morethanenoughtruth

As a pre-teen, I visited for two weeks every summer with my Dad’s parents in the farm country west of Ft. Worth.  In the pasture beyond the fenced front yard there was a giant oak tree with several generations of farm detritus strewn about its roots.  There were wagon wheels, rims, chain, wire, lanterns, gears, pails, and innumerable miscellany.  Most were rusty, but all were full of imaginative possibility.  It was my special place.

With these junk components I assembled many marvels of invention.  I constructed a bicycle with wheels that turned.  There was a rocket ship, a loom, and an escalator.  There was even a horse and buggy, but you had to imagine the horse.  I filled the hours in between Grandma’s meals with my serious work.  A scrawny child but growing aggressively, I never lost track of the possibilities of breakfast, (eggs, sausage, steaming buttermilk biscuits with fresh churned butter, pear preserves and red-eye gravy).  That was soon followed by high noon farm hand dinners spread on the dining room table, the old oilcloth clean but sticky, and quiet evening suppers, retrospective warm-ups of the noontide feast.  Those meals must have been inspired by her memories of men, strong, hot and dripping sweat, just in from the hayfield and powerful hungry.  The hours under my tree were peopled with those laborers’ ghosts and empowered by their implements laid aside just in case someday they might prove useful to the work at hand.  Fortified with Grandma’s cooking, I toiled.  Grasshoppers buzzed.  Dragonflies chased and caught each other, then lit all-coupled on the quiet creek skim, celebrating the marvels of surface tension.  Cicadas shrilled a solid wall of scream.  With all that company it never occurred to me to feel lonely.  I had all I needed to do my work.

Every object had a right place where it fit; each necessary to the whole.  All the parts went together, mechanisms incarnate.  They lived.  Wheels turned.  Bearings screeched.  Rims rolled.  Chains pulled.  Pails frothed with warm buttery milk.   Old harness became pliant and slick with horse and sweat.  Square nails and rusty rings coupled dreams, as once they had bonded boards and leather strapping.  Time shrank into the single moment of now as I embodied pure happiness.

One evening Grandpa came to visit me under my tree.  I showed him my wondrous creations, demonstrating how each one worked.  We spoke of future projects.  I confided my worry that since everything had already been thought of there would be nothing left for me to invent.  He assured me there were marvels yet to come, and said to keep an open mind for wild hares passing.  As light faded to the west and early stars blinked on, we walked together toward the house and rest.  I slipped my hand into his.  “Grandpa,” I asked, “you know, don’t you, that I don’t really believe my machines are real?  They are just pretend like the mud-pies Grandma and I made when I was little.”  He looked down at me, eyes twinkling but with a face full of serious. “Sure,” he said.  “I know. But you can never tell with those jackrabbits.”

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One reason why Alzheimer’s is so ugly is that it mimics Narcissism in its deconstruction of the self.  Narcissism might well be defined as the inchoate fear of disintegration.  What can be more frightening?  This wonky insight is something that accrued to my fascination with the important psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut who is agreed to have broken the code of Narcissistic Personality Disorder.  I learned that narcissism is far more complex and ubiquitous than the classic myth of Narcissus, gazing into his pool , provides to the general run of popular psychological understanding.

I believe there is a connection between Alzheimer’s and the mechanisms of human thought.  Why is there now an epidemic of dementia?  I suspect it is because we just plain folks know way too much about it, and we are terrified.  If we indeed create each other’s minds through our interactive gaze, (See previous posts entitled “Gaze” and “Catching Corelle”.) We may be initiating the shutdown of the mental processes through our cooperative hypochondriacal interactions and paranoiac expectations.  We used to say, “He’s just getting old and forgetful.”  Now we say, “He has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Dementia”.

Who in 2011 cannot describe in grisly detail how people of advanced age are expected to cognitively decline?  There is the science, the graphs, all slip-sliding down, all predicting what will, must, should occur.  Why “should”?  Because it is expected.  What is expected must occur; if it does not, we will make it occur.

