the new racist

Yesterday I talked about reading Sven Lindqvist's book "Exterminate All the Brutes", which I continue to enjoy very much.

After writing my post, during the day, I came to a realization. Something in Lindqvist's book has caused me to look at things in a new way. The specific event was this: I discovered my own definition of the word racist: "someone who believes in the existence of races".

This was a further step in a series that was launched during my investigation into the thematic ideas of my story--specifically the idea of identity.

Before I started that research, I took it for granted that races were real--that something called race actually exists in nature. What could be more obvious? There are groups of dark-skinned people, and groups of light-skinned people, and groups of people sharing similarly formed eyes and hair-texture. They're strikingly different from each other.

Three things budged me off my conviction (which I held quite strongly) that races exist:

1. Reading about the discovery that all human beings currently on Earth are descended from a single woman--a literal Eve


2. Reading in Scientific American and other places that no clear genetic basis for race has been found--nor is it likely to be


3. Reading the book Us and Them by David Berreby, in which Berreby shows that race is a mental category created, like any mental category, to fulfill a purpose. And in the case of race, that purpose has always been to rationalize unjust treatment of others

Plus there are the obvious holes caused by the simple fact that people of different "races" can have children together--who then belong to which race? They have to choose one, like Barack Obama!

Those things pushed me away from the belief that there is such a thing in reality as race. I still assumed that the idea of race was a useful tag for certain purposes, and certainly it's a widespread notion.

Yesterday that notion too dropped away for me. Lindqvist in his book documents the long debate that existed in the European scientific community of the 19th century in which anthropologists wrestled with the question of why contact with Europeans led to the extermination of native populations everywhere: Australia, Africa, the Americas. The consensus came to be that it was "natural selection": that the strong "races" were killing off the weak--a natural and inevitable process.

Lindqvist's key point is that genocide, blame for which is now customarily laid at the feet of the Germans under Hitler because of the Holocaust, was actually already a firmly established process, if not policy, of colonialism, starting, he maintains, with Spain's colonization of the Canary Islands in 1478. The indigenous people were wiped out, every last one of them, in what was to be the type case for colonization.

In short, Hitler did not by any means "invent" genocide. Rather, he was jumping belatedly on a bandwagon that had already been rolling for hundreds of years. What made it shocking to Europeans was that it was carried out right in Europe, and not far out of sight and out of mind in the remote wilderness of other continents. The Jewish "race" could be identified, isolated, branded "inferior", and selected for extermination. The "Slavs" were also an inferior race--and likewise slated for destruction, so that their farmland could be taken over for the benefit of the master race.

Berreby shows in his book that our "tribal mind"--the part of us that divides the world into them and us--is very deep-seated, and not really liable to simple reprogramming by conscious decision. It seems to be more automatic, more visceral. But nonetheless, it's not supported by either facts or logic, and still less by the idea of justice. We put people into races when we want to control them or exploit them.

In Bernard Knox's excellent introduction to the Iliad, he refers to the writer Simone Weil's characterization of the Iliad as the poem par excellence about force as the center of human history. And Weil defined force thus: "force is what makes the person subjected to it into a thing."

The concept of race helps turn people into things. And things we can push around, move, destroy, and dispose of as we choose.

So I intend to stick to my new realization: there is no such thing as race, and anyone who believes that there is, is, by my definition, a racist.

what babies say

Vacation mode. Vacation means departure from workaday routine. For the likes of me, that means that my usual activities require an extra push of intention in order to get done. That applies as much to things like brushing my teeth as it does to writing posts for this blog.

So: a push of intention this morning. I wanted from the beginning to offer a window into the life and mind of a writer--this writer anyway--and that window stays open only so long as I actually come down here and write. I want to do it; I just need to remind myself.

Yesterday afternoon I finished reading What Babies Say Before They Can Talk by Paul Holinger. (I feel a sense of accomplishment and pleasure whenever I finish reading a book. My coffee-table is like an airport: books still in progress are like aircraft circling, awaiting a landing. Every time I actually finish one I feel like I've brought in another load of passengers safely.) It's a good book, and I found it stimulating and provocative for several reasons.

Holinger has aimed his book at the parents of young children. He has drawn on recent studies of how newborns express emotions (apparently we are all born "hardwired" to express nine distinct emotional "signals": enjoyment, interest, surprise, distress, fear, anger, shame, disgust, and "dissmell"--the reaction to a bad smell) to suggest ways to help one's children grow up in good mental health.

I bought the book as part of my ongoing philosophical investigation into the phenomenon of identity. Inspired partly by the ideas of William James, I'm looking into the idea that our personal identity, our inward sense of integrity and unitary being, consists, essentially, of a set of thoughts. By thoughts I mean what James would call conceptions--mental images that are stable and recognizably the same at different points in time. It seems logical that the basic conceptions, if they show up enough in the mind, are what we give the labels called words.

