April 2011 Archives

I've stopped drinking coffee. I used to drink quite a bit of it--I had an espresso machine at my desk, and drank anywhere from one to three a day. Good stuff, too, from the roaster across the parking lot from my office. In January my ex came out to visit, and I brought the machine home so there'd be coffee in the morning, and I never brought the machine back to my desk. Since then, I've had the very occasional half cup of the weak office coffee. But in general: I no longer need coffee, because my recently transformed overall mood and outlook on life has been providing me with a wonderful and seemingly sourceless energy, and when I do have strong coffee like espresso, I feel a little strung out.

Also: there's been chocolate, which may have helped me through any withdrawal I might have had. A bit each day, dark, single-origin stuff made with cocoa from around the world: places like Madagascar, Cuba, the Philippines, even a single village in Venezuela. I have a small piece of 100% dark by way of breakfast, which sounds awful if you're thinking of baking chocolate, but is really just phenomenal. I share it--the other chocolate, that is, my fellow devotees weren't all that mad about the 100%--at the office, which is fun and amusing, because the really good chocolate is psychoactive. It's a bit like handing out sweet mellow drugs at work. It's complex and rich, so we sit in the cubicle for a few minutes and talk about the flavors much as one would talk about wine: the notes, the roast, the finish. There's a bar made with cocoa beans from Cuba, produced by François Pralus, that is so...well, Cuban...that I swear it's got tobacco notes.

Which could just be me being a pretentious knob. But there's no denying that a bar from Ecuador is different than a bar from Chuao, and the whole experience is in danger of turning me into one of those hipster doofuses who's got that One Thing that he's really, really into, like bicycles or cheese or beer. I may have to move to Portland.

There's a shop in town, a little Mecca for the other brown bean, where I buy bars to stash in my desk drawer and dole out in the afternoon, when the slump hits. Every once in awhile I'll go to the shop during lunch, accompanied by a lovely lass if I'm lucky, bulk up the stash, and have coffee. A couple of weeks ago I had a double espresso and three different sorts of freshly-bought chocolate, and at 11:30 that night I didn't see how I was going to get to sleep much before one AM.

Today I restrained myself: a single espresso, with a mere two varieties of cocoa goodness later on in the afternoon. But around dinner time I said to my mother, "I feel a bit strung out right now, I'm not sure why." Then I remembered: the caffeine. The coffee, plus the smaller amounts in the chocolate, sets my chest to thrumming and my ears to ringing. I can't believe that I used to drink as much coffee as I did. No wonder I was such a wreck.

There's a lot of things I don't do now that I used to do which contributed to an overall state of mind that could best be described as "miserable." I don't really drink any more, that was a big deal for awhile. I stepped away from pot long ago. And now, it seems, caffeine has joined the list of Substances That Just Aren't Helpful. I don't think that chocolate will join those ranks, it's too fun and innocuous. Besides, it's good for you.

And now--having exercised such coffee-related restraint--it's actually time for bed, where I'll dream cocoa dreams and wake up with my face stuck to the pillow.

I'm trying to have a moment with you here, and you've got a snootful of juniper vapors which seems to be more important to you. This is actually a rare thing, you know. Not only is there properly bright sun spearing out through the rain, but there are two bright and happy 'bows that look like they're coming straight up from the Winfreys' yard, just behind the wall. They look fantastic against the mountains!

So pleased you could join me. I know it was a long journey from the wet bar to the railing. No, I don't want your olive, you just enjoy that, why don't you. I've been meaning to talk to you about that, actually...a martini isn't typically a breakfast drink, you do realize this. Yes, I know you're allergic to tomatoes, but you could at least try for some semblance of propriety and have a Mimosa or a Fuzzy Navel, couldn't you? I feel like I'm living with a Fitzgerald. Soon you'll be hurling yourself down the staircase during a party to attract my attention.

You know, you and I seem to be operating on a different sort of frequency, lately. It reminds me of when I was first after you: all those weeks of pursuit and flirtation and downright poetry, Gerald--I sent you poetry!--and you thought I was just being friendly. I practically had to beat you over the head to come with me to the Saint-Milay's that weekend, remember? And then you went off after William, who barely knew you were alive! Sometimes I wonder if we'd ever have gotten together if you hadn't fallen into the pool. No, thank you, I'll just finish the champagne I've got.

