Meno's Stories
One: Winter Flies
The frost patterns on the single-pane windows resembled, without color, the end pages of some old, very old leather-bound book in his father's library. The cold had worked patiently and delicately to create a design that combined paisley and fleur de lis. Meno was impressed, as he hand-ground his coffee beans, with nature's ability to mimic human art—or actually the other way round, he corrected his thoughts, dumping the grounds into the filter.
The cabin, where he lived now, was heated by a wood-burning stove. No matter how much he fed it, the fire died not long after he went to bed, and mornings were brutal. Wearing an oversized ugly bathrobe and thick socks, he looked at the dormant stove and well-stocked
woodpile and remembered that he was out of kindling.
It was difficult. There was great difficulty, but respite from exile came occasionally when he was sent, as he still sometimes was, to cities far away and put up in some majestic hotel where the fine and many-times-washed linens and marble bathrooms with heated towel racks and ginger-scented soap reminded him of home. It wasn't the wealth behind such things that he missed so much as the attention to comfort and beauty—the patient and careful consideration of the texture and tone of a stone soap dish next to a worn brass fixture.
Might as well get it over with, he thought, as he stepped into his snow boots and tightened the belt to his robe. There was a huge heap of brush that the tractors had cleared from the hill, which had lain drying in the field for two winters. The twigs were grey and brittle and started the fire easily. But his frozen stiff hands were like someone else's and he struggled to get them to do the task. The sticks snapped violently and it was painful despite the numbness of his hands.
Now the fire was blazing, and in his chair next to the stove, he soon became too hot but was, nevertheless, reluctant to leave his place. Understanding one's own principles and standing up for them was also a delicate art, he thought, and he would do it all again, even though it had brought him to this. Sacrifice is not without some satisfaction and loss is not without a sweet sharp ache of desire. One ought to be grateful for that, for feeling alive. The worse pain must be not to feel at all, or to feel vaguely, or with the crowd. Should he have a third cup of coffee? It would probably make him jittery, but he liked the routine and went for the pot.
On the windowpane now, as the sun was unweaving the night's design, there was a grotesquely large green-bottle fly, slipping off the wet glass to the sill, crawling up again. From what musty corner of the cellar had it emerged? A fly had no business existing in February's cold. Obviously cursed for violating the usual order of things, its movements were slow and clumsy. I wonder what this means? his mind said to itself, the way it often did, surprising him with its strangeness and a credulity that did not seem to be his.
As the afternoon slowly came on, the winter sun, low and dazzlingly bright, changed the world. The warmth on his back, as he walked to the mailbox, felt nurturing and kind. What makes a slice of life a real story, his mind absentmindedly mused, is when three chance events collate. He crunched on through frozen snow.
One of the several inconveniences of living in his friend's cabin out-of-season was the distance he must walk to the mailbox at the end of the road every day, not to mention the much longer weekly trek to the store. Of course, he did not have to check the mail daily. Usually, the expedition produced nothing. But he had lately put in several humble requests, extremely humble, for research funding. So now, with all the hope of a lottery player who knows the odds, he made the trip. Born into the wrong climate of thought, he couldn't fully unfold his mind. He had to write his applications in a kind of code that, perhaps, under the right eye might be deciphered. At the end of the dirt driveway, he turned to walk another mile down the farm road to the twenty mailboxes signifying cabins equally remote as his.
Today the box was overfull, with grocery store circulars and someone else's junk mail. As he sorted through the lot of mis-delivered mail, a card fell onto the ground. He looked in wonder at the gorgeously printed advertisement from a jewelry company showing a large white gold brooch in the shape of a fly with an enormous emerald body. Following the image was a price, an obscene amount to be sure. He stooped to pick up the card, and as he did so, a letter dropped from his bundle. He did not recognize the return address, but judging from the fine paper, it was from a law firm or foundation. Opening it he found, enfolded in a letter, which he didn't pause to read immediately, a check, made out to him, with a number that was followed by an unspeakably long chain of zeroes, a figure that matched exactly the price of the emerald fly.
Two: The Walk
Meno had been turning his mind over with a spade for weeks. Nothing. He was done. He was ready to retreat into the soft bosom of admitted failure and spend a few days in his old room at his old parents’ house.
But then he found the solution—in the woods that abut the property, literally standing upright, calmly smiling by a big locust tree. When he first encountered it, he immediately recognized it as an old friend. And he had been looking for a stranger, with odd ways and an inscrutable language! No wonder he hadn't seen it at first. The solution, when it came, came with the full force of a long forgotten memory returned. Eureka. Suddenly, all the pieces fell into place.