In James's view, some of these discrete, stable conceptions have a certain quality of "warmth" or "intimacy" that marks them out as belonging to ourself: we recognize them as being part of me. He likens such thoughts to cattle that have been branded, so that, in a stream of cattle passing through a gate, their owner can immediately recognize them as his, even when mixed with other cattle. (Interestingly, the word character originates from just this same process of branding or stamping something with a permanent distinctive mark.)

In mathematical terms, such branded cattle form a set: a collection of discrete members drawn together by a rule of inclusion. I'm calling this set Me: the set of conceptions that I regard as "branded", as belonging to myself. The name "Paul" belongs to Me; the term "English-speaker" belongs to Me--and so on, millions of such conceptions. The entire set of these represents Me: the collection of thoughts that I regard as true statements about myself. The totality of Me is what I consciously regard myself as being.

All right. Thinking along these lines got me interested in learning how babies acquire and express language. How and when do they start speaking? What words do they use first, and why? Could I find traces of how a newborn starts to form a Me set?

I was drawn to Holinger's book because it deals specifically with the communication of babies before they can talk: and so it might hold clues as to how babies think and acquire language.

And it does hold those clues. A baby, when born, is a completely dependent person whose survival depends largely on its ability to communicate its needs, in the hope of having these met by someone. According to the researchers on whom Holinger draws, these needs are expressed in exactly nine discrete ways. These basic, inborn expressions of affect become refined and combined into the full suite of adult emotions. In this view,the basic affects anger and "dissmell" combine to become contempt, for example.

Holinger stresses the importance of helping children learn how to verbalize what they're feeling. In this way they--we--learn to talk about feelings instead of simply acting on them. We develop self-awareness and "tension-regulation". We become able to say "I'm angry" instead of punching someone in the head.

In my terms, this means recognizing feelings as recurring, nameable things, and giving them labels--words. The feelings themselves are not conceptions. Only the thoughts that recognize and label them are. In my view, an unnamed feeling can't be part of Me. But a distilled conception that recognizes a feeling, like "I'm angry", can be. The thought "I'm angry" is not itself an emotion; it's a dispassionate thought that includes anger temporarily in the Me set. If it happens enough, a further thought might arise: "I'm an angry person". That would be an effort to include the feeling of anger permanently in one's own identity--to brand the feeling as belonging to Me. One then identifies with anger.

These are just a few thoughts. There is a great deal more here to think about. For one thing, my Buddhist training had much to say about emotions vs. conceptions, and their natures. One way of looking at emotion is as a raw energy that in itself has no particular flavor or color; it is just dynamic and powerful, or perhaps simply naked dynamism and power. This is one way of looking at the view of Vajrayana Buddhism. When the energy is colored, we experience it as a specific emotion, such as anger or desire. It takes on qualities and attracts concepts that support it and "explain" it and so on. From this point of view, our inward "talking" about our "feeling" can actually distance us from its intrinsic power and purity.

As often happens, I've said more than I expected here, without really going where I thought I wanted to go. So be it! The writer shoots from the hip here, and the bullets go where they go.

who are we?

As established in yesterday's post, I never have only one project on the go. What else, then, have I got going besides a massive novel (and intended sequels thereto)?

One project, I suppose potentially a nonfiction book, is a more or less directed inquiry into my own beliefs. What do I believe? What do I think is true?

I remember reading, years ago, I think in an astrological text by Zipporah Dobyns, that it is a good idea to discover what one's beliefs are, to bring them from the darkness of unconsciousness into conscious awareness. Twenty years later I'm still working on it.

Who knew that this task would be so difficult? It is much complicated by the fact that, as the painter Robert Henri put it,

Most folks don't think what they think they think.

He's pointing to our capacity for self-deception. For while we tend to deceive others more or less all the time, or at least conceal our true thoughts from them, the issue of self-deception is less obvious, and indeed impossible to discover without outside help. It doesn't have to be professional help: other people are well able to act as mirrors for our self-deceptions. Others can see clearly where we're kidding ourselves, as we can see where they're kidding themselves.

The specific project I'm now working on is centered around the question of identity, and my working title for it is Who Are We? Who are we? I find this question provocative, mysterious, koan-like.

And indeed in a sense it's a very Buddhist question. Buddhist analysis shows that the root of all our suffering in life is one thing: what we call our ego, or the thing denoted by the word I. Then it instructs us to isolate this I to discover what exactly it is.

The Buddha's answer is that if you look long and hard enough, you will discover that there is no I. What we call I is a shifting collection of thoughts that exist first of all for convenience, and then become a matter of intense emotional attachment. When we look very closely, we find that everything we think I is, it isn't--and that it isn't anything other than these things either. It's a movie projected on mist.

Very well. I'm prepared to accept that the ego, the I, has no ultimate existence. It's not for me to contradict a wisdom tradition of 2,500 years' standing, or the teachings of a practice that has brought me so much personal benefit. But how about on the relative level? My keyboard and coffee-mug don't have any ultimate existence either, besides being a temporary agglomeration of atoms in a particular configuration. Nonetheless, for practical purposes, in those configurations they have existence and usefulness. As my teacher Sangpo at shedra, the monastic college at Gampo Abbey, taught us, relative truth is not so much in dispute, because it's all a matter of convention and convenience anyway. These are the things that are true essentially by agreement, rather than in the nature of things. If we argue over whether a certain thing is or is not a coffee-mug, for instance, it's really just an argument over a definition--not over the essence of anything.

