On telepathy and the battle for narrative control.

After William Burroughs experienced how pitifully he could be held in thrall by a small molecule, he developed a lifelong interest in telepathy and mind control.

His own brain had been upended. Suddenly, he found himself devoting the vast majority of his time and money toward a single cause: obtaining a day’s ration of opiate. If he was delinquent in this task, he grew sick. Agony would keep him focused.

If that drug was capable of re-sculpting a human personality, might there be other ways? In Queer, the protagonist speculates:

“I know telepathy to be a fact, since I have experienced it myself. I have no interest to prove it, or, in fact, to prove anything to anybody. What interests me is, how can I use it?

“In South America at the headwaters of the Amazon grows a plant called Yage that is supposed to increase telepathic sensitivity. Medicine men use it in their work. A Colombian scientist, whose name escapes me, isolated from Yage a drug he called Telepathine. I read all this in a magazine article.

“Later I see another article: the Russians are using Yage in experiments on slave labor. It seems they want to induce states of automatic obedience and ultimately, of course, ‘thought control.’ The basic con. No buildup, no spiel, no routine, just move in on someone’s psyche and give orders.

“I have a theory that the Mayan priests developed a form of one-way telepathy to con the peasants into doing all the work. The deal is certain to backfire eventually, because telepathy is not of its nature a one-way setup, nor a setup of sender and receiver at all.”

As it happens, psychedelic drugs are quite poor tools for potentiating mind control. But there are other ways. A precisely-localized magnetic pulse can cause prompt, unnoticeable alterations in a person’s behavior – researchers were able to change how their human study subjects responded to unfairness, all without those subjects realizing that they were acting differently from usual.

Because repeated behaviors give rise to our personality, it stands to reason that repeated transcranial magnetic stimulation could rewire a person’s identity. Invisibly, and, with the right interference patterns, at a distance.

You could be made other.

The more common form of mind control practiced in the United States is much less technologically advanced. Rather than using a magnetic pulse to stimulate or suppress particular regions of the brain, we employ narrative control.

Here’s a simple story: a bell rings, then dinner is served. If this story is integrated inside the brain as universally true, then the sound of the bell will trigger salivation. This is the basic principle behind Pavlovian conditioning. You can train a dog to associate dinnertime to the sound of a bell, or to have an aversion to a particular smell.

Humans can be similarly conditioned. Companies like Facebook and Apple have incorporated a variety of sensory experiences into their designs, all intended to engender a sense of urgency about checking your telephone. The alerts, the updates, the little pings – these are pushed to the forefront of the design because they compel engagement. Likewise the little jingles of dropped loot in online fantasy games.

In a perfect world, corporations would not make their users’ brains worse in order to increase their own profits. If those companies’ designs were less malicious, the makers wouldn’t need to be so vigilant about making sure that their own children don’t engage with their creations.

But those are little stories. A few stray details added to the narrative of your day: if you see the dot, click to see the update! More threatening is the prospect of mind control that totally rewrites an internalized narrative. Take a person’s memories and supplant them.

In Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, the doctor Benway describes his interrogation techniques:

“While in general I avoid the use of torture – torture locates the opponent and mobilizes resistance – the threat of torture is useful to induce in the subject the appropriate feeling of helplessness and gratitude to the interrogator for withholding it. And torture can be employed to advantage as a penalty when the subject is far enough along with the treatment to accept punishment as deserved.”

In an excellent article for Science magazine, journalist Douglas Starr describes research into false confessions, situations when people are subjected to such extreme narrative control that they temporarily lose grasp of their personal memories and accept instead an interrogator’s version of reality.

A variety of techniques are employed – the threat of torture, as above; a questioning regime that is in itself torturous, giving the subject an incentive to play along just to make it stop; sleep deprivation to muddle the brain; ardently repeated falsehoods to supplant the subject’s own stories; deceitful cajoling to persuade the subject that there would be minimal consequences to accepting an alternate version of reality (by saying things like “Anyone would have done the same thing”).

And it works. Innocent people can be made to believe that they’ve done horrible things. With a variety of laboratory experiments, psychologist Saul Kassin has shown that these techniques can induce almost anyone to confess to things they haven’t done.

Your stories can be wrested from you.

Indeed, our entire legal system is a battleground for narrative control. Two sides compete to determine what story will enter the legal record: this is typically set up as a test of wits between a well-trained, well-funded prosecutor and an indigent, incarcerated individual who might or might not receive a brief consultation with an overscheduled public defender.

Predictably, the prosecutor often wins. Because prosecutors have absolute, unchecked power to determine what charges to levy against a defendant, they can threaten people with the risk of outlandish punishment … and they can force a defendant to suffer in jail simply by delaying trials. So, eventually, when a prosecutor offers an alternative story that would allow the defendant’s torture to end, most people will renounce their own memories. They plead guilty. After all, you might spend another year in jail waiting for a trial, or you could just let the prosecutor re-write history and walk out today.

Of course, you might not walk out today. Even if you were told that you would. In this battle for narrative control, one side – the defendant – is required to be honest. The other is not.

And so people lose their stories, the very narratives that make us who we are.

Featured image: neural pathways in the brain taken using diffusion tensor. Image by Thomas Schultz.

On sexuality: dolphins.

Dolphins, like humans, fool around throughout the year. But dolphins, unlike humans, can conceive only during certain seasons.

(After writing the preceding sentence, I wanted to mention which seasons. I typed “when can dolphins conceive” into my search bar. The top hit was a website called Can Male Dolphins Get Pregnant, with the blurb “There will be nothing you can do about it but pray.” I clicked the link. The page instantly re-directed to a website called Trusted Health Tips featuring a “new groundbreaking online video that reveals how to get pregnant,” alongside the disclaimer that “pharmaceutical and fertility companies have requested the government to ban” the video, since it would clearly destroy their businesses. Our generation is the first to have all the world’s knowledge at our fingertips! We are like gods, are we not?)

Dolphins, like humans, are attracted to a wide range of sexual partners. Pairs or trios of males form long-term strategic alliances, and they will engage in “psuedo-sexual” behavior with their allies. Presumably one or both of the participants finds these activities pleasurable. They’ll tumble with females, and males, and humans, too.

As best we know, dolphins hold no negative stereotypes against those who pursue consensual pleasure, no matter what form it takes.

I’ve felt surprised, when discussing sexuality in jail, that so many men who’ve spent time in prison still use starkly binary terminology. I’ve never heard anyone use the word “bisexual” in jail. Instead I’ve heard things like, “I’ve got nothing against people who want to be gay. It’s not for me, but I’ve got nothing against it. What gets me is when people who I know are gay, who I saw be gay inside, they get out and want me to back up their lies that they’re not. I’m like, excuse me, I know you’re gay, so how can you ask me to tell somebody that you’re not?”

At another class, we discussed human sexuality throughout history. Physical affection was encouraged among the troops of ancient Rome, with the idea that a soldier might fight more fervently to protect his lover than his country. Japanese samurai were considered unrefined if they didn’t savor the occasional dalliance with another male. (I refrain from describing the samurai’s encounters as “sexual,” because many were not consensual by contemporary standards – the objects of their desire were often too young.)

In many cultures, if someone was so persnickety that he had sex exclusively with women, despite spending long periods of time surrounded only by other men, he’d be seen as deviant.

One of the guys interjected, “Yeah, but what they were doing wasn’t, you know, cause I heard you’re only gay if your testicles touch.”

This was immediately disputed. “No way – there’s positions with two guys and a girl where your testicles touch, and I know for a fact that don’t make you gay.”

My co-teacher and I sighed. We’re both long-haired, relatively effeminate men, typically dressed in some measure of women’s clothing – every pair of pants I own comes from either the Indiana University dumpsters or the women’s department of Goodwill, and the same is true of most of my co-teacher’s jackets.

But my co-teacher and I live in a world where ambiguity is safer. The way we punish people in this country carves away the nuances of people’s personalities – immersed in violence, they’ll need friends, but people are shuffled so often that there’s little time to build friendships. They make do with communal identity instead.

When people were talking over a young black man as he read a poem, they were shushed by a convicted murderer covered in Aryan Brotherhood tattoos. The tattooed man never seemed particularly racist. He was very well read, and often mentioned things he’d learned from reading The Quran or Confucius. But he was socially a white supremacist. A pragmatic choice for a dude who’d spent eighteen years in prison. At cafeterias under AB control, he’d get to eat.

Likewise, no matter who men fool around with, most choose to identify as socially heterosexual while they’re inside.

(A lovely quote from Morgan Freeman that I first saw as an epigram in CAConrad’s While Standing in Line for Death: “I hate the word homophobia. It’s not a phobia. You are not scared. You are an asshole.”)

