Human Meme

I want to tell you about something I overheard in a cafe in Newark, New Jersey, about twenty-five years ago, and about the book that grew out of it, and about why it took me a quarter of a century to understand what I heard. I was teaching at the time. A colleague from my department was sitting near the window with her daughter, a young woman just starting her freshman year of college. I came in, we exchanged the usual pleasantries, and then I sat down at the next table and we performed that ritual of urban public life where you pretend you cannot hear the person three feet away from you. But I could hear her. Her voice had changed. It had acquired weight. She was no longer making conversation. She was delivering an instruction. She pointed at her daughter and tapped the table with her finger, and she said: "Go to every funeral. Even if you don't want to. Even if you don't know them. If you know the people around them, you go."

The book is twenty-one letters. I use the word "letter" loosely. A surgical dictation is a letter. A cockpit voice recorder transcript is a letter. A recipe card annotated by three generations of the same family is a letter. A homestead deed from 1884 is a letter. A radio signal broadcasting Chopin and a list of forty-seven names into a dead frequency is a letter. A mathematical theorem inscribed into the DNA of a bacterium is a letter. Each one crosses a gap. The first gap is one second. A surgeon dictating an operative report while the patient is still on the table. The last gap is 4.24 light-years. That is the distance to Proxima Centauri, the nearest star, and it is also zero, depending on your frame of reference. Special relativity tells us that a photon traveling at the speed of light experiences no transit time. From the photon's perspective, emission and absorption are the same moment. The gap is a property of the receiver, not the sender. The message does not know it is late. Between those two extremes, one second and light-years, I tried to cover every register of human communication I could reach. The clinical and the domestic. The bureaucratic and the intimate. The comic and the elegiac. The personal and the geological. The living and the dead.

I want to talk about a sentence. A very specific kind of sentence. The kind of sentence you hear every day, in every newscast, in every corporate press release, in every school board meeting and church bulletin and government report, and you never notice it, because the sentence was designed not to be noticed. The sentence goes like this: "Jobs were lost." Or: "The congregation dwindled." Or: "The neighborhood changed." Or: "The program was discontinued." Listen to the grammar. In every one of those sentences, the subject is the thing that was abandoned. The job. The congregation. The neighborhood. The program. In none of those sentences is the subject the person or the institution that did the abandoning. The jobs were not taken by a board of directors who calculated that cheaper labor was available overseas. The jobs were lost, as if they had wandered off on their own, as if employment were a set of car keys that slipped behind the couch cushions through nobody's fault. That is the grammar of leaving. And my new book is about that grammar.

When an actor walks onto a stage and says the words a playwright has written, whose body is it? Not legally. Legally the question is settled. The actor owns the body, the playwright owns the words, and an intricate web of union contracts and intellectual property law keeps the two from colliding in ways that require attorneys. The legal answer is clean. I am asking a different question. I am asking what happens, at the level of consciousness, when a human being stands in a defined space and pretends to be someone else. Whose experience is the audience receiving? The character's? The actor's? The playwright's? Some fourth thing that does not exist until all three converge in a room where strangers have agreed to sit in the dark and watch? I have spent more than forty years in the theatre, and I do not have a settled answer. What I have instead is a book.

In 1970, a woman named Vera Rubin pointed a spectrograph at the Andromeda galaxy and found that it was wrong. Not the galaxy. The galaxy was doing what galaxies do. What was wrong was every prediction about how the galaxy should behave. The stars at the outer edge of Andromeda were moving too fast. Not slightly too fast. Not within the margin of error. They were moving as though something enormous was holding them in place, something with gravitational mass far exceeding everything visible in the galaxy combined. The stars were orbiting matter that no telescope on Earth, or in orbit, or conceivable within the laws of electromagnetic radiation, could detect. Rubin published her findings. The physics community did what physics communities do when a woman presents evidence that the standard model is incomplete. They told her to check her equipment. She checked it. She observed more galaxies. She found the same result in all of them. Every galaxy she pointed her instrument at was embedded in a halo of invisible mass that outweighed the visible matter by roughly six to one.