All right. But in purely conventional terms, can I define what I am? Can I discover how I, and how we all, use what we all call I as the basis for our actions? What do I think I mean when I use it?

In writing my story for The Mission, I came to see the issue of identity, especially as it manifests in what we now call identity politics, as a key thematic strand. Why do "my people" hate "your people"? What's going on there? Why do we care about the fortunes of our local hockey team, even when its members hail from Sweden and Finland rather than anywhere nearby? Why do thousands get depressed if the team loses against "them"? Isn't that peculiar?

These questions are just a few bite-sized samplers of what got me involved in a parallel nonfiction project--a work of philosophy, really.

I have other projects too--but more of that perhaps another time.

reflections on the immune response

Another weekend goes by--very pleasantly, in the main, although both Kimmie and I are fighting off simultaneous headcolds. Dosing ourselves with tincture of echinacea, we're holding the virus at bay thus far, having both started to feel symptoms on Friday night. We reckon we must have caught it together from the same source, but aren't sure where. Two possibilities: one of Kimmie's family members was a vector when three of them came over for lunch a week ago Sunday--giving a long-sounding incubation period of five days; or we picked it up when we had lunch together on Thursday at The Burgoo restaurant near her work. Neither of our waitresses appeared to be infected, but who knows what goes on in restaurant kitchens? I picture some cold-ridden cook sniffling his way through soup- and stew-preparation.

"Another reason to eat at home," said Kimmie last night, while we speculated on the source of our infection.

But in fact we don't know. Viruses arrive, board our cells like pirates, and then must be dealt with.

I used to think of viruses as more intimidating than, say, bacteria, just because they are not treatable with antibiotics, and their method of attack always involves a direct invasion of our cells and subversion of the cells' own reproductive process--creepy. Viruses are much, much smaller than cells and do not eat, breathe, or indeed metabolize in any way. They have no propulsion system of their own but move passively wherever they're driven. How can the body deal with such an invader?

I was heartened by reading the book Microbiology the Easy Way last year (I wrote a review of the book on Amazon.com, if you're interested). Our immune systems are wondrous and complex things, and include powerful antiviral weapons. One of these is a class of proteins called interferons. When a cell is invaded by a virus, the virus's commandeering of the cellular reproductive system causes the cell to produce interferons. Although an infected cell is generally doomed, it releases these interferons which are picked up by neighboring cells. The interferons cause these other cells to switch on genes for producing special proteins that can block viral reproduction. So when the viruses arrive in these cells, the cells are ready: before the viruses can invade the cell nucleus and subvert its DNA-processing, they are stuck with proteins that prevent them from functioning or can dissolve the viral nucleic acid. The viruses or their dissolved parts can then be broken down by the cell like regular cellular waste. Amazing!

I don't know whether this is how the body deals with the virus for the common cold, but if it does, I imagine the virus landing, possibly riding on water droplets that we inhale or smeared on our membranes if we touch our mouth, nose, or eyes with unclean hands, and invading the cells of our mucous membranes. The death of cells and their released products would trigger an immune response, which we experience as the symptoms of our cold. Neighboring cells arm themselves against the virus, which, multiplying furiously as it kills infected cells, leapfrogs over them to other cells that aren't warned yet. The cold spreads from throat to nose to lungs as the virus looks for pristine defenseless cells to invade. Eventually all the cells susceptible to the virus have been warned and are no longer vulnerable. The invaders are immobilized, dismantled, and flushed into the body's wasted system. The dead cells are replaced by reproduction among the survivors. By the end of the cold the body has probably produced antibodies to the virus--special molecules that fit the virus's exterior chemicals like a key in a lock, enabling the body's white blood cells to recognize them as invaders and vacuum them up before they can enter cells. The next time that type of virus invades, it finds the body much better prepared to take it out of circulation.

I bought the book on microbiology in December 2005 as part of my inquiry into the mystery of identity--for our immune system is a vigorous and complex assertion of our physical identity. It is the border patrol and immigration office of our body, getting rid of everything that is not "us". Our immune system knows what "we" are--but do we know what "we" are?

It's a mystery. Right now I'm grateful that my immune system seems to be strong and on full alert. Go, team, go.

ego is my hobby

Stephen King said that he wrote 365 days a year, including Christmas and his birthday, because that's what he liked to do. Book after book was written in this way, seven days a week, many thousands of words a day. Hence his famous prolificness.

I write fewer than 365 days a year--but not that many fewer. It's probably about 350. (Of course my output per day is also much less. Sigh.) But I'm not always pushing a single project forward. Continuous, unremitting work on a single thing I find exhausting and eventually boring and confining; I need a break, I need to let my mind loose on other things.

