's missing, you just feel lighter. Like pure oxygen is filling the room. The background music of everyday social life (that scratchy tape loop hiccuping "Did I do the right thing?...Did I do the right thing?...Did I do the right thing?") had been switched off and the sudden silence was still crackling, cooling and expanding, opening up more and more space for me to breathe and move. I was completely alone in the world, which meant I was also completely free, and the only word sufficient to encompass the change both in me and the world was prairie: Beautiful. Empty. Sufficient environmental resource to survive if you know where to look.

But if bodies don't worry, what is this I'm feeling?

Hey body...

I read this in today's online NYT. It's about the possible neurological basis of flaming:

In face-to-face interaction, the brain reads a continual cascade of emotional signs and social cues, instantaneously using them to guide our next move so that the encounter goes well. Much of this social guidance occurs in circuitry centered on the orbitofrontal cortex, a center for empathy. This cortex uses that social scan to help make sure that what we do next will keep the interaction on track.

Research by Jennifer Beer, a psychologist at the University of California, Davis, finds that this face-to-face guidance system inhibits impulses for actions that would upset the other person or otherwise throw the interaction off. Neurological patients with a damaged orbitofrontal cortex lose the ability to modulate the amygdala, a source of unruly impulses; like small children, they commit mortifying social gaffes like kissing a complete stranger, blithely unaware that they are doing anything untoward.

The word mortifying caught my eye. And around that nucleus, the surrounding words dislodged themselves from the page and began to spin like electrons through my peripheral vision, gaffed by mortifying gravity: Unruly children, blithely unaware, kissed upon their cortexes by damaged strangers guided by upset impulses. And eventually this whole mortifying system was spinning so fast that it went through a phase change, like solid to liquid to gas, and the colliding discrete images resolved into a cloud of feeling. And that feeling condensed into a memory of me kissing an unruly stranger on the back of the neck while my pod orbits around us, humming like electrons, blithely unaware that they are doing anything untoward.

Hey body...

Music again at the lab yesterday. After the I.V., now I go sit in a sensory-deprivation closet lined with gray carpet. Like the back room at a research facility when you're watching focus groups through one-way glass. Only there's no glass of any kind and I'm the one being falsely and condescendingly assured that there are no wrong answers. (Of course there are wrong answers. Why else would I be here?) I rest my chin on a padded stand. (Lightly. I don't need another bruise.) Then a piece of music, about 10 seconds long maybe, comes through what appear to be car stereo speakers snugged into the carpet at eye level in front of me. The playlist is college radio random: Vivaldi, kecak, Aphex Twin. Then, from a different set of overhead speakers, somebody asks me a series of brain-damaged questions like, What makes a pet different from any other animal? Why can't brothers and sisters get married? How do you know when someone wants to have sex with you? I keep waiting for the one about the poor turtle flipped on his back in the desert. But I'm not helping him. WHY? WHY WON'T I HELP HIM?  Apparently they think I'm a replicant.

Hey body...

The first song that came up was Nemesis. I thought it was appropriate since it's pretty much a party tune about being a body and doing body stuff. Apologia pro postmortem. You know how soldiers have a theme song they play to get psyched up before they head out? This was mine.

Timo on Once In A Lifetime: It's very confusing when you wake up, toch? Who am I? What am I? What have I done? My God...... (yes I get it timo you can lower your remaining piece of eyebrow now) .....but this confusion sits on a false bottom. You can break through this falsehood, to see in a clear way what you were then and what you are now are not different. Same as it ever was.

Me on Back In Black: Another gimme. Every body knows how Bon Scott walked into the recording studio two months after he died with the words to Back In Black written on his arm. "Then he mounted up shanks pony, leaving just his words behind."

Timo on Beautiful Day: Only bodies can see the world correctly because the background noise is gone. That's why they put telescopes in space, you know. (has he been using the internet?)  What we see looking back at the human world is first, food, but it is beautiful food. There is beauty there. Even in the destruction of tuna fleets and oil fields. Until you see this, you are stuck in your hunger, going nowhere. Because you do love the human world, even if you don't know it. You are like this (he interweaves his fingers). We can see this when we learn to know what we used to feel. (jesus. now i know he's been practicing. the first part is literally true. i used to spend whole nights watching traffic lights change. i think he stole the last part from me. i've always mentally switched those words in the song about knowing and feeling. feeling fails all the time. you don't have to be a body to know that. knowing is more reliable. what you don't feel, you can know. That's good enough in any case and better in most.)