Anyway--it's not just me. Do you know that Roger actually rang me up last week to ask if everything was all right with us? And Roger doesn't notice anything! He didn't realize Beatrice and Phillip had split up until she showed up in Monterrey without him last year, did you know that? Not a clue in the world. So if he's concerned, you bloody well ought to be, don't you think?

Well no, I'm not so sure that's true. I mean, you've got the gallery now, but that's only three nights a week, and I'm only in the studio during the day, so we've got weekends and four nights a week together. We've got plenty of time with each other. It's just that when we're in the same place you always seem to be...elsewhere. Another one? You've already had two! It's not even eleven yet.

Fine. You go and do that, then. I'll stay here and watch my rainbows.

Love doesn't just keep happening, you know!

...when the mountains are looming just so, and the sun has vaulted itself up out of the eastern ocean and into the sky;
when the highway rolls north all the way past the city of sparkling sidewalks and into the deep wine country;
when enough veils have dropped;
when the music matches;
when the dance steps are synchronous:
then we'll see who's traveling where, and when.

Won't we.

Ah, well. I'm supposed to do this for a living, but sometimes the right word doesn't present itself. To continue: to justify the personal experience here, I feel the need to tie it in to writing, because a) it makes me feel less like an overwrought exhibitionist, and b) it's useful to me to do so, which in turn leads to c) maybe it'll be useful to someone else. (See how that works? Two "me"s and a "you." But at least I care a little.)

So. I pay attention to my internal life, my interactions with other people and the world at large, as well as other people and their interactions with me and the world at large, because that is a prerequisite to the creation of characters in fiction. Observation must precede the commitment of the details of a character to the page, and when it's time to write, details are all you've got to work with. You can write out a ten-page character sketch as an exercise, but you can't include that in the story itself, because it doesn't belong there. What belongs in the story are the expressions of that biography which can be found in the way a character thinks, speaks, and acts. You don't tell the reader that a female character is shy. You show her speaking to a person she's just met with her arms folded across her chest. In a later scene, when she's grown more comfortable with that person, her arms drop, and she becomes more expressive with her hands as she speaks. If the person she's with is an observant sort, he'll notice that. If he's self-involved or doesn't care all that much about her, he won't. So from the simple portrayal of body posture, you can convey two sets of character traits: those of the woman, and those of the man.

Taking it further, there's a certain insight you can gain into a character's mindset if you find yourself in a similar mindset. My forthcoming novel involves a protagonist who's falling in love--actual, true love--for what is essentially the first time in his life. I don't have to be falling in love myself while I'm writing about that, but it certainly helps if I've done so once or twice, can play around with the thought of it, and imagine what emotional and mental states I'd have to be in for that to occur if I were the protagonist. There's a difference between falling in love at, say, 18, and falling in love two decades later. I've got the former experience in my memory banks. I have to use my imagination for the latter, and to do that I write odd little outbursts and fictional vignettes, some of which end up here for you lovely people.¹

If all of this sounds a bit familiar, that's because it owes quite a lot to the work of Lee Strasberg, and is also an inversion of the gonzo notion that fiction is the best fact. To yank from that link:

Method acting is a phrase that loosely refers to a family of techniques by which actors try to create in themselves the thoughts and emotions of their characters in an effort to develop lifelike performances. It can be contrasted with more classical forms of acting, in which actors simulate the thoughts and emotions of their characters through external means, such as vocal intonation or facial expression. Though not all Method actors use the same approach, the "method" in Method acting usually refers to the practice, advocated by Lee Strasberg, by which actors draw upon their own emotions and memories in their portrayals, aided by a set of exercises and practices including sense memory and affective memory.

This isn't a new or original idea (which I had already assumed when I started this post, and confirmed with that Google search just now.) Some of its more extreme examples have been proclaimed as "ridiculous" in a short burst of reductio ad absurdum. But I haven't taken any classes on it, or read any books describing the approach. And as for the extent of my own particular method, well, I'll just leave that one be. Which, given some of the stuff I've written, might be something of a disturbing idea. There are of course limits. I don't want to end up like Heath Ledger because I spent three months alone in a hotel room really getting into the mind of the Joker. But there is some role playing that goes on, yes. I'll spend time in a weird space, and explore it to see what it's like. If I've done the work properly, that shows in the finished product.

