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English Studies Forum
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Plus Light Joseph McElroy Remarks Delivered to Bookmarks Future Letture Conference, Potenza, Italy, May 25, 2002
I try not to speak of books I haven’t read. Asked to speak of this book of mine Plus, I am looking into it after a quarter of a century. Always uneasy about earlier work, I had recalled a passion, an impression, an action, but perhaps not the sentences one by one. I am discovering the book again. I am a reader of Plus. Proust’s Marcel recalls becoming the very subject of the book he happened to be reading. Doubtless this in a more literal sense was once true of me and Plus: I mean, in some imagining/psychic [ally] imagined circuitous [self-writing autobiograph[y]ical way unknown to many biographers as they doggedly match the life to the work. One’s life already fiction—a pressure I struggle to embrace deciding anything important in the hope that it will be worth “rereading”—today what do I see on the page and in the words? A brain. Its body gone, its onetime body. Brain in Earth orbit. A solar experiment. A novel written from the point of view of the brain (and, I’m happy to add, translated last year into Italian, in which from Dante to Calvino I find such a rich tradition of science joined with art). Told not in the 1st person—I—which I realized would be all wrong, but in the 3rd. But close, close up—sometimes too close for comfort. A brain that has been surgically divorced and lifted out of that body. A body that had been terminally ill, we will learn, though it is hardly of more than passing concern in this tale whose focus is here and now under light which is also our focus. A brain still human? we may ask. With what resources? This once upon a time person, this (I thought) stunned thing. (Speechless?) Now called Imp Plus—from IMP, a NASA acronym for Interplanetary Monitoring Platform; and we must check the dictionary under “imp.” But in this project, Imp Plus: imp, but more. Its body gone? Imp Plus free of that onetime human body. Yet not what you would call free. Haunting, almost unthinkable, a premise I began with that had stayed with me for years. What I made up from it I made up out of what I knew or was coming to know. A brain hooked up to instruments and nutrients in a space capsule, including green growing things. Reduced to this (so far), to a set of functions in an experiment. First and always a living being, no mere instrument. Yet saying that, what have I said? Awakening; always awake. No body did I say? Growing a strange new one. He found it all around. It opened and was close. He felt it was himself but felt it was more (3) the book begins. An extension almost inseparable from its consciousness. Science fiction? Last week in the midst of the stalemated bioethics debate in Washington with its potential crisis centering on gaps between intellect and feeling, knowledge and action, basic research and its human application, talks were going on in San Francisco that promise to be at least as interesting—about a branch of the subject called neuroethics. The benefits, the dangers of treating our minds. Changing our minds. For example, beyond issues of steroids and anti-depressants and Ritalin for hyperactive kids, what about this?—what about hooking up software to “wetware,” the human nervous system, so you combine human imagination with the speed of a machine. What do you think? Is this a next necessary step of evolution (of Nature), or does it invite an unNatural control, potentially political, “to hack into the wetware between our ears” (as one neuroethicist from NASA put it). I’m reflecting on whatever was in my head in 1975. I did not write Plus more than 25 years ago thinking that it would come true some time. A brain enslaved by NASA? “Unmanned” (the word comes to me now as if I were editing the text). A brain grow a body? The reverse of the flatworm that in the course of how many million years evolves at one end a beginning node of nerves. I, by contrast, begin with the head. Not even the head. A brain headless. And end with— if I, a rereader, may share the smallest preview of what is not quite the ending—a new body apparently quite different from our old brain-ruled system. Was it a future foreseen? Imp Plus’s impossible position feels more like an inescapable present. On the other hand, even when Plus was first published the future was clearly here. A reference in it to the last Apollos tells us we are beyond an era of manned Moon launches (in fact at that time recently concluded). Voyages technically fulfilling, they were dangerous and expensive and glamorous; an astronaut could improvise and choose, chat with Earth, be audibly human, commercially even, not to mention American. Think of Apollo 13, the Flight that Failed, the book, the movie. Think? How much thought was really ever up there, men aloft, men on the moon slow motion? You figure instruments alone may give you all you need to know. And more. Unmanned trips, you risk only money not human life. In Plus, in Imp Plus, you have something in between instrument and person. In the beginning you do. Impulses from Earth had kept coming on the frequency like an absence of obstacle. They were messages and Imp Plus had inclined to receive them. They asked for levels of light and of glucose. (3) When we get it—what we’re looking at—it seems scarcely human. “Minimally” human we would say, nowadays, of this Imp Plus. Living. Capable of something. Of unexpected growth before we are done, unfamiliar and, if I have done my job, visible, a body grown from this brain you could say but no more like the body it was once part of than mission control on the ground could have planned for. What was the plan? Transmission of data back to Earth through our main character, evidently neuro-connected to Ground Control, word-wired, linked electronically, pulse-translatable evidently into communicable sounds—thought-wired?