Sync
Did you know that if you take two neighboring pendula and set them in motion at separate times, they will eventually synchronize with one another?!
It's true. It's called "coupling" and is one of the Funfacts in the emerging science of Sync.
Synchronicity is everywhere, like π. In biology, for instance, we find deeply encoded into certain cells these kind of metronomes or clocks which tell them when to do things, and to try to do them at the same time as their adjoining cells. Because of them, our hearts are able to beat, certain groups of fireflies are able to flash in unison, women living in close proximity may develop synchronized menstrual cycles, and "weakly electric fishes!" can discharge little electrical pulses in lieu of sight, just as bats use sonar. Sync! Laser light also depends on this phenomenon, as does its mostly obsolete predecessor, the maser. (Lance Stromberg, who works one door down from me, still has one in his lab ― loves vintage science equipment ― astrolabes, planespheres, old pressure calibrators, apothocary scales, barographs. Here is a purdy picture:)
Anyway, Sync is an interesting topic for the life sciences, in particular, because the phase mechanics can tell you about all sorts of other systems like, say, the human brain. For example, part of the reason we're asleep at night and awake during the day is that we each have a built-in pacemaker that regulates sleep cycles with neurotransmitters. It works like this: photoreceptors in our eyes receive the morning daylight, prompting a chemical reaction in the retina, which triggers a stream of electrical signals to the hypothalamus, the site of the pacemaker, which, in turn, releases serotonin and tells the body to wake up. Not surprisingly, 80% of blind people have chronic sleep disorders. The interesting thing, though, is that 20% do not. These people are no less blind, yet they're consistently able to enjoy a restful life, exactly in-step with the rest of the world. Why? We're not sure. But an appealing theory is that while their retinal cells, the rods and cones, may be defective, their photoreceptors remain intact, and are perfectly capable of transmitting the electrical signals to the pacemaker through a separate pathway, therefore bypassing the visual brain altogether. So, while these people are technically blind, they can still "see" the light.
Reunion of Broken Parts
The Professor returned today, clean shaven. Family business, he said. That was it.
For a large part of the day I looked at the diagram I'd copied from the mirror. I don't know much about geometry, so I found it very difficult to glean anything from the shape. I decided I'd consult an expert.
Barry Needleman is a gruff and pedantic professor of topology who works at the other end of the campus and is almost never seen. He is known for his impeccable track record in research as well as his swaggering recalcitrance.
The math department is sequestered in a tree-enclosed compound of wintery stonework, vaguely reminiscent of medieval cloisters. I found Needleman's office and knocked on the door.
"What!" The sound was not unlike a dog bark.
"Professor Needleman?"
"So what?" he bellowed.
"Can I come in?"
"Nope." I waited for a qualifying remark, but none came.
"Is there a better time to come back?"
"What the hell do you want?"
"If you open the door I can show you."
He made a sound like he was having tremendous abdominal pain. Almost half a minute passed before he opened the door. The figure that appeared was squat, thick-necked and dough-cheeked, almost amphibious. He looked up at me, scowling from his wheelchair.
"A pretty lady from neuroscience. So what?"
"How did you know I was― ?"
"You're all the same. That desperate crinkle between your eyes. I've seen it I don't know how many times. Let me do you a favor. Whatever you're working on, you won't find the answer. It's an endless path, whatever it is. Better to accept it now."
"Can I step in for one second?"
"What do I care?" He rolled back several feet, leaving me just enough room to squeeze by. The office was cramped with academic junk. A hundred texts in a hundred languages, all mismatched. An old, box-shaped computer, a desk layered with transparency paper like a draftsman's, the walls completely bare. Not the slightest trace of ornamentation.
"I would apologize for the mess, but why should I? It's my office and this is how I work."
"I have to show you something," I said, and opened my notebook to the paper-clipped page. I felt as though I were in third grade. "This shape."
"A shape so important that you would interrupt my work. You would come to my office on a Friday afternoon, the busiest day of the week."
"I know, and I'm sorry to interrupt--"
"Ba!" he said, swiping his hand in front of him. He leaned in and adjusted his brown, rectangular glasses, which for some reason reminded me of a mailman. His hair was thin and raw, the color of damp newsprint. I had the fleeting sense that at one point in his life he was capable of great tenderness.
"Big whoop," he said, and looked at me with upturned palms.
"What do you mean?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, are you telling me that you see nothing here?"
"What's to see? What am I looking at? You've told me nothing. I'm looking at some lines on a page."
"But, so, there's no significance to the lines, their shape?"
"You're talking about symbols? What would I know about symbolism? Go take Mythological Iconography with Alan Hodges."
"I thought maybe, I don't know, it contained some sort of... information."
There was a long pause.
"I have a lecture to give," he said at last. "And you have rat brains to cut up."
"Cow."
He closed his eyes, anticipating the relief that would come once I left.
"Go with God," he said, and swiveled around to face his desk.
The brittle grass crunched under my boots on the walk back. I was feeling more than a little embarrassed. The figure, after all, was remarkably simple. A two-dimensional line drawing. And I'd asked one of the world's leading experts in non-Euclidean geometry to explain what it meant.
The path from the west campus is divided in two, one leading to the SAC (student activities center) and the other to the dorms. At the fork there's a wooden sign with a map of the campus bound in Plexiglas, the surface whitescratched and warped with age. "You Are Here" was inscribed at the bottom left inside a red circle.
Where I was, apparently, was on a line which split like a sideways Y. The right arm fortified into several smaller lines, each connected to a large ellipse. About halfway up, the arc intersected with a double line, which ran straight into the center of the diagram. That intersection was supposed to represent the main entrance.
