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Overview
“Self” has many definitions. Science has demonstrated that 90 percent of the cells in our bodies are bacteria—we are in many respects more non-self than self. In Lousy Sex, Callahan considers this microbio-neuro perspective on human identity together with the soulful, social perception of self, drawing on both art and science to fully illuminate this relationship.
In his stories about where we came from and who we are, Callahan uses autobiographical episodes to illustrate his scientific points. Through stories about the sex lives of wood lice, the biological advantages of eating dirt, the question of immortality, the relationship between syphilis and the musical genius of Beethoven, and more, this book creates another way, a chimeric way, of seeing ourselves. The general reader with an interest in science will find Lousy Sex fascinating.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781607322337 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University Press of Colorado |
| Publication date: | 07/15/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Lousy Sex
Creating Self in an Infectious World
By Gerald N. Callahan
University Press of Colorado
Copyright © 2013 Gerald N. CallahanAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60732-233-7
CHAPTER 1
First Self
If selves are anything at all, then they exist. Now there are selves. There was a time, millions (or billions) of years ago, when there was none — at least none on this planet. So there has to be — as a matter of logic — a true story to be told about how there came to be creatures with selves.
– Daniel C. Dennett, "The Origins of Selves"
Slowly, purposefully, my mother unbuttons her blouse. The blouse is blue with small white flowers, and the tail is tucked firmly into the elastic waistband of her salmon pink pants. Beginning at the top and moving down, she works carefully at each of the small plastic buttons.
"Mother," I plead with her, "you don't need to do that."
She smiles at me and continues unfastening buttons. Beneath her blue blouse, her padded cotton and elastic bra begins to appear. Her breasts swell pallidly above the brassiere.
The room is not well lit. The curtains are drawn, as they always are, against the sun. But I can see more of my mother than I wish to. My father, sitting here with me, says nothing. My wife, Gina, and the two other women in the room also sit silently as my mother undresses herself.
I smell my mother's perfume as she works at her blouse, her perfume and the lotion she slathers herself with every morning. I see the wrinkles beneath her arms, the flaps of skin at her elbows.
She pulls off the blouse and stops, standing before us all, the blouse hanging in her right hand. "Isn't it pretty?" she says and turns slightly so each of us can see her brassiere. My mother is eighty-two years old and mostly naked to the waist in front of her son, her husband, her daughter-in-law, and two perfect strangers. Her gray hair sprays from her head in nearly every direction. Her back is littered with small brown moles. And her dark eyes, fallen far back in the sockets of her skull, flutter from face to face.
"Do you need a brassiere?" she asks, grinning thoughtlessly at my father. His breasts, sagging with his eighty-six years of life, nest like doves beneath his gray knit shirt. He lowers his eyes and looks away from her.
* * *
This is not, of course, my mother. My mother would never have bared this much of herself in front of strangers, and certainly never in front of her son. My mother was quiet, shy, prudent.
And this is, of course, my mother. Nearly naked in front of me and strangers. Proud of her new bra, badgering my father. I know it is my mother, because it is clearly her face, her hands, her dried-out, fungus-ruined feet here before me. But things have changed.
The nondescript, nappy, brown carpet is just as it always has been. The counters are still lined with the detritus of a middle-class life. The cheap fan still chops at the air overhead, and the plastic draining board — with its plastic dish rack — still drips dishwater into the same stainless steel sink. The clock, with its three golden globes, rolls on the ball bearings of the hours, just as it always has. But my mother is mad. And the five of us have gathered here today to evaluate her for custodial care. Custodial care — that sounds as though we might turn her over to the janitors at the university where I work. As though they might know what to do with her since we don't. Repugnant or not, though, we have no more time to twist our tales.
The Meanings of Self
Among other things, I am immunologist. I have spent my life studying the intricate paths by which we protect our selves from this infectious world. Self, nonself, and why the two should never meet. But as a son watching his mother disintegrate, I am cut adrift.
My mother's self, the thing that was her for all these years, the thing I had imagined fixed as flint beneath her bones, has fractured. Shattered like a crystal vase on concrete. It is one thing to watch feathers grow from chicken-skin grafts on self-confused nude mice. It is quite another thing to watch your mother undress herself in front of total strangers.
* * *
Merriam-Webster says self is "the entirety of an individual, the realization or embodiment of an abstraction." The realization or embodiment of an abstraction. I don't know what that means. It seems woefully incomplete and miserably metaphysical. As though only abstractions will do to speak of my mother's disappearance — no matter how concretely and obviously she is disappearing.
Beyond Merriam, Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnett, considering the same issues, chose a laboratory and microscope rather than the caverns of the mind for his explorations. Through the lenses of that microscope, Burnett watched as an ameba devoured and digested another microorganism.
The fact that one is digested, and the other not, demands that in some way or other the living substance of the ameba can distinguish between the chemical structure characteristics of "self" and any sufficiently different chemical structure as "non-self."