—though not necessarily “user-friendly” as we say now though not quite when the book was written. Great chance for dialogue, joked one writer of my acquaintance who had not read Plus. O.K., terribly solitary, yet not when we are inside the prose. And Imp Plus is not in all regards alone. In contact with two NASA controllers evidently distinct in Imp Plus’s memory: the Acrid Voice, all business, technical or “techno-logical,” associated perhaps with a dim memory of smoking; and the Good Voice, more a co-worker, some sympathy recalled in the system. Dialogue soon bearing not just routine information but Imp Plus’s growing resistance to Ground. A progress via other, differently voiced connections as well, perhaps never audible (the reader may decide), Imp Plus answering to the Sun (?), Imp Plus answering to the light. Light seen by the author more simply then. For now, 25 years later, we know that light was always an ambiguous force. The Japanese novelist Tanizaki regrets the lack of shadow designed into modern, fully lit domestic interiors. To take an example close to home, the condemned in their cells have no respite from that light bulb burning 24 hours a day. And if sunlight is indispensable for life, unshielded it becomes lethal. Not here in 1975. A tale opening into a crisis involving light. Screened perhaps even by the very brightness of the sun, for brightness and even clarity can sometimes be a screen. A crisis somewhat technical perhaps. Nothing like my other work, I would say—those father-and-son, women-and-men novels intricately contemporary in subject and sentence. Fiction invented to discover people and history expanding to seek what is missing: an abducted child, a politically loaded film, the meanings of a celebrity suicide; or, in one novel, The Letter Left to Me, the most personal piece of paper, bizarrely taken from or yielded up by its rightful recipient and multiplied a hundred fold, much more, for the world to see. Quests that create what has been lost, these books speak in a mixed voice, American, everyday-elaborate, technologuish, emotional, slang/cliche, science—some ironic manifold. Heterogeneous or continental or urban American, I would stress; mostly unlike the language of Plus. Which, as you might expect, is at first built of brief phrases, a reined-in diction, a narrow, magnetic idiom, austere, groping. Solitary, implying shock, I thought. Some slow building of rudiments, a reaching, painfully accreting, quizzically adding bit by bit, secretly getting there, I trust. I recall a “congress” of writers in Belgrade in 1990, the theme Utopia at a moment when in at least two of the Yugoslav republics you could see trouble coming. I recall the speeches, the uninformed, at best romantic, attacks on something called technology, which was of course mixed up with science. To this dismissal I tried to respond that technology, like science, is neutral until we make it, bad or good, part of our life—science not as arcana but as thought, attention, personal imagination, and a vocabulary of forms: part of that embracing fiction about people and families, cities, nature, the rush and color and manners and plasm of factual and mythy possibility that can go into a novel. Thirty years ago science in American fiction was technologically slanted, and it was satire mostly or science fiction. I am happy if Plus is called sci-fi—with its often meliorist or utopian notions—but I don’t claim to have been working quite in that genre of invention and prediction. Prophecy, however, has often been implicit in the Novel, like seeds of experience embedded in the present. And as I speak I find myself coming round to think the opposite of what I said a moment ago: maybe Plus was very much me. The science reaches out of the lab into everyday work and survival and community. Into remembered popular idiom. The IMP project’s name, we learn, is “Travel Light,” which may suggest traveling with a backpack rather than a bunch of suitcases; and it’s the getting going, not what you own or need to take. (I even think now of the familiar, “You can’t take it with you,” though at the end of the day readers—and some have found humor in this book— may find this truism reversed.) And at some point Travel Light always indicated Imp Plus traveling in this synchronous Earth orbit naked of his original body, most of it, and, thus, freed (though horror-story helpless); or free in the sunlight of space. Let the sun ... dream up a life-support system. (107) In a pivotal insight it was given to Einstein to see that sunshine, the light we need, which adds to us, is in fact being subtracted all the time from its source the sun. The Sun literally sheds light. With this perception came the dazzling thought that light has not only speed but mass—weight, you could say; which, if I think about it, would not have seemed at all strange to Lucretius or Archimedes. Nor that Mass period is Energy. How to release it? In Travel Light, light with chlorophyll makes green growth which is both experimental subject and, indirectly, we gather, nutrient. Derived partly from light, illumination of another kind also nourishes this work. Something else new from the beginning less raw than sun-shed light. Old, it occurs to me on rereading. Some old force curiously continuing like light. Another change in Imp Plus, beginning who knows when. Before the new body?