E. Doctorow - Andrew's Brain

I KNOW THAT WHEN women have their babies the husband takes second place, it’s to be expected that the mother-infant bond prevails and the husband finds himself usurped.

Yes, that sometimes happens.

Well, that did happen in a gentle kind of way with Briony and our baby, that maternal fixity of attention, but it was enough to worry me. What if it was more than that? I noticed that whenever I left things of mine scattered about — newspapers, books — she’d pick them up and put them where she decided they belonged. She had this alarming sense of order. Surely as time went on our different ways would add up. I began to think of the future — how with the passing years the disparity of our ages would become more pronounced. I decided to join a gym and work out.

Not really.

Yes, I entered the world of abs and pecs and quads. No two-syllable words in that crowd. I hated the place, all these heroes with weight lifter belts around their waists, heaving bars loaded with metal plates the size of sewer covers and grunting, and shouting, popping their muscles and then strutting around in display of their magnificence. I couldn’t bear it there for more than a few minutes — working this or that machine for fifteen reps — not repetitions, reps, and why fifteen was the sacred number I never did learn. But Briony approved — thought it was a good idea that I perform exercises, get up from my desk and fit myself to those machines. Cheers your brain, don’t you know, she said in the closest thing to flippancy that I had ever heard from her. As if I hadn’t taught her about the brain-body nexus.

Do you think, Andrew, you may sometimes overreact?

In the nineteenth century, work was physical. Blacksmiths, capenters, hod carriers, farmers, dam builders, ditch diggers, layers of railroad track, slaughterers of cattle. People didn’t have to find ways to exercise. Do you know what the New York Marathon is?

Of course.

If I ever were to decide to do serious research in neuroscience — well, it would have to do with the communal brain. As with ants, as with bees.

Why?

The brain of an ant colony is the colony. The brain of a beehive is the hive. And we have our popular delusions and the madness of crowds. Fellow who wrote that knew more than he knew.

You mean the tulip bubble?

Why do schools of fish change direction instantly, as one? Why do flocks of birds, leaderless, fly in changing patterns with more precision than a ballet company? Think of wars. How they become unavoidable and once begun grow bigger and bigger. Or the bizarre indigenous practices of any religious group no matter what god it attests to. And people going to the park on Sunday. Why should the day for the park be Sunday?

Families are together for the day of rest and so on. We have cities and we put parks in them for sound and obvious reasons.

No, Doc, it’s only a true park on Sunday, it needs a large amount of people to find its definition as a park, because a park is only a park when it organizes a human colony, and the fact that that is temporary shouldn’t blind us to the fact that it is repetitive.

Andrew—

The collective brain is a powerful thing. But we can’t compare to the ants, the bees. They have pheromonal cloud brains — chemical instructions for everything — sex, war, foraging. Millions or billions of years from now when the planet is long crisped and the human race is extinct, ants will reign, or maybe fruit flies, or maybe both, and they’ll be archaeologically inclined, they will crawl over the ruins of our cities, arrange our bones, display our remnants in museums of natural history, they will fly into the open windows of our skeletal apartments, rise up our elevator shafts, explore our long underground tunnels in their effort to understand who we were and what we were up to with our stacked caves of steel and stone and on the streets and runways our rusted-out prosthetic devices to move us from one place to another.

You’re suggesting they will survive us?

The collective brain of the ant colony is outside the body of any individual ant. It is the gaseous chemical identity of a colony that governs every ant’s behavior. So that looking at them you might think they know what they’re doing. Or why they’re doing it. Or it’s possible that the colonial brain invests each ant with an intelligence he or she might not otherwise have. That interests me. And the chances of survival are improved exponentially.

I seem to recall your quoting Mark Twain about the stupidity of ants.

That was of a particular ant who’d individualistically wandered off on his own. Nevertheless he, the ant, was capable of carrying three or four times his own weight. I didn’t see the equivalent from the grunts lifting sewer covers in my gym.

Why are we having this discussion?

We do pale emulations of the group brain as if in envy. We give ourselves temporarily to a larger social mind and we perform according to its dictates the way individual computers cede their capacities to their network. Perhaps we long for something like the situation these other creatures have — the ants, the bees — where the thinking is outsourced. Cloud thinking, a chemical ubermensch. Which brings us to politics.

I’m not sure you’re serious.

You know Emerson? It’s what Emerson, thinking of his own kind of creature, mistakenly calls the oversoul. He romanticizes it, makes it a constituent of ethical thinking suggesting God. When all he is aspiring to is a kind of universal pheromonal genius.

Seriously, Andrew, are you planning to do this research?

And then, of course, fashion. Even Briony wore jeans. Even I. And then our slang, the way a phrase will catch fire and go through all of us, all at once indispensable, ubiquitous, until it dies out as quickly as it arose. [ thinking ] What?

Your plans for the future.

Don’t make me laugh, Doc. I’m telling you about the end of my life.

We were getting ready to go out. A Sunday morning, a beautiful May morning, and we were to have brunch at this little French place on Sullivan Street. Briony was well into her eighth month and moving somewhat slowly, and while I waited I turned on our new TV I had bought to certify us as a family. And as it happened there was this documentary about the New York City Marathon. And there were the marathoners, in full color, streaming across the Verrazano Bridge by the thousands. For a moment I had the illusion that Briony was among them. But she appeared beside me, materialized as if from the screen.

All thoughts of leaving for our brunch were put aside, so rapt was she.

It is, after all, a remarkable sight, this legion of runners advancing like a tidal wave over the silver bridge, these thousands all doing the same thing at the same time, a great swath of humanity putting itself to the test of running twenty-six or so miles without falling down dead. I have to admit there is something so clean and spare about it, with its ancient allusions. How it exalts people to do this thing that has no reward except for having done it. There are purses, of course, for the world-class long-distance runners who come from other countries to breast the finish line, a man, a woman, gender indistinguishable in their running shorts and their numbered ribbed shirts and running shoes and sinewy bodies, crossing the finish line hours before the masses. [ thinking ] She hadn’t known about it, my wife. So it was as if all those runners were about to sweep us up, carry us along, engulf us in the tide of them.

Was this so portentous, people running?

I knew it before she said it, Briony right then and there swearing to run in the coming marathon. With a resolute nod to herself. With a clenching of fists. This was the girl, after all, whom I had seen for the first time spinning around the high bar. I had to smile — here she was, melon-ripe, and planning to begin training like the moment she delivered — but she wasn’t joking and was put out with me for not taking her seriously. I want to do this, Andrew, and I will. I don’t care what you say. And that’s all there is to it.