So on weekends I turn my mind away from The Mission and focus elsewhere. Right now I'm back to my musings on identity, writing notes toward what may, I hope, eventually become a nonfiction book project of its own. On Saturday and Sunday I sat here keying notes in much the same way I do with The Mission, including notes from research books. This project has its own folders set up on my PC, just as the novel does.

It's a hobby project, undertaken for love and interest, in exactly the same way that Kimmie makes a hobby right now of creating haute couture costumes for Barbie dolls up in her sewing room. Purely for love, not for any monetary or pragmatic reason, she diligently puts together patterns with carefully chosen fabrics, and makes little accessories from scratch such as hats with plumes and little handbags with special details; she even sews up Barbie-scale lace panties from sections of stretch ribbon. Over this past weekend she spent hours preparing an inventory of all her work on it to date, and counted 73 outfits already made, many of which are modeled on the three dozen or so dolls she has ranged in tiers atop her white shelving unit. Many of the costumes are Victorian and antebellum gowns--her favorite period. Like everything that's done for love, they're all excellent.

I'm trying to work for love as much as possible (I'm certainly not working for money!). And certainly my weekend hobby is done for love. I'm driven by pure curiosity and a desire to understand.

And what am I coming up with? I'm working toward a unified belief system for myself. I'd like to find out what I believe--what I think is true, what my real values are. In various problems and conflicts around the world, from the Iraq War to global warming to mass violence and starvation in Darfur, I think about what the solutions might be--not merely band-aids but solutions to the underlying problems. This means identifying the underlying problems correctly, just as a doctor can't treat a disease without diagnosing it properly first. What are the root causes of these problems?

The Buddha identified the root cause of all suffering as ego fixation: clinging to the notion that one's self is a real, existent thing that needs continual care and feeding. His insight was that this universal conviction is in fact a mistake, and that if one can gain clear insight into this mistake, everything changes--for the better. Specifically, your suffering is at a complete and permanent end, and you become a truly useful person to the rest of humanity.

Sounds good. I spent 15 years fairly intensively studying and practicing those teachings; they form the great bulk of my spiritual education, such as it is. I haven't achieved the enlightenment of the Buddha--far from it--and I came to see that that eventuality is probably some way off, not in this lifetime, not for me. But in all those years I made an examination of ego from the Buddhist perspective, for Buddhism is, in a certain sense, an intensive effort to understand ego through study and introspection. Now I've changed my approach, and am looking at it from a "Western" perspective--a philosophical and scientific approach, you might say.

What is it that makes us hate? What is it that has us identifying with an in-group and seeing ourselves in antagonistic competition with other perceived groups? Why are "Arabs" slaughtering "blacks" in Darfur? What, at bottom, do Shiites have against Sunnis, and vice versa? Why do I want more than my share?

These are all questions relating to ego, which I have rebranded as "identity" for my purposes. And that, friends, is my hobby.

innies and outies

Most Sundays Kimmie and I watch the CBC current-affairs show Sunday Night with Evan Solomon and Carole MacNeil. Last night they had a segment on introverts and extroverts. Apparently 75% of people are extroverts, 25% introverts. Two (introverted) American professors talked about the problems of being an introvert in an extroverted world.

I watched with interest, because I've quietly (in my introverted way) followed the issue since I first seriously encountered when reading Jung, who, I believe, invented the terms, or at least developed the concepts into an important part of his psychological theory. It wasn't my favorite part of his system, since it seemed simplistic to me. Was it useful to categorize people into one of two great bins, according to whether they are habitually outgoing or more inward?

They had a pop-questionnaire on the show so you could tell which bin you fit into. Here are the traits. You are an extrovert if:

• You like to be in the thick of things.
• You enjoy chitchat, even with strangers.
• You feel stoked after activity.
• You know lots of people and consider them friends.
• You’re generally quite peppy.
• You tend to speak or act without needing to think first.
• And you tend to talk more than listen.

You are an introvert if:

• You enjoy time alone or with a few close friends.
• You experience a blank mind in groups or under pressure.
• You feel drained after activities, even the ones you like.
• You consider only deep relationships as friendships.
• You appear calm, self-contained, and like to observe.
• You think before you act or speak.
• And you tend to listen, but talk a lot about topics of importance to you.

Hands down, no question, I'm an introvert--point for point. (Kimmie felt she was a blend of the two.)

One thing that surprised me in the show was that introverts felt a need to justify themselves, that they feel beleaguered or undervalued in an extroverted world. I suppose I feel that way to some extent; certainly any introvert has felt envy for those who can mingle and schmooze easily. But when they put up the names of some famous introverts they included the likes of Abraham Lincoln and Albert Einstein--and I don't mind being grouped with them.

Indeed, as I said to Kimmie during the show, society seems to advance mainly through the efforts of introverts.

But what is the deeper meaning of introversion and extroversion, if these are real traits? The professors on the show put it down to brain chemistry--always a weak and unsatisfying explanation for me. No, to my mind, it raises the fascinating question of identity, and I see introversion/extroversion in terms of it.