We must explain from the beginning how it happened, if we can.
Last month, in the midst of an aside with Zhou, he'd suddenly realized his whole damned paper was wrong. Something he said made Meno visualize one of his equations in a way he hadn't before, and from that angle he could literally see it, obvious and monstrous, a big hole in the center where the wheel should be. He felt ill and had to excuse himself. Later, sitting down at his desk, he got out the paper, all crisp and neat in its journal jacket. And yes, there it was, the duck-rabbit flickering. I'd done one thing and thought another. Blood flushed his cheeks and he felt absolutely stupid.
He was glad when his father called and asked them out. Lisa and he took the first jitney and got to the island in time for brunch. He hadn't told her yet and said almost nothing the whole drive. He was looking forward to doing nothing, maybe even watch some TV. Then his mother surprised him with the news of a big dinner they had planned to celebrate his award.
She beamed, "Mr. Michaels" (he was the dentist next door) "says he's read it and found it very interesting. Of course I read it too, with a dictionary!"
He would fix it, he decided, before anyone found out.
At about 4:30 that afternoon the caterers arrived. He was sitting alone on the terrace wondering how he was going to be sociable. The pianist was trying out the keys and the torches were already lit on the lawn. He had in his hand a pocket-sized notebook, tied with leather, that he had found in his room. In the notebook, among various aphorisms and musings, he had written decades before, “A new creature is ‘jotted down’ in the world.” He could recall exactly the emotion he had felt when he had written those words, when he had jotted them down, in fact. It was the sensation of being on the threshold of understanding something.
Suddenly, he needed a walk, and he took off like a dog with a scent in the direction of the woods. Lisa called out after him with loving irritation, and he pretended not to hear her. Just half an hour, dear. Half an hour. He needed time to think.
There were miles of paths, some of them maintained by hikers, others mere animal paths that squeezed through hedges. As a child he had helped beat them with the other animals, ducking under brush and squirming every now and again on his belly. The trees had grown and the markers aged in the fifteen years that he had forsaken his forest for other paths to wander, but he would trust his memory to compensate for the changes, generate an age progression for an ecosystem, and guide him in, around, and out again.
Now what was the damned problem again? It was not as if he had forgotten, but he did need to prepare his mind to think of it again, lay it out on the table and see all the parts, or like an ancient poet remember his stanzas, going room to room.
The Japanese honeysuckle was never this thick before. The farmers thought it would be good as windbreaks, but it takes over without livestock to graze it down. It is vaguely pretty in the spring when in bloom. These woods have pink as well as the common white and yellow, only slightly odiferous.
He was walking in his mind's landscape. Ruts triggered the thought he'd had tripping on that rut before and memories were laced upon the branches that brushed his flanks. The difference between physical paths and thoughts, though, is they are well constrained by the terrain. Thoughts go off in more directions—but, he realized, they too are constrained by the like and the near.
He thought of the temporal cycle involving innumerable interrelating parts that formed a pattern, maybe not a physical structure exactly, or maybe so, yes maybe! he saw images of magnetized metal filings and felt calmer. The honeysuckle branches were chaotic in comparison. Their branchings tended to look like sand where retreating water had left its mark. That pattern kept shifting locations. Here it is in the sand. Here it is in the branches. Here it is in time.
It's not as if I don’t know the answer because I keep doing the work that poses the question, he said out loud. It was then that he realized the answer had been on the walk with him the entire time, like a ghost, guiding him. It has always been there in the woods where he had walked since he was a child. His whole life he had been laying cues here and there, little mnemonic devices that bore triggers of the past thoughts. Bodily calculating like a kaleidoscope, not like a Freudian dream, the right equation.
Eureka is not a moment. At first it seems so when you shout it out. But later you realize how gradually it had been forming and how afterward it was always already there. No! That’s wrong. This is a new thing he had created.
Maybe it was his body that realized the solution first, discovered or invented it, and he, that conscious part of him, simply walked in while the performance was already in full swing. But now he could grasp it, for certain, like a handle.
He followed the sound of the piano back home.
© VN Alexander 2019
These stories were taken from the collection Chance that Mimics Choice: Short Stories about Creativity by VN Alexander.
Winter Flies is reproduced by permission from the Antioch Review, Vol. 77, No. 2 (Spring, 2019). Copyright © 2019 by V. N. Alexander.
One: Winter Flies
The frost patterns on the single-pane windows resembled, without color, the end pages of some old, very old leather-bound book in his father's library. The cold had worked patiently and delicately to create a design that combined paisley and fleur de lis. Meno was impressed, as he hand-ground his coffee beans, with nature's ability to mimic human art—or actually the other way round, he corrected his thoughts, dumping the grounds into the filter.