Our world didn’t have to turn out this way.

In the poem “Gilgamesh,” Spencer Reece documents the slow crumbling of an affair – the poet fell in love with a man who desires only the young. As Spencer ages, the romance fades. This man wants only to recapture the love that was denied to him in youth.

This instability is tragically common – Spencer’s paramour was raised in a culture that considered all sexual desire to be sinful, and homosexual desire especially so. Even outside prison walls, we consider certain ambiguities too fraught to tolerate:

Fragments, clay cylinders, tablets, parchment –

to write Genesis, they say, the writers

searched their neighborhood,

found all kinds of things, including

the epic about Gilgamesh, much of it damaged,

regarding the man who saw into the deep.

Somehow, the part

about Gilgamesh and Enkidu

in love

got lost.

What a different world we’d have if our sacred books taught that love was love was love. People could comfortably be all of themselves.

In his poem “Dolphin” from An Aquarium, Jeffrey Yang writes that

The Greeks thought dolphins

were once men. The Chinese

river dolphin was a goddess.

Scientists tell us that if we

rearrange a few of our genes,

we’d become dolphins. Wouldn’t

that be real progress!

On Han Kang’s ‘The Vegetarian.’

More women than men are vegetarian — if you consider the word “vegetarian” to mean someone who eats no meat, milk, or eggs & wears no leather, as in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, something like 4 out of 5 vegetarians in the U.S. are female.

BeingaBeastcover_0 If I were planning to write an essay about the moral or philosophical virtues of eating vegetables, I might approach this statistic with claims like Charles Foster’s from Being a Beast:

Women have more theory of mind than men, which makes them nicer people — less prone to start wars or engage in egocentric monologues at the dinner table.

Foster goes on to say that in his experience, empathy, trying to imagine what life must be like for individuals of other species, changed his diet. He knows, of course, that humans evolved to be carnivorous. This evolutionary history is readily apparent in our minds and bodies. We experience the thrill of the hunt (not the fear of the hunted), our intestines are short, our cells can’t synthesize all the nutrients they need. Foster carries genes that “want” him to be a hunter, and he writes:

I’ve put down my guns and taken up my tofu, but there was a time when I crept heavily armed through the woods and over the mountains.

By hunting, he could more fully embrace what it meant to be born a Homo sapiens. And yet. Once he made a serious effort to understand what his choices meant for other creatures, once he’d lived as a badger, and concluded that badgers, too, must have their sorrows and joys, their own reasons for wanting to be alive, he could no longer support their murder. And if not badgers, why cows?

River_Otter_with_Fish_(5711531594) Later in his project, Foster writes of a moment — while he was trying to live as an otter, swimming underwater and hunting raw fish with his hands — when a fish swam into his mouth. In that moment of truth, he chose not to eat it:

A disoriented stickleback, no doubt taking my open mouth for a cave, swam inside. Its fluttering spines grazed my palate like the probe of a Parkinsonian dentist. I should have crushed it between my fillings and swallowed it. I couldn’t, any more than I could stamp on a mouse. My failure is illogical: I pay good money for other people to winch cows bellowing to their deaths so that we can serve up buttock muscle for Sunday lunch. My illogicality isn’t original, of course, which perhaps makes it worse, and certainly makes it less interesting. It’s about distance; about vicarious guilt being less intense; about the little physiological details of death that speak more intimately to our moral intuitions than any amount of argument; about the fact that physical proximity connotes relationship, even with a very basic animal, and that almost any sort of relationship makes it harder to kill.

As Foster’s empathy developed during the project, he felt that he had developed a meaningful relationship with all animals. Their minds are all similar to his own. He could not support their murder for his sake.

But — importantly — Foster does not impugn the otters. An otter would crush and swallow the fish. They do so ceaselessly; otters sleep some eighteen hours a day, but for their waking six they are frenetic killing machines.

Otters, like humans, are heterotrophs. We must eat to survive. And empathy is a consideration that the feelings of others, like our own, have value. You can’t properly value someone else’s life without valuing your own.

Maybe otters would rather give up the hunt, laze about during the day and take a twice-weekly trip to the grocery to buy tofu. But they don’t get that choice.

And so, if I wanted to claim that the decision to be vegetarian, for most people, springs from well-reasoned philosophical or moral beliefs, that is how I would explain the gender split. I would claim that women are more able to empathize with other species than men. Foster does. So does the Huffington Post article I pulled the numbers from.