I think that when we're born, we are immediately faced with the task of understanding our world--making sense of the barrage of inputs. Gradually we have to sort our experience into two categories: things that are "us", and things that are "not us". When we form a more or less conscious idea of a single thing that can be called "us", then we have arrived at a sense of identity. It is a learned thing: we learn about ourselves in the same way we learn about the world--as an already existent fact, or set of facts. We discover who we are, just we discover what the world is and how it works.

This process of discovery never stops. We learn about ourselves continually, up until we die, just as we learn about the world (provided we are willing to learn). This continued learning about ourselves is what is known as maturation or individuation. For, just as when we learn something new about the world, we have to make allowances for that fact in our thinking and behavior, so when we learn something new about ourselves must we make allowances for that fact.

I believe that the terms extrovert and introvert point to whether one's main orientation is toward learning about the world without, or toward learning about the world within--for both worlds are of unknown scope and depth. And they are no doubt, in some way, mirrors of each other, so that to know one deeply is to know the other by reflection.

Those are my thoughts, based on much introverted reflection.

depression and its antidotes

It was a disturbed night. I woke up several times, finally at about 3:30, and lay awake for the next three hours, feeling troubled in mind. I sank into a swamp of dark thoughts and emotions and lay there submerged.

I'm looking at my life and in many ways not liking what I see. I opened my journal in Word and made an entry, trying to tease apart the strands of discontent. I turned 47 on 24 January. What have I got to show for the accumulating decades of my life?

Just these magic beans, mainly.

I made a few more notes in my Thinking - Identity document, trying to summarize what my tentative conclusions are thus far. Why am I so obsessed with identity? For one thing, my life has been a (mainly unconscious) quest for identity--a search for the answer to the question, "Who am I?" or even: "What am I?" But in addition to that, and probably not coincidentally, the great myth of the Holy Grail is, according to Joseph Campbell, essentially the mythology of the individual, which is to say, the mythology of the modern person. The quest for identity is an effort to define or isolate this individual. Who or what is it that thirsts for salvation and feels its lack?

So: as I say, a few notes. Had a couple of soft-boiled eggs with toast, prepared by Kimmie, and sat silently afterward, buffeted by emotional crosswinds. "This is what depression must be like," I thought. Chilling.

They say exercise is good for depression, and so is nature. Kimmie said that she wanted to take a long walk, so I proposed walking the seawall in Stanley Park. That's where we went--about a ten-kilometer walk around the scenic perimeter of the park. It was moist and blustery, with cold wind blowing from the east. The snowline was low on the blue mountains; the water of Coal Harbour was choppy and milky-green against the pale sand and crushed shells of the bottom. Halfway around the seawall, when we were facing west in the lee of the park, the sky was a great featureless dome of pale gray, with the gray sea terminating at its bottom like the edge of the world--no island mountains in sight.

The drizzle increased to rain; I put up our big Knowledge Network umbrella, green-black, and we huddled under it as the wind blasted coldly, driving rain into us. There were still walkers, joggers, and cyclists moving along the seawall, their bare thighs red and chapped. We made it back to the car, grateful for the rest and shelter. And I did indeed feel revived by the exercise and the scenery.

Yes: Jack before the beanstalk, going to bed chastened. What must that night have been like for him?

the mystery of identity

Earplugs deployed, I was oblivious to the midnight yelling, pot-banging, and horn-blowing (Kimmie woke up for it, of course). I woke a couple of times in the night, and finally at about 6:45 got up. I made coffee and served Kimmie in bed, using her tall "snowman" mug for the last time this season (she put away all her indoor decorations as soon as she got up).

I returned to my notes on identity. Why do I feel such a strong urge to delve into this question? I offer that question rhetorically, since it doesn't really matter whether I understand the urge or not. I follow my quest for knowledge wherever it takes me, trusting that it is pointing me where I need to go.

Today it was leading me toward the psychological aspect of the question. I wound up keying notes from the book Abnormal Psychology by Timothy and Joseph Costello; they provide a good overview of the history of psychological theory and practice. I also keyed notes from a book I bought a couple of days ago at Indigo Books: Microbiology the Easy Way by Rene Fester Kratz, a textbook designed to help microbiology students improve their grades (I've never taken microbiology). Why? I was nudged that way by my reading of Acquiring Genomes by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, in which the authors brush aside Richard Dawkins's concept of the "selfish gene":

Selfish genes, since they are not "selves" in any coherent sense, may be taken as figments of an overactive, primarily English-speaking imagination. The living cell is the true self, an entity that cannot help creating more copies of itself. The engine of evolution is driven by tiny selves of which we are only half conscious.... A gene alone is only a piece of DNA long enough to have a function. There is no life in a gene. A gene never fits the minimal criterion of self, of a living system....

And what about viruses? Here is what they say:

Some present viruses as the smallest forms of life. But viruses are not alive and indeed they are even, in principle, too small to be units of life. They lack the means of producing their own genes and proteins.

According to Margulis and Sagan, the cell is the unit of life--the smallest living thing. It would then also be, presumably, the smallest potential bearer of an identity. This thought led me to buy the microbiology text.

