Science Love Letters

Let me love living things, I think, as I remove a snail – dead – and a beetle – alive and dazed – from my salad and place them outside.

It was Pentecost last week – the end of Christian holy time and the beginning of “ordinary time.” We wore red to symbolize the Spirit’s descent as flame, though it occurs to me, sitting in that crimson church, that fire isn’t red, and I can’t think of what color to call it.

I wanted to be a pathologist until I saw people in pain – pinned like butterflies by biopsy needles, evinced by bags of bright red blood. So much out of place. I never wanted to work with living things again, so I studied viruses and chemicals. And paint, with its blood-implied colors, colors that represent life, not pain: pyrrhic, sanguine.

My resolution for Pentecost was to respect the words for how viruses hurt people, how there are always lives haunting the data. I write out genus and species names, eschew abbreviations, as if this matters, and it does; it forces me to look at the word and what’s behind it. Everyone at the church hopes, just a little, that the ghost who descends will be one of theirs.

Materials: ink, watercolor

My son’s preschool had 3 transgender kids. That seemed like a large ratio of boys in headbands and skirts peeing at the urinal.  The kids didn’t mind changes in names, pronouns, hair length.  I worry for those boys though that the price of acceptance is certainty. 

Could a girl be a boy then girl again?   

Out of college I lived in DC and met a group of girls who performed as Kings – dressed as extreme masculine men while singing and dancing on stage.  Some of the Kings were raising money to have top surgery – one minute we were singing and laughing, the next women were chopping off body parts.  I felt abandoned in womenhood.

I feel gut reaction support for the transgender movement, but at the same time I dont believe in gender.  Or certainty.

I am a high femme women trapped in a low to medium femme life. I would like to sing in silky slips on top of pianos.  I would like to wear flowing gowns.  I would like to match my underwear  and bra.  I get as far as wearing colors, lots of color, my kids too, we are a mismatch of orange, red, yellow, blue, green.

Medium: ink

Reference: Excerpt from a song in the front yard, Gwendolyn Brooks

I’ve started this new project – mapping damage done to my soles walking the hills of Saint Paul – as part of an art and text library of winter sounds. I have a heavy, unbalanced, trampling tread; I walk fast and leggy; I don’t experience the world in a way compliant with how other people think experience should happen (headphones, taking photos with my phone, fast and leggy and strong – these are things I like). I absorb through movement, let it settle later, sift through patterns, things that won’t stay quiet.

The cell’s interactome – where everything comes together to communicate – depends on shared heritage, what genes we’ve all accumulated, how we or others gain or resist access. The interactome depends on topology, those characteristics of a system that bend so as not to break, stretch to not tear. But sometimes they break or tear. Most interactome networks have been mapped in the context of cancer-causing viruses – human papilloma, Epstein-Barr. They’re known because they’re disturbed significantly enough to cause harmful genetic changes. To gain entrance to the network, some viruses bring a protein translator; others speak nucleic acid fluently and translate themselves.

When I walk, I notice clusters, patterns, networks. Fallen lilacs, ice floes, salt stains. I think of interactomes, resistomes, microbiomes, blind spots – how all that work is occurring right before and inside us and we can’t grasp it.

We know everything’s connected, but we don’t know how or why. We’re gathering signs in the dark. I feel devoted to the signs and the darkness, an urge to absorb more, look closely, build my library of sounds and maps, feel the hint of knowledge at my sole.

Medium: watercolor, ink

The ocean levitates 270,000 tons of plastic.  To conceptualize mass I translate to animal – this is equivalent to 45,000 bobbing elephants. 

Each day Americans throw out 88,000 tons of plastic that begin an endless journey.  Plastic rambles. It goes on the road.  It won’t rot and it won’t go back into the soil like bones or cloth or wood. 

The ocean accepts this eerily translucent material, it accepts spills and shipwrecks, loads of shoes, shirts, toys, chemicals even.

I did fieldwork at Lake Bosumtwi in Ghana, it was 2004. I stayed along the coast traveling back to the capital to fly out.  The sound of singing carried across the water, up the cliff, in my window, to me. In the morning I followed the sound to the beach below. It was a road with women balancing loads of firewood and baskets on their head.  I walked along the sand and jagged rock, looked at the broken bits of shell and cloth – soggy blue, red, orange, green wads of cloth.  The waves heaved with color.  I came to a village with round clay smoking ovens 5-feet tall and 30-foot fishing canoes pulled up under the palms.

