Firefly: Mind Control #2: River at The Academy

These are stills from the Josh Whedon film Serenity. They go with the previous post on Firefly and Mind Control.

Firefly, Mind Control, Eugenics

One of the obvious moves in cyborg literature is from prosthetics (arms, legs, exoskeletons, eyes) to technologies that interface directly with the mind. I am thinking of the Gibson Neuromancer trilogy, with its jacked-in hackers, but there are tons of examples. And in keeping with the theme of augmentation and amputation, there is something lost or in the shadows regarding mind/machine links.

Firefly caught my eye partly because one of the characters, River Tam, is a disturbed character (erratic, schizophrenic, exhibiting signs of mental illness and/or instability) who has been the subject of horrifying brain experiments at a supposed school for the high achieving called The Academy. As the FireflyWiki explains,

The Academy was actually a scientific installation (likely funded by the Blue Suncorporation)... Blue Sun still considers River their property, and they will stop at nothing to get River back. Unfortunately, exactly what River is now remains uncertain. River's brain was operated on countless times while The Academy had her in its clutches, and she was treated for all intents and purposes like a laboratory animal. Simon was able to perform diagnostic tests and now knows for certain that, among other things, they cut into her brain multiple times. They even stripped her amygdala, which is a part of the brain used to control emotional responses and 'filter' incoming information. As he describes it: "She feels everything; she can't not.

In my dissertation, I discuss the 1950s technologies of lobotomy and shock treatment, as shadow narratives of cybernetics. A frightening amount of brain "research" (in particular, the funded work of Jose Delgado and others of his ilk) crossed over into searches for mind control and even torture. Wikipedia accurately describes Delgado's work thus:

Much of Delgado's work was with an invention he called a stimoceiver, a radio which joined a stimulator of brain waves with a receiver which monitored E.E.G. waves and sent them back on separate radio channels. This allowed the subject of the experiment full freedom of movement while allowing the experimenter to control the experiment. The stimoceiver could be used to stimulate emotions and control behavior. According to Delgado, "Radio Stimulation of different points in the amygdala and hippocampus in the four patients produced a variety of effects, including pleasant sensations, elation, deep, thoughtful concentration, odd feelings, super relaxation, colored visions, and other responses." Delgado stated that "brain transmitters can remain in a person's head for life. The energy to activate the brain transmitter is transmitted by way of radio frequencies." (Source: Cannon; Delgado, J.M.R., "Intracerebral Radio Stimulation and recording in Completely Free Patients," in Schwitzgebel and Schwitzgebel (eds.))

Firefly does a remarkable job of showing the terrible effects of what was done to River, and also of parsing out in bits and pieces the story of how and why these things were done. One sequence shows her in a dream sequence at The Academy, filmed through a gauzy soft filter; the lovely teacher walks up to her and puts her finger on River's forehead, and suddenly the scene shifts to a researcher pushing a needle into the forehead of a screaming River as we see her trussed up like a monkey in some hideous experiment.

In Firefly there is a connection between the organic brilliant mind (in the show River's brother is a brilliant doctor, top 3% of his class; but River is shown to be the genius, early on the smarter) and a "science" that is interested in a variety of ways to control and manipulate actual minds, especially ones already "super" human. She is driven mad by their efforts (much as some subjects in the 50s and 60s were made much worse by lobotomies, shock treatment, and even Nazi-like experiments), turned into a machine/killer (a la The Manchurian Candidate), and apparently also deprived of her ability to filter things (and so both a "reader" of others' minds, and someone unable to block out the thoughts/emotions of others, including the dead). I think Whedon is trying to say that all powerful governments, like the Alliance in the show, want to control minds, and will be prone to finding ways to do so (modern torture techniques derive in part from work on brains and minds done in the 60s by doctors working for the CIA). And he is saying that it is not impossible that the brain can't be augmented (River "knows" things she shouldn't know, like martial arts and how to read thoughts; her journey is a lot like Jason Bourne's journey in The Bourne Identity, with similar questions: how do I know this?) but that societies that practice Alliance type control (including control over how the history of the rebellion is taught to children) will enact sciences of the mind that bear out their priorities. The show has a definite critique of eugenics Nazi-style, and implies that this kind of control can shift from the individual (performed on River) to entire societies (the horror revealed in the move follow up Serenity about the planet Miranda and the social experiments there gone genocidally wrong).