The cabin, where he lived now, was heated by a wood-burning stove. No matter how much he fed it, the fire died not long after he went to bed, and mornings were brutal. Wearing an oversized ugly bathrobe and thick socks, he looked at the dormant stove and well-stocked
woodpile and remembered that he was out of kindling.
It was difficult. There was great difficulty, but respite from exile came occasionally when he was sent, as he still sometimes was, to cities far away and put up in some majestic hotel where the fine and many-times-washed linens and marble bathrooms with heated towel racks and ginger-scented soap reminded him of home. It wasn't the wealth behind such things that he missed so much as the attention to comfort and beauty—the patient and careful consideration of the texture and tone of a stone soap dish next to a worn brass fixture.
Might as well get it over with, he thought, as he stepped into his snow boots and tightened the belt to his robe. There was a huge heap of brush that the tractors had cleared from the hill, which had lain drying in the field for two winters. The twigs were grey and brittle and started the fire easily. But his frozen stiff hands were like someone else's and he struggled to get them to do the task. The sticks snapped violently and it was painful despite the numbness of his hands.
Now the fire was blazing, and in his chair next to the stove, he soon became too hot but was, nevertheless, reluctant to leave his place. Understanding one's own principles and standing up for them was also a delicate art, he thought, and he would do it all again, even though it had brought him to this. Sacrifice is not without some satisfaction and loss is not without a sweet sharp ache of desire. One ought to be grateful for that, for feeling alive. The worse pain must be not to feel at all, or to feel vaguely, or with the crowd. Should he have a third cup of coffee? It would probably make him jittery, but he liked the routine and went for the pot.
On the windowpane now, as the sun was unweaving the night's design, there was a grotesquely large green-bottle fly, slipping off the wet glass to the sill, crawling up again. From what musty corner of the cellar had it emerged? A fly had no business existing in February's cold. Obviously cursed for violating the usual order of things, its movements were slow and clumsy. I wonder what this means? his mind said to itself, the way it often did, surprising him with its strangeness and a credulity that did not seem to be his.
As the afternoon slowly came on, the winter sun, low and dazzlingly bright, changed the world. The warmth on his back, as he walked to the mailbox, felt nurturing and kind. What makes a slice of life a real story, his mind absentmindedly mused, is when three chance events collate. He crunched on through frozen snow.
One of the several inconveniences of living in his friend's cabin out-of-season was the distance he must walk to the mailbox at the end of the road every day, not to mention the much longer weekly trek to the store. Of course, he did not have to check the mail daily. Usually, the expedition produced nothing. But he had lately put in several humble requests, extremely humble, for research funding. So now, with all the hope of a lottery player who knows the odds, he made the trip. Born into the wrong climate of thought, he couldn't fully unfold his mind. He had to write his applications in a kind of code that, perhaps, under the right eye might be deciphered. At the end of the dirt driveway, he turned to walk another mile down the farm road to the twenty mailboxes signifying cabins equally remote as his.
Today the box was overfull, with grocery store circulars and someone else's junk mail. As he sorted through the lot of mis-delivered mail, a card fell onto the ground. He looked in wonder at the gorgeously printed advertisement from a jewelry company showing a large white gold brooch in the shape of a fly with an enormous emerald body. Following the image was a price, an obscene amount to be sure. He stooped to pick up the card, and as he did so, a letter dropped from his bundle. He did not recognize the return address, but judging from the fine paper, it was from a law firm or foundation. Opening it he found, enfolded in a letter, which he didn't pause to read immediately, a check, made out to him, with a number that was followed by an unspeakably long chain of zeroes, a figure that matched exactly the price of the emerald fly.
Two: The Walk
Meno had been turning his mind over with a spade for weeks. Nothing. He was done. He was ready to retreat into the soft bosom of admitted failure and spend a few days in his old room at his old parents’ house.
But then he found the solution—in the woods that abut the property, literally standing upright, calmly smiling by a big locust tree. When he first encountered it, he immediately recognized it as an old friend. And he had been looking for a stranger, with odd ways and an inscrutable language! No wonder he hadn't seen it at first. The solution, when it came, came with the full force of a long forgotten memory returned. Eureka. Suddenly, all the pieces fell into place.
We must explain from the beginning how it happened, if we can.