During our fieldwork we generated a lot of trash.  The lake villagers organized a wait list to receive our empty plastic containers. A way to carry water. Something that would be used over and over. Why didn’t the ocean village want the clothing washed up?  Were they already saturated?

Medium: Water color and pens

More information:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/01/150109-oceans-plastic-sea-trash-science-marine-debris/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9znvqIkIM-A

https://earthandsolarsystem.wordpress.com/2014/11/14/impact-craters-on-earth-bosumtwi-in-ghana/

With a geographic map I can follow footsteps.  I want to walk where saints and pilgrims walked, to be in such sacred spaces.  With a geologic map I can trace the history of place.  Limestone sticks out like fists in the air resistant to erosion. The marls, unbaked clay, taken by wind and water leave low lands to walk through.

All the mountains around Assisi are ancient sea beds.  This is where I decided to be a geologist.  In the land of St. Francis.  I fell in love with the pink and white stones of the basilica, the city walls, the mountains.  It was July 1997.  Two months after I returned home earthquakes crumbled rock and ceilings fell in. I came back the next fall to scaffolding. I was just out of high school.  On a search for beauty. 

It meant something to me. Why mountains? Why pink and white? Why such violence in the land?

The pink and white tell the story of ocean waters with oxygen or without.  Oxygen rusting tiny bits of iron or not.  The iron reads like a bar code, carrying signals of Earth’s magnetic field reversing back and forth through time.  A code linking rocks across the world to each other in time. 

Medium: Sharpie, pens, colored pencils.

Reference to Walter Alvarez’s The Mountains of Saint Francis

I saw Cuban choreographer Osnel Delgado talk about his baseball-inspired dances last year. He likes the metaphor of baseball: the one who returns home the most times is the winner.

When I thought about what I could map – objects and between-spaces that mean something to me – I couldn’t relinquish the idea of escape routes. I’m always aware in any place of how to get away. Always, I have a desire to escape that draws its own mental maps of away.

I mapped escape routes – real and fantastical – lying in bed as a child, and later, I learned to escape toward. I had a horrible Salmonella infection when I was 14, and I escaped the pain by learning about the inner life of things – DNA, bacteria, cytoplasm – and realized that by looking intently at anything, I could draw infinite maps to escape toward what I loved.

When I was a child, my dad pulled off the road once to show me the crawdads in the river – a new, amazing thing! Later, in a science class, boys tortured a crawdad adhered to a dish for study, its escape movements – contraction of specialized, segmented shell – forestalled, and I knew I wanted to save everything, let my study and gaze draw it a map toward its own wonder.

Materials: India ink; the left half of the card maps my childhood escape routes, and the symbology is only for me:)

In her 1912 history of Jacobean embroidery, Ada Wentworth Fitzwilliam reveals that needlework is violent, intimate, and transformative; it changes a surface by repeatedly puncturing it. “O, redeem the monotony of plain surfaces,” she writes. The needle is outside and inside, on the other side, crossing, creating and destroying at once.

Sterility implies “about to enter:” bloodstream, flesh. Edge of external and protected environments, contamination the risk when they meet.

Sterile doesn’t mean clean; it means killed. I think we are always walking this line between wanting connection and wanting to be entirely alone. I fight this troubling and wonderful sense constantly – that every being is just as real as I am, that I could be hurt or made unlike myself now at any moment. It makes me want to love everything harder and not at all, protect and destroy at once.

I’ve been reading and writing about fecal transplants lately; what we dismiss as waste is wondrous bacterial ecology with princess names: Roseburia, Akkermansia, Alistipes. Like all ecologies, it can swing our beings toward paradise or catastrophe. We’re biomes inside biomes inside biomes, always and never ourselves.

Medium: needle, thread, watercolor. The image is my attempt at fecal bacteria, which, despite their lovely names, all look much the same.

 

I was Alice chasing a line of inquiry down a rabbit hole, passionate and not paying attention to my surroundings.  I went from wading knee deep in mud to sterilized glass ware and rooms with emergency eye wash stations.  I took on Julia Child recipes to extract chemical fossils from dirt with carcinogenic chemicals.  I wore white coats and tied our hair back in the lab.  This was to protect ourselves, but mainly it was to protect the samples from me.  Natural oils from my hair, sunblock, lotion, sweater fuzz, crumbs, anything alive or once live could contaminate the samples. 