One of the ways this expresses itself during the creation of a story is when a narrative "goes off the rails." That's where you're writing along, at a pretty good clip, and suddenly find yourself in a sort of cul-de-sac where the story just stops working. If you're lucky, you'll notice this sooner rather than later. This used to happen to me fairly frequently--and still does--but what I managed to figure out about my own process was that this sudden dead end was nearly always the result of a character who wasn't behaving like herself. If I had a particular plot point I wanted to reach, and made a character do or say something that she simply wouldn't do or say in order to reach that point, I could keep forging ahead, yes. But somehow, the whole thing would start to unravel, to feel less and less genuine, and I would finally get to the point where the characters were sort of standing around, waiting for me to figure out where the screwup had occurred so that I could go back and allow the character to make a choice consistent with her own personality. Because, as it turns out, once one character is forced to jump through a hoop, it's reflected in how all the other characters react. It's as though they know she's being a phony, and then everything gets awkward.

Now, none of this is intended to be instructional, per se. It's just a set of observations about my own process, and while I believe that reading about this sort of thing can be useful, in the end the most genuine writing--the writing that only you can produce, the writing that's in your voice--is always the product of your own, personal process. Perhaps that's synthesized from a multitude of external sources, but at some point there has to be a kind of alchemical reaction that produces something entirely new. So, if anything, maybe this will form some minor ingredient, a bit of crypt shroom to add to your own peculiar brew.

Which would be nice, I think. See? I'm helping!

¹Just to keep things confusing: that doesn't mean there isn't genuine emotion in there, that's kind of the point. Let me put it this way: I'm not lying. If in doubt? Ask. I mean, if you want.

So it's been a viral couple of days, although I seem to be over the worst of it now. My weekend of love and laughter was too short, or, to be more precise, Just Long Enough, which is a period of time that is only observable in retrospect. Said weekend doubtless contributed to my current raspy state: I read short stories, and engaged in provocative discourse for hours at a time into the wee bits of the morning, and all the while my immune system was mounting an assault upon a sneaking interloper. I spent most of yesterday nearly mute, my voice a croak, though it improved today, which is a good thing because I had to spend three hours on the telephone this evening doing secret business things.

Hey, look! Here's a bit of Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi (or مولانا جلال الدين محمد بلخى for those of you who speak th' lingo):

Suddenly the drunken sweetheart appeared out of my door.
She drank a cup of ruby wine and sat by my side.
Seeing and holding the lockets of her hair
My face became all eyes, and my eyes all hands.

Ah, the drunken sweetheart! What a find, what a find she is. I enjoy Rumi immensely, because I can take him in any of my moods: spiritual, the beloved is God; romantic, the beloved is whomever on earth I fancy; or--at the best of times, in the best of moods--the beloved is both and all. And this snippet in particular--which is to say, at this exact time, complementing my exact mood--is a delightful mixture of the sacred and the profane. "He was all hands!" she said. Of course he was, darling! You were his drunken sweetheart, he had no choice. Even if he never touched you, his gaze was a manifold and loving caress.

Moving on, before I say too much.

The hell with it, I'll continue.

If you'd asked me, a year ago, whether I believed in love, I would have said no. Isn't that sad? I had it all reduced to neurochemistry and evolution: the limbic system and dopamine, vasopressin and oxytocin, pheromones. These days, I still know all of that--I tend not to unlearn things once I've captured them--but it matters less. I've given up the myth of my objectivity in favor of a more subjective bent, or, if you prefer--and even if you don't--a somewhat bent subjectivity. I mean! You can prattle on all you like about the evolutionary adaptation of the human brain in clever ways that promote mating and the perpetuation of the species, but how do you get from that to, say, Byron? Give me the mild beam of the soul-breathing glance, indeed! It's not just for cryptic drunks in bars, you know. That man was on to something.

Now love is not a thing that happens to you, love--it seems to me--is a sure-footed place from which you move. No longer a state of cognitive obsession, or a trick of the neurons, but something else entirely. Not so much a happening or a doing, but a being. A verb instead of a noun. A kind of breathing flow, a daring dance with phantom partners that can at any moment resolve itself into a solid, rose-biting Tango.

The beauty of this particular dance, the energy that drives the music that moves the feet, is a complete non-attachment to an outcome. There is no outcome! There is only the dance, made up of small steps, grand spins and dips, and--if you're lucky--the close abrazo, the embrace. But even if that never comes to pass, or if it does, and then passes, you've still had the dance.