The shape as a whole looked very little like the shape on my mirror, but it led me to think that maybe there was nothing to decipher. Perhaps it didn't "contain" a message but in fact was a message, just as a map represents distances, but does not navigate them. Could the mirror diagram be a map of some sort? But to what?
The historical society is supposed to have every map of every building and zone in the prefecture. Tomorrow I will play hooky and look through their archives.
In the meantime I'll try to sleep. Not having very good luck so far, hence this somewhat long-winded entry. I have an awful song stuck in my head. This is another one of my delightful quirks: I am mercilessly over-receptive to music. Some people will hear a catchy tune, an annoying jingle, and it'll get stuck in their heads for a while. No ― these songs wake me up in the night. They're relentless, incapacitating. They literally play through my dreams. I don't even have to hear them! I could just see the phrase "Don't Stop Believing" written out, and the jukebox in my head will involuntarily fetch the record and set it playing at top volume. Over and over and over. You see? Just writing about it has unleashed Steve Perry's ungodly falsetto.
The only way to stop it is to play something else ― something less catchy, less easily replayable. Bach fugues are good for this because the melodies keep evolving, inverting, pirouetting. Unlike Journey.
The affliction is one notch away from schizophrenia ― one notch, I say ― instead of paranoid voices, its shitty music.
In any case, I'd be interested to see how these hallucinations work in a neurobiological sense. I suspect it's something of a feedback loop between the temporal lobe and the hippocampus. One day we'll have PET scan programs on personal computers, EEG wrist watches, MRI headphones, but until then I'll have to content myself with La-Z-boy speculation. They don't exactly give grants for this kind of stuff anymore.
Did I mention it's 2:46 AM.
Appetite for Deconstruction
Vegetarian Sloppy Joes at the commissary today. Leathery, oaty corpusles of soy mashed into a beanless chili, then microwaved and scooped onto buttered cakes of starch. The stench was almost overpowering. Duncan wouldn't shut up about Guns n' Roses and how they were the only hair band to transcend the ironic boundary. Miranda spat a grape seed at him.
Question: when exactly did men stop wearing top hats and why? They looked good in them, they looked dapper, self-possessed, like gentlemen. They should start wearing them again, and start walking arm in arm when in pairs, like Sherlock and Watson. They should have pocket watches and monocles and walk arm in arm down the street smoking pipes.
Another question: how are collective decisions made? Maybe this mysterious process is the gestalt of culture, the tangled discussion of which traditions to keep and which to discard.
I'm typing this from the internet cafe on Riverview after having spent the morning going through old maps. The Henderson Library is a tiny little faded pink building that used to be a one-room schoolhouse. Inside, the floorboards are wide and uneven. In fact everything is uneven ― the doors don't fit in the doorjamb, so they're left open ― and the placed smells of soggy wood.
A pointy, split-sized woman of indeterminate age and a beehive haircut made me fill out pages of paperwork and give her my driver's license before showing me to the map archive. The blueprints were all kept in one large chest, organized by district. I rifled through perhaps three dozen all in all: sewer maps drawn in 1819, floorplans of the Blackburg State Mental Hospital, which used to be called the Lunatic Asylum, various electrical grids, blueprints of the old armory, etc. Some were mildewy and faded and crinkled, and even the new ones, the multicolored roadmaps, seemed somehow antiquated. But no, I couldn't find a match after several hours, so I gave up. This was a dumb idea. There is no map.
Mirror Neurons
After work I got stuck in crazy traffic again. I was sitting there listening to NPR and breathing in toxic exhaust from the 18-wheeler in front of me, each inhalation shaving a day off my life. In Italy there's so much traffic that they're not even bothered by it. They could be in a standstill for hours on end, and they just resign to it. They get out, sit on their hoods, listen to music, chat with strangers. There would have to be a rift in the space-time continuum for that to happen in the States.
Anyway, at one point I saw myself in the semi-reflective surface of the windshield and was reminded of a perplexing thought I had as a child: why do all mirrors invert their images horizontally rather than vertically? How does the mirror "know" to flip the world side-to-side and not top-to-bottom? Are there stupid mirrors that don't know any better? When I was about seven I thought I'd found one. In Naoko's bathroom there was a mirror that had forgotten to flip the image! I was looking at myself head-on, able to see exactly what other people saw when they looked at me, and it was disarming and surreal. Of course, I later figured out that I'd been looking at a twice reflected image, a trick mirror, but not before imagining the secret alchemy of crushed sand and crystals that gave mirrors their wondrous properties.
These memories washed away as the traffic began to clear, and I thought suddenly of the "message" left on my own mirror two days ago. Perhaps the fact that it was drawn onto a mirror was part of the message. Could it be a reference to the symbolic idea of reflection? A literal indicator of "mirror" neurons? Or was there another way to view the diagram that would make more sense?
When I got to the lab I flipped the image back and forth, up and down. Of course, I had no idea what I was looking for, so it continued to look like a random configuration of lines and curves. But what if the diagram was indeed a kind of map, only a different species of map ― a map of another diagram? I recalled the Duality Principle, where one shape acts as a reciprocal of another by inverting its attributes. [In other words, two figures are dual if all the lines on the first figure behave as points on the second, and vice versa. ] I took out my notebook and flipped to my sketch. I began by naming all the points and lines, then listing the properties of each. [Parabola I contains points A', B', C', and D', etc.] Then I plugged them into a graphing program on my computer and let it spit out the resulting shape.
After a few moments, an image appeared on the screen that looked startlingly familiar. Not at first. It took me a minute to grasp it in my head. I tweaked the shape a bit, extended the lines so that they were even and such, and then shaded the triangular sections to give it a sense of depth.
It looked not unlike a molecule.