Last month, in the midst of an aside with Zhou, he'd suddenly realized his whole damned paper was wrong. Something he said made Meno visualize one of his equations in a way he hadn't before, and from that angle he could literally see it, obvious and monstrous, a big hole in the center where the wheel should be. He felt ill and had to excuse himself. Later, sitting down at his desk, he got out the paper, all crisp and neat in its journal jacket. And yes, there it was, the duck-rabbit flickering. I'd done one thing and thought another. Blood flushed his cheeks and he felt absolutely stupid.
He was glad when his father called and asked them out. Lisa and he took the first jitney and got to the island in time for brunch. He hadn't told her yet and said almost nothing the whole drive. He was looking forward to doing nothing, maybe even watch some TV. Then his mother surprised him with the news of a big dinner they had planned to celebrate his award.
She beamed, "Mr. Michaels" (he was the dentist next door) "says he's read it and found it very interesting. Of course I read it too, with a dictionary!"
He would fix it, he decided, before anyone found out.
At about 4:30 that afternoon the caterers arrived. He was sitting alone on the terrace wondering how he was going to be sociable. The pianist was trying out the keys and the torches were already lit on the lawn. He had in his hand a pocket-sized notebook, tied with leather, that he had found in his room. In the notebook, among various aphorisms and musings, he had written decades before, “A new creature is ‘jotted down’ in the world.” He could recall exactly the emotion he had felt when he had written those words, when he had jotted them down, in fact. It was the sensation of being on the threshold of understanding something.
Suddenly, he needed a walk, and he took off like a dog with a scent in the direction of the woods. Lisa called out after him with loving irritation, and he pretended not to hear her. Just half an hour, dear. Half an hour. He needed time to think.
There were miles of paths, some of them maintained by hikers, others mere animal paths that squeezed through hedges. As a child he had helped beat them with the other animals, ducking under brush and squirming every now and again on his belly. The trees had grown and the markers aged in the fifteen years that he had forsaken his forest for other paths to wander, but he would trust his memory to compensate for the changes, generate an age progression for an ecosystem, and guide him in, around, and out again.
Now what was the damned problem again? It was not as if he had forgotten, but he did need to prepare his mind to think of it again, lay it out on the table and see all the parts, or like an ancient poet remember his stanzas, going room to room.
The Japanese honeysuckle was never this thick before. The farmers thought it would be good as windbreaks, but it takes over without livestock to graze it down. It is vaguely pretty in the spring when in bloom. These woods have pink as well as the common white and yellow, only slightly odiferous.
He was walking in his mind's landscape. Ruts triggered the thought he'd had tripping on that rut before and memories were laced upon the branches that brushed his flanks. The difference between physical paths and thoughts, though, is they are well constrained by the terrain. Thoughts go off in more directions—but, he realized, they too are constrained by the like and the near.
He thought of the temporal cycle involving innumerable interrelating parts that formed a pattern, maybe not a physical structure exactly, or maybe so, yes maybe! he saw images of magnetized metal filings and felt calmer. The honeysuckle branches were chaotic in comparison. Their branchings tended to look like sand where retreating water had left its mark. That pattern kept shifting locations. Here it is in the sand. Here it is in the branches. Here it is in time.
It's not as if I don’t know the answer because I keep doing the work that poses the question, he said out loud. It was then that he realized the answer had been on the walk with him the entire time, like a ghost, guiding him. It has always been there in the woods where he had walked since he was a child. His whole life he had been laying cues here and there, little mnemonic devices that bore triggers of the past thoughts. Bodily calculating like a kaleidoscope, not like a Freudian dream, the right equation.
Eureka is not a moment. At first it seems so when you shout it out. But later you realize how gradually it had been forming and how afterward it was always already there. No! That’s wrong. This is a new thing he had created.
Maybe it was his body that realized the solution first, discovered or invented it, and he, that conscious part of him, simply walked in while the performance was already in full swing. But now he could grasp it, for certain, like a handle.
He followed the sound of the piano back home.
© VN Alexander 2019
These stories were taken from the collection Chance that Mimics Choice: Short Stories about Creativity by VN Alexander.
Winter Flies is reproduced by permission from the Antioch Review, Vol. 77, No. 2 (Spring, 2019). Copyright © 2019 by V. N. Alexander.
Narrated by VN Alexander.
Narrated by VN Alexander.
POST RECITAL
TALK
BR: We’re pleased to have the author VN Alexander in our studio today. When I asked, should we call you V? or N? She said “Call me Tori.”
VNA: It’s short for Victoria.
BR: Okay…
TN: Welcome, Tori.