Not that I regard Margulis and Sagan's opinion in this as anything more than that--an opinion. Saying, for instance, that viruses are too small to be alive begs the question, in my view. They are robust, carry around their own genetic material, and are vigorous "survivors" in nature. It's true they don't eat--they don't need to. For me the more telling question would be: do they have an experience? Are they sentient? We can't know this directly, but their behavior is just like that of other, larger, more complex parasites. They look and act like mosquitoes, ticks, lice, and other such things that also require "hosts" to survive and propagate. Or this: if they are not sentient, how would they behave differently if they were sentient? I suspect a sentient virus would behave exactly the way these supposedly nonsentient ones do.

Last night in the microbiology text I was reading about how bacteria, so-called prokaryotic (non-nucleated) cells, are able to propel themselves by means of whiplike appendages called flagella. Flagella rotate, pushing the bacterium forward as a propeller pushes a boat. Bacteria move toward things that are beneficial to them, such as food. When faced with something harmful, a bacterium can reverse the direction of rotation of its flagellum, which causes the bacterium to rotate in place or "tumble". When it is pointed in some new direction, it goes into forward gear again and resumes forward motion.

If I were a bacterium, and sentient, equipped in that way, that's exactly what I would do.

Some bacteria have a further amazing capability: when environmental conditions become harsh (too cold, hot, or food-deficient), they form "spores", which are simply copies of their single chromosome encased in a tough shell of protein. The spore is released from the cell, able to survive for thousands of years or 20 hours' exposure to boiling water. (Indeed, some believe that spores could survive the cold and vacuum of interplanetary space, allowing life to be propagated between planets.)

Is a spore alive? Only in the way a seed is alive. A bacterium is alive, though: it metabolizes, it reproduces. It moves toward food and away from danger. It is a tiny pocket of metabolizing chemicals contained in an envelope called a plasma membrane; it has an inside and an outside. It is indeed a little self--a little identity.

The thesis of Margulis and Sagan's book is that speciation--the creation of new species--occurs mainly through the acquisition of whole genomes by a species. That is, a creature that was prey, or a symbiont--something that lived on or in one's body--now becomes incorporated in one's body so that the two form a new, more complex organism. The mitochondria that provide the energy for our bodies' cells were at one time, in the distant past, free-living creatures in their own right. They became incorporated in a cell at some point in history, and the result of the merger became a viable, indeed more viable, new organism.

What happened to the selfhood of the component creatures? Does each of my cells have a sense of its own individual existence? What does that mean in terms of identity--theirs and mine?

It's a mystery, and it is absorbing me.

thinking during domestic hibernation

I enjoy the period between Christmas and New Year. In a novel I wrote back in the late 80s and early 90s, called Truth of the Python (about a hypnotherapist who accidentally regresses a client to a past life as the ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras), I used the phrase "domestic hibernation" to describe this week of the year--and it is still apt. For me there is a feeling of true vacation, of hiatus between the old year just past and the new one not yet begun. I feel a lightening of shoulds in my life and a sense of permission to do what I please.

This year, that has meant delving into the question of identity and what it means. My philosophical self has emerged with full force. I have been spending the early mornings keying notes from the books Acquiring Genomes, Identity: Youth and Crisis, and In the Name of Identity. Yesterday I created a new Word document in a folder labeled Thinking, where I file notes of my thoughts on various topics; the new document is entitled Identity.

Why am I so thirstily in quest of identity? I have long realized that the issue is a central one in my novel. As I was structuring my story I came to recognize how much it was making its presence felt, and as I have drafted the prose it has pressed forward more and more as an issue. Finally a kind of ignition temperature has been reached: the question has caught fire and become urgent to me. I recognized that I don't know very much about identity. What is it, exactly? Where does it come from?

When I typed the phrase "caught fire" and "become urgent", I see the connection with a dream I had last night. I have already written the dream down. Here it is:

I'm with Dad, heading up through the Edgemont area toward a fire alarm, seemingly at Handsworth High School. I may have been talking about the necessity of having drills, at least weekly, in order to have orderly responses to fire alarms. People need to practice in order to be proficient in an emergency. Now the alarm is going--but is it a drill, or the real thing?

Somehow the talk of fire drills and volunteer firemen makes me think of Carisbrooke Park and also Deep Cove: as though these are places where there are local firehalls, and where therefore people need to practice. I'm thinking that three hours a week would be enough, maybe on Saturday mornings.

Traffic is jammed in the reaction to the emergency. As though from on high, I can see the main street (Lonsdale? Edgemont?) become jammed with cars, and on-ramps get backed up. I see cars accumulate in a herringbone pattern on one ramp, the last few are taxis who try to surge ahead and there is a rear-end collision by the last one. "It figures," I think, disgusted.

We get out of our bus, figuring we can make better time on foot. It looks like 1st Street between St. Georges and Lonsdale, but is maybe supposed to be higher up, like at Balmoral in upper Lonsdale. I run, jumping up over obstacles like boulders and concrete debris on the old, broken road. Dad keeps pace with me, and Kimmie is also with us, trying to keep up. I can't wait--this is a civic emergency, and I have a role to play.

