this is the place where i must stand and fail
February 27, 2007
there’s absolutely nothing like working all night long to finish a mathematics assignment. i haven’t dropped a problem set off as i just did in quite a while, but the experience hasn’t changed: i throw on an mit hoody so no one can see the mess of hair on my head (most of which seems like it should’ve been pulled out already), i refuse to take the time to lace my shoes and instead just slip on flip-flops, and i make my way down the snow-covered cambridge sidewalks toward campus. people are, somehow, always out, and they always stare me down — probably because i look half dead, or maybe just because i look clinically insane, wearing a hoody and flip-flops standing next to four-feet-tall piles of snow. i inevitably go to the wrong floor of the math building, since i’m often so tired i can’t remember what i’m doing, and i end up shoving my problem set under doors belonging to men much more brilliant than myself — an experience which never fails to spawn within me a tremendous disbelief in what i’m doing, an experience that leaves me wondering, apocalyptically, what college, what knowledge — what this — is good for.
it’s even worse than usual this morning, because i have less than an hour to read half of frances burney’s evelina for my major english novels class. so i’ve successfully proved some rather useless things about tensor algebras and i’ve failed to read what i should’ve already read. what a broken record. i am perpetually failing here, not in terms of grades, but in the more important sense: i work all the time, but seem only to make a fool of myself. i’m the mathematician who reads poems, the aspiring writer who attempts to cure cancer, the cancer researcher who proves theorems. i subvert myself incessantly but hypocritically or naively bemoan my lack of progress. my days fill up with little but constant disappointments, like the words on this screen, and by the time all the imprecision and mediocrity works itself out, i’m more than happy to give it all up for sleep. i am not prince hamlet, nor was meant to be; am an attendant lord, one that will do to swell a progress, start a scene or two. i admit my failure, i tuck it gently into bed alongside me at night, it pries my heart open for all the world to see, survived –
what did we build it for? was it all a dream? …
ghostly above us in lamplight the towers gleam
monday, february 26, 2007
12:58 am
today i am every effort of the self to recede from the self,
being becoming nonbeing to begin becoming being
reading listening to lolita mendelssohn in tehran cambridge
February 25, 2007
sunday, february 25, 2007
1:33 am
there’s something funny going on in kundera’s the unbearable lightness of being, and evidently i’m not the only one who thinks so.
arthur phillips has written a fantastic review (called “the disillusionist: in praise of milan kundera’s hypocrises”) of kundera’s most recent book, the curtain, in the march issue of harper’s (one great thing about having a subscription is that i get each month’s issue about two weeks before it hits newstands). he identifies a fundamental contradiction between the theory of the novel kundera develops in the curtain (and two other collections of essays) and the characters we actually confront in his writing. illuminating and helpful in its own right — especially for its tangential recasting of the same terms of zadie smith’s recent essay on fiction, namely the overwhelming presence, and not extinction, of kundera’s personality in his writing — the essay reminds me of that fundamental, even hypocritical (ay, there’s the rub) dialectic between levity and gravity in unbearable lightness that i’ve always sensed and appreciated but never given its due analysis.
i’m not up to that analysis here either, but i will, first, point out what i consider to be a rather congruous argument in ammons:
You cannot come to unity and remain material:
in that perception there is no perceiver:[...]
how I said I can be glad and sad: but a man goes
from one foot to the other:
wisdom wisdom:
to be glad and sad at once is also unity
and death:
wisdom wisdom: a peachblossom blooms on a particular
tree on a particular day:
unity cannot do anything in particular
what strikes me about this heavy-light glim-glum duality, as old as parmenides, is the strange way we can, in ammons’s terms, move from one foot (or pole) to the other. in fact, what motivated this post wasn’t phillips’s essay at all (i read that about a week ago), but a desire to understand why i’m so head-over-heels for my latest mendelssohn discovery, his lieder ohne worte (songs without words). just as the well-tempered klavier moves us through every key, these short, lyrical pieces for solo piano move us through an incredibly rich range of sentiments — including glim to glum, and nearly everything in between.
i tend to hate framing literary ideas in the context of scientific ones (i pointed out defoe’s stylistic clunkiness in moll flanders the other day in my english class by crudely likening the transition between episodes in the novel to the transition between levels in a video game, but the teacher seemed to love it) — but it seems to me we’re a lot like schrodinger’s cat, abstractly fluctuating between two states of being (in our case, unbearable lightness or unbearable weightiness) until certain circumstances, the bloom of a particular peachblossom on a particular tree on a particular day, locate us in one or the other. ammons is as suspect as we all are of schrodinger’s cat, who cannot come to unity and remain material (what’s a cat that’s both alive and dead? ahem, problematic).
kundera’s novel enacts this motion (from one foot to the other), of course, but this is almost the problem, and also the place where whatever problem this might be lines up with phillips: it’s a novel that purports to be about unbearable lightness but loads us down with philosophical and emotional weight. granted, the point is to repudiate eternal return, but what hooked me about the book was the way it started out sounding like some grand treatise (how many novels have you read with titles like the unbearable lightness of being?), the way the it begins:
The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?
nietzsche? mad myths? eternal return? in the opening sentences of a novel? isn’t this supposed to be fiction? well i better read on because kundera’s doing something i’ve never seen done before. again i wasn’t alone; the featured review on the back cover of my edition screams in bolded red print: “kundera has raised the novel of ideas to a new level of dreamlike lyricism and emotional intensity.”
case in point. a novel of ideas wants to tell us about the unbearable lightness of being? way to subvert yourself, milan. but the funny thing isn’t that he’s subverted himself; it’s that doing so is precisely what makes this novel all the more important.
friday, february 23, 2007
5:23 am
i’m wide awake, it must be morning the day my differential forms and organic chemistry problem sets due. i feel very hypocritical running a science mentoring program in which i encourage students to get excited about and pursue science, when i can’t even sustain that excitement myself, when all i can think about is running away from it, running to sleep:
i run to sleep and take my running slow,
i learn by never quite getting where i have to go –
thursday, february 22, 2007
1:55 am
from a student’s short-answer response to a question on the application for the science mentoring program i run:
“and a question I have about science is i wanna no why science is important”
me too, kid. me too. knowledge ends not with a bang, but with a whimper.
give me perfect prose, or give me death
February 19, 2007
monday, february 19, 2007
1:57 am
muddled syntax is the outward and audible sign of confused minds, and the misuse of grammar the result of illogical thinking.
– quentin crisp
as true as his name sounds delicious. i’m in the middle of my first paper for my introduction to western music class [a comparison of chopin's prelude in c minor, op. 28, no. 20 with wagner's overture to act iii of lohengrin], and i’m of course pulling my hair out. i’d rather die than ascribe my name to such mechanical and insipid sentences. where’s my voice? my verve? my mind? my muse? there’s nothing so immoral and destructive as bad writing, nothing so cherished and healthy as good –
when i’m not intentionally deluding myself, i spend most of my time wanting to quit this place to go read everything i should’ve already read and learn how to write a sentence worth anyone’s time, including mine. but it’s all too intimidating, so i slide back into routine and try to get through another semester. [maybe it's clear now why i hate routines and barely make it, emotionally, through the semesters here.] i am convinced i am the least interesting person alive, and the sooner i figure out how to extinguish my personality and write decent words in its place, the better –
it’s a small world, after all
February 13, 2007
tuesday, february 13, 2007
11:30 pm
pulchra sunt quae visa placent.
[that is beautiful which pleases the eye.]– aquinas
and the end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started
and know the place for the first time.– eliot, “little gidding” [last of the four quartets]
it was like / a new knowledge of reality.
– stevens, “not ideas about the thing but the thing itself”
most of the labwork i do is a lot like cooking: i play around with colored solutions and try to optimize certain characteristics of those solutions, just as a chef plays around with his ingredients in order to produce a desirable dish. but the chef’s job is a little bit easier. it’s not that difficult to determine whether or not there’s actually celery in your salad, but i can’t actually see most of the ingredients — that is, the particular particles or molecules that are in those colored solutions — i work with. [of course, the chef does in fact encounter the same problem every now and then; since he can't see salt, he has to taste his dish to know whether he's added enough -- just like i have to perform various tests to characterize my solutions.] we take our sense of sight so much for granted [or vice versa?] that it’s hard for most people to come to terms with that old adage that things really aren’t always what they seem. over the last few centuries [and the last few decades in particular], the development of the molecular sciences has taught us that our world is much more rich and complex than our vision would have ever allowed us to imagine. to echo stevens [albeit in a very different context], we have found a new knowledge of reality.
but given the urgency of our sense of sight, there’s something fundamentally abstract, and potentially even dull, about a reality we can’t see. [and this probably motivates those perennial questions about abstract mathematics: what is it, exactly? what is it good for? what's interesting about the ability to do calculus in twenty-nine dimensions if i can't visualize a twenty-nine-dimensional space?] how can an abstract, nonvisual reality rival the primal energies vibrating in van gogh’s starry night?
even for theoretical mathematicians, abstract knowledge somehow comes to life when it’s applied in contexts we can easily visualize.
in this same vein, it’s hard to imagine there’s anything exciting about playing around with colored solutions. and in fact, there often isn’t. what validates the whole experience is the chance i get every now and then to paint my own starry night, or in other words to see a representation of the “reality” i’m trying to study.
well, i thought i’d share a little bit of that reality with you. over the last few months i’ve worked to develop “stealth” nanoparticles that circulate in a latent state in the blood until activated by proteases upregulated in cancer tissue; once activated, they expose a postively-charged peptide which allows them to (electrostatically) associate with the negatively-charged cell membrane and internalize into cells. to obtain the images below, i incubated fluorescently-labeled preactivated particles over fibrosarcoma cells. i used fluorescence microscopy to visually monitor the intracellular delivery of these particles over time, from their initial association with the cell membrane to their localization in vesicles inside the cell:
incubation time: 1 hour.
incubation time: 3 hours.
incubation time: 5 hours.
now compare this to the intracellular fluorescence we see when we haven’t preactivated our particles [hopefully very little, since our particles are supposed to shield that internalizing functionality until activated]:
incubation time: 5 hours.
okay, so they aren’t van goghs, but they are like a new knowledge of reality. eukaroytic cells, like the ones imaged above, typically have diameters between 10 and 30 micrometers; that’s 1 to 3 hundredths of a millimeter! our particles are even smaller — they have a diameter of about 100 nanometers, or 1 ten-thousandth of a millimeter! engineering [and good cooking!] is plenty difficult on our scale; that we can do it on scales we know so little about, on scales that are so far removed from our visual reality, consistently amazes me –
i’m in a hurry to get things done
February 13, 2007
tuesday, february 13, 2007
12:58 am
he who binds himself to a joy
doth the winged life destroy
but he who kisses the joy as it flies
lives in eternity’s sunrise– blake
i’ve been trying to write this post for a week now.
classes started, and they’re wonderful — especially my major english novels class — but it’s hard to believe it’s only been a week. last tuesday night the same bunch of us went back over to the harvard piano instructor’s house for a definitively undeserved five-course meal. on wednesday i noticed the pi of my lab made the cover of tech talk for her recent coauthorship on a really neat paper entitled “biomimetic amplification of nanoparticle homing to tumors.” that night ally and i attended the 2007 burchard scholars welcoming reception, which was rather anticlimactic in the wake of tuesday night’s dinner, which had been filled not only with delicious wine and food, but also tales of said harvard instructor’s travels in europe, including his search for musical transcripts that went missing after the second world war. thursday evening i attended the first session of the harvard-mit divison of health sciences and technology (hst) biomedical engineering seminar series and heard harvard chemist george whitesides’s talk on “unconventional nanofabrication.” that night i also threw together a website for my theory of differential forms class, having (stupidly?) volunteered to maintain a website for the (ironically) computer illiterate professor. i took what i thought to be a well-deserved break friday night and went to see children of men on saturday. thanks to some bad planning i somehow ended up eating lunch for six hours on sunday, but that’s neither here nor there. i nevertheless did happen to notice during that marathon meal that kundera has a new book out on the art of the novel that i’m just dying to read.
but i don’t have a second to spare this week, with three problem sets due, a novel to read, hours of music to listen to, research proposals to write, students to admit for my volunteer mentoring program, applications to complete for summer programs, and submissions to review for mit’s magazine of the arts and letters. there’s something rather mechanical, even inhumane about being this busy — i don’t have time to write what i’d like to write; thoughts come and go like a gentle breeze, leaving no trace of themselves (however interesting they were), only a slight chill —
three’s company
February 5, 2007
monday, february 5, 2007
when i was a kid [as if i'm now not] i used to read about nobel laureates like philip sharp and dream about doing medical research at a place like harvard or mit. i was a lot like stephen daedalus in joyce’s a portrait of the artist as a young man:
it pained him that he did not know well what politics meant and that he did not know where the universe ended. he felt small and weak. when would he be like the fellows in poetry and rhetoric? they had big voices and big boots and they studied trigonometry. that was very far away.
i still don’t know much about politics, nor where the universe ends, but what i do have is a sense of having arrived somewhere, as far away as this has been. this evening i went to the february mit-harvard nanomedical consortium meeting and heard a presentation on targeted polymeric nanoparticles for drug delivery. i sat three seats away from some of the biggest booted scientists around: robert langer, ralph weissleder, and, as you probably already guessed, philip sharp. newton said he stood on the shoulders of giants; i’ve been eating pizza with them.
now, i’m writing not out of hubris but out of contentment: for the first time i’m starting to get some serious work done. [though i'm not seriously comparing myself to newton, of course.] all of a sudden there’s a need to reinvent hughes and ask what happens to a dream not as it’s deferred but as one watches it come true. is it possible to write a happy poem [which is distinctly not a love poem]? it’s been so long since i’ve felt intellectual satisfaction that i’m needing to learn what sorts of things [especially ethical, psychological] are at stake here, in happy or ecstatic poems, in happiness … and while we’re on possibilities, i’m not entirely sure it’s possible for me to empty out my identity in this enterprise the way i might have liked to, the way stein and eliot and a whole suite of others understand creativity. just as i’ve been thinking about these sorts of things lately, zadie smith recently wrote an essay in which she repudiates eliot’s claim that “the progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.” i’m not sure i really agree with her reinvolvement of a writer’s personality in his texts, but one thing’s for sure: i’m not writing poems here, i’m keeping a blog. the problem, of course, comes in my publishing this publicly. until i decide to write more discursively or keep a journal all to myself, this might just have to be a token of my [seemingly hypocritical] struggle to understand identity and the different technologies of the self [to borrow foucault's phrase] –
on a completely unrelated note, i’ve been trying to put the digital camera my mother bought me for christmas to good use. my room has a view:
