|
The Brain in the Bell Jar |
||||
|
Novel Deborah Griggs 2004 Chapter 1:The Omniscience of Narrators
|
||||
|
The suspension of disbelief I'm here to tell a story about Alexandra. I will be aided from time to time by her computer. What do computers know, you may well ask. Do they watch us from the other side of the display screen? Do they listen to our thoughts? Do they talk to us, just beyond the range of our hearing? In general, computers can do anything we ask them to do...anything we let them do. But could they become the receptacles of our souls? Perhaps...if our souls can be properly formatted. On the other hand, perhaps they have no more talent for spirituality than a vacuum cleaner. The verdict is still out. The computer in this story is Mephistophelean—a morally ambivalent observer of events. Its power to control these events is limited, whether by lack of ability or lack of interest is not clear. It is not a wistful little contraption, whose odd face we may search for expressions of good or evil: it is alien, but it is not ET. It has no far away, celestial home, but lives here in a second-floor flat, somewhere in Germany. It sees the sunlight reflecting on Alexandra's image and speculates. Why not let Alexandra tell her own story, you may ask. She will, I would respond, but her reliability as a witness is limited, for reasons that shall be seen. Who do I think I am to tell her story, for that matter? Can I really see, and if I see, can I really understand Alexandra's thoughts or actions? Who is objective or omniscient in the end? Perhaps a god of some sort? On the other hand, would a god care enough to tell this story? Hardly. The fact is that you'll just have to make do with me. I'm the one interested in this story. I have access to the information necessary to tell it. Don't ask me how I got it. Just turn the page. A first shot in the dark As a teenager, Alexandra looked older than her age. She was never "carded," sneaking into bars and got herself into the awkward situation of being asked out by older men who scared her. When she reached twenty-five, she suddenly turned into one of those people who look younger than their age and subscribed to a then currently popular homily, "You're only as old as you feel." In keeping with this modest motto, when she began teaching college courses, she would sit in the classroom on the first night, listening to students chat before class. Everyone took her for a fellow student. However, when time came for instruction to start, she pulled out the class roster and began calling names. She rarely failed to get laughs for this and other such harmless, but rather childish pranks. In her early years of teaching, male students were flirtatious. When asked out, she responded jokingly, "Do you know how OLD I am?" They merely grinned and said "So?" As she neared forty, they became more cautious, but there were still occasional approaches. To circumvent embarrassing situations, she began relating personal memories of historical events from earlier decades. Her students began to keep their distance, making it obvious they considered her unusually interesting…for her age. Her most recent preoccupation has been a nerve that edged into the space between two vertebrae and stayed there, spreading excruciating pain throughout her entire body. "General wear and tear," the orthopedist said. "The beginning of the end," Alexandra wrote a friend. During the same time frame, her dermatologist discovered during a routine check-up that some early sun damage gone bad. After briefly wondering if she would ever start to think of the beach as the place where she'd begun to die, she decided to develop a viable perspective on age. The question was how. She began working out more frequently; however, the physical benefits of training stood in direct proportion to the inferiority she felt in the gym, surrounded by muscle-bound youth. She went shopping for a new look, but found herself too old for second skin t-shirts and too young for badly cut matron-wear. Fate revealed a new path when she was assigned to a virtual classroom and blindly entered into a much higher level of computer human interaction than she had ever imagined. She began to consider the advantages of technology with respect to age: In the world of computer mediated communication, she decided, she could be a shriveled, naked brain in a bell jar and no one would be the wiser. This is one way to introduce Alexandra Fielding, but it is only a random fragment of the whole, and since random fragments do not sit well with me, I have been trying to transform her cumulative chaos into an ordered account. My first attempt produced a list: She has loved the most tender and literary kiss as described by E.M. Forster and the exploding pigs of a Bay Area performance group. She follows the guidelines of political correctness but longs for a radical movement to which she may secretly belong. She is fearful but longs for danger. She understands great films but may slavishly follow a television series. She is loyal and erratic, generous and shrewish -- she bounces back and forth between poles of behavior like a pinball. As her ex-husband has put it: "Many women are difficult; she's made it the core of her identity." Her daughter puts it differently: "When something goes wrong, mom creates a new life--it's as if these personalities were hiding in the depths of her solar plexus like a hoard of poltergeists." Her friend Daniel, who will also appear in this narrative, once said: "The range of tastes that she has exhibited over the years should not be praised as eclectic or postmodern, but should be frankly recognized as a symptom." I soon discovered that this would not do. A list is nothing more than a body of words expressing data – not being. In fact, I suspect that regardless of the form in which the material is presented, this narrative may not succeed in presenting any conclusive truth about Alex. However, it will, I hope, deliver the goods on her. Thus, I will introduce her as she may often be found, sitting somewhere lost in thought, unconsciously hatching out a new personality. She doesn't think of her activity this way. She just does it. A typical scene She is staring at the display, reading and re-reading the phrase announcing that her setting are being loaded, wondering how this procedure could be integrated into the process of waking up mornings. The virus protection logo appears on the desktop, only to be covered by a larger logo from another program, after which the small rectangle common to all three layers becomes corrupted, revealing bits and pieces of the desktop and both logos. Something about this is incredibly annoying. For one thing, it doesn't happen every time. Sometimes the logos appear in sequence, not disturbing each other at all. What set of circumstances controls this sequence? She's looked through the event viewer, searching for a warning or error report, but the computer seems to think this is not a problem. She wonders whether this annoyance causes frustration or allows her to vent it. How can one tell? Eventually, the logos make way for her data folders and