—which comes upon us early but gradually and turns space capsule into time capsule by filling it and grows on us more than physically. Perhaps before we see, we hear, and, hearing, see the point, feel what is struggling to gather and locate. By association. By logic. By illogic in the groping, austere yet quirky, questing text. The two words held together like one thing — one quantity — apart from other things said; the two words had come to Imp Plus from many points like seabirds winging into him over paths of spray till they were out of focus. (18) Is it a life made of words? What they point to and secrete. Words attach like hopes, like objects. Words together surprise. Phrases build. But what? It is a language discovered lost and found in fresh light. In self-defense is it? If there is a self, and if so, made of what? I thought again of Pascal, mid 17th century: Pensee 339: “I can well conceive a man without hands, feet, head (for it is only experience which teaches us that the head is more necessary than feet). But I cannot conceive man without thought ....” The discoveries of this being Imp Plus, indeed of being Imp Plus, measure themselves by a progress of words, terms, modifiers like acts. In Plus, which is not an essay but a story, growth is embodied: it does not explain so much as it is what it is about. But it is only partly finding words. Now, language is a medium in which tension, alteration, a bio-human experiment and more are at hand. An achievement for Imp Plus—a restoring of power and in some distributed sense of poignancy and meaning, turn by turn, level by level, bit by bit (the phrase with new resonance 25 years later). You build on what you have. I resist, however, the literary conclusion that Plus is “about language”—which is too often code for marginalizing experimental fiction. Here you have a fiction about an experiment! This brain, this person, when he submitted himself to be trained for this project, and when at last he committed himself or his brain to be severed from a sick and dying body, had a language, a command of language. I honor the event. I have no words for some of it. I presume that the severing caused a trauma virtually unthinkable, after which this residual being pruned of its body (forgetting, but not everything) must relearn who knows what? As a plant reaches for the sun across a gap between here and there; but more likely jumping into nowhere from some given in the brain, remembered in use. I remember “imp” in my dictionary at home: a shoot as of new growth from a plant. Wordsworth recalls Plato’s theme of pre-existence: “our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.” Not that I believe it. I believe that this character whose body has been amputated has never stopped existing or persisting in his existence. Building out of memory, which Plato argued was basic reservoir. Building in Plus toward what? The method of this word-thought-power is more than one thing after another like print line by line—out loud, even. It is nonlinear if the reader wants, a radiant, fore-and-aft desequencing, multiple and multi-directional all at once. Musical. Like harmony, or some expanding counterpoint of remembrance. Non-linear we say so readily these days. I use the word cautiously, because for all the simultaneities we may experience reading prose fiction, in print a sequence stands established by the writer, and this is linear, from the printer’s point of view and to some extent the reader’s, this thing after that thing, not the other way around—that is, until your mind starts messing with it, appropriating it. That said, words in Imp Plus put more than two and two together. I respect (I seek) sequence, struggle with it—I feel alternative sequences existing all at once, just as you do, and must make my peace with that or find my form for it. Two and two. Two by two, and so forth. Language in Plus may be experienced as a blueprint in motion. Or a field. An old analogy, a term widely used in the arts by now. With me it goes back to the beginning: field in the sense of a space characterized by a variety of points related in multiple directions and by their reflecting a force that communicates its influence in this region. It goes back to Faraday of the scientists, in the early 19th century, later Alfred North Whitehead, of the philosophers of science; and eventually it offers me an account gravitational, magnetic, or other of how two bodies might affect each other at a distance. In my revered Carlo Emilio Gadda's Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana (1957), you find in the midst of minute data radiating outward into manifold connections the key to it all—amid his heterogeneous vocabulary (including slang way way beyond me) a wonderful passage that reminds us how far ahead he was, and how modestly, how wryly, he shares this locus of powers in the thinking of his detective Ingravallo pondering in turn the thought of others he would know:
... destiny’s “field of forces.” The prefiguration of disasters must have evolved into a historic predisposition: it had acted: not only on the psyche of the woman to be robbed-strangled-tortured, but also on the “Field” of atmosphere, on the field of the external psychic tensions. Because Ingravallo, like certain of our philosophers, attributed a soul, indeed a lousy bastard of a soul, to that system of forces and probabilities which surrounds every human creature, and which is customarily called Destiny. (trans. William Weaver)
None of this field sense need be explicit in Plus. I felt it in the strange intent, the cellular feeling of this being’s increase, and the writing too. I myself changed, learning that a cell develops not from a simple fate of lineage, but through “rather ... the operation of forces” “to which the cell becomes subject in the course of its development.” This from a book I read in 1975 about embryology by Paul Weiss, Principles of Development. It confirmed how I imagined growth in my story. Hard to predict. Naturally improvising, experimenting as Darwin demonstrates. ( What does it sound like, this improvising? Other activities? Yours? Mine?) Plus can take the reader into this experience. That half-unknowable experiment on the reader which any serious book may make. “Experience” (esperienza) means also “experiment” in Italian (in French a tighter equivalence). Presumptuous of me to label as basic research a mere imagining. Fiction science? Call it in Plus a “thought game” as scientists and philosophers say: and a search in the sense of Proust’s recherche studying people and insects, rock, flora, seeing. In my book a test of what might happen if outside earth’s atmosphere—through the window of a control filter— the sun shone upon a living brain as upon the green growing things packed in here with it. Basic research in the sense that one may not know, whatever the result, how it might be applied (or until recent stem cell research which has turned inquirers into entrepreneurs or at least practical predictors). Parallel more than cause-effect events are pretty much what the author observes in Plus. Parallel action in language and body. May not language be physical too? Events staged in the brain; actual neuron changes; neuronal shifts. More than once Imp Plus in some natural rapprochement seems to see with optics of the field of his extended new “body” back to the brain ... see his very thought, as I a mere reader reapproach the book. With such illuminations the source of which are hard to pinpoint, the brain itself is changing. A new knowing, an embodied knowing! Not just a metaphor likening word-phrase-sentence and body—so thinking is like other kinds of growth. But part of the whole change shown in this incremental bit-by-bit increase of language colaboring with the light. Imp Plus’s recovery of it in the acquisition of words, phrases, combinings, and the thoughts made from them ... of which a new body is the salient sci-fi event in the book yet not the whole story. The light that has joined to make this experiment. What has become of it? Its motion beyond my grasp. What do we grasp? That we imagine in a limitless genre of time—imagined possibility, call it; while we exist in Nature’s time, which our thought conceives and contains and by which our thought someday dies with us I most of the time think. By analogy with this time of thought and of nature I have imagined light: there is the light of nature which moves at absolute speed, and cannot stop and still be light though we measure it in photons; and then apart from a light that hardly moves in my room from moment to moment, is there not a light that must exist unmoving (if anything is ever unmoving), held, used, contained, say? All very well to say. It’s imagination, it’s literature—mere literature, I add disloyally. Yet I have tried to imagine this paused (pooled!) light as organic fact in the growth depicted in Plus. Pushing metaphor aside in favor of homology. I say homology to mean a kinship due to the inheritance of features that are present in a common ancestor: the wing of a bird, the wing of a bat, the foreleg of an amphibian; or the seven neck vertebrae in giraffe, mole, bat, and you and me—7 being the ancestral # for most mammals as I am taught by our evolutionary biologist the late Stephen Jay Gould. Where is homology in Plus? Strange body-limbs eventually visible through a new-grown visual field. Through some partnership with the sun and more than the sun. Though I left it there, or ongoingly there, I conveyed the process of this growth from blind reaction through words combining through an intensity of solitude to desire and resistance. A body thought into being, evidently. In someone else’s sci-fi novel we might learn if these limbs, each with a name, are adapted to some purpose. (Yes, I could have gone further.) Adaptive, though, down to the last thickening or whorl or strength or inch, I do not think, siding with Gould’s theory devised with Richard Lewontin that some features of organisms exist simply as the necessary result of how they (the organism) developed: their spandrel theory they called it, by analogy, referring to the spaces above an arch that come into being only because of how arches are built but have no special purpose. Some vegetable growth Ground Control envisioned? Imp Plus has become