Me on Bittersweet Symphony: First of all, have you seen the video? (of course he hasn't) Pale skin, thousand yard bug eyed stare, greasy leather rocker jacket, bumping into people? Someone just woke up feelin' funny. And it is true that when you wake up, one of the first things you notice is the dark, oceanic mental silence. That constant chittering self-commentary made up of what you imagine other people are thinking is just gone. The airwaves are clean and nobody's singing to you. And the Glimmer Twins connection makes this the first recorded case of body-on-body lawsuit.

[Here, Timo asked for a "mulligan" on Hey Venus, which I take it means "bail". When I asked him why, he got all blinky and said he didn't have anything to add. I didn't want him to sprain his eyelids so I let him reshuffle.]

Timo on Ain't Talkin' 'bout Love:  He is talking about something that is not love but has the same function or shape. Fitting the same receptor as something else that has rotted away. I think this is not far from liefdenken.

Me on Golden Brown: Drugs work. Or not. But you don't have to believe in them or meditate on them. No religion would have kept me in the pink this long.

Timo then pulled this song which we both decided was the logical end of this, or any, debate.

Hey body...

"His" game was basically Tink (aka "Tom & Katie"). It's a party game where you're given some cultural phenomenon and you have to explain why s/he/it/they must be or have been made by, bodies. But in Timo's version, the items to be explained (or "debated" as he put it ) are the songs on my iPod. I'll give him this: Timo is the only body I've ever known capable of this, or frankly, any other sort of mind game.

In Dutch, to squirrel stuff away, like nuts for winter, is hamsteren, to act like a hamster. This is apparently seen as a positive trait here. Timo hamsters bits of personal information. When he hears any body say something about their parents or when their dog died or the first time they saw themselves reflected in a dark window on the way home after, you can see him calculating (Is this emotional?  How is it important? What does it mean?) and if the calculation returns a value above threshold, he locks it in by blinking his eyes. Really. It's that mechanical.

But I didn't know that when I started hanging out with the monks last year. I told them my story. More or less. It's just what you do in a new pod. I told them how the very last thing I did before I left home, after arranging things for my mother, was copy everything off my dad's laptop. Most of the songs in my iPod came from there. When Timo heard that, he blinked and asked if he could copy the songs. I bet he thinks he's uncovered some leveragable emotional residue he can use to monkify me.

Also, he'd been suspiciously quiet about Ibu since I told him about my visit. Normally, that's the kind of tidbit he'd tear into right away with a sermonette on liefdenk/lovethink, his clunky Dutch neologism for the thoroughly American idea that bodies can somehow get on the good foot through the power of positive thinking. Now I see he was just waiting for the right communication platform, this game.

So we played iTink. Mostly because if I said no, he would have just started asking why and that would be even more annoying. So we put it on shuffle and I went first.

Hey body...

Something new at the lab yesterday. They play music and I rate it using a dial device, like those things they use to pre-test political ads ("See there in frame 00:15:18 where his eyebrow droops? That's where you lose the audience"...and so everything becomes a step faster, a bit more superficial, a little more reflexive, manipulative, visual and lot less thoughtful, respectful and rational. It's like intelligent design in the service of stupidity. We're exerting evolutionary pressure upon ourselves to be even more gnat-brained than we already are. But hey, knock yourselves out. What do I care? I'm not on that team anymore. I just wish they'd play less of that stupid body music.)

This was the first thing I've said about the lab that Timo seemed interested in. He generally ignores my lab reports because he's decided that drugs/science can't possibly be the right answer. He's like a Buddhist Nancy Reagan. Just Say No mind. But he sparked to this. He wanted to know what they were playing, how I responded, how they reacted. When I suggested that his sudden interest might mean  he's losing his grip on unreality, he...smiled (which he really shouldn't do. The visible, animatronic effort it takes him to remember when and how to do it severely undermines the intended effect) and said, "Let's play a game."