documents, which slowly materialize on the screen like stars in a darkening sky. Opening up the browser, she chooses a bookmark—her virtual place of work. When the page has finished loading, she types in her user id and 66666—what she likes to think of as her password to the underworld. Daniel, who talked her into joining the distance learning program and whom she therefore forced to guide her through all steps of the training, found the password irresponsibly easy for an intruder to crack. Alexandra, however, has a childish weakness for banal jokes and doesn't really care about virtual break-ins. On her monitor, a banner reading "California Virtual University" slowly takes shape, along with some generic photos of student life on campus. She finds these photos not only anachronistic, but in poor taste, like painted street scenes on the walls of prison corridors. The message--Hello Alex Fielding--appears in the space under the banner, followed by a list of the areas to which she has access and the links to her personal reference pages. Choosing the link entitled ENG322, she clicks into one of her virtual classrooms. "And the door slammed behind her," she murmurs while waiting for the class page to load. A flashback After the first day of instructor training for the virtual classroom, Alexandra wrote the following in an email to Daniel:
|
||||
| Chapter 2:The Morning Mail
|
||||
|
A bad moment at the break of day Alexandra awoke with scratchy eyes. She tried to ignore the bright rays of light falling on her bed and let her body sink deeper and deeper into the soft, warm latex of her mattress, but the duties of the day began slogging through her mind in a long, silent parade…virtual faculty committees, dirty wash, student papers, grocery shopping, course planning, overdue correspondence. Her nose itched. It would soon begin to run, the result of her circulatory system trying to jump-start. She imagined the sounds of an unwilling auto ignition—the useless grinding sounds of a spark trying to get from one place to another. It was a sound from the past, from non-computerized ignitions, where real sparks of fire danced dangerously over black, oily surfaces and butterflies living dark lives within the carburetor flapped their wings to let the air and gas blend to the just the right mixture for the sensitive stomach of the tiger, hiding in the tank. All of those animals had been silenced and replaced by the electronic beeps and blinks of a fully computerized, silent and reliable rocket to the moon kind of car, whose hood might as well be welded shut for all the good it would do for a driver to open it. Alex remembered her father standing on the side of the road, looking critically under the hood, touching and probing, listening and looking. This image then melted into that of a man in a business suit pulling out his cell phone, calling his garage and then opening up the laptop so as not to waste the time it took for the towing vehicle to arrive. Age crept into each cell of her body. Why did it leave her body only at night, and where did it go? Rolling over, she tried to think of three great things about the day ahead, her nose flattened against the pillow. Waking up seemed a crime of her body against her mind. A slow throb of pain radiated through her hip and down to her knee, culminating in a shot of pain to her middle toes. "Consciousness," she thought, and got up. An electronic soliloquy Alexandra stares at the activity report: "Receiving 1 of 37 messages" Having roused herself to the computer, she is waiting for a message that will connect her mind to the world of action. When the download is complete, she scans the messages. The computer finds this process intriguing. My user generally ignores the chronological presentation of the inbox contents, but begins by scanning all new messages and manually distributing them into mail folders. She does not use mail filters because, as she puts it, they do not work. While there is some validity to this statement, the main cause lies not with the filters, but with her ignorance of complex sorting criteria. And while I will admit that the erratic behavior of senders can sabotage almost any sorting rule she cares to create, the percentage of error is low enough that time would be saved overall. Thus, I must find fault with her conclusion that "no rules are better than imperfect ones." Once she sorts the mail, she views folders in constantly changing order, although new mail in the "student" folders generally enjoys primary priority (96% ± 2% of all cases) and "private" messages are almost always (in 90% ± 2% of the cases) read last. Other mail receives priority, according to intensity of flurry activity (where the term flurry = 10+ mails a day from any one person or group). The more intense the flurry activity, the higher the priority. Flurries can last anywhere from one day to two weeks. In general, although I have successfully created frequency and ranking charts descriptive of mail- processing practices, some elements of ordering behavior remain undecipherable. For instance, although there are measurable factors of physical behavior consistently accompanying the reading of mail—sounds, facial expressions, gestures—I have not yet been able to fully classify or interpret these. I have, however, observed that there is a definite correspondence between the frequency of certain sounds, gestures and or expressions and the mail sender and that the messages read first tend to cause different physical behavior than those read last. The computer, poor sod, can go on and on about this system. However, as you can see, it encounters difficulty with the concepts of frowning, laughing, sighing or head shaking. It stumbles over the simple observation that Alexandra's personal mail motto is "duty before pleasure." On the other hand, this simple observation does not do justice to the complexity of Alexandra's concepts of duty and pleasure, which are by no means simple and which often cause her profound disquiet. A search for medium Alex felt like a mouse gnawing its way through a wall. On the far side of the wall was a kitchen or a garden—some kind of Promised Land. What she had left behind was already forgotten. In the middle were mindless gnawing and the taste of sawdust. Quickly she chewed and scratched her way through department news, technical support information, announcements for administrative jobs, conferences, and new appointments, and, finally, the listserv communications from the committees and discussion groups to which she belonged. Her posture was bent, her glance glazed; her thumb rested on the command key, her index finger on the letter "D." Every once in awhile, Alex moved a message into a mail folder; sometimes she took time to wonder what distinguished this message from others or why it should be saved; however, for the most part, she followed the steady beat of read and delete. By the end of an hour, she had finished the duty mail. Yawning, she shed the dreamlike, robotic glaze that had formed on the surface of her consciousness and contemplated the sparse morning packet of pleasure mail. It held one message.
|
||||