Some years ago, I taught in Pacific University’s low-residency MFA program, which meant that I attended two ten-day residencies in hotels in Oregon, one in January and one in June, and corresponded by mail with my students the rest of the time. We used USPS priority mail envelopes rather than electronic correspondence because a great deal of editing goes on between the time you think you’ve finished a story and the time you print it out, read it one more time, put it in an envelope and take it to the Post Office.
Manuscripts arrived in the mail with edits all over them. Envelopes had been pried open and taped back together. The scribbled edits on the manuscripts were solid evidence of new writing skills.
“Even when a story of yours is published,” I told my students, “you’ll see things you could have made better. But once it’s in a book or magazine, and you’ve spent the meager check your editor sent you, you need to turn your attention to whatever’s next.”
Whatever’s next is scary because it’s not written yet. Enormous acts of imagination combined with yet-to-be-achieved technical excellence lie just on the other side of the blank screen.
I told my students to write a story as quickly as possible and spend four times as much time making it better.
“The lasting joy of creation comes when a sentence or paragraph looks stupid and you suddenly see how it and you can become so much smarter,” I said. “But don’t get stuck there. Some authors get stuck in a story and never come out, except with a postmortem diagnosis of OCD.”
Thinking your story is done. Thinking your story will never be done. The Scylla and Charybdis of writing.
Of life, for that matter.
At the MFA residencies I conducted workshops, gave readings, and spent a lot of time talking with the other writers on the faculty. One of them was a blind playwright who had gotten trapped in his story. What made him unique, at least in our faculty, was that his story had a happy ending.
He told that story one day after classes were over. A group of us had gathered in the hotel bar, and he was holding forth to students about the bright future that was ahead for him and for them. He was a disciple of Ray Kurzweil, the genius engineer who developed a number of computer technologies that helped blind people read and write.
Kurzweil predicted (still does) the advent of a technological Singularity, the moment when intelligent machines begin to design ever-smarter versions of themselves and quickly usher in a golden age for humanity.
My blind colleague was confident that technology would restore his sight, and that he would, somewhere between 2030 and 2040, undergo medical procedures that would make him immortal. “Nobody in this room will ever need to die,” he said.
Ray Kurzweil’s own faith in the future was so strong that he had arranged to be flash-frozen at death and thawed out once technology had advanced enough to fix him. If necessary, his memories and personality could be transferred into brand-new hardware.
You don’t tell a colleague, especially a blind one, that he’s full of shit, or that there are problems with downloading your identity into computer memory. It’s a little like teleportation: does the you that’s teleported make it to your destination, or does the machine simply print a copy of you at your destination? What if the copy of you that’s in your brain isn’t gone once you’re downloaded? Are there two of you?
I didn’t bring these questions up. Kurzweil had already disposed of them by saying it doesn’t matter where identity resides, as long as it exists, thinks, walks, and talks, preferably in an eternal solid-state device.
The important thing is not you but you-ness. Small comfort, I thought, as they’re lowering your worn-out body into liquid nitrogen.
“Sounds like heaven,” I said.
“It is,” said the blind man. “Everything will be possible.”
“That’s not what I meant,” I said. “It sounds like heaven in the Bible. It sounds like a soul independent of the material world. It sounds like Kurzweil’s peddling religion, not science.”
The blind man shook his head. “If you don’t believe in it, you won’t get there. We’ll grant you that.”
I’m not sure what the students took away from this exchange, but I began to wonder how much of what we consider the world is an artifact of faith.
My world, for example, rested on the belief that people can use their imaginative powers to produce drafts of stories that, in successive drafts, become increasingly real. Like the Velveteen Rabbit, they are loved into existence (although often enough, when people are learning to write, stories are hated into existence).
Every story my students wrote made my own story as a writing teacher stronger, but if any one of them became famous, I risked becoming a character—the wise old mentor—in their stories of becoming a writer. If they were good and famous enough, I’d never escape being a wise old mentor. Although there’s nothing shameful about being wise, and old, and a mentor, I’m not sure that’s the way I want my story to end.
I don’t want my story to end at all, truth be known. I have that in common with Ray Kurzweil and his blind disciple, although I’m convinced there will be no Singularity, and that artificial intelligence won’t become exponentially more able to design higher intelligence into its successor machines, and that nothing and nobody will preserve industrial civilization from energy and resource depletion, climate change, and exponential increases in population.
If you’re in a cryogenic tank, your possibility of resurrection will last until the electrical grid goes down, in which case the New Testament is going to be preferable to any story Ray Kurzweil has dreamed up.
My blind colleague is, as far as I know, still blind. Kurzweil has yet to be frozen because he’s still alive, intermittently fasting and, when he’s not, eating handfuls of vitamins and supplements. He’s trying to live long enough to live forever.
