STORY
The psychologist Karl Duncker performed an experiment on schoolchildren in 1938 in which they were presented with two foods or anyway edible substances: one was white chocolate powder laced with lemon and the other was refined sugar laced with valerian root and dyed brown. Valerian root, so the person who told the story to me says, is bitter and has a medicinal taste; I wouldn’t know; in the moment, I wondered that seemingly all medicines could have such similar tastes as to have this word applied equally well to them all, without any loss in clarity or evocativeness, but then I realized that it’s much more likely that, because taste is connected to memory, it’s probably that the taste of all medicine is so objectionable that our memories do their best to forget what we’ve experienced as soon as possible—everything is functionally the same in oblivion. Duncker and his associates read the children a story about a mouse who, in short, finds white hemlock disgusting but loves maple sugar. The story I heard about this story mentioned few details from the story Duncker told the children—I can remember the mouse climbing a tree and being roughly the same age as the children (the mouse, naturally, was presented anthropomorphically) and almost nothing else about it, even only a few hours after hearing the story. One presumes this is because there are few details to report; although Duncker was an assistant to the founders of Gestalt psychology, I have heard no evidence that he was anything more than an indifferent storyteller, even as his experiment must at least incidentally have demonstrated the relative significance of story to him. In any case and after tasting both foods, almost two-thirds of the children chose the brown sugar laced with valerian as their favorite, despite the medicinal, bitter taste of it, over the white chocolate powder, preferring the food that children in a control group who hadn’t heard the story thought tasted bad over the food that children in the control group who hadn’t heard the story thought tasted delicious. The conclusions that could be drawn were drawn, and then Duncker emigrated to the United States (the experiment had been done in the United Kingdom), where, shortly after, he committed suicide. From what I’ve heard, he’d suffered from depression; it seemed clear, anyway, at the time, why the story had been told.
ANECDOTE
I can say only that I heard the following, which in this case is to say that I haven’t been able to verify the following; the person telling it, an amateur in the field because the field hasn’t yet been sown with professional societies (for which reason there can only be amateurs there, which is to say lovers, all without formal training only, like other lovers and addiction specialists, a tragic or intense experience with the malady), this attendant at the so-called screenless retreat, would have had some obvious interest in its truth or rather in its appearance of verifiability, but I had no context with which I might then vouch for this person’s word (may I be honest? I was playing some mindless game involving letters that occasionally combined into words on my phone when her credentials flashed on screen; I didn’t look up in time and still, afterward, didn’t feel I’d missed anything) that there had been, some years before, a young couple charged with criminal neglect when their daughter starved because the couple had been playing, without breaks lengthy enough to care for their daughter (or was the problem that caring for their daughter would have been all they had time for in those breaks?; there was that advice given to young parents and those on airplanes—put the mask on yourself first, a dead parent is no use to a child, and who can blame anyone for taking the advice of the experts, at least in life if not also in video games?), a video game in which the goal, according to this attendant, was to care for a young girl; it’s neat, as a narrative, in a way that makes one suspicious, I mean, but, as I say, I heard it and can say with confidence that it is what I heard. What I read, later, attempting to verify the story (because, see?, I care about what goes into these things, I don’t only report this stuff to confirm my biases and grudges, no, I try instead to depict a particular world of attention, which amounts to something very slightly different), was that the couple neglected a daughter and a son, both very young, neither one even two years old at the time and so unable to advocate for themselves except through inarticulate cries, apparently also developmentally delayed because of the neglect so that even had they wanted to they wouldn’t have been able to fend for themselves or throw their misery back at the perpetrators if, as seemed not to be the case in this case, the perpetrators bothered to give them any attention; this couple had been playing a game in which I can believe at some point a young girl needed to be cared for, but which I felt certain did not have as its only goal the caring for a young girl, in which, I thought, more than likely, the caring for the young girl played only a small part, one can easily see such a couple being interested in a game in which caring for a young girl plays only a very small part and only with more difficulty see such a couple being so absorbed by a game in which caring for a young girl was the sole or the main goal, and obviously if the purpose of the game had been to care for a young girl, the irony of the situation would be clearer, yes, but then this is the problem with writers of fiction who don’t seem to have considered that the parallels between events never need to be quite so clear, who, in other words, see the market as their audience rather than readers or listeners (how can this not be a pathology?), that it is, for feeling people, enough for the couple to have neglected their children for a video game of any kind, or, more clear-eyed, enough for the couple to have neglected their children for any reason, that the awful point of it all, one this attendant has occluded and the documentary, in making this use of the woman’s anecdote, has occluded, is that the end of the story is horrifying no matter why the parents neglected their children, and the reasons for the neglect are only in fact of any practical concern to those for whom the creation of, dissemination of, or a reliance upon recovery narratives seems like a viable career pathway, and that this situation creates recursion if only one will see it.
