Green Earth

He did, however, seem overly impressed by game theory. “What if the numbers don’t correspond to real life?” she asked him. “What if you don’t get five points for defecting when the other person doesn’t, what if all those numbers are off, or even backwards? Then it’s just another computer game, right?”

“Well—” Frank was taken aback. A rare sight. Immediately he was thinking it over. That was another thing Anna liked about him; he would really think about what she said.

Then Anna’s phone rang and she picked up.

“Charlie! Oh dovelie, how are you?”

“Screaming agony.”

“Oh babe. Did you take your pills?”

“I took them. They’re not doing a thing. I’m starting to see things in the corners of my eyes, crawlies you know? I think the itches have gotten into my brain. I’m going nuts.”

“Just hold on. It’ll take a couple of days for the steroids to have an effect. Keep taking them. Is Joe giving you a break?”

“No. He wants to wrestle.”

“Don’t let him! I know the doctor said it wasn’t transmissible, but—”

“Don’t worry. Not a fucking chance of wrestling.”

“You’re not touching him?”

“And he’s not touching me. He’s getting pretty pissed off about it.”

“You’re putting on the plastic gloves to change him?”

“Yes yes yes yes, tortures of the damned, when I take them off the skin comes too, blood and yuck, and then I get so itchy.”

“Poor babe. Just try not to do anything.”

Then he had to chase Joe out of the kitchen. Anna hung up.

Frank looked at her. “Poison ivy?”

“Yep. He climbed into a tree that had it growing up its trunk. He didn’t have his shirt on.”

“Oh no.”

“It got him pretty good. Nick recognized it, and so I took him to urgent care and the doctor put some stuff on him and put him on steroids even before the blistering began, but he’s still pretty wiped out.”

“Sorry to hear.”

“Yeah, well, at least it’s something superficial.”

Then Frank’s phone rang, and he went into his cubicle to answer. Anna couldn’t help but hear his end of it, as they had already been talking—and then also, as the call went on, his voice got louder several times. At one point he said “You’re kidding” four times in a row, each time sounding more incredulous. After that he only listened for a while, his fingers drumming on the tabletop next to his terminal.

Finally he said, “I don’t know what happened, Derek. You’re the one who’s in the best position to know that … Yeah that’s right. They must have had their reasons … Well you’ll be okay whatever happens, you were vested right? … Everyone has options they don’t exercise, don’t think about that, think about the stock you did have … Hey that’s one of the winning endgames. Go under, go public, or get bought. Congratulations … Yeah it’ll be fascinating to see, sure. Sure. Yeah, that is too bad. Okay yeah. Call me back with the whole story when I’m not at work here. Yeah bye.”

He hung up. There was a long silence from his cubicle.

Finally he got up from his chair, squeak-squeak. Anna swiveled to look, and there he was, standing in her doorway, expecting her to turn.

He made a funny face. “That was Derek Gaspar, out in San Diego. His company Torrey Pines Generique has been bought.”

“Oh really! That’s the one you helped start?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, congratulations then. Who bought it?”

“A bigger biotech called Small Delivery Systems, have you heard of it?”

“No.”

“I hadn’t either. It’s not one of the big pharmaceuticals by any means, midsized from what Derek says. Mostly into agropharmacy, he says, but they approached him and made the offer. He doesn’t know why.”

“They must have said?”

“Well, no. At least he doesn’t seem to be clear on why they did it.”

“But it’s still good, right? I thought this was what start-ups hope for.”

“True …”

“You’re not looking like someone who has just become a millionaire.”

He quickly waved that away, “It’s not that, I’m not involved like that. I was only a consultant, UCSD only lets you have a small involvement in outside firms, and I had to stop even that when I came here. Can’t be working for the feds and someone else too, you know.”

“Uh-huh.”

“My investments are in a blind trust, so who knows. I didn’t have much in Torrey Pines, and the trust may have gotten rid of it. I heard something that made me think they did. I would have if I were them.”

“Oh well that’s too bad then.”

“Yeah yeah,” frowning at her, “but that isn’t the problem.”

He stared out the window, across the atrium into all the other windows. There was a look on his face she had never seen before—chagrined—she couldn’t quite read it. Distressed.

“What is then?”

