Science Love Letters

X and Y image

X and Y text

I realized only recently that X and Y chromosomes were named due to how they look during replication. I’m constantly amazed by my blind spots – by all I’ve ignored or let go unseen.

I use to love putting together karyotypes – maps of the 46 chromosomes in human cells. It was so precise – matching them up, figuring out sex or disorder.

And, of course, X and Y are sex chromosomes, but anatomic traits are such a small part of what they code for. There’s so much in my life that seems to depend on my two Xs, and I wonder how much of me is in my blind spot, my inability to see because I’m looking so steadily at something else.

The X and Y shapes appear during replication when the centromeres (the pinched parts) come together only because the kinetochore spindles pull apart. This is my favorite part of biology: when resistance serves fusion, when separation and connection look very much the same.

I like speaking to audiences.  I know, and the audience does not, we are approaching a cliff.   All through the introduction, the funny story that gets everyone to look up and see me, the X and Y axes of data explained, we move closer and closer to the drop off. The cliff is the moment sterile facts and observations come together to take the form of a story.  It is the free fall of faith. Seeing logic and cause and effect.

Reconstructing anything unseen requires a leap of faith, the braiding together of different  threads of evidence.  We don’t actually ever totally know and once we have formed a story it is hard to let go. 

We’ve believed so much that is no longer true. 

Today we must jump, tomorrow we can look back  with different perspective.

Materials: Micron 01, colored pencils, Pilot silver marker. Image based on Whitaker, Communities and Ecosystems, 1975

Chemical elements have their own taxonomy based on structure and properties: noble gases, alkali metals, halogens, etc. They put themselves in numerical order.

But then there’s QSAR – quantitative structure-activity relationship: the way you can look at a chemical’s structure, its taxonomic place, to predict how it or a similar chemical will behave. It’s the ghost in the machine. Chemicals have identities that are beyond what we can organize, and these identities are seen in reactions, relationships.

I have a recurring dream in which I’m the Hagia Sophia, which has been many things to many people – church, mosque, museum, yet also something else, something itself.

I wanted to draw chemicals as roads, but I kept thinking of cityscape, of how we can love and feel at home in a city – apart from structure, apart from culture – when we feel the “itself” of it, its ghost in the machine.

Materials: Gouache, waxed paper

Tarot Card

This is my first tarot card, a four of planets: wondering about creation and what lays at the outer edges of the universe. I want to design my own deck, a set of cards to lay out the taxonomy of my emotions.

I live too much in the moment, I am continually shocked, I lay awake at night trying to process the confusion.  I am unable to map out cause and effect. Once I can name it, my mind quiets, the dust storm settles, I can examine the situation.  A pebble dropping through water, a sense of clarity.   

My emotions are not so complex, I find myself lost in the same places over and over: sense of abandonment, sense of responsibility for all outcomes, unrelenting standards, not feeling safe.  It is finding the names of those feelings that is complex.

All card decks have four suites, my deck will have: Ocean waves (emotions, moods), mountains (work, struggles, goals), planets (abstract concepts), and spirits (relationships). Can I use metaphors to name the un-namable?

Materials: colored pencil, water color, Pilot sliver marker.

***The image is from a stained glass grave marker in the cemetery in Assisi, Italy. I drew it from memory, if anyone has seen this grave and can send me a photo I would be grateful.

Licking rocks, letting ants crawl across the expanse of our palm, smelling dirt.  The language of science is tactile.  Words come later as something we must be taught.  When I started to read published peer-reviewed articles I could understand the stand alone words, but not the collection of words in sentences. 

Like a foreigner in a new land, I read without comprehending until I passed the invisible boundary. Then like a fiction writer, I channeled this learned voice into my own hand and pen.

To make one word exact can take a whole army of words.

Or, when a speaker is confused and they search for an anchor, grab onto everything as they fall, they throw words behind them like marbles as they run for a dark alley.

Materials: Peer-reviewed scientific articles, glue stick, scissors.

When I was in grad school, I volunteered at a free clinic. I took vitals and helped with insurance and interpreted. I didn’t have to be fluent in Spanish, but I had to be able to circumlocute.

We have so few scripts for difficult things – for being in pain, being depressed or hurt, being undocumented and overworked.

Circumlocution reveals so much. The fewer words you know, the more you give of yourself, the more poetic and vulnerable you become.

Someone told me recently that it’s wrong to love my work, when my field of research – viruses – causes so much suffering. So I circumlocute – describe their shapes, interactions – revealing myself through their language.

Materials: Watercolors

You wrote last week about peeling back the layers of life and compared these to the former Mississippi River paths. I live three blocks from the Mississippi River and often wonder about these former paths. The chains of lakes in the cities around around our city follow ancient river beds. Or, ancient river beds are over printed with glacial melt water tunnels that are now overprinted with lakes. The rivers left fingerprints in our landscape. Those fingerprints grow across the plains in fractals. River water flows faster on the outside of a bend, eroding the bank and making the bends more sinuous. The bends increase until the river snaps back to a straight path. A crescent shaped lake called an oxbow is left as the mark of an ancient meander.

Materials: Water colors, coffee, ink

It used to bother me that I could hold the image of a place in my mind, that the place could exist – perfectly itself – in two places at once.

I’m always looking for signs…in the dark, in silence, when the light changes at the end of the day.

Signs are observed; symptoms are felt.

Antibodies attach more readily to the hemagglutinin stem of a flu virus and to the glycoprotein stalk of an Ebola virus: the crossroads between outer shield and virus membrane. Anatomy is structure but also revelation of vulnerability.

My hair lately has become my mom’s. It takes hours to dry; I lay it on the couch, and it leaves maps of all the connections I used to despise.

I’m homesick always – holding geographies in body and memory to which I can never really return.

Materials: Ink, Sharpie

Images: [top left] Pattern of wet hair on couch (Aug 23, 2014); [top right] Lights on the shore of Lake Superior seen from Duluth’s Bayfront Park; [bottom left] Lights on Saint Paul’s Cathedral Hill and the freeway seen from Cedar Street; [bottom right] Pattern of wet hair on couch (Jan 7, 2016)

Muscle Memory

Muscle Memory

When words fall away and the body takes over. The automatic motion of hands, leg muscles, shoulders pulling mud from the bottom of the lake. An archive like a book with pages stuffed full of fossils instead of text. The smell of dirt or sulfur.  The grit of sand when you lick the sediment or the smooth slide of silt. The way dawn lights the trees from below. A fire rising, but instead of smoke comes the flat blue of day. The way water is tool cold than a relief and then too cold again at dusk.  A peanut butter sandwich eaten with muddy hands. The bell tolls as metal tools and rods strike each other on the wood deck.

Materials: Ink and coffee

A teen at the bus stop, drumming his fingers on his knees. I thought he was nervous, but then, my hands wanted to do what his were doing, and I knew: Beethoven’s 19th piano sonata. I had to ball up my fingers to keep from following along. When I play the piano after time away, I need the score to be there, but I don’t need to look at it. My hands just go. Part of it is repetition stored: where to go and when, force, volume, tendon stretch, extension leap. And I become multiples: 12-year-old Natalie in a dark house with Beethoven’s 17th, or 15-year-old Natalie in an old church with a Chopin Nocturne. It’s all there in the memory of old movement. I keep thinking of those old maps of the Mississippi, the ones that show its former paths. I love that there’s always an underneath to things no matter how many layers you peel up. I love that our bodies give us ways to be libraries of our infinite selves.

Materials: Ink and those Pigma Micron pens that are thin as needles