BR: Purely a coincidence, I’m sure: VN is also, of course, Vladimir Nabokov, from whom you borrowed the phrase that gave the title to your book, Chance that Mimics Choice: Short Stories about Creativity. Can you say a little about what that means?
VNA: Chance that mimics choice is a coincidence that happens to be useful. And if I can adapt an example from Vladimir Nabokov—imagine that there is an ordinary spotted butterfly species, and there’s one individual that has a mutation of one gene and this stunts the shape of his wings, which also in turn makes the pigment diffuse differently, and when he emerges from his chrysalis he looks entirely different from his parents. His wings are truncated and he’s much browner in color, and in fact he has the shape of an American elm tree leaf—exactly. And the little lines have lined themselves up to look just like the veins on a leaf and he even has, instead of the eye spots that his parents had—he has these little fungus spots all over his wings. The believers in a creator will call this sort of thing design. Darwinists will say that the poor decisions of predators over many millions of years gradually shaped the butterfly into its new form, its new disguise, but Nabokov said that this kind of thing could happen in a single generation. And it’s purely an insane coincidence that it happens to look like an American elm leaf, because after all this butterfly lives in India, where none of the leaves resemble American elms. I’ve exaggerated this example a little bit to make the point.
TN: You have butterflies that look like sitars in New York… You’re refuting the old adage that “there are no new stories under the sun.” Stories may be made up of pre-existing parts but their arrangement in the hands of an artist does create something entirely new. After all, energy can neither be created nor destroyed. We’re always recycling!
VNA: Yes. New things do emerge. You’ve probably heard of chaos theory and…
TN: Yeah.
VNA: … complexity sciences and self-organization. That’s what I study as a philosopher of science. In short, even completely deterministic systems, modeled on a computer can evolve unpredictably.
TN: Brent can evolve unpredictably.
Laughter
VNA: And I want to add—I’ve gone by VN Alexander ever since I was a child, imitating my father’s signature—RF Alexander—F for Fiddes. And it turns out that the Fiddes castle in Scotland is only five miles from the Turing castle, of Alan Turing of computer fame. In 1952 Alan Turing discovered the equations that describe the reaction diffusion processes that form butterfly wing patterns.
BR: Hmm, that sounds like a chance that mimics choice, or something.
VNA: Making those kind of connections is the sort of thing that crazy people do. You know, connecting the dots they say, like, you know… finding a figure in the starry sky that’s not really there. So there’s that kind of insane connecting the dots. An artist finds a function for that pattern. The pattern does something. It has an effect. It has a cause of some kind.
BR: Well now this Meno guy, your protagonist in these stories, is not the original Meno. Tell us about who Meno was and why you’re using his name.
TN: When I saw the name Meno, I thought this was going to be some form of Socratic dialogue.
VNA: Yeah, it’s from Meno’s paradox. It’s a reference to Meno’s paradox. If you know what you’re looking for, inquiry is unnecessary. If you don’t know what you’re looking for, inquiry is impossible. Therefore inquiry is either unnecessary or impossible.
BR: Yeah. I can’t help it, I’m drawn to anything that has the word “paradox” in it.
TN: Does it make any difference to you that this is a male character? Is gender a paradox?
VNA: No. Meno is based on, you know… a dozen or so science creative people that I’ve known over the years and a little bit of myself too. I’m in there, and it’s just completely arbitrary what gender I choose. In the stories I tell, sometimes I pick a male voice and sometimes a female voice and it’s usually just because someone inspired that story and they happened to be male or female.
BR: I see. Well in the story “Winter Flies,” three chance events come together: the fly on the cold window, the ad for jewelry in the shape of a fly, and the check in the amount that matches the price of the emerald fly. Now I was reminded of the famous story about Carl Jung and the golden scarab beetle that landed on his window just as his patient was recalling a dream about a golden scarab. And it helped her have a breakthrough, and this is one of the stories Jung used in his development of the concept of synchronicity: coincidence that is both acausal and meaningful. So how does this intersect with your thoughts about chance?
VNA: I’ve been told many times that I should read Jung. And that story is great. I love it. I’ve done similar work, working with hypnotists that use these kinds of things to make some sort of progress with their patients. The areas of science that I work in are so controversial that I’m afraid to dip in to someone who is associated with a… kind of a non-scientific… or I’m afraid to go in those areas, so I haven’t really read Jung but everyone insists that I should—frequently.
TN: You know, apparently Freud said something like: “Jung was all right until he became a prophet.”
VNA: I’m sure there’s a lot of good stuff there.
BR: Interesting anyway.