CONSTRUCTION
Before looking down again, he moves the mouse so that the AI-powered productivity software will understand that he can after all be made to do as he’s told; his wife has, he then sees, texted him a photo of some object advertised on the internet neither one of them can make sense of; this basic incomprehension is, as both of them understand, the reason she chose to share the photo, but also, in its popular form, this incomprehension is the reason the advertiser chose the object—Boomers and the gullible will have to give up valuable worthless personal data in order to satisfy their curiosity. Before continuing the book he holds in his other hand, he should, he thinks, reread what he just read because he realizes he hasn’t, while reading it, seen to what, if he were forced to put his intuition into words, he might call the far reaches of its implications (what he’s just read is—and this, he fears, is a measure of how degraded his faculties of comprehension and synthesis must be—a summary of someone else’s thought, not, in other words, thoughts original to the author of what he’s just read but thoughts that author has summarized and reproduced), and so he rereads the passage even as he’s conscious his time for reading and thinking is limited; he really should finish bullying the results of the survey into a bar chart those above him in the division won’t have to think about when they see it. He opens the meeting link and turns off his camera and speakers like everyone else in the meeting. He rereads that Glenn Gould preferred the studio recording to live performance because it offered the performer some additional opportunities to present the composer’s ideas (this summary of Gould’s ideas made him think that possibly what was being said was that the recording could make the listener think they were hearing a live performance, which after all, he thought, they were, one that had been recorded, but a live performance that was, in some way doubled or tripled or otherwise amplified, as though, he thought, the listener were listening live to the performance but doing so from several places in the concert hall at once, as though the listener had been multiplied, although he also recognized that the summary itself didn’t make any such claim, only going on to say that Gould thought of the live performance, in turn, as really a rendition of the composer’s sheet music, in other words, Gould, according to this author’s summary, thought of the recording as standing in an identical relation to live performance as live performance did to sheet music, which led him to wonder where Gould, famous for his performances of the works of other composers, could have believed the composer originally derived the ideas then rendered as sheet music, but then mannered or excessively systematic thinking had this effect, he thought, of encouraging and even at times demanding that one continue its chain of relations; thinking systematically begets systematic thinking). One will by now have realized: He was my invention, me being the narrator of this thing you’re reading, you being an invention of this thing since, without it, the you reading it cannot exist, and we say that the thing being read is an invention of its author or we say it is the invention of its reader or we say that it is instead a collaborative process undertaken by author and reader or we say instead we are—those of us who are—fascinated by this unsolvable mystery of the relationship between thought and language, by which one means that effort put toward identifying we and effort put toward identifying one, and, more to the point, effort put toward identifying the author should only reveal how it is, all of it, not empty or mindless only lacking in sensation, some may say consequence (precisely because they are oriented to sensation). Regardless, in it, he responds to the text with a cartoon face, cartoon hands held palm up and open on either side, one of a clearly defined set of responses one may have.
Gabriel Blackwell
Gabriel Blackwell is the author ofCIVILIZATIONand eight other books. He lives in Spokane, WA.