Dad and I are in cheerful, friendly spirits. We're talking about meteorites hitting the earth. Meteorites rain down all the time, but small ones get burnt up in the atmosphere. We're joking about being hit by one. I say something like, "Even one the size of a rice-grain would feel like you’re being shot by a BB gun." Dad flinches comically at the thought of this, and I picture being hit by a small meteorite--what would it feel like? Would I survive?

I make my way through the traffic snarl-up in Edgemont Village (or a place like it), perhaps leaving Dad behind too because of the emergency. I might be a journalist, working on a feature that relates to the emergency, and so may get special attention or access. I get to the high school, which is full of normal-looking kids (no sense of emergency here), and run up the stairs, knowing that the emergency room, bell room, is on the second floor.

I'm on a landing of the stairs, wondering which way to go. I ask a student, a teenage girl, where to find it. She may direct me, or she may try to get me to go to another room, where another event is happening that she supports. I am impressed with her calm, mature, intelligent demeanor.

I might finally make it to the room where the alarm is controlled; but I forget what happens...

The issue of identity has deep roots. Here are some thoughts from Amin Maalouf, author of In the Name of Identity (slightly compressed):

My identity is what prevents me from being identical to anybody else.

Each individual's identity is made up of a number of elements. These factors include allegiance to a religious tradition; to a nationality--sometimes two; to a profession, an institution, or a particular social milieu. But the list is much longer than that. A person may feel a more or less strong attachment to a province, a village, a neighborhood, a clan, a professional team, a union, a company, a parish, a community of people with the same passions.

None is entirely insignificant. All are components of personality--we might almost call them "genes of the soul."

While each of these elements may be found separately in many individuals, the same combination of them is never encountered in different people, and it's this that makes each human being unique and irreplaceable.

From this point of view, one's identity is the intersection of all the sets to which one belongs, in my case male, white, North Vancouverite, (sometime) Buddhist, and so on. This intersection is unique for each person.

As I thought about this yesterday, I arrived at the idea that these sets do not all have the same value in identity-formation. Maalouf says as much in passing, before turning to a few that are of special importance for his main topic. But in my thinking I figured that the important sets will be of those qualities that are inseparable from oneself (such as one's sex or place of birth), and those that are deliberately chosen (such as a faith one has converted to, or a country one has emigrated to).

But sets are conceptual constructs that do not exactly coincide with reality. I'm a Canadian--but what after all is a Canadian? The conceptual category seems clear, but on the ground it is not. I was born in Canada and am a Canadian citizen, so my Canadianness seems solid. But what about Quebeckers and aboriginals and landed immigrants? What about children born to Canadian parents abroad, and who are therefore citizens of that other country? Or at sea? What about children of one Canadian parent? What about someone granted Canadian citizenship by mistake or through fraud? What about someone born in a place where Canadian sovereignty is challenged by other countries? In at least some of these cases the boundary conditions of "Canadianness" are being tested; such individuals may feel a diluted or conflicted or incomplete sense of being Canadian.

My point: while the category "Canadian" seems clear, its application is not. Concepts do not and cannot match reality exactly. Therefore an identity that is forged purely of concepts is inherently mismatched with reality.

This got me thinking about another angle on identity: ego as understood in Buddhism. I spent time in my office yesterday going through my notes and books from three years ago, while I was studying at Gampo Abbey and Nitartha Institute. I couldn't find what I was looking for (a stack of vocabulary index-cards with definitions on them), and felt a vague sense of loss and chagrin. But I certainly remembered that the whole project of Buddhism, at least for the beginning practitioner, is discovering the emptiness of ego: that the thing we call I has no absolute existence. Does this mean identity is a non-issue?

There is, as always, much more to say. Another time...

inconclusive questing

The day is wet and mild. Naked black trees were silhouetted against the bright strip of light over the south horizon as Kimmie and I walked in the Wall Street neighborhood of Vancouver this afternoon. On Triumph Street people had set up lavish displays of Christmas decorations in an effort to win a lighting contest: life-sized nativity scenes, flocks of log-and-stick reindeer, whole plantations of stylized white Christmas trees on lawns covered with white foam to simulate a snowed-in look.

"I have to come back here at night!" Kimmie said, ever a decoration enthusiast.

We made our way in a criss-cross pattern through the streets, mainly looking at the old houses, of which there are many fine specimens in the neighborhood. Sidewalks were poured there in 1930 and 1931, so the oldest houses are a few years older than that Craftsman bungalows and the tall clapboard houses called "builder's boxes" from the World War One era. A few bare oak-trees were alive with the liquid twittering song of starlings. Overhead gulls squealed hoarsely, floating low over the lanes.

It's been a good Christmas. Over the years we have been able to pare down the event so that it is not a manic rush of shopping and visiting, just a couple of small family gatherings and gifts exchanged only within our household. Kimmie gave me jeans and navy-blue moccasins and a blue-gray fleece (among other things); I gave her a gray skirt with black floral needlework and a black coat with a fake-fur collar. Robin gave me a bottle of Glenmorangie single-malt scotch--much appreciated (and not yet tasted--but soon, soon).