TN: Yeah. So “The Walk” is a more complex story, I think. It’s interesting that we never learn what exactly the problem is that he needs a solution for. But first there was no problem and then he looked at the work from another angle, and it was suddenly all wrong. I imagine that most people who write fiction have had that experience.
BR: Yes.
TN: Is the second viewpoint really more valid than the first, or is it just that it is now the current view, and we can’t go back? Or is the first view more authentic?
VNA: I think there’s a little bit of a paradox there with the right and the wrong way… you know, looking at it from a different perspective makes you think you were completely wrong, and I think that the character in “The Walk” does realize that he wasn’t completely wrong. He was right in a very interesting way.
BR: Well in writing it’s easy to think you’re doing one thing when actually you’re doing something else entirely. Then suddenly you see it, like those figure/ground optical illusions. In the story you call it the “duckrabbit flickering”—which I like because I understand the reference. But maybe for those who don’t, can you explain the duckrabbit?
VNA: It’s a drawing of an animal that if you look at it from one view it could be a duck. In another view it could be a rabbit. Joseph Jastrow, I think, is the name of the psychologist who drew that. If you search “duckrabbit drawing” you can find it. It’s really pretty amazing. It’s very, very cute.
TN: I love those consciousness-optical illusions.
VNA: There are many things like that, that are wonderful and these kind of things actually occur in biology too and that’s some of my work. Like a cell in a receptor—if a piece of protein turns around the other way it might fit into a receptor where it shouldn’t, where it’s not evolved to do and cause some sort of response that’s entirely unpredictable and I believe that’s how adaptations occur…
BR: Yeah.
VNA: Some sort of “duckrabbit flickering” in biological processes.
TN: I think that fiction is an adaptation, maybe.
BR: Yeah, for me it is.
TN: So Meno realizes that if your work keeps raising a question, you must know the answer somewhere inside. Walking in the deep woods of your own mind, not searching, just walking, noticing the patterns everywhere… the thing you need makes itself known. So was it there all along, or is it new?
VNA: It’s new.
TN: Okay.
Laughter
VNA: I believe in emergence.
BR: Yeah… Well Chance that Mimics Choice also could be said to be a favorite topic of Paul Auster’s as well, at least in his early novels. And when he was criticized for using coincidence in his stories, he said that to him, that is realism—that’s the truth about the world because his life is full of remarkable coincidence—what he calls the “rhyming” of events. Have you read his work at all?
VNA: I have. It’s been a while. I remember his narrator in The Locked Room says: “In the end, each life is no more than the sum of its contingent facts. A chronicle of chance intersections, of flukes, of random events that divulge nothing of their own purpose.”—which I can’t figure out. Does he really mean that? Because I feel the opposite of that. I feel like purpose emerges in the intersection of these chance events.
BR: Purpose is an after effect, so to speak.
VNA: Yeah. Who’s to say where it begins and ends? It’s sort of like knowing the answer already when you formulated the question. What makes something purposeful is very cyclical. You can’t exactly figure where it begins. It’s always already begun but it is new. That doesn’t make any sense.
BR: But we’re not into making sense here.
Laughter
TN: You seem to be both a scientist and an artist. That’s quite rare isn’t it?
VNA: I think they used to be the same occupation back in the day. I don’t know what happened.
TN: Things got too specialized. Does Chance that Mimics Choice have a publisher yet?
BR: And are you working on anything else?
VNA: It doesn’t have a publisher yet. My publisher—The Permanent Press, doesn’t do collections. So yeah, I’m looking for a publisher. I’m looking for an agent actually. Right now I am on my way, in less than a month, to St. Petersburg. I have a Fullbright grant to work on proving Alan Turing’s equations will produce various forms of butterflies that Nabokov predicted.
BR: Oh wow. Very cool. Awesome. Well thank you, Tori, for your time, and for your contribution to our podcast.
TN: Thank you, yeah.
VNA: Thank you both. It was really lovely.
BR: Hey, here’s a meaningful coincidence—it is now exactly 12 noon and suddenly I’m hungry for lunch!
TN: I don’t think that’s what we’ve been talking about.
BR: Okay, then how about breakfast?
TN: Fine. I’ll make you something. Would you like an omelette with goat cheese and human hair?
BR: We’re pleased to have the author VN Alexander in our studio today. When I asked, should we call you V? or N? She said “Call me Tori.”
VNA: It’s short for Victoria.
BR: Okay…
TN: Welcome, Tori.
BR: Purely a coincidence, I’m sure: VN is also, of course, Vladimir Nabokov, from whom you borrowed the phrase that gave the title to your book, Chance that Mimics Choice: Short Stories about Creativity. Can you say a little about what that means?
VNA: Chance that mimics choice is a coincidence that happens to be useful. And if I can adapt an example from Vladimir Nabokov—imagine that there is an ordinary spotted butterfly species, and there’s one individual that has a mutation of one gene and this stunts the shape of his wings, which also in turn makes the pigment diffuse differently, and when he emerges from his chrysalis he looks entirely different from his parents. His wings are truncated and he’s much browner in color, and in fact he has the shape of an American elm tree leaf—exactly. And the little lines have lined themselves up to look just like the veins on a leaf and he even has, instead of the eye spots that his parents had—he has these little fungus spots all over his wings. The believers in a creator will call this sort of thing design. Darwinists will say that the poor decisions of predators over many millions of years gradually shaped the butterfly into its new form, its new disguise, but Nabokov said that this kind of thing could happen in a single generation. And it’s purely an insane coincidence that it happens to look like an American elm leaf, because after all this butterfly lives in India, where none of the leaves resemble American elms. I’ve exaggerated this example a little bit to make the point.
TN: You have butterflies that look like sitars in New York… You’re refuting the old adage that “there are no new stories under the sun.” Stories may be made up of pre-existing parts but their arrangement in the hands of an artist does create something entirely new. After all, energy can neither be created nor destroyed. We’re always recycling!
VNA: Yes. New things do emerge. You’ve probably heard of chaos theory and…
TN: Yeah.
VNA: … complexity sciences and self-organization. That’s what I study as a philosopher of science. In short, even completely deterministic systems, modeled on a computer can evolve unpredictably.
TN: Brent can evolve unpredictably.
Laughter
VNA: And I want to add—I’ve gone by VN Alexander ever since I was a child, imitating my father’s signature—RF Alexander—F for Fiddes. And it turns out that the Fiddes castle in Scotland is only five miles from the Turing castle, of Alan Turing of computer fame. In 1952 Alan Turing discovered the equations that describe the reaction diffusion processes that form butterfly wing patterns.
BR: Hmm, that sounds like a chance that mimics choice, or something.
VNA: Making those kind of connections is the sort of thing that crazy people do. You know, connecting the dots they say, like, you know… finding a figure in the starry sky that’s not really there. So there’s that kind of insane connecting the dots. An artist finds a function for that pattern. The pattern does something. It has an effect. It has a cause of some kind.
BR: Well now this Meno guy, your protagonist in these stories, is not the original Meno. Tell us about who Meno was and why you’re using his name.
TN: When I saw the name Meno, I thought this was going to be some form of Socratic dialogue.
VNA: Yeah, it’s from Meno’s paradox. It’s a reference to Meno’s paradox. If you know what you’re looking for, inquiry is unnecessary. If you don’t know what you’re looking for, inquiry is impossible. Therefore inquiry is either unnecessary or impossible.
BR: Yeah. I can’t help it, I’m drawn to anything that has the word “paradox” in it.
TN: Does it make any difference to you that this is a male character? Is gender a paradox?
VNA: No. Meno is based on, you know… a dozen or so science creative people that I’ve known over the years and a little bit of myself too. I’m in there, and it’s just completely arbitrary what gender I choose. In the stories I tell, sometimes I pick a male voice and sometimes a female voice and it’s usually just because someone inspired that story and they happened to be male or female.
BR: I see. Well in the story “Winter Flies,” three chance events come together: the fly on the cold window, the ad for jewelry in the shape of a fly, and the check in the amount that matches the price of the emerald fly. Now I was reminded of the famous story about Carl Jung and the golden scarab beetle that landed on his window just as his patient was recalling a dream about a golden scarab. And it helped her have a breakthrough, and this is one of the stories Jung used in his development of the concept of synchronicity: coincidence that is both acausal and meaningful. So how does this intersect with your thoughts about chance?
VNA: I’ve been told many times that I should read Jung. And that story is great. I love it. I’ve done similar work, working with hypnotists that use these kinds of things to make some sort of progress with their patients. The areas of science that I work in are so controversial that I’m afraid to dip in to someone who is associated with a… kind of a non-scientific… or I’m afraid to go in those areas, so I haven’t really read Jung but everyone insists that I should—frequently.
TN: You know, apparently Freud said something like: “Jung was all right until he became a prophet.”
VNA: I’m sure there’s a lot of good stuff there.
BR: Interesting anyway.
TN: Yeah. So “The Walk” is a more complex story, I think. It’s interesting that we never learn what exactly the problem is that he needs a solution for. But first there was no problem and then he looked at the work from another angle, and it was suddenly all wrong. I imagine that most people who write fiction have had that experience.
BR: Yes.
TN: Is the second viewpoint really more valid than the first, or is it just that it is now the current view, and we can’t go back? Or is the first view more authentic?
VNA: I think there’s a little bit of a paradox there with the right and the wrong way… you know, looking at it from a different perspective makes you think you were completely wrong, and I think that the character in “The Walk” does realize that he wasn’t completely wrong. He was right in a very interesting way.
BR: Well in writing it’s easy to think you’re doing one thing when actually you’re doing something else entirely. Then suddenly you see it, like those figure/ground optical illusions. In the story you call it the “duckrabbit flickering”—which I like because I understand the reference. But maybe for those who don’t, can you explain the duckrabbit?
VNA: It’s a drawing of an animal that if you look at it from one view it could be a duck. In another view it could be a rabbit. Joseph Jastrow, I think, is the name of the psychologist who drew that. If you search “duckrabbit drawing” you can find it. It’s really pretty amazing. It’s very, very cute.
TN: I love those consciousness-optical illusions.
VNA: There are many things like that, that are wonderful and these kind of things actually occur in biology too and that’s some of my work. Like a cell in a receptor—if a piece of protein turns around the other way it might fit into a receptor where it shouldn’t, where it’s not evolved to do and cause some sort of response that’s entirely unpredictable and I believe that’s how adaptations occur…
BR: Yeah.
VNA: Some sort of “duckrabbit flickering” in biological processes.
TN: I think that fiction is an adaptation, maybe.
BR: Yeah, for me it is.
TN: So Meno realizes that if your work keeps raising a question, you must know the answer somewhere inside. Walking in the deep woods of your own mind, not searching, just walking, noticing the patterns everywhere… the thing you need makes itself known. So was it there all along, or is it new?
VNA: It’s new.
TN: Okay.
Laughter
VNA: I believe in emergence.
BR: Yeah… Well Chance that Mimics Choice also could be said to be a favorite topic of Paul Auster’s as well, at least in his early novels. And when he was criticized for using coincidence in his stories, he said that to him, that is realism—that’s the truth about the world because his life is full of remarkable coincidence—what he calls the “rhyming” of events. Have you read his work at all?
VNA: I have. It’s been a while. I remember his narrator in The Locked Room says: “In the end, each life is no more than the sum of its contingent facts. A chronicle of chance intersections, of flukes, of random events that divulge nothing of their own purpose.”—which I can’t figure out. Does he really mean that? Because I feel the opposite of that. I feel like purpose emerges in the intersection of these chance events.
BR: Purpose is an after effect, so to speak.
VNA: Yeah. Who’s to say where it begins and ends? It’s sort of like knowing the answer already when you formulated the question. What makes something purposeful is very cyclical. You can’t exactly figure where it begins. It’s always already begun but it is new. That doesn’t make any sense.
BR: But we’re not into making sense here.
Laughter
TN: You seem to be both a scientist and an artist. That’s quite rare isn’t it?
VNA: I think they used to be the same occupation back in the day. I don’t know what happened.
TN: Things got too specialized. Does Chance that Mimics Choice have a publisher yet?
BR: And are you working on anything else?
VNA: It doesn’t have a publisher yet. My publisher—The Permanent Press, doesn’t do collections. So yeah, I’m looking for a publisher. I’m looking for an agent actually. Right now I am on my way, in less than a month, to St. Petersburg. I have a Fullbright grant to work on proving Alan Turing’s equations will produce various forms of butterflies that Nabokov predicted.
BR: Oh wow. Very cool. Awesome. Well thank you, Tori, for your time, and for your contribution to our podcast.
TN: Thank you, yeah.
VNA: Thank you both. It was really lovely.
BR: Hey, here’s a meaningful coincidence—it is now exactly 12 noon and suddenly I’m hungry for lunch!
TN: I don’t think that’s what we’ve been talking about.
BR: Okay, then how about breakfast?
TN: Fine. I’ll make you something. Would you like an omelette with goat cheese and human hair?
Music on this episode:
Étude Opus 2 No. 1 in C sharp minor by Alexander Scriabin
License CC PD
Prelude 1 Opus 67 by Alexander Scriabin
License CC PD
Sound Effects used under license:
Twigs being broken by urbandroid
License CC BY-NC 3.0
Fx Envelope Open by Pete Barry
License CC BY 3.0
FP Van Driving on Gravel by cmusounddesign
License CC BY 3.0
Wood Burning Stove by nebulousflyn
License CC BY 3.0
Man Scream by malexmedia
License CC BY 3.0