It was a no glove laboratory, a swearing laboratory, an angry lab, and a sad lab. The defiance of basic safety protocol came from the top, the principal investigator only used the lab to make her tea – just across from where we dripped organic solvents with pipettes.

I succeeded at my Alice adventure.  I read profiles of plant communities from glass vials, these recorded key moments in horse evolution and the development of ice sheets.  I hid my clean glassware in a secret stash in the back of a filing cabinet and no one ever sniffed it out. I wore gloves and swore at anyone who told me I shouldn’t. I even made friends. 

But I missed working with dirt and plants that I could touch and put in my mouth to identify by taste.  In the lab I could taste solvents when the fume hood was up too high, they were bitter and went down like a serpent sinking into my throat.

I just heard about a colleague from the lab, he has the bad kind of cancer, the kind that spreads through your body before you find out. He wasnt the swearing kind of scientist, or the crying kind, or even angry.  But he didnt wear gloves. 

Materials: Lab protocols and notes, water colors, sharpie.   

A year or so ago, videos showing people touching harvestmen aggregations (like balls of fluff, all those long legs twined) and then screaming as the harvestmen revealed their multitudes and dispersed became popular – as if to say: look at the horrors, disguised and waiting, the world holds.

Harvestmen are neither horrific nor spiders. They cluster to ward off the cold, and some studies have suggested they group for comfort. Every time evolution’s come knocking in the last several million years, they’ve politely declined. The males are the only arachnid to have a penis; it resembles a scythe.

Why do we hold scared things in contempt, seek to destroy what runs away or bears an ancient body? The more I drew the harvestmen’s legs, the more I saw patterns, felt the sensual softness of their barely-there forms. Harvestmen move via leggy pacemakers; I move to kill any distaste that threatens to harm.

Dusk, and the birds move together.  Against a darkening sky they collapse into black paper cut outs.  If music is the silence between the notes, these flecks of negative space make the vast sky.  They dive over the train station in Rome, come together and circle round as if responding to a square dance caller.  Any member can initiate the movement and it propagates through the flock like a wave.  A mathematician in the piazza scribbles differential equations in his notebook desperate to describe how the individual relates to the flock.   A poet watches 10,000 flapping pairs of wing and repeats “…they roll / like a drunken fingerprint across the sky…”

We took a word to describe highly social animals, animals that almost share a soul their level of cooperation is so striking, and we applied it to our own personalities.  For animals, gregarious is many acting as one.  For us it is one acting with abandon.

I am multitudes, but my flock is never in sync. I have no grace or coordination.  My ideas and passions dont vary in relation to the others.  Each is a panting, jumping, wild beast to which I dont have time to give myself over.

With all our three dimensional models and computer simulations, we still cannot fully explain flock coordination.  Do we ask the question because we think the answer will tell us how to coordinate our own disparate selves?

Materials: Water color, sharpie, mascara

References:

• An Event, Richard Wilbur poem
• Starling Flock Networks Manage Uncertainty in Consensus at Low Cost, Young, G.F.; Scardovi, L.; Cavagna, A; Giardina, I.; Leonard, N.E.  2013 Computational Biology.
• Claude Debussy, “Music is the silence between the notes.”
• Flocks and Formations, Veerman, J.J.P; Lafferriere, G; Caughman, J.S.; Williams, A. 2005 Journal of Statistical Physics.

Look on either side of something, and you’ll see the gods hiding, expectant. We call the heart a pump because knowledge about it grew during the Industrial Revolution when we were looking at hydraulics, placing all that newness alongside each other and saying “this is like that.” Before that, the heart was simple storage, and, before that, a mysterious whisper against your eardrum at night. But what if “pump” is only one of the heart’s many identities – lost to us, in shadow because our faith grew too great.

In the beginning, there were gods, and with the gods came ways to form, dissolve, and push away, ways to make more, ways to take apart and become different. Then alchemy: means to an end, means a desperate unearthing, a trying, a pulling the elements transparent. Golden end impossible. But something of the gods in the trying. Something of God in the pulling. Then, when too much was known, pieces of world taking their place in the table, chemistry was born.

Materials: Ink, sharpie

The image is of thorium and vanadium, named after the Norse gods of thunder and beauty. And Jormungand, the snake who circles the world and helps to bring about its end by consuming Thor.