Feeling that I'm on to an important thread, I have been digging into the question of identity and selfhood, reading the material I've got and buying a few more books that I think might help me. It feels partly like a sidetrack, since it has nothing directly to do with the ancient world, and yet I also feel the question is central to my story, so it counts as thematic research. I'm not sure what I expect to find; all my deepest research, my philosophical questing in life, has been inconclusive. I dig and I search, I read and I think and I write; but there is no feeling of "click" for me--the sense that I've arrived somewhere.

Nonetheless, that is where my passion is taking me. I feel like one riding a dogsled. The dogs are out of control, pulling the sled where they want to go. The idea of steering or control is out of the question; I have to hang on or be left behind.

the concrete mirage

As I write these words sun is streaming low through my venetian blinds, and the air rings with the reverberations of the two chimney-cleaners' brushing-out of our chimney: a low metallic sawing sound. One of the guys is tall and hulking, in a green mackinaw and a watch cap; his partner is shorter, darker, and more wiry--he's the guy in the roof.

Another relatively breezy day of writing: I'd typed five pages almost before I realized it. My ideal is to write in a relaxed frame of mind, the way I might write my journal or a dream. The view: Just say it. Will my new character ideas pay off? Can I keep creating interesting characters? Is this whole thing going to be as hard going to read as it is to write?

It's later: 4:13 p.m. I've just come back from an errand to the library and (of course) liquor store. The kitchen floorboards squeak as Robin moves about, preparing a meatloaf for tonight's dinner; Kimmie's sister-in-law Ev is coming to join us.

Have I dealt with my identity issues? Not hardly. Does anyone, ever? In Buddhist practice the aim of the (first leg) of the journey is realizing the nonexistence of ego: that the seeming thing we designate by I has no actual, ultimate existence. This thing that we try to cherish and coddle, to feed pleasure and shield from pain, isn't there. And yet people who are mentally disturbed, poorly adapted, who suffer from what is called abnormal psychology--in short, those whose egos are fragile or unformed--are not suitable candidates for strict Buddhist meditation. What we in the West would call a strong, healthy ego is a prerequisite for discovering its actual nonexistence.

The question of identity, then, is part mirage, and part concrete. Here is a quote from William James, used by Erik Erikson in his book Identity: Youth and Crisis:

A man's character is discernible in the mental or moral attitude in which, when it came upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely active and alive. At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: "This is the real me!" [Such experience always includes] an element of active tension, of holding my own, and trusting outward things to perform their part so as to make it a full harmony, but without any guarantee that they will. Make it a guarantee...and the attitude immediately becomes to my consciousness stagnant and stingless. Take away the guarantee, and I feel a sort of deep enthusiastic bliss, of bitter willingness to do and suffer anything.

I have had such experiences, I would say--but they have been in disparate activities, not any one connected effort. The threads of true identity, for me, still have to be gathered and woven together.

new books and personal identity

Snow fell through the night. There is still a wet layer of white, turning to translucent slush, outside. Snowmelt drips from deck and rhododendron.

A book arrived yesterday in the post, and two today. Yesterday's was Beyond the Essene Hypothesis by Gabriele Boccaccini; today's are Identity: Youth and Crisis by Erik H. Erikson and The Challenge of Youth, edited by Erikson. I have wiped down the covers of these used books with a damp cloth, entered them in my Excel book inventory, and inscribed my name, along with the month and year, in them. (The Erikson books, paperbacks from the 1960s, had their previous owners' names inscribed in them still: Roger King and Jane Boyle, respectively.) My library is augmented.

Boccaccini's book was mentioned in Uriel's Machine by Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas, which I've got about half read. Knight and Lomas's book is about the astronomy of the Book of Enoch, which in turn was a core text for the Qumran community. Boccaccini's book is subtitled The Parting of the Ways between Qumran and Enochic Judaism, and apparently argues that the Essene community at Qumran was in fact the offspring of something he calls the Enochic party, which, he claims, contributed to the birth of the parties led by John the Baptist and Jesus. I felt I could not afford to overlook this book.

The Erikson books came out of my quest earlier this month into my own life and its development, its story. Erikson is the preeminent psychologist of personal identity and its development. In astrology, the identity is represented by the Sun in the birth chart. In my case this identity, and its realization, are conflicted by the situation of Neptune in what's known as a square aspect to the Sun. The tension is heightened by the Sun's placement in my 4th house of the inner world and domestic situation, suggesting a life focused on self-discovery and the arrangement of my own inner world, and by Neptune's placement in my 1st house of contact with my environment. The arrangement points to someone who, by life calling, is searching for his own identity (Sun in the 4th) while at the same time is inclined to mirror back other people's wants and wishes (Neptune in the 1st)--to be what others want him to be. Not hard to see the possible difficulties posed here.

So: Erik Erikson. Of the three books that have just arrived, I think I'll start with his major work Identity. It relates not only to my own life, but to my work, where I see the issue of identity as an important theme. Maybe I can see how it all fits together, and how the art is more intimately related to my life than I thought.