And now I've said just enough.

It wasn't the sort of phrasing I was used to hearing in a dim bar, and he certainly wasn't talking to me, or to anyone but his mostly-empty pint glass. He wasn't dressed in velvets, and wore no ruff around his neck: he looked to be an ordinary sort of fellow, who'd stopped off for one after work, which turned into three, or maybe six. His dark tie was undone, looped low against his chest, and the tailoring of his jacket was tight and trim, shoulders straight, with no sagging. But his head drooped, eyes down. "Tell me: can you be a true romantic if you believe in love but don't believe in transcendence?"

I had the sudden impression that he wasn't speaking to his glass any longer. He'd somehow felt my attention upon him from the end of the bar, from behind my own small wall of martini-shaped bricks, and was addressing me. His sidelong glance in my direction confirmed it. "Well," I said. Then my brain engaged and I thought a bit. It was slow going. My martini wall was three empty glasses thick, and another one squatted before me, well-olived. "It seems to me," I said, which was the equivalent of putting the clutch in, and jerking the neurological shifter into first, "that love without transcendence won't really take you anywhere." Not bad, I thought. No idea what I meant, but it sounded decent.

The fellow started upright and slapped at the bar. "Yes!" he said. "Without it you stay where you are. There is no transport of spirit. Love becomes a mental attitude, walled within your own skull." His eyes blazed, and not with beer. "That's the whole point, isn't it? If you stay within yourself, you can't possibly reach anyone else, can you? Not truly." He waved a finger at me. "Very fine."

"Okay," I said, nothing if not agreeable.

"Isn't it so!" he continued, as though I had contributed something. "Otherwise, none of it makes sense. 'Away with your fictions of flimsy romance, Those tissues of falsehood which Folly has wove; Give me the mild beam of the soul-breathing glance; Or the rapture which dwells in the first kiss of love.'" He peered over at me with something that looked much like admiration, though I had no idea why he should feel that way about me. "No transcendence, no rapture. No rapture, well then, what's the fucking point?"

I raised my glass. "Of course," I said. He matched me, raising his own glass, then tossed back the last of the beer it held. He hopped off his stool and strode over to me with such purpose that I recoiled, but his firm grip on my shoulder brought me close to him.

"I won't give in, then," he said, with quiet intention. "I'll stay the course. I'll believe. She'll see it too, I know she will."

"Right on," I said. For the barest moment--and I'll swear to this on any holy book you care to choose--the man's eyes glistened with incipient tears. Then, after another congenial squeeze of my shoulder and a determined nod, he spun in place and marched out into the evening, the door closing behind him like the curtain of a stage.

As far as I could tell, no one else in the place had noticed a thing.

I sat there, alone at the bar except for Akers the barkeep and the pair of seeming sisters at the far end of it who closed the place every Friday. The scattered tables behind them were half-filled with late-night noshers who'd gotten in before the kitchen closed. Overhead, the oversized wrought iron chandelier--too big for the space, really--cast burnt orange light from flame-shaped bulbs. For some reason I couldn't bring myself to finish the last of my martini, which meant that the third olive would have to remain uneaten. I grinned at it.

Some people can find inspiration anywhere.

Sara Soulati kindly invited me to write a guest post for her blog as part of a project she's working on for her MFA in Creative Writing. In it, I use the word "really" too many times, and talk about stuff as though I know what I'm doing. You can read it here.

What he wrote:

These locks, which fondly thus entwine,
In firmer chains our hearts confine
Than all th' unmeaning protestations
Which swell with nonsense love orations.
Our love is fix'd, I think we've proved it,
Nor time, nor place, nor art have moved it;
Then wherefore should we sigh and whine,
With groundless jealousy repine,
With silly whims and fancies frantic,
Merely to make our love romantic?
Why should you weep like Lydia Languish,
And fret with self-created anguish?
Or doom the lover you have chosen,
On winter to nights to sigh half frozen;
In leafless shades to sue for pardon,
Only because the scene's a garden?
For gardens seem, by one consent
(Since Shakespeare set the precedent,
Since Juliet first declared her passion),
To from the place of assignation.
Oh! would some modern muse inspire,
And seat her by a sea-coal fire;
Or had the bard at Christmas written,
And laid the scene of love in Britain,
He surely, in commiseration,
Had changed the place of declaration.
In Italy I've no objection,
Warm nights are proper for reflection;
But here our climate is so rigid,
That love itself is rather frigid:
Think on our chilly situation,
And curb this rage for imitation.
Then let us meet, as oft we've done,
Beneath the influence of the sun;
Or, if at midnight I must meet you,
Within your mansion let me greet you:
There we can love for hours together,
Much better, in such snowy weather,
Than placed in all th' Arcadian groves
That ever witness'd rural loves;
Then, if my passion fail to please,
Next night I'll be content to freeze;
No more I'll give a loose to laughter,
But curse my fate for ever after.