Of this kind of dilemma, Whedon has said, "nothing will change in the future: technology will advance, but we will still have the same political, moral, and ethical problems as today."

Mundane Cyborg: more on phantom ring, or “who put the Oh! in Neuroplasticity?

Mundane Cyborg: more on phantom ring, or “who put the Oh! in Neuroplasticity?

Today I was listening to NPR’s radio show Fresh Air, when V.S. Ramachandran's Tales Of The 'Tell-Tale Brain” came on. I’d heard Dr. Ramachandran interviewed before; he is a neurologist at the University of California, San Diego. He was talking about his new book, The Tell-Tale Brain, which cites case studies that
“illustrate how people see, speak, conceive beauty and perceive themselves and their bodies in 3-D space.” The interviewer wanted specifically to know about something I’ve grown quite interested in: the issue of “"phantom limb" and what it reveals about both the mind, and (potentially) about how our minds may react to prosthetics that are not originally limbs but which may begin to act that way.

The interview (which can be found at http://www.npr.org/2011/02/14/133026897/v-s-ramachandrans-tales-of-the-tell-tale-brain) focused on a few core ideas. First, many people who’ve lost limbs and/or had them amputated suffer from chronic phantom pain. Originally scientists thought the pain was caused by peripheral nerves (and nerve damage) near the lost limb. But Ramachandran proposed that phantom limb pain might be caused by changes in the brain. He says in the interview,

[It] was based on an idea that there's a complete map of the body's surface on the surface of the brain. So every point on the body's surface has a corresponding point in the brain. Now the curious thing about this map is, even though it's continuous, the face area of the map is right next to the hand area instead of being near the neck where it should be.

Several things interested me about what he found:

1. Ramachandran found that the brain can literally remap pain can “refer” to another place, so that touching a blindfolded amputee’s face revealed that the amputee felt the touch as touching their phantom limb.

2. This means that (as is assumed now, but was controversial until very recently) that the brain is constantly remapping itself, and is not so fully determined at birth. Our brains aren’t as genetically fixed as we thought; instead, he asserts, “Even the basic sensory map in the brain gets completely reorganized in a matter of weeks. This challenges the dogma that all medical students are raised with that no new connections or pathways can emerge in the adult brain. That was news 10 or 15 years ago. Now it's widely accepted." I’m not sure what he means here; in other words, is it trauma that reorganizes the brain this quickly, or does this happen as a matter of course? I assume the latter. But regardless, the extreme example of phantom limb may reveal something fundamental about not only our brains, but their relation to our limbs and perhaps by extension (no pun intended) our prostheses.

3. What I am interested in, here, is the possibility – or perhaps the likelihood – that our almost constant interaction with technologies like “smart” cell phones and laptops may also remap the brain in nontrivial ways.

I found a lot of anecdotal data on phantom vibrations, phantom ring, vibranxiety. Right around 2006 and 2007 several articles in the popular press began to notice a trend in cell phone users. When Web developer Steven Garrity wrote about it in his blog, he got over 30 responders also citing the phantom sensations. (See the USA Today article at http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2007-06-12-cellphones_N.htm. A Guardian article at approximately the same time comments on the similar nature of the phantom “hearing” of your cell phone’s ringtone. Obviously we are surrounded by cell phones with similar tones, but it turns out some of the sound issue has to do with our ears: “Certain sound registers - about 1,000 and 6,000 Hertz - are more easily caught by the human ear, and therefore more likely to stimulate a response.” And the term phantom ring is defined at UrbanDictionary.com, more or less as a common annoyance.

One theory behind both the phantom ring and phantom vibration is that its origins are physical: nerve damage, for example, or muscle memory. Another set of theories focus on psychological factors; the cell phone represents/creates a psychological need in us, a need to be connected. (Hence the preponderance of articles that describe the feeling as anxiety, though I don’t experience it that way, and I don’t imagine others all do, either). A third theory has to do with how we “learn” to perceive important new signals in our environment. Jeffrey Janata, director of the behavioral medicine program at University Hospitals in Cleveland, calls it "hypothesis-guided search." We are learning to pick out sensations of our phone vibrating, and this “leads you to over-incorporate non-vibratory sensations and attribute them to the idea that you're receiving a phone call." Alejandro Lleras argues that we set what he calls perceptual filters, and this setting is imperfect. His calling such phenomenon “false alarms