My mother, deserted by my genius father when I was nine, fell into a distraught paranoia.  I too began to anguish, not about all the missed meals, but that I might come to be like her.  She made this wish to detach from her a natural, holding and stroking my hands, telling me that I was just like “Him”, exactly like “Him”, totally like “Him”, that I would surely do great things, like “Him”.  I saw the lunatic gleam in her eyes, and knew she was not there, but was somewhere else less frightening than being left to care for her child all alone with no-one to share the silent scream that chased its tail in her head

I submitted to her gentle stroking of my bi-lateral upper appendages, feeling wrong, feeling violated in some down and dirty way, soiled because at some dark and hidden level I believed I was like “Him”, wanted to be like “Him”, prayed to be like “Him”.  This was a Faustian transaction: I could let my Mother disintegrate, dragged away by the raging tide of her obsession and I could become “Him”, or conversely, I could mount a quiet rebellion.  It was my choice.  In my prior little twerp healthy narcissism, I had thought I created my own world, was thus all-powerful and omnipotent.  When my parents fought, it was always about me.  Mother shrieked at Daddy for his ever longer absences, leaving us bereft of money for basic earthly requirements such as food and shoes with room for growing feet. He loved me conceptually, even poetically, but failed to translate me into a meaty, bony, messy, inconvenient incarnation of all those lovely thoughts and words.

I affected a compromise: I chose to try but never succeed to become “Him”, never to be the son he wanted.  The wisest part of me knew that I must fail.  There was always a way to deny myself the hoped for success that would secure my fathers devotion, and in so doing, validate my mother’s incestuous desire to make me into a “Him”, a creature she could create and adore.

There is no doubt I did inherit an aptitude for understanding and manipulating the physicality of my realities, offering themselves to the joy of creative play.  However, I am not my Father.  I will never be fine enough, smart enough, dear enough, amazing enough.  It is better that I should just be me and let that be good enough.

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While on a church sponsored retreat and tucked into my cot at night, I began humming. The array of bare coiled springs under the mattress hummed back, but only when I hummed certain notes.  Later I asked my dad why.  He explained the concept of sympathetic resonance specific to the precise (tuned) frequency of that set of springs.  He explained that all flexible structures are capable of bending in response to external pressure, then returning to a relaxed state.  When subjected to a discrete frequency of vibration, a structure will attempt to flex and relax at that frequency, and at a directly proportional amplitude; the stronger the signal, the stronger the responding vibration.

The physical world is amazing, this case in point being the simple coiled set of springs supporting my camper’s mattress.   Everywhere I looked there were wonderful things to learn about.  In this case, the resonant frequency was determined by the composition, shape, and size of the spring wire, by the form and additive effect of the coils, by the fixed locations and terminations of the individual elements and by the nature of the coupling at the points of fixation. Not to be ignored is the length, width, and breadth of the integrated construct.  I have a suspicion that my presence, a weighted shape pre-loading the system, had an implication, but I hesitate, not wanting to spoil what I have understood as a lovely reality by introducing yet another complexity to obfuscate clarity of insight.  (Keep it simple, stupid!)  Visualizing, much less calculating, the whole concept would be difficult, but I was eager to try and see if I could be one of the relentlessly curious who would figure it out.

Equally interesting, imagine a still pond impacted by a single pebble.  The waveform generated propagates outward concentrically at a frequency specific to the viscosity of the fluid, and to the size, shape, surface texture, and weight of the pebble.  A second pebble, dropped at a distance from the original, sets up a pattern specific to its own unique entry.  When the two patterns intersect each other, a new (interference) pattern is created, and a whole new set of observations and inferences can be appreciated describing the additive (diffraction) pattern.  Though any number of waveforms and interstices can be introduced, a multiplicity of added pebbles, rocks, and boulders, creates great beauty and confusion.  Keeping to the simple truths fosters clarity, so I set aside the lovely complexities and pray over the bones of what is laid bare.

When I graduated from high school in 1956, girls didn’t go to engineering school, but that fact meant nothing to me.  My father said I could do anything I wanted to do.  Growing up resisting my mother’s confused realities was good training for resisting peer pressure that said that above all I must please the boys and play dumb.  That struck me as a very condescending attitude.  I wouldn’t like a boy anyway who would fall for such stupid manipulation.  I applied and was accepted at Carnegie Institute of Technology, with a major in Engineering Physics.