 

Francis a Saint, me an atheist, but I think we share the same god. We both find god in the outdoors. While St. Francis needed to hear a voice and see a face, my beliefs are disaggregate.  To draw my god would be to collect every slant of light and bit of joy and moments of peace and pheromone of harmony.

Saint Francis found god again and again walking barefoot preaching joy.  God came to him in nature.  He felt a presence press up against him and hold him tight when he lay ill on a mountain ledge, he heard voices speak to him while fasting and praying on islands and in caves.

I too go to the outdoors to find god. I studied science to be in the wild.  It was a way to live on mountain tops, to swim in lava damed lakes, to walk through landslide slopes velvet with ferns, to explore the eerie blue of glacial crevasses.  With science I saw each of my sons growing inside me, their skin transparent plastic bags over alien skeletons. I saw plankton through microscopes and counted their alkenones with gas chromatography. Each day I watch my heart pump on a smart phone, the rate changing in reaction to how I feel or breath or move.

I have seen what Saint Francis could never see and I don’t need a concrete god.  But I do need the heart spaces, places where the boundaries of our skin and species dissolve.  A lake, a forest, even a cave where a saint once fasted for forty days.

Materials: Ink

I’ve been reading Álvaro Enrigue’s Sudden Death, in which he talks about how names (given and taken) allow people and things to have different identities depending on context, how what might seem to be a sneering diminutive could have been hard-won.

Bacteria and fungi communicate through quorum-sensing: release of molecules that say when to make a biofilm, when to change shape, how to move forward. Sometimes, identity is all context and communication.

Candida albicans can change from yeast blastopore to fungal filament, can be called pathogen only because it found opportunity. Context provides opportunity – moisture, biofilm slime, the privilege doled out by immunity in different organs at different times.

When cultured, Candida will cluster, and the motile forms will journey out alone. In various contexts, Candida is creature, commensal half of a relationship, pathogen, mucosa-homed and agar-homed, and an ecology both unto and outside of itself.

Materials: watercolor

I went from academics to the U.S. Senate.  It was like landing on Jupiter. I didnt understand the dress code or that all meetings were cut off at thirty minutes.  I surmised that anything you would wear to a prom or funeral was appropriate.  The men and women were all beautiful and spoke slowly, held ideas for the right moment.  I was all emotion and saving the world. Words tumbled out of my mouth as I mashed together facts, ideas, and anecdotes.

The first time I met the Senator -I’ll call him Skipper- he asked what my PhD was in. 

“Lakes, I study lakes.”

He looked at me with the concentration of a lawyer at work, “Write me a memo on that.” 

Talking with him was the opposite of interacting with a puppy, though when he was with a puppy he would fall to his knees kissing and whispering to the hound.

The three rules of memo writing are brevity, political context, and a clear ask. 

My lake memo was about how lakes form from glaciers or tectonics and evolve with the climate.  It was totally out of context of Senate business. I thought the juxtaposition was poetic. I convinced my boss to stick it in Skipper’s binder of memos for the night – a binder as thick as three encyclopedia volumes.  I’m sure it didn’t go in, but I like to picture that between reading about unfunded research for diseases killing his constituents and the future of nuclear power, he had a moment of meditation – a moment to consider that the landscape has a story and you can read it in the mud.

Materials: Water colors and pen

Foraminifera are tiny ocean creatures, a cross between a plant and a seashell.  Graceful as the architecture of basilicas, they form calcium twists, twirls, swirls, spirals visible under a microscope. 

These creatures live in the water, die, and fall to the sea floor where they collect in thick layers.  Over time this becomes limestone, if the ocean floor is subducted the limestone becomes marble.  The sculpture of the David is an ooze of heated metamorphosed foraminifera. 

This process is a pump over geologic time, pumping carbon from the atmosphere into the ocean into forams into the mud that turns to rock.  Rock that pushes up into mountains to crumble under the forces of wind and water.  This cycle regulates the Earth’s climate. 

Ocean acidification is dissolving these creatures – too much CO2 in the atmosphere, now ocean, now preventing the burial and pumping of carbon into the earth.

The dissolution of so many acts of grace.

Materials: water colors, salt, gravity.

I’m fascinated by religious tracts, and I seem to collect a lot of them. I like the bold colors, the supernatural and often inexplicable elements, and how they tell stories. It makes me want to design tracts for scientists to they too can share the good news.