But more likely, I feel, is that women are more pressured to consider the food they put into their bodies. In Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth she writes that

Some women’s magazines report that 60 percent of American women have serious trouble eating. The majority of middle-class women in the United States, it appears, suffer a version of anorexia or bulimia; but if anorexia is defined as a compulsive fear of and fixation upon food, perhaps most Western women can be called, twenty years into the backlash, mental anorexics.

Dieting is the essence of contemporary femininity. Denying oneself food is seen as good in a woman, bad in a man. Where the feminine woman of the Feminine Mystique denied herself gratification in the world, the current successful and “mature” model of femininity submits to a life of self-denial in her body.

To eschew meat is a form of self-denial, and self-denial (in many contexts, but especially at the dinner table) is praised in women. A good woman, it was believed, gives up her dreams of a career for the sake of her family. A good woman, it is often still believed, gives up her dessert for the sake of her figure.

Not that dessert — or meat, for that matter — is a comparable sacrifice to a career. But all the abnegations add up. Women are routinely asked to do more with less. “Hunger hurts but starving works,” sings Fiona Apple.

Han Kang’s The Vegetarian speaks to the ways that a misogynistic society curtails the opportunities of women. The book uses the same structure as Knut Faldbakken’s Adam’s Diary: we examine a culture by observing the way three separate narrators relate to an unknowable woman. In The Vegetarian, the central woman has renounced meat as a step toward renouncing personhood. She reflects Yi Sang’s self-negating idea, “I believe that humans should be plants.” She states that her decision was motivated by a nightmare, yet her dream closely mirrors a nightmare from William Burroughs’s Queer:

veg “Another dream I had a chlorophyll habit. Me and five other chlorophyll addicts are waiting to score. We turn green and we can’t kick the chlorophyll habit. One shot and you are hung for life. We are turning into plants.”

The central woman of Han’s The Vegetarian strives to become a tree. She experiences arousal only when her body is painted with flowers and leaves. She practices handstands and imagines how it would feel for her fingers to extend root-like into the soil, her legs the boughs of a tree. And she announces to her sister, who had brought her fruit to eat, “I don’t need this kind of food, sister. I need water.” Later, as she is dying of anorexia, she screams at the hospital staff, “I . . . don’t . . . like . . . eating!”

The story is less about a woman who wants to be vegetarian, than one who wants to be a vegetable. Which is perhaps a more important story to tell. We should not be proud of a culture in which people feel so trapped they no longer want to be human. Being alive should be a joy, and yet, as depicted in the final panels of Stuart McMillen’s Rat Park, we’ve created a world in which many feel their lives to be a cage.

On chess as a window to the soul.

I loved chess growing up, enough that I always felt a shiver of pleasure when games appeared in novels. Like the pre-felo de se game in Love in the Time of Cholera, the grim filial sacrifice in Vonnegut’s “All the King’s Horses,” the entirety of The Defense ...

If you also are a fan of chess in art, you’ll definitely want to watch Andrew Bujalski’s brilliant mockumentary Computer Chess. The film manages to be incredibly entertaining and humorous while addressing big ideas about artificial intelligence, the treatment of women in science, power structures between underlings and their professional superiors, and the difficulty of bridging cognitive gaps between people with different value systems. With that list of themes, and the film being shot in black & white by shaky handheld cameras, it could’ve so easily been dull and dry… but it’s a blast.

One reason why chess has appeared so often in artistic works is the claim that people reveal their personalities through their playing styles. I never agreed with this. Sure, you can play aggressively, you can play cautiously. The biggest distinction, though, is between playing well or poorly. And even then, only a small set of moves are available each turn. With only twenty moves to choose from for the first turn, and hardly ever more than fifty, many of them strategically bad, how much of your personality can you reveal?

That’s why I was so excited when I discovered Go. It’s a rough cultural equivalent to chess, but on any turn there are a much wider range of options that seem to be strategically reasonable (I say “seem to be,” because, unlike with chess, computers still can’t beat the best Go players, so we don’t have a clear algorithmic understanding to identify the best moves).

At the beginning of a game of Go, there are hundreds of options to choose from for each move. And, unlike with chess, there’s no certainty that a slightly more aggressive move, or a slightly more timid one — setting a piece down very near an opponent’s, or father away — is better or worse than the other options. Toward the beginning of the game, at least, your personality is less likely to be squelched by strategic constraints.