What he meant:

The braided hair is a nice gesture,
but it's really cold out,
and if we can't meet in daylight,
let's at least meet indoors
so I can bang you.

So this crazy thing happened last night--crazy, of course, being a relative term, related to a deviation from the norm--and what I remember about it are dead grandparents, and drill presses, and talking sticks, that last thing being particularly odd, as it meshes well with the novel I'm reading at the moment, to wit: there's an ambulatory Painted Stick in that narrative, which speaks, and if that's not a talking stick then nouns are not persons, places, or things.

There was music! And extreme paranoia! And three people who were just about the same age, which is a first for me in this town, this town being mostly the province of the newly wed and the nearly dead. There was, in addition, a vanishing woman, and a man with good cheekbones and a hat well worn, both of whom contributed, but were not essential (sorry folks) to the unfolding of the tale. They were embellishments, which is a fine thing to be, but! As we all know: nice to look at, great for adding detail and myth to the scene, but not, you know, vital.

Let's step away for a moment and consider that: were they vital? Something in me recoils at dismissing them as mere decoration, slight fillips of strange, and one of them did, in fact, buy me a beer. That alone should elevate the participatory importance of that hatted lad. Hutch--dear, cheekboned, hat-wearing Hutch--he vamoosed, skedaddled, was "Audi" before flame was ever set to vegetation, leaving me to the tender mercies of the apostles of hemp. And the woman! Had she not been so voluble at the start of things, I'd've left alone, two martinis poorer. Deep in her cups, she was, and capped in a face-hiding manner, and she vanished at some point unnoticed, out into the evening, leaving only a space on the couch in her wake, her absence only remarked upon minutes or hours--or perhaps even days!--later.

But even her disappearance was not so crucial as that of Zach, slider of faders and beater of skins, who was defined at first by a plate of pasta and his non-presence. Zach, who was not-there! Broken-hearted Zach! Zach by the dumpster next door, succumbing to the vagaries of his liver and alcohol. He disappeared before I ever met him.

And what, then, of Josh? Maker of furniture. Appreciator of vacuum tubes, drawer of lettered houses, player of keys! That's what of Josh, good-hearted Josh.

I'd gone downtown with a specific purpose: go to Roy, order a martini, and see what happens. Perhaps there will be people there, and we can talk. I've done it before, showing up there alone with my guitar, fresh from busking for drunken bridesmaids, and invited by strangers to join them at their table due to my apparently interesting look and the instrument by my side. The bar at Roy curves 'round at the end, so that we were in effect all seated at a table, Josh and Hutch opposite, Emily next to them, and an empty space next to me, like Elijah's place at the Seder table. Conversation was struck: where is the man who ordered that pasta? I'd never met him. But he'd ordered and then gone, and the three of them seemed unsure of his whereabouts. Eventually, it was determined that he was next door. "There's nothing next door but a dumpster," I said, whereupon the situation resolved itself into clarity. It had been a long night for those four, and consequences were being paid, out on the sidewalk.

They packed rare Zach into a cab, a poacher, no less, who'd just happened to drive by after the call was made. Then the four of us wandered northwards, while the jilted cab company called Josh every few minutes to complain. Eventually we crawled to a bar with a keeper of a legendary and accomplished flirtatious nature, and a tale was told of that. You see that fellow there, in the black ball cap? Her boyfriend. He comes here and drinks and watches her until it's time for him to leave, said Josh, and there he goes, now! Just watch what happens to her demeanor when she's not under his watchful eye. Tits out, winks on! There she goes. And that pair at the end of the bar: not sisters, no, but enough alike in habit and appearance be be considered such. Slaves to the bottle, them, with their beers and shots lined up before them like brave soldiers.