Here’s what I’d share – one of my favorite stories: During WWII, German scientists James Franck and Max von Laue fled to Denmark, along with their Nobel medals. It was illegal to take gold out of Germany, and, when Nazi soldiers came looking for it, George de Hevesy had dissolved the gold in aqua regia. The Nazis looked everywhere, ignoring the vial of dark liquid on the shelf. After the war, de Hevesy precipitated the gold from the acid, sent it to Stockholm, and the Nobel Foundation made new medals for Franck and von Laue.

I love this story of dissolution, of how dissolved only means gone if you don’t know where to look.

Materials: watercolor

I didn’t want to be a scientist anymore.  I knew the languages of plants and dirt and rivers and time.  But I didn’t know anything yet about NGOs, corporations, COB, project charters, win-win ideas, stakeholders, shareholders, pushing things up the food chain, circling the wagons, or soup to nuts.

How do you become something you are not? How do you stop being a scientist?  Like the red panda that escaped from the DC zoo I had no framework to understand the world outside my limited confines.

I started doing informational interviews.  Before meetings I practiced 60 second who-I-am statements with a stop watch in a bathroom stall or a parked car. I met people at coffee shops, museum entrances, bars, conference rooms, walking through downtowns, at italian restaurants, and over the phone.  In each interview I took a slice of myself and made it my whole self, a certain and clear version of the million possibilities of me.  I tried each out to see if I liked it. And I listened to the people, I looked for clues of their daily life, I picked up words, I started to recognize their languages.

It was a breakup with science, but the good thing about breakups is they are iterative and rarely clean.  It took a while to realize the simple fact that being a scientist is part of the human condition – to study the world, to use our senses, to wonder.  I’m just no longer an academic scientist.

I get a visual migraine – an aura, or scintillating scotoma – with no headache about every two years. They’re distinguished from malicious causes of vision change, like retinal problems or stroke, because vision has been added rather than lost. Aura is strikingly beautiful and scary – both unreal and inescapable.

It’s caused by an electrically depolarizing wave in the occipital lobe; all neuron activity goes silent and dark. It means the cells’ current in that area has changed, flickered into reverse. The sparkling waves of aura happen when the occipital lobe’s visual center flickers against the vanguard of the oncoming wave.

Mine, like many, display Widmanstätten patterns of interlacing, crystalline lamellae found in meteorites. In meteorites, the patterns are caused by steady cooling and etching over millions of years. In me, they’re caused by a sudden tide bearing silence. Unlike those found in metal cores, mine dissipate, but we both hold a bit of the world’s shifting glimmer and shine.

I always forget that “complex” means several things joined to make a new thing – in this case, a real and an imaginary number. And I always wonder, with so much to gain from using imaginary numbers (negative square roots!) – what is lost?

I like how imaginary numbers are bounded – how they iterate and bounce back and forth, creating their own patterns in the oscillation. How they can’t escape and tend toward infinity, how they have to keep playing cat’s cradle in the space between.

I see chain-link fences all the time, and often, I see my city through a fence protecting a beautiful area from being enjoyed by everyone. I like watching what happens around fences: vines take their climbing advantage, bits of garbage become caught and flutter like messages exchanged between worlds. Chain link is ugly until you see the tapestry it creates as it moves together and apart, over and over.

Materials: ink, gouache

I heard the ghost before I saw it – floor boards creaking under a weightless body.

Mathematics in biology and engineering combine imaginary and real numbers.  These complex numbers contain the ordinary and real but also an extension into the imaginary.  There are practical problems that cannot be solved with real numbers alone.

The ghost sat on the edge of my bed, the wood burning stove was still filling the small bunk house with heat. The ghost put one hand on my shoulder and leaned over.  I bolted up and ruined the whole thing. This was a rare night away from my young sons needing help untangling from their covers. Did she want something?  Or was she checking on me, the way she leaned down, the gentleness of it, the light touch on my shoulder, making sure I was really there.

I am working on a book. It uses both short fiction and short short nonfiction to tell a story about Italy.  I need to extend from the real into the imaginary to tell the story right.

Materials: Ruler and colored pencils. The art is based off Judy Chicago’s Optical Shapes #4, 1969. Though still living, I highly suspect Chicago is connected to the ghost. 

Field note: The ghost encounter was in Brimson, MN, a rural area homesteaded by Finnish immigrants at the turn of the century, now a community of aging back-to-the-land hippies.