I figured that this abundance of choices meant games of Go would be more effective literary devices than chess games. So far, though, I haven’t come across literary Go games that I’ve enjoyed as much as those chess matches cited above. I’ve only read a few, though; maybe ones that’ll floor me are out there somewhere.

But, right, this essay is supposed to be about chess, not Go. Because I eventually realized that chess does reveal the players’ personalities… as long as they’re not following the rules. Consider this monologue from Burroughs’s Queer (a bit of context that might help explain the speaker’s casual racism: Queer is, in my opinion, the best novel about unrequited love. The speaker is trying, and failing, to get the man he loves to pay attention to him. His aggrieved petulance and insobriety lead him to tell increasingly vicious, mean-spirited stories):

“I was reading up on chess. Arabs invented it, and I’m not surprised. Nobody can sit like an Arab. The classical Arab chess game was simply a sitting contest. When both contestants starved to death it was a stalemate.” Lee paused and took a long drink.

“During the Baroque period of chess the practice of harrying your opponent with some annoying mannerism came into general use. Some players used dental floss, others cracked their joints or blew saliva bubbles. The method was constantly developed. In the 1917 match at Baghdad, the Arab Arachnid Khayam defeated the German master Kurt Schlemiel by humming ‘I’ll Be Around When You’re Gone’ forty-thousand times, and each time reaching his hand towards the board as if he intended to make a move. Schlemiel went into convulsions finally.

“Did you ever have the good fortune to see the Italian master Tetrazzini perform?” Lee lit Mary’s cigarette. “I say ‘perform’ advisedly, because he was a great showman, and like all showmen, not above charlatanism and at times downright trickery. Sometimes he used smoke screens to hide his maneuvers from the opposition — I mean literal smoke screens, of course. He had a corps of trained idiots who would rush in at a given signal and eat all the pieces. With defeat staring him in the face — as it often did, because actually he knew nothing of chess but the rules and wasn’t too sure of those — he would leap up yelling, ‘You cheap bastard! I saw you palm that queen!’ and ram a broken teacup into his opponent’s face. In 1922 he was rid out of Prague on a rail. The next time I saw Tetrazzini was in the Upper Ubangi. A complete wreck. Peddling unlicensed condoms. That was the year of the rinderpest, when everything died, even the hyenas.”

Chess played that way clearly reveals the players’ personalities. They’re no longer shackled by strategic constraints — the apparent lawlessness of the game resembles Calvinball more than traditional chess.

The chess game in Michal Ajvaz’s The Other City has a similar emphasis on personality over rules. The Other City is a beautiful novel, and I think this passage is fairly representative of what I love about it. Dream logic that is far enough removed from traditional reality that we expect weirdness, but not so weird as to be incomprehensible. A real attention to detail in describing the oft-impossible physical surroundings. And pervasive horror; this passage is followed by one describing a once-beautiful poet scarred by long use of a typewriter that struck him with poisonous quills each time he pressed the keys. Even the description of the chess game has real nightmarish properties. The stakes are high, but the rules are unclear. Oh, and, many thanks to Gerald Turner for the translation; all translation seems difficult, but recreating this sort of surrealism in another language must’ve been particularly arduous.

The Book of Deserted Gardens speaks of this on the page with the greasy stain from noodle soup left by a scribe of long ago, who took fright when across the sun-drenched page there fell the horned shadow of a monster as it passed through the sleepy and desolate lanes of the city after defeating the aging king at a game of chess on the parched ramparts. It was played with chessmen of sparkling ice; all that could be heard in the silence was the soft rattle of red and purple gemstones falling in the hour-glass alongside the chessboard; it was the monster’s vengeance for a bygone defeat in a contest beneath the high stone walls of the fortress, on which broke the waves of the nocturnal sea. The stories do not tell the entire truth — monsters always return: one day, a familiar monster will ring your doorbell too, bearing a chessboard under its arm; it will persuade you to join it in a game of chess and you will be obliged to include in the game the carved figure of a tiger-headed spearman, a piece that moves in irregular, furtive spirals and can stray quite far from the chessboard — even out of the apartment.

Frank Brown Cloud

Justice through words.

Tag: Queer

On sexuality: dolphins.

On Han Kang’s ‘The Vegetarian.’

On chess as a window to the soul.