Biological self self-evident in the simple battle between devourer and devoured.
And here's Burnett later, in contemplation of an immune response:
The failure of antibody production against autologous [self] cells demands the postulation of an active ability of the retciulo-endothelial cells [immune system] to recognize "self" patterns from "non-self" patterns in organic material taken into their substance.
Biological self, not as concept or thought, not as abstraction, but as the solid fist of antibodies as they take hold of infecting germs but leave the body itself untouched.
In other words, even the most primitive of us don't regularly eat ourselves. And even the most complex among us don't regularly mistake our bodies for infectious enemies and destroy the very thing that sustains us. It is the unique way of our being that our digestive and immune systems ignore us while they chew away at the rest of the organic world.
Something substantial, a thing apparently very different from Webster's self. The fact that, on the surface, these two selves — the abstraction of Merriam-Webster and the rock-solid self of Frank Macfarlane Burnett — seem incommensurate, we probably owe to René Descartes.
Where Micro- and Macroorganisms Separated: The Divided Self
Descartes, a mathematician and philosopher, found himself one day deeply concerned with the reality of things. What could he truly trust? What was rationally and irrefutably real? We all know that we make mistakes at times about what is real — the monster under the bed, the shadow in the closet, mirages, purpose. Most of us just shrug it off, but Descartes was not so easily mollified. He wanted to know for certain. So Descartes eschewed the laboratory (he missed the microscope by about twenty years) and secluded himself in a darkened room at the back of his chateau. There, he set out to discover what was demonstrably real, trustworthy, certain. What he new for sure about the world and his self.
First, Descartes considered the things we learn through our senses — the stuff we see, hear, taste, touch, and smell — the physical world that apparently surrounds us. Is any of this truly real, unquestionably real? No. Almost immediately, Descartes realized our senses regularly fool us. Dreams provide hard evidence of that. While we are in a dream, we become completely absorbed with a false reality. Dreams do not announce to us that they are not "real." And many things in the so-called real world do not announce to us that they are false, things like an obviously flat Earth, optical illusions, and sleights of hand.
The reality we come to know by touch or sight or smell or sound or taste may be as ghostly as our dreams. All of the natural world became questionable. Descartes's vision narrowed.
Since Descartes was the inventor of analytical geometry, he turned to the reality of mathematics — a priori knowledge, knowledge accessible without sensory perception. Because of Descartes's deep investment in mathematics, he thought a priori knowledge to be a thing of stone, beyond reproach, above suspicion. But as he delved deeper, he realized that some "evil genius" might have fooled us all about the reality of mathematics. Evil indeed. Mathematics might be nothing more than an elaborate ruse and have nothing whatsoever to do with "reality" (as many of us suspected even in grade school). In the end, Descartes was forced to abandon mathematics and all a priori knowledge as well as sensory knowledge.
Without the physical world, without mathematics, the only things left to Descartes were his own thoughts. He realized, at the last, that rationally and philosophically he could not question the reality of the questioner. It simply wouldn't make sense. So his questions proved his own existence, even if he could not establish the existence of anything else. Cogito ergo sum.
If Descartes had been a microbiologist or immunologist like Burnett, things might have ended differently. But for the mathematician, the world devolved to one man's thoughts. Descartes rested, then, in the midst of an absolutely solitary universe.
According to him, two types of things existed: the seemingly real but demonstrably untrustworthy things of the physical world (res extensa), and the only truly real things, things of the mind (res cogitans). These were two completely separate kinds of things. The world outside our heads was full of machines and ghosts, including our own bodies. Our thoughts were concrete, real, essential; our bodies and our worlds abstractions. Descartes had scalpeled the self off the body.
The self, he claimed, was something other than the stuff of the physical world that surrounds us. Selves did not come from the same stuff that trees and stones and arms and legs and knuckles and immune systems came from. Selves came from somewhere else. Self-stuff and body-stuff were distinct and immiscible.
But almost 400 years later, as I watch my mother fumble with the tails on her blouse, I recognize a certain absurdity in the perspectives of René Descartes.
The Reality of Biological Self
We finally convince my mother to put her blouse back on and button it. It takes her two tries, but she now has each button in its proper hole. I am embarrassed. My mother seems unabashedly pleased with herself, what remains of it.
She smiles again at me. Sitting, now, quietly while everyone else tries to deal with the shadows she has cast across the room. My father still sits with his eyes lowered, waiting for someone to tell him what to do. I turn to one of the women seated across the room. I look for some sort of forgiveness, some sort of reassurance that my mother's antics haven't ruined all of this for all of us.
"She will do perfectly, I think," Jennifer says.
"Does she wander at night?" Melissa asks.
* * *
Our selves are not something ethereal, something forged from the stuff of a separate reality. Our selves are no different from our livers or our hearts. Our selves are just as susceptible to the effects of breeding and infection and aging as any other part of us.