Quietly he said, “I don’t know.” Then: “The system is messed up.”

She said, “You should come to the brown-bag lecture tomorrow. Rudra Cakrin, the Khembali ambassador, is going to be talking about the Buddhist view of science. No, you should. You sound like them, at least sometimes.”

He frowned as if this were a criticism.

“No, come on. You’ll find it interesting, I’m sure.”

“Okay. Maybe. If I finish a letter I’m working on.”

He went back to his cubicle, sat down heavily. “God damn it,” Anna heard him say.

Then he started to type. It was like the sound of thought itself, a rapid-fire plastic tipping and tapping, interrupted by hard whaps of his thumb against the space bar. His keyboard really took a pounding sometimes.

He was still typing like a madman when Anna saw her clock and rushed out the door to try to get home on time.

The next morning Frank drove in with his farewell letter in a manila envelope. He had decided to elaborate on it, make it into a fully substantiated, crushing indictment of NSF, which, if taken seriously, might inspire some changes. He was going to give it directly to Diane Chang, head of NSF. Private letter, one hard copy. That way she could read it, consider it in private, and decide whether she wanted to do something about it. Whatever she did, he would have taken his shot at trying to improve the place, and could go back to real science with a clean conscience. Leave in peace. Leave some of the anger in him behind. Hopefully.

He had heavily revised the draft he had written on the flight back from San Diego. Bulked up the arguments, made the criticisms more specific, made some concrete suggestions for improvements. It was still a pretty devastating indictment, but this time it was all in the tone of a scientific paper. No getting mad or getting eloquent. Neither chicken nor ostrich. Five pages single-spaced, even after he had cut it to the bone. Well, they needed a kick in the pants. This would certainly do that.

He read it through one more time, then sat there in his office chair, tapping the manila envelope against his leg, looking sightlessly out into the atrium. Wondering, among other things, what had happened to Torrey Pines Generique. Wondering if the hire of Yann Pierzinski had had anything to do with it.

Suddenly he heaved out of his chair, walked to the elevators with the manila envelope and its contents, took an elevator up to the twelfth floor. Walked around to Diane’s office and nodded at Laveta, Diane’s secretary. He put the envelope in Diane’s in-box.

“She’s gone for today,” Laveta told him.

“That’s all right. Let her know when she comes in tomorrow that it’s there, will you? It’s personal.”

“All right.”

Back to the sixth floor. He went to his chair and sat down. It was done.

He heard Anna in her office, typing away. He recalled that this was the day she wanted him to join her at the brown-bag lecture. She had apparently helped to arrange for the Khembali ambassador to give the talk. Frank had seen it listed on a sheet announcing the series, posted next to the elevators:

“Purpose of Science from the Buddhist Perspective.”

It didn’t sound promising to him. Esoteric at best, and perhaps much worse. That would not be unusual for these lunch talks, they were a mixed bag. People were burnt out on regular lectures, the last thing they wanted to do at lunch was listen to more of the same, so this series was deliberately geared toward entertainment. Frank remembered seeing titles like “Antarctica as Utopia,” or “The Art of Body Imaging,” or “Ways Global Warming Can Help Us.” Apparently it was a case of the wackier the topic, the bigger the crowd.

This one would no doubt be well attended.

Anna’s door opened; she was leaving for the lecture.

“Are you going to come?” she asked.

“Yeah, sure.”

That pleased her. He accompanied her to the elevators, shaking his head at her, at himself. Up to the tenth floor, into the conference room. It held about two hundred people. When the Khembalis arrived, every seat was occupied.

Frank sat down near the back, pretending to work on his pad. Air-conditioned air fell on him like a blessing. People were sitting down in groups, talking about this and that. The Khembalis stood by the lectern. The old ambassador, Rudra Cakrin, wore his maroon robes, while the rest of the Khembali contingent were in off-white cotton pants and shirts, as if in India. Rudra Cakrin needed his mike lowered. His young assistant helped him, then adjusted his own. Translation; what a pain. Frank groaned soundlessly.

They tested the mikes, and the noise of talk dampened. The room was impressively full, Frank had to admit, wacky factor or not. These were people still interested enough in ideas to spend a lunch hour listening to a lecture on the philosophy of science. Surplus time and energy, given over to curiosity: a fundamental hominid behavioral trait. Also the basic trait that got people into science, surviving despite the mind-numbing regimes. Here he was himself, after all, and no one could be more burnt out than he was. Still following a tropism helplessly, like a sunflower turning to look at the sun.

