Pursuing praxis

[email to Jenna]

I just had the most amazing conversation with one of my advisors, Clark. I can’t remember how much Gould stresses the 1959 centennial celebration of Darwin’s Origin at U of Chicago in the first chapter, but he goes into it at great length later (big surprise), and all the characters and figures and opinions and dissenters and ideas that were present there. Well - dude, get this - Clark was there. He helped organize the thing. Shared an office for an entire quarter with Julian Huxley. Friends with Dobzhansky. Knew like everyone else. I mean everyone. Holy fucking cow. Like, all this I’ve been reading about, and that’s being held in my mind with some difficulty, just exploded! Just like that, it was real.

And he sees Gould’s book the way you and I do, and not like everyone else who wants a hard, fast, skinny little technical book. Because there’s so much depth, so many tangents, so much to even a single subject - in Gould’s thinking, his writing, in the way people’s minds work, and in the very nature of a subject like evolutionary theory (or any topic for that matter). SET is a treasure trove of connections and possibilities, synthesis and analysis that god only knows what’s going to come out of this, but I think it’s gonna be huge, even if it takes 20 years to play out, bit by bit.

And you know what - Clark knows. He gets it. He talks about books the way you and I do (without being a pervert about it or anything) for exactly the same reasons. He gets it, the high that is learning, and branching out and making connections, and he wears it on his sleeve. Maybe most of my other advisors think the same thing, but if so they’re not obvious about it. Clark’s the teacher everyone wishes they had, no matter how good one had it. Man, him and Gould together, talk about scales falling from my eyes. He points out books on his shelves (and he has a whole office full, four walls, floor to ceiling, overflowing), that have been sitting there all along, and I’m like that one! that’s the book! or another, or another. He talks about buying Simpson’s Tempo and Mode of Evolution in San Francisco before shipping out to the Pacific for WWII, before he’d even been to college, and how it gripped him, or one of Lewontin’s books in London before going to Ethiopia for the first time (he’s a human origins/evolution researcher). Just, so amazing. I’m going to encourage him to write a book about learning and growing as a scholar next time I see him.

Man, I’m so high right now, and I’m starving and 66 pages of Gould still stand in front of me tonight.

Ideas swarming. Hopefully I can catch and pin some down tonight, and with any luck and finageling, I’ll have some really awesome things to share tomorrow.

Ahhh! Man, life’s grand. I wish I could pass this feeling out like party favors.

—-

[email to Joe]

I think I may have just had the best day of my life. I saw the world spread out in front of me, wide open, and so brilliantly bright and full of possibilities that happiness stabbed so hard it brought tears to my eyes. And twice. I’m painfully, joyously aware of how much I can do, and all I have to do is do it, even if it means I’ll be worn to the bone, because I don’t care, there’s nothing that’ll hold me back. And there are no boundaries, no walls in any part of my life; it all goes together, one flows into the next, and success in one is success in another. And I got to share that, in a way, with two people I tremendously respect.

First, I connected with one of my advisors, Clark, despite the distance of a good 60 years, and –I think I’ve been looking for this my whole life. Here’s the teacher I’ve been waiting for, knowing I haven’t any right to expect it, but holding on to the hope all the same. He can’t teach me a damn thing, but he’ll help me do it all myself. He sees that I can take the world by storm, and he nods and smiles, seeing what I see and saying yes to it.

Second, I got your cd, just now, and it about knocked me over. The songs, the way they hang together, and Rand and Rodin and everything. It’s this collection and integration of wierd yet special little snippets of my life - all in one place, and they cohered so fast and so hard I … am speechless, still.

—-

[reply from Jenna]

Hey–It is so awesome when it becomes so *real*– the meeting of a man who’s been there, who has thought along a similar path, who by living validates all that one values. I’m so happy that you’ve gotten to really talk with Clark; that he can understand the weight of the book that really isn’t a weight at all– that it’s a door opening. I hope you’re talking with him regularly now– I’m here cheering you on :) to pick this guy’s brain! He sounds like he has mountains to offer, from what you’ve written– I’ll be in line for his book if he decides to write it!

“He gets it, the high that is learning, and branching out and making connections, and he wears it on his sleeve.”

The party favor has been handed to me, my eyes are tearing, it is *so* beautiful to hear that others have know the high and the ambition, andhave not dulled it nor set it on the wayside as they’ve grown. It’s awesome to hear a lifelong non-complacency, a lifetime’s worth of having doors opened all the time, of not turning away from shut doors.:) I’ve felt this, many times; the mental opening of doors, the innocent wonder and mature gravity– and sometimes scholastically it ends at me– my advisor for physiology actually told me that I need to “relax” or else I’ll “have a stroke”. I know one of his doctoral students and they’ve told me that he never says that to anyone, so in a sense, I take it as a compliement that a rigorous, hard-assed, blunt, and difficult teacher would tell me to relax. But anyway– so glad to know that advisors that appreciate the beauty of SET for each and every sentence– that they are out there, that they can wear it on their sleeves. Even if I may never have such an advisor in cognitive neuroscience, it is more than possible that one can *be* such aperson. While guiding lights such as Clark or Gould exist in many different fields and possibly very few treasure them as what they are, it is also a heady knowledge to know that we (who are in love with the mind) can be guiding lights as well.

“Because there’s so much depth, so many tangents, so much to even a single subject - in Gould’s thinking, his writing, in the way people’s minds work,”

I know! There’s so much depth everywhere, such that each sentence can compose an entire book on its own. I am realizing with amazement, day by day, the multidimensionality (adjectival, not literal *grin*) of existence that I cannot even begin to explain the multitude of connections I ponder about in my brain, much less write it all out. Gould can not only understand it but craft words such that it enables others to see it, if they want to.

Thank you for the wonderful email! I have yet to read chapter 2, but Iwill right now…–J