So, just as there is a biology of reproduction or of respiration, there must be a biology of self. Who we are is not simply a matter of spirit or story or thinking. It is in our genes — those we are born with and those we acquire.
That's important, because genes arose and were preserved over eons to protect us, to provide each of us with some specific edge in the struggle for survival and reproduction. The genes we have come from a very long line of survivors and reproducers. In among those genes is the template for self.
* * *
"She does wander at night," I add, wishing I didn't have to. "Twice, that I know of, Dad found her outside the house in Kanab, Utah, making her way down the road toward town." The first time she wasn't even wearing the bottoms of her pajamas. She was naked from the waist down.
When he stopped her and asked where she was going, she said, "Home. I'm going home." My father, though he tried, could not make her understand that she was home.
"When would you like to move your wife?" Melissa asks my father. I watch to see his response.
The Origins of Infectious Disease and The Reason for Selves
If selves are born inside of genes, then, just as with all things biological, there must be an evolutionary advantage to selves and an evolutionary history of selves.
In the beginning there was RNA (probably) — ribonucleic acid, strange curlicues of chemical bases that snapped together spontaneously in the witches' brew that was the primitive seas. Then there was DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) that twisted itself into long chains and then wrapped itself up in fatty acids. Later, true cells appeared. Life — bacteria, archaea, prokaryotes, protists, eukaryotes. Everything was suddenly possible.
But only if everyone followed three basic rules: (1) eat; (2) don't get eaten; and (3) reproduce as quickly and as often as possible. Three rules alone that would account for all who followed. But at least the first of these rules required a certain insight, a certain pair of interlocking concepts — self and nonself. Nonself is food; self is not.
First-self had walked onto the stage. Pronouns became meaningful. A simple "it" was no longer sufficient to describe everything. "Me" and "you" were necessary now. While sense of self was, perhaps, a long ways off, self was there, that day, swimming in a thin broth of "other."
The next major step up from the muck was bacteria or archaea, or something much like them. These were, after all, living, respiring, and reproducing creatures. But bacteria suffered from one huge drawback — each of them had only one cell to work with. That meant then, and still means today, that most bacterial cells had to do everything, all of the time, all at once. Each cell had to see, hear, touch, taste, and smell. Each cell had to eat and excrete, reproduce and think. Each cell had to make everything that was needed for the survival of the individual. Because of this, bacteria — though remarkable survivors — weren't and aren't much good at anything beyond simple survival — bacterial poetry, for example, is unreadable.
One day, all of this began to change. A few cells got together cemented themselves to one another with some new glue. A protoplasmic hand reached into the void and another hand took hold. The door of opportunity swung wide open. For the first time, individual cells were freed from the slavery of necessity. No longer did anyone have to be everything for everyone. No longer did anyone face everything alone.
Cellular specialization took the world by storm. Some cells stopped eating and became eyes (or something that would one day become eyes), others ears, others nerves, others muscles — there were no limits. Taste buds, antennae, pincers, intestines, hearts, tails, legs, arms, muscles, bones, livers, lungs, hair, nails, claws, blood, hide, and horn were all within reach.
But almost immediately, everyone saw that cellular specialization alone led nowhere. Before the gift of multicellularity could be had, before grandeur, they needed selfishness. The first few of these complex multicellular creatures probably shared everything with everyone. After all, they had no means to distinguish among themselves. All that I have is yours, not because of altruism, but because I cannot tell you from me. Such largesse defeated the whole purpose of cellular specialization. What benefit is there to eyes, if what I see I share with the blind who surround me? Remember, there are rules. I come first. I am not to be eaten by others. I am to eat others. I am to reproduce first. The things I see are for me and for me alone.
But up until now, "I" had meaning only in terms of food, only in terms of the external world. "I" don't eat "I," "I" eat "not-I." "I" eat what is out there, not what is in here. Something more was needed. At a higher level, what or who was I and what or who was not? I could not decide. Before I could reach for the stars, I had to reach within and find some way to know myself from all the others.
Without a sense of self we are less than bacteria.
If I am to keep what I have earned, if I, and I alone, am to benefit from my mutations and absorptions, my specializations, my senses, my motility, then I must know self from not-self. My eyes must be for my self. My thoughts must be my own. My heart must beat only for me. I must keep all that I can to my self at the expense of not-self or I have gained nothing.
Selves leave no fossils. So we cannot know for certain how or when the first colonial (multicellular) organisms came to sense their selves. But biologically, biochemically, basically, they had to know, everything depended on it. And the biology and the chemistry of that knowledge were and are the only things to keep us apart, to prevent us all from slipping back into the singularity of a living ooze known only as it.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Lousy Sex by Gerald N. Callahan. Copyright © 2013 Gerald N. Callahan. Excerpted by permission of University Press of Colorado.
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