The old monk cut quite a figure up at the lectern, incongruous at best. This might be an admirably curious audience, but it was also a skeptical gang of hardened old technocrats. A tough sell, one would think, for a wizened man in robes, now peering out at them as if from a distant century.

And yet there he stood, and here they sat. Something had brought them together, and it wasn’t just the air-conditioning. They sat in their chairs, attentive, courteous, open to new ideas. Frank felt a small glimmer of pride. This is how it had all begun, back in those Royal Society meetings in London in the 1660s: polite listening to a lecture by some odd person who was necessarily an autodidact; polite questions; the matter considered reasonably by all in attendance. An agreement to look at things reasonably. This was the start of it.

The old man stared out with a benign gaze. He seemed to mirror their attention, to study them.

“Good morning!” he said, then made a gesture to indicate that he had exhausted his store of English, except for what followed: “Thank you.”

His young assistant then said, “Rimpoche Rudra Cakrin, Khembalung’s ambassador to the United States, thanks you for coming to listen to him.”

A bit redundant that, but then the old man began to speak in his own language—Tibetan, Anna had said—a low, guttural sequence of sounds. Then he stopped, and the young man, Anna’s friend Drepung, began to translate.

“The rimpoche says, Buddhism begins in personal experience. Observation of one’s surroundings and one’s reactions, and one’s thoughts. There is a scientific … foundation to the process. He adds now, if I truly understand what you mean in the West when you say science. He says now, I hope you will tell me if I am wrong about it. But science seems to me to be about what happens that we can all agree on.”

Now Rudra Cakrin interrupted to ask a question of Drepung, who nodded, then added: “What can be asserted. That if you were to look into it, you would come to agree with the assertion. And everyone else would as well.”

A few people in the audience were nodding.

The old man spoke again.

Drepung said, “The things we can agree on are few, and general. And the closer to the time of the Buddha, the more general they are. Now, two thousand and five hundred years have passed, more or less, and we are in the age of the microscope, the telescope, and … the mathematical description of reality. These are realms we cannot experience directly with our senses. And yet we can still agree in what we say about these realms. Because they are linked in long chains of mathematical cause and effect, from what we can see.”

Rudra Cakrin smiled briefly, spoke. It began to seem to Frank that Drepung’s translated pronouncements were much longer than the old man’s utterances. Could Tibetan be so compact?

“This network is a very great accomplishment,” Drepung added.

Rudra Cakrin then sang in a low gravelly voice, like Louis Armstrong’s, only an octave lower.

Drepung chanted in English:

He who would understand the meaning of Buddha nature,

Must watch for the season and the causal relations.

Real life is the life of causes.

Rudra Cakrin followed this with some animated speech.

Drepung translated, “This brings up the concept of Buddha nature, rather than nature in itself. What is that difference? Buddha-nature is the appropriate … response to nature. The reply of the observing mind. Buddhist philosophy ultimately points to seeing reality as it is. And then …”

Rudra Cakrin spoke urgently.

“Then the response, the reply—the human moment—the things we say, and do, and think—that moment arrives. We come back to the realm of the expressible. The nature of reality—as we go deeper, language is left further behind. Even mathematics is no longer germane. But …”

The old man went on for quite some time, until Frank thought he saw Drepung make a gesture or expression with his eyelids, and instantly Rudra Cakrin stopped.

“But, when we come to what we should do, it returns to the simplest of words. Compassion. Right action. Helping others. It always stays that simple. Reduce suffering. There is something—reassuring in this. Greatest complexity of what is, greatest simplicity in what we should do. Much preferable to the reverse situation.”

Rudra Cakrin spoke in a much calmer voice now.

“Here again,” Drepung went on, “the two approaches overlap and are one. Science began as the hunt for food, comfort, health. We learned how things work in order to control them better. In order to reduce our suffering. The methods involved, observation and trial, in our tradition were refined in medical work. That went on for many ages. In the West, your doctors too did this, and in the process, became scientists. In Asia the Buddhist monks were the doctors, and they too worked on refining methods of observation and trial, to see if they could … reproduce their successes, when they had them.”

