I will be at a research retreat near Pompano, Florida, visiting family as we drive back and forth.  But, I will be checking e-mail often and will be happy to answer questions or help you fine-tune.

March 13, 2019.  Last night, 12 March, Dr Jan Simek presented his scholarship on paleolithic art–and even more, he (and we) spoke to what it means.   This was a compelling couple of hours and I think everyone was affected by the messages: the paleolithic creators of this art were remarkable people in both their determination to communicate with each other and their spirit world.  In all the hard science there emerged a clear sense of spirituality.

For check in on our next meeting on 26 March, please have your latest version of a project title AND be prepared to offer a couple of lines on some specific experience from the perspectives of development, ecology, evolution, and physiology.

.

 .

ABOUT CHECKING IN, (from an old personal diary note/reflection–once again I ask you to bear with me as I free-associate ideas).  I have the common experience of passing a colleague in the hallways of work and asking “How are you doin’?”  – “Fine.” –   And then, for no obvious reason, I sometimes ask, “You sure?” – and my colleague can choose to go beyond the socially constructed custom.  I’m asking for a “check-in,”  a better connection.

Scholars sometimes speak of the “social construction of reality” – the construction of our “selves”–  and we do this first by observing others and then by interacting with them.   To become wholly ourselves  —to fully manifest our authentic selves—  we must have countless shared exchanges.

 Before the dead hand of habit has turned many of us into sleepwalkers, social automatons, we must rediscover the enriching joy of genuine connectedness with our cohabitants in the net of time and space we call our lives.  

And we begin by getting to know our neighbors.   We need to know about each other, what others see, think, feel.  How they are likely to act . . .

Someone once wrote that  Manhattan is a city of  “conversations overheard,” of  “people reading over your shoulder on the subway train.”

Well, I lived on that crowded island for several years and learned the meaning of that observation.  I learned that a few human habits that I thought were peculiarities of overcrowding were, in fact, givens of human nature.  And part of that given is a need to connect.  As in the John Prine song, “Hello in There, hello”   —I am a biologist and one of the things I’ve learned is that there a whole areas of the human brain dedicated to creating, interpreting, and appreciating social signals.   

I am also interested in the tensions (and convergences) of art and science and I have always been troubled by a famous aphorism by one of the fathers of physiology, Claude Bernard: “Art is I, Science is we”  – But I also believed with John Donne that “no man is an island” By that reasoning,  “I is we.”  

We can’t be alone because we have internalized those we love (as well as those we hate) — we are not necessarily like them but they affect us, they are there. And they are in us.  And the ones whose judgments we value I’ve nicknamed our “listening angels” 

This is what by Allen Ginsberg called Jack Kerouac. George Burns’ listening angel was Gracie, Herman Melville’s was Nathaniel Hawthorne*, Virginia Woolf’s was Katherine Mansfield.  We need to listen and we need to be listened to –even when we speak to ourselves, someplace there are listening angels  –and when you speak you imagine, “this is how Dad would have responded,” or “Mrs Goldman in the third grade,” or “that taxi-driver in Amarillo.”

In our small community we have all become each other’s listening angels  —We want to be understood but we also speak to understand.  A curious phenomena whereby we understand our own thoughts better after tring to express them to others.  And so I encourage and relish “checking in.”  I have a favorite line by the great Spanish poet Antonio Machado:  se hace camino al andar – “we make the road by walking” –

This is the WISDOM of CHECKING IN.  We become connected — we may or may not laugh and cry together — BUT every check-in helps create the pathways we seek between our own – and each other’s hearts and minds.

* A letter from Herman Melville’s to his close friend Nathaniel Hawthorn dated November 17, 1851, says, “But, I felt pantheistic then-your heartbeat in my ribs and mine in ours, and both in God’s. A sense of unspeakable security is in me this moment, on account of your having understood my book” 

• All this about listening angels, checking in, and the tension between individuation and socialization brings to mind Loneliness and Longing