Stanislaw Lem: Peace on Earth

One character followed me for two months trying to wring the truth out of me. He would visit me at the most uncivil hours to ask me how many of me there really were. The medical textbooks I gave him didn’t help him any more than they had helped me. I loaned him the books only to get rid of him. How did I meet him? I had gone to buy shoes without laces, the kind with Velcro on the top, because if my left side didn’t want to go for a walk, it was impossible to tie my shoes. As soon as I’d tie a shoe, my left hand would untie it. So I went to buy a pair of running shoes with Velcro fasteners, not that I’m one of those jogging types, I just wanted to teach the right hemisphere of my brain a lesson because at that time I couldn’t communicate with it at all and I was furious and covered with bruises. I muttered something to the salesman to excuse my erratic behavior which wasn’t actually mine. Then, as he knelt before me with the shoehorn, I grabbed his nose with my left hand. My left hand, that is, grabbed his nose, and I tried to explain this to him, the difference, figuring that even if he thought I was deranged (how could a shoe salesman know anything about callotomy?) he would still sell me the shoes. No reason for a madman to go barefoot. Unfortunately the salesman was a philosophy student working part-time in the shoe store and he was fascinated.

“Mr. Tichy!” he now yelled in my apartment. “According to logic, you’re either singular or you’re plural! If your right hand is pulling up your pants and the left hand interferes, it means that behind each stands a separate half of the brain that thinks its own thoughts and refuses to cooperate with the other. Because hands and feet don’t go around fighting each other on their own!”

That’s when I gave him the Gazzanigi. The best research done on the split brain and the results of that operation are in Professor Gazzanigi’s book, The Bisected Brain, published in 1970 by Appleton Century Crofts, Educational Division, at the Meredith Corporation, and may my brain never grow together again if I’m inventing Michael Gazzanigi or his father to whom he dedicated his monograph and whose name is Dante Achilles Gazzanigi, also a doctor (M.D.). If you don’t believe me, go to the nearest medical bookstore and ask for a copy.

The man who hounded me asking over and over what it’s like living as two learned nothing from me. All he accomplished was to drive both my hemispheres to unanimous fury because I grabbed him with both hands by the neck and threw him out the door. This brief armistice of my dissociated being sometimes occurs, but I don’t know why.

The young philosopher then telephoned me in the middle of the night, hoping that half-asleep I would spill my incredible secret. He asked me, ignoring the colorful language I was hurling at him, to place the receiver first to the left ear then to the right. He said it wasn’t his questions that were idiotic but the state I was in, which defied all anthropological and existential concepts of man as a rational being conscious of his own rationality. He’d probably just finished his finals, that philosophy student, because he threw Hegel at me and Descartes (I think therefore I am, not we think therefore we are), and Husserl and Heidegger, to prove that my condition was impossible because it contradicted the greatest minds who for thousands of years, beginning with the Greeks, studied the conscious ego, and here comes someone with a severed commissure of the brain, as fit as a fiddle except his right hand doesn’t know what his left hand is doing, likewise with the legs, and while some experts say that he has consciousness on the left side only and that the right is a soulless computer, others believe he has two consciousnesses but the right one can’t speak because the Broca’s area is in the left frontal lobe, but a third group proposes two partially separated egos. “You can’t jump off a train in pieces,” he yelled at me, “or die in pieces, and you can’t think in pieces either!” I stopped throwing him out because I felt sorry for him. In his desperation he tried to bribe me. Eight hundred and forty dollars, he swore that was all he had, what he’d saved for a vacation with his girl, but he was prepared to part with it and with her as well if I told him who was thinking with my right hemisphere when I didn’t know what it was thinking. I sent him to Professor Eccles, an advocate of left brain consciousness who believes the right side doesn’t think at all, but the student didn’t buy that, knowing that I had painstakingly taught sign language to my right hemisphere. He wanted me to go to Eccles and tell him he was wrong. The student now read medical papers instead of going to his classes in the evening. Learning that the nerve pathways are crossed, he searched through the fattest textbooks to find out why in the hell that crossing happened so that the right brain controls the left half of the body and vice versa, but of course there was no answer to that question. The crossing either benefits us as human beings, he reasoned, or it doesn’t. He read books by psychiatrists and found one who said that consciousness is in the left hemisphere and the subconscious in the right, but I was able to get that notion out of his head. I had read more than he, naturally. Tired of struggling with myself and now with this student burning with the thirst for knowledge, I left, I fled to New York — and jumped from the frying pan into the fire.

I rented a studio apartment near Manhattan and took the subway or bus to the public library to read Yozatitz, Werner, Tucker, Woods, Shapiro, Riklana, Schwartz, Szwarc, and Shvarts, and Sai-Mai-Halassza, Rossi, Lishman, Kenyon, Harvey, Fischer, Cohen, Brumbach, and about thirty different Rappaports. Almost every trip caused a scene, because I pinched the prettier women, particularly blondes. It was my left hand of course that did the pinching but try to explain that in a few words. Now and then I was slapped in the face, but the worst part was that most of the women accosted didn’t seem to mind at all. On the contrary they considered it an overture, a pass, which was the last thing on my mind.

I could see I was getting nowhere trying to extricate myself single-handed from this nightmare, so I finally contacted a group of leading authorities in the field. These scientists were only too happy to study me. I was examined, x-rayed, scanned, subjected to positron emission tomography and magnetic resonance imaging, covered by four hundred electrodes, strapped to a special chair, and asked to look through a slit at pictures of apples, dogs, forks, combs, old people, tables, mice, mushrooms, cigars, glasses, nude women, and babies, after which they told me what I already knew: that when they showed me a billiard ball so that only my left hemisphere could see it and at the same time put my right hand into a bag with many objects, I wasn’t able to choose the ball, and vice versa. They said I was an uninteresting case, but I said nothing about the sign language. I wanted, after all, to learn something about myself from them; I didn’t care about adding to their knowledge.

I turned then to Professor S. Turteltaub, a loner, but instead of shedding light on my condition all he did was tell me what a pack of wolves, thieves, and parasites all the others were. Thinking his contempt for them was on scientific grounds, I listened with interest, but Turteltaub, it turned out, was angry only because they had rejected his project. The last time I saw Drs. Globus and Savodnisky, or whatever their names were — there were so many of them — they were offended when I told them I was seeing Dr. Turteltaub. They informed me that he had been expelled from their research group on ethical grounds. Turteltaub wanted to offer murderers sentenced to death or life imprisonment the chance to submit to callotomy instead. He argued that since callotomization was performed only on severe epileptics, it was not known whether the effect of cutting the commissure would be the same in normal people. And a normal man sentenced to the electric chair for murdering his mother-in-law, for example, would certainly prefer to have his corpus callosum cut. But Supreme Court Judge Klössenfanger spoke against this, because if Turteltaub murdered his mother-in-law in cold blood, that could be the decision of his left hemisphere alone, the right hemisphere knowing nothing about it, or knowing and protesting but being overruled, and if the murder occurred anyway after such an inner conflict, it would be difficult indeed to condemn one hemisphere while exonerating the other. In effect fifty-percent of the murderer would be sentenced to death.