In “Too Young to Feel so Old,” a mental health piece in the February 10, 2022 New York Times, Steven Kurutz writes, “I was 43 when the pandemic began. I am now 60.” He goes on to note that the pandemic has robbed him of his youth, and he lists a bunch of age-related debilities he’s now facing. Four hundred and eighteen comments later, a bunch of sixty- and seventy- and eighty-somethings have accused him of ageism, of confusing depression with old age, and of being a whippersnapper who knows diddly-squat about how it feels to be sixty.
But the thrust of Kurutz’s essay is that two years of the pandemic have taken more than two years off our lives, and it’s hard to argue with that. Our lives may be the moral equivalent of floating around in a vat of liquid air at sixty-five degrees Kelvin, waiting to be revived by superior intelligences (who might go bowling instead). But in the physical world, the slow, repetitive passage of pandemic-dampened days has kept many of us in the red zone of the stress scale. Stay there long enough and we face exhaustion and premature death.
Given their comments, few of Kurutz’s critics are planning on shorter lives. Eighty-eight-year-olds describe their exercise routines and diets, and say they are too old to feel so young. Lots of people recommend antidepressants, quitting alcohol, helping others, finding new uses for old skills. A few people warned against forgetting the million-plus Americans whose lives have been shortened for good by Covid, overdose, lack of medical care, car accidents, and suicide, and noted that there’s a big difference between shortened and shortened for good. But mostly, people were angry at Steven Kurutz for bringing up the idea of shortened lives in the first place.
It’s hard, if you’re conscious, to conceive of your consciousness ending. It’s only when death gets close that we feel inclined to do anything about it, and usually what we do is deny that it will ever happen. Hence our sudden embrace of Singularities, Messiahs, detailed descriptions of the afterlife, people who say that vaccines will kill you but viruses won’t, people who say everything would be fine if not for Donald Trump or Anthony Fauci. When denial stops working (and it does), we project ourselves into the future by having children, promoting tribalism, endowing foundations or academic chairs, reaffirming privilege, reaffirming liberation theology, building pyramids, and threatening to haunt family members who won’t complete our projects for us.
Give the pharaohs credit for knowing that they needed to finish their tombs while they were still alive.
The pandemic has pushed death a little closer to all of us, and it has become harder and harder to push back. Getting vaccinated was a huge relief. Finding out that we all needed boosters was an unwelcome reminder that the virus was still there. The idea that we might need a booster every four months was a memento mori.
Add children who refuse to have children of their own, a dying democracy, a loss of faith in the medical industry, the replacement of political ideals with power for its own sake, and the inability of anyone to say if things will ever be normal again, and you have the mass failure of what the sociologist Ernest Becker has called immortality projects. Becker goes on to say that when your immortality project fails, you lose the capacity for rational thought.
I wonder if Ray Kurzweil is feeling older or younger than his age right now. He’s seventy-four. The Singularity isn’t in sight, and if I was him, I’d be getting ready for the freezer. That said, he’s got an immortality project that hasn’t failed yet, and he’s got more than one blind disciple. Kurzweil is probably like a lot of other religious leaders, who have their Gethsemane moments but who keep the faith so as not to destroy the faith of their followers.
My own immortality project—trying to become conscious before I die—has its Gethsemane moments, but it also contains the hope that consciousness, once it does exist, persists eternally.
Quantum physicists have identified consciousness as one of the essential ingredients of our universe, but they can’t articulate what it is. I find hope in their lack of understanding, and more hope in the universe being made of atoms, and the atoms being made of protons, neutrons, and electrons, which are in turn made of quarks, and so on ad infinitum, as the poet says. Everything that exists is constantly flickering in and out of existence, say the quantum guys, and they include us in that dictum, which implies that reincarnation is a semisolid fact, at least in the microcosm, which is mostly where we live during these pandemic days.
Beyond that, my cosmology gets a little foggy. I study the supplement ads in Costco Connection, and now and then order a bottle of CoQ10 or turmeric. If Steven Kurutz puts another dark mid-life depression article in The New York Times, I’ll read it, if only so I can remember what it was like to be forty-three, before age conquers ageism. I’ll keep writing this journal for a while longer, but I don’t for a moment think that my words will make me immortal. I’ve lived ten years longer than Hemingway, as things stand now.
If I were teaching writing now, I’d tell my students that literary immortality is a poor substitute for the real thing, and that consciousness has the power to banish death, at least in the moment.
Nobody knows for certain what a moment is anyway. Moments may last forever, and you with them, as long as you can keep aware and moving, dancing through the narrow passage that lies between the end of your story and its beginning.