rather more than that. A new organism to absorb the old brain-body hierarchy, rethink it. More than a new body grown by Imp Plus it is clearly a new organism Imp Plus is growing into. Engendering resistance stubborn and palpable. It yields now a new action. Choice, can we call it? Following Pascal’s Pensee 339 about thought, listen to 340: “The arithmetical machine produces effects which approach nearer to thought than all the actions of animals. But it does nothing which would enable us to attribute will to it, as to the animals.” In my dictionary, under “imp” I find offspring, mischievous child, demon. You need to make the reader care about this Imp Plus that is transmitted in words that start things, evoke powers. Care for the awful predicament, but for the future, always a condition waiting like emptiness or a field. And light, organically collaborative. Summonable, it would seem. There are gaps between what we want and what we do about it, and if these are traversed by what we are willing to call will—this light that must generate itself to know itself, will remains a dark matter in the gap between acting and not acting, as it is a motion in our lives so determined (and by chance) yet with quite bodily intimations of alternative, the stroke of decision. In Plus a thought of extinction, too. Signs of resistance and changes in the state of affairs determine Ground Control to terminate the project and bring this thing home. Recovery it is called: this new Imp Plus to be examined exhaustively. And as a freak in custody. But by now Imp Plus can do what he could not have done before. Either choose an incorrect angle of reentry into Earth’s atmosphere and cause the capsule to burn up, or change trajectory and coast off onto some tangential course elsewhere. To deny Ground Control its chosen ending is not to betray the project. A mass of data has come down already. The same will that, acting apparently with the Sun or its light, seems to have been instrumental in evoking the growth that is part of what the experiment yields—will it now say No? To put the reader on this existential pivot amid such silence, such light external and inwardly absorbed. I suppose for me this was part of the experiment. I am told it is moving. Exact, I hoped. With a pace, an architecture, and a clear mystery. Search, and again search: research emotional, ethical. In theory unrelated to anything except finding out what is so, our experiment opens on basic uncertainties. Repeatability I couldn’t say. From Galileo to cloning, basic research meets not only limits of imagination but cultural prohibitions, which to the individual imagination are the same thing. Is it our old friend forbidden knowledge we’re invoking when, today, we have genuine doubt that results of research into cloning will create wretchedness and who knows what exponential contagion? This was hardly in my mind, at least in this form, when I wrote Plus. Any more than the long-term survival of the particular seabird fragmentarily recalled by Imp Plus (perhaps, though I can’t know for sure, because new limbs may suggest wings). A shearwater, a gull-like bird, it skims, it shears the water as it hunts for fish; it was part of a life that the man liked and was losing. Pure coincidence that today, a quarter of a century later, the so-called Newell’s shearwaters on the Hawaiian island of Kauai are being threatened by light: artificial light, however: for shearwaters nest on land and the fledglings depart on autumn evenings for the sea: but like many other species of birds they are confused sometimes on their maiden flights by artificial lighting on bridges and buildings, and many of them are crashing there and dying. In years when the October full moon falls near the fledglings’ mid-month departure deaths are fewer than in years when they take off on nights with little moonlight. Natural light helps them navigate. Artificial lures them off course. Light pollution, it is called, a matter of technology, correctable maybe. Imp Plus gains the power to cut short Travel Light. Here the individual can do something. That is fiction for you. I thought of Plus as an idyl, that classical genre here turning pastoral into an orbit’s remote setting. A sort of sci-fi tale. A familiar premise, the brain disembodied and kept alive, but developed by this author with a little hardware and theory using his reading and citizen awareness of technology and his trips to Cape Kennedy in the early 1970s to observe space launches and talk to project engineers and even astronauts: altering, then, the drift of such tales and risking seeming to transcend the observable process by inferring a collaboration between Will and Nature, I would guess Will and Light shed from the sun. I risked a strain of magical transcendence. But the style and the events hardly cast off from the facts, the realistically if inwardly pursued premise, or from science however speculatively particular, for example, as to the effect of electromagnetic cascades of light packets on growth. I had hoped the tale or inquiry would gain a radiance. The Novel as a form of forms D. H. Lawrence called “the one bright book of life.” Here, against the shadows in the capsule and from Earth, with some special experimental focus on brightness, I find that for this reader light is shed on courage and on whatever we might mean by the natural.
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