Come to Dixon Place in New York on Saturday, 25 October 2014, 7:30 pm, for a staged reading of the first part of this dialogue. Dixon Place is at 161 Chrystie Street in Manhattan. Show will last 45 minutes and is Free! Click for more info.
Text is by William Eaton, CUNY Grad Center GRAD
From the script
CYNTHIA: I find myself tempted to say that your critique of the airplane is not dissimilar from your critique of experimentation and technology. Once again, the airplane, in promoting homogenization, is getting in the way of our appreciating, or even coming in contact with, “the otherness of the other” as you put it. And similarly, we might say, with middle-class men and women going to the same schools, to the same kinds of jobs, both being involved in child care . . . Of course in many ways this represents great progress — great progress for women, and perhaps also for men. Yet here is another way in which otherness — the exoticness of a female to a male, of a male to a female — may be slipping away from us.
THE PROFESSOR: Very good, my love. You flatter me by making me think my thoughts are better organized than I suppose them to be. And even if I keep coming back to the same themes — “insufficiency and cruelty,” as you put it. But I remain concerned that your men and women and my airplane and this half-cocked French idea of “the otherness of the other” may trivialize what I really want to say about experimentation.
CYNTHIA: Pray tell, what is that?
THE PROFESSOR: Let me put it this way. It is not so much that I believe there is something being lost, something to be regretted, or even something evil or corrupt in pursuing knowledge or information via experimentation on living things — human beings included. It is not that any knowledge or information obtained comes at too high a price. My belief is that none of this has anything to do with knowledge.
CYNTHIA, feeling her intellectual oats: Excuse me, Professor Thorn, and excuse me if I have misunderstood you, but this does not gibe with the impression I have had listening to you. It has in fact sounded to me like you do indeed believe this research is evil or corrupt, and I have heard you are saying this with particular force — with passion. And this is why I think [all your talk about rocks have feelings or about drilling in the] “ancient ice” are in your way. They don’t make you seem like an extremist, a “crackpot”; they make you seem like escapist. You too. They take a strong emotional case and turn it into a dry or esoteric intellectual one. They make me feel that you feel — if I don’t say something extreme, something shocking, nobody’s going to listen, nobody’s going to notice me.
The Professor is looking a little drained.
CYNTHIA: I’m sorry — I — If I —
PROFESSOR THORN, slowly — slowly disappearing into his musings. Should we call this hitting below the belt, Cynthia? No, that makes it sound bad, and it’s not bad. It’s helpful. I’m sure that when I have the time to reflect on it — to reflect on what you’re saying, telling me about myself . . . It’s going to help me, you’re helping me move a few more squares. [His voice is drifting off.] Like a knight in chess perhaps. On a board with just 64 squares.
The idea of love comes to mind. Another thing Thoreau wrote in his Journal: “the barren assumption that is in our science.” Or let’s try this: A person who gives gifts, good gifts, but cannot receive them, does not know how to receive them, does not receive them with “grace” or simply pushes them away. You know there are people, you try to give them a gift — physically hand them something, nicely wrapped — and it ends up back in your hands, you’re taking it home with you. Fascinating. In any case, we might want to say that such a person does not really participate, or participate fully, in gift giving, and that she doesn’t really know what it is. And, as she, or he, is currently constituted, s/he cannot know what gift-giving is.
CYNTHIA: And? I’m afraid, it’s my fault, but you’ve lost me here, Professor. Is this something you are proposing about those who do research on other beings and on the ice, the “ancient ice”? They don’t know what gift-giving is?
PROFESSOR THORN: You know, Cynthia, I don’t know if you share this feeling, but I find there’s something heartening, something deeply engaging about mental tasks, levels of understanding, that I am not quite up to.
CYTHIA: Maybe that’s easier for you to say, Professor. For my part — since I started working at the magazine, and since a third of my colleagues were laid off as the Internet began to take over and people stopped reading anything but twits and chats — “Deeply engaging mental tasks.” I’m sitting here involved in some kind of extended philosophical conversation for the first time in who knows how many years, and I’m thinking I’d better check my phone, I’d better call my mother, get back to the office.
PROFESSOR THORN: I’m sorry to hear that. You know, I don’t know if this helps, but you remind me of a woman I was talking with the other day. She must have been about 40 years old; her son was in a group tennis lesson with my nephew. Two years ago her husband worked in the city, a 20-minute commute from their home. Then, after a long, tense job search, he found a job in the suburbs, about 45 minutes away. Then this company bought another company, and now he’s working in another state. Husband and wife are like ships passing in the night. She works on Saturdays. From Saturday evening at 6 p.m. until Monday morning at 6 a.m. — this is the only time they actually see one another. Though of course they feel the other’s warm body in bed. This is the way Americans, middle-class Americans are living these days. And I have some idea that what really matters is that people somewhere are experimenting on animals, using needles to extract ancient air from ancient ice.
CYNTHIA: You know what? Let’s go back to your beliefs. They’re easier, they’re a nice break from everything else.
PROFESSOR THORN: OK, back we go. But let’s not lose track of a word that I think is lurking here: “loneliness.” The woman, the wife, I sensed, was lonely; her husband lost to the task of earning money. Or, more likely, I sensed my own loneliness in talking with her, in enjoying having this opportunity to just talk about various things while the kids were enjoying themselves playing tennis.
And I think this idea of loneliness relates to my interest in “the other.” Returning to our previous discussion regarding experimentation: If our interest in the other, in learning from “him” or about him, involves our destroying him, reducing his otherness, then what are we really involved in? Even in Thoreau’s Journal, I find stuff that disturbs me. A little flying squirrel he deftly captures and takes home and keeps for some days in a barrel, carefully observing its misery — the life of a hostage, we might now say. Or Thoreau reports climbing up in a tree and finding an owl’s nest, and taking just one of the eggs. What for? What possibly for?
What can it mean to say that in such an activity we are engaged in a pursuit of knowledge? Pursuit — as dogs pursue a fox. We are interested in reducing the other to a servant of our needs. And thus, among other things, we are not in fact perceiving our experimental subjects because we are perceiving them not as they are but as servants. Servants of a curiosity that, among other things, never asks: Why am I curious?