Rudra Cakrin nodded, put a hand to Drepung’s arm. He spoke briefly. Drepung said, “The two are now parallel studies. On the one hand, science has specialized, through mathematics and technology, on natural observations, finding out what is, and making new tools. On the other, Buddhism has specialized in human observations, to find out—how to become. Behave. What to do. How to go forward. Now, I say, they are like the two eyes in the head. Both necessary to create whole sight. Or rather … there is an old saying. Eyes that see, feet that walk. We could say that science is the eyes, Buddhism the feet.”

Frank listened to all this with ever more irritation. Here was a man arguing for a system of thought that had not contributed a single new bit of knowledge to the world for the last 2,500 years, and he had the nerve to put it on an equal basis with science, which was now adding millions of new facts to its accumulated store of knowledge every day. What a farce!

And yet his irritation was filled with uneasiness as well. The young translator kept saying things that weirdly echoed things Frank had thought, or answered questions occurring to Frank at that very moment. Frank thought, for instance, Well, how would all this compute if remembering that we are primates recently off the savannah, foragers with brains that grew to adapt to that surrounding, would any of this make sense? And at that very moment, answering a question from the audience (they seem to have shifted into that mode without a formal announcement of it), Drepung said, still translating the old man:

“We are animals. Animals whose wisdom has extended so far as to tell us we are mortal creatures. We die. For thousands of years we have known this. Much of our mental energy is spent avoiding this knowledge. We do not like to think of it. Then again, we know that even the cosmos is mortal. Reality is mortal. All things change ceaselessly. Nothing remains the same in time. Nothing can be held on to. The question then becomes, what do we do with this knowledge? How do we live with it? How do we make sense of it?”

Well—indeed. Frank leaned forward, piqued, wondering what Drepung would tell them the old man had said next. That gravelly low voice, growling through its incomprehensible sounds—it was strange to think it was expressing such meanings. Frank suddenly wanted to know what he was saying.

“One of the scientific terms for compassion,” Drepung said, looking around the ceiling as if for the word, “… you say, altruism. This is a question in your animal studies. Does true altruism exist, and is it a good adaptation? Does compassion work, in other words? You have done studies that suggest altruism is the best adaptive strategy, if seen from the group context. This then becomes a kind of … admonishment. To practice compassion to successfully evolve—this, coming from your science, which claims to be descriptive only! Only describing what has worked to make us what we are. But in Buddhism we have always said, if you want to help others, practice compassion; if you want to help yourself, practice compassion. Now science adds, if you want to help your species, practice compassion.”

This got a laugh, and Frank also chuckled. He started to think about it in terms of prisoner’s dilemma strategies; it was an invocation for everyone to make the “always generous” move, for maximum group return, maximum individual return … Thus he missed what Drepung said next, absorbed in something more like a feeling than a thought: If only I could believe in something, no doubt it would be a relief. All his rationality, all his acid skepticism; suddenly it was hard not to feel that it was really just some kind of disorder.

And at that moment Rudra Cakrin looked right at him, him alone in all the audience, and Drepung said, “An excess of reason is itself a form of madness.”

Frank sat back in his seat. What had the question been? Rerunning his short-term memory, he could not find it.

Now he was lost to the conversation again. His flesh was tingling, as if he were a bell that had been struck.

“The experience of enlightenment can be sudden.”

He didn’t hear that, not consciously.

“The scattered parts of consciousness occasionally assemble at once into a whole pattern.”

He didn’t hear that either, as he was lost in thought. All his certainties were trembling.

He thought: an excess of reason is itself a form of madness—it’s the story of my life. And the old man knew!

He found himself standing. Everyone else was too. The thing must be over. People were filing out. They were massed in a group at the elevators. Someone said to Frank, “Well, what did you think?” clearly expecting some sharp put-down, something characteristically Frankish, and indeed his mouth was forming the words “Not much for twenty-five hundred years of concentrated study.” But he said “Not” and stopped, shuddering at his own habits. He could be such an asshole.

The elevator doors opened and rescued him. He flowed in, rubbed his forearms as if to warm them from the conference room’s awesome AC. He said to the inquiring eyes watching him, “Interesting.”

There were nods, little smiles. Even that one word, often the highest expression of praise in the scientific tongue, was against type for him. He was making a fool of himself. His group expected him to conform to his persona. That was how group dynamics worked. Surprising people was an unusual thing, faintly unwelcome. Except was it? People certainly paid to be surprised; that was comedy; that was art. It could be proved by analysis. Right now he wasn’t sure of anything.

“… paying attention to the real world,” someone was saying.

“A weak empiricism,” said someone else.

“How do you mean?” the first person said.

The elevator door opened; Frank saw it was his floor. He got out and went to his office. He stood there in the doorway looking at all his stuff, scattered about for disposal or packing. Piles of books, periodicals, offprints. His exteriorized memory, the paper trail of his life. An excess of reason.

He sat there thinking.

Anna came in. “Hi Frank. How did you like the talk?”

“It was interesting.”

She regarded him. “I thought so too. Listen, Charlie and I are having a party for the Khembalis tonight at our place, a little celebration. You should come if you want.”

“Thanks,” he said. “Maybe I will.”

“Good. That would be nice. I’ve gotta go get ready for it.”

“Okay. See you there maybe.”

“Okay.” With a last curious look, she left.

Sometimes certain images or phrases, ideas or sentences, tunes or snatches of tunes, stick in the head and repeat over and over. For some people this can be a problem, as they get stuck in such loops too often and too long. Most people skip into new ideas or new loops fairly frequently—others at an almost frightening rate of speed, the reverse of the stuck-in-a-loop problem.

Frank had always considered himself to be unstable in this regard, veering strongly either one way or the other. The shift from something like obsessive-compulsive to something like attention-deficit sometimes occurred so quickly that it seemed he might be exhibiting an entirely new kind of bipolarity.

No excess of reason there!

Or maybe that was the base cause of it all. An attempt to gain control. The old monk had looked him right in the eye. An excess of reason is itself a form of madness. Maybe in trying to be reasonable, he had been trying to stay on an even keel. Who could say?

He could see how this might be what Buddhists called a koan, a riddle without an answer, which if pondered long enough might cause the thinking mind to balk, and give up thinking. Give up thinking! That was crazy. And yet in that moment, perhaps the sensory world would come pouring in. Experience of the present, unmediated by language. Unspeakable by definition. Just felt or experienced in mentation of a different sort, languageless, or language-transcendent. Something other.

Frank hated that sort of mysticism. Or maybe he loved it; the experience of it, that is. Like anyone who has ever entered a moment of nonlinguistic absorption, he recalled it as a kind of blessing. Like in the old days, hanging there cleaning windows, singing, “What’s my line, I’m happy cleaning windows.” Climbing, surfing … you could think far faster than you could verbalize in your mind. No doubt one knew the world by way of a flurry of impressions and thoughts that were far faster than consciousness could track. Consciousness was just a small part of it.

He left the building, went out into the humid afternoon. The sight of the street somehow repelled him. He couldn’t drive right now. Instead he walked through the car-dominated, slightly junky commercial district surrounding Ballston, spinning with thoughts and with something more. It seemed to him that he was learning things as he walked that he couldn’t have said out loud at that moment, and yet they were real, they were felt; they were quite real.

An excess of reason. Well, but he had always tried to be reasonable. He had tried very hard. That attempt was his mode of being. It had seemed to help him. Dispassionate; sensible; calm; reasonable. A thinking machine. He had loved those stories when he was a boy. That was what a scientist was, and that was why he was a good scientist. That was the thing that had bothered him about Anna, that she was undeniably a good scientist but was a passionate scientist too, she threw herself into her work and her ideas, was completely engaged emotionally in her work. She cared which theory was true. That was all wrong, but she was so smart that it worked, for her anyway. If it did. But it wasn’t science. To care that much was to introduce biases into the study. It wasn’t a matter of emotions. You did science simply because it was the best adaptation strategy in the environment into which they had been born. Science was the gene trying to pass itself along more successfully. Also it was the best way to pass the hours, or to make a living. Everything else was so trivial and grasping. Social primates, trapped in a technocosmos of their own devise; science was definitely the only way to see the terrain well enough to know which way to strike forward, to make something new for all the rest. No passion needed to be added to that reasoned way forward.