A-wandering, then, to yet another establishment, where Hutch pulled a story about being pantsed by a Balinese monkey for the peanuts in his pocket out of the air. A cash-only establishment, this, which meant that new friend Hutch bought cash-poor me a Boont amber ale. Embarrassing somewhat, that, though he was gracious about it. Then: more wandering! Off into the misty evening on fog-slicked streets. Hutch departed, having had enough of our nonsense, but the four of us went on, seeking shelter and smokables. Which we found, in a small plaster-walled dwelling wherein the walls met the ceiling with gentle curves rather than molded angles. Zach had made it home with the taxi poacher, and was wrapped in unconscious tartan on the couch. Flame was struck, and he awoke! Then be-capped Emily disappeared into the night, without a word that we could recall, leaving the three of us--mixer of sound, worker of wood, smithy of words--to the tender mercies of our neurochemistries.

Imagine, for a moment, that you've developed a sort of cosmology, not overt, not a System of the World, but more of an overarching viewpoint derived from the sum total of your experiences. It shouldn't be hard to imagine--you're doing it whether you want to or not--but it might be something that you don't pay a lot of mind to. Then imagine that you encounter, in the course of one befogged evening in a city by the sea, a pair of other people who for some reason seem to have laid down a similar experiential substrate. They use much of the same notional shorthand that you do. A simple phrase--"I have the talking stick!"--is freighted for them with the same meaning as it is for you. It's really an amazing thing, if you'll take it down from the shelf and look at it, shuffle it from mental hand to mental hand: the common viral idea, a hot nest of a concept, shared among strangers, saves months or years of discussion. It's the ideological equivalent of a single word, but no one spends much energy on being amazed at a shared noun or verb. That's just what communication is, isn't it, and a single word can easily bear as much meaning as a concept that can be unpacked in a phrase or three.

We had that going on for us, though it took a lot of work to bring me into the room, befuddled as I was with the consequences of toddler dexedrine and methylphenidate. By that I mean: I was acutely aware, suddenly, that I was a jumble of experiences and chemical impulses, and that, furthermore, my own path from birth until just that moment had assembled a unique consciousness that was given to rattling the bars of its cage and occasionally pissing in the corner. So it was difficult for me, just then, to focus on the realities of these two shiny new people, or to even believe the stories I was hearing: had grandparents really died, just that day? Was that drill press that seemed as though it had been there for quite some time actually a recently acquired heirloom? The story of the broken relationship I believed, having seen Zach booting into the street wearing Josh's borrowed white pants. But all else was uncertain, lost in a fog of paranoia so acute that I am, even now, waiting for the video of my foolishness to show up on YouTube.

Which is, I think, a comment on mod'ren media, if I may slide into my pretentious theorizing. I blame Alan Funt, he started it. With the technology of his day, he entrapped people in ridiculous situations, recording them for our amusement. Now, ABC News has "What Would You Do?" a hideous program described as (and I quote): "ABC's hidden camera, ethical dilemma series What Would You Do? puts ordinary people on the spot. From bullying to abuse, racial attacks and public humiliation, John Quinones captures people's split-second and often surprising decisions when they're thrust into real-life ethical scenarios." Fuck John Quinones, though, to be fair, he's just riding the surveillance wave that's cresting on the Internet, where temporary idiocy lives forever. I spent some portion of the evening looking for cameras, so convinced was I that the situation couldn't possibly be unfolding as it was.

But it was. Strange and deep conversations. Matters of etiquette! Laughter in the garage, and a complete inability on my part to determine when the evening was actually over. Which is fine. My gracious hosts were patient with my neuroticism, or at least put on a good show of it.

It's morning now--and will remain so for another fifteen minutes--and what I really want is pancakes. I see that in my future. I feel as though I've made a foray into an uncharted land, because I'm strange that way about new people. Who are they? I don't really know yet. Sometimes I'm struck dumb by the sheer oddness of our skull-encased consciousness: we toddle around, a perceiving "I," a thing-that-sees, an awareness wrapped in meat studded with sensory receptors, bumping into similarly-clad and equipped Others, each of us truly alone because of the quarter-inch of bone which forms the tureen that holds our neuronal soup. We can pass messages out of the mixture, information encoded in the vibrations of the air, with subtlety lent by the light that bounces from the expressions of our faces. But all of that is just packets moving from hand to hand, letters from the soul, their true author always hidden, never really seen.

One can achieve great facility with the language, become a raconteur of personal experience. But in the end?

We're never entirely sure that we're not just making the whole thing up.