First week on campus, I bopped into the office of the head of the Department of Physics, introduced myself, and explained my intense interest in sympathetic resonance and the  spectra of frequencies interacting with physical structures.  A wise and gentle man, full of encouragement, Dr. Winbourne welcomed my innocent enthusiasm and assigned to me a small laboratory usually reserved for graduate students.  He piled it high with black boxes, high frequency oscillators, oscilloscopes, tuning forks, bridge platforms for vibratory analysis of tensioned wire, and pipes of adjustable length to experiment with vibrating air columns.  It was like having my very own toy store.  I jumped in and began trying to learn how it all worked and what to do with all that sophisticated instrumentation that was supposed to answer my questions.  I had a lot of class work, but I could still do this during free time.  It was a perfect setup.  I had two keys, one to the science building front door and one to my lab.  I kept to myself, bothering nobody.

Then one Saturday night before Christmas, as I was leaving, I stopped at the Physics Office to leave a note for the professor telling him I would be off-campus over the holiday.  As I scribbled on a notepad, I suddenly realized that I wasn’t alone in the office.  Five graduate students had slipped in, blocking both exits.  The eldest, a doctoral candidate I had seen in the halls, spoke first:  “We know why you’re here.  You can’t fool us.”

“Fool you?  What do you mean?  I‘m just leaving a note for Dr. Wilbourne.”

“That not what I’m talking about.  What are you doing in Lab 127?

“Doc assigned me that lab to do some experiments,” I snapped.  “What’s wrong with that?”

“You’re here to get your MRS degree.  We know what you’re up to.  You can forget about us.  We aren’t interested.”

“You?” I squawked.  “I‘m here to learn physics.”  My hands squeezed so tight my knuckles turned white, and my breath started coming in gasps.

“You’ll never learn this stuff.  We don’t like you being here.  Get it?   Hand over that lab key and don’t be inside the building except when you have a scheduled class.”

“I don’t have to do what you say.  Let me out!”  I pushed against the shortest creep who was blocking one of the doors with his blubber butt and belly.  It was pretty stupid of me to choose the biggest one to push against.  Did I want to get away, or did I want to prove to myself that it really was hopeless?  I’ll never know.  Sometimes even hindsight is less than 20/20.

Even the smallest of them was stouter than I was.  He grabbed my arm, smirking, and pointed toward my lab instructor.  “Robert, there, has your section for freshman physics lab.  An F in there would finish you.  Is that what you want?”

Robert piped up then, basically a wimpy geek but now emboldened by the others, “You didn’t get the picture, did you, when I wouldn’t let you check out materials and made you just watch the others do the experiments?  It’s a waste of lab space to let a girl do the set-ups, and it takes learning time away from the boys.  I really meant what I said.”

I assessed the dangerous possibilities of my situation and equivocated, “OK.  I’ll give the key to Dr. Wilbourne but not to you.  I‘ll do it.  I promise.  Now get out of my way.  I’m going to start screaming if you don’t let me out of here.”  They sneered and filed out then, heading down the hall.  They called back demands to remember what they had said, yuck-yucking to each other as they went.

The next day after class, I returned the key to Dr. Wilbourne.  I squirmed, full of shame, afraid to tell him what happened, and muttering that I just couldn’t spare time for extra lab work.  My stomach dropped like a rock, like it does even now when I think about the time I had my very own Carnegie Institute research lab but was dumb enough to let five bullies take it away from me.  I hate those assholes but not nearly so much as I hate myself for letting them do it to me.

I was part of the first tide of fearful but courageous young women who beat and broke bodies and brains against the irresistible flood wall of male science.  Now women take it as a given that they are welcomed and often even appreciated.  It’s tempting to hate them as well for giving no credit to those of us who made it possible for those who followed.  I do resist that temptation and feel only pride and happiness in their achievements.  That lovely confidence they claim as their natural right, makes me a retrospective winner in my own right.  Sounds like resonance to me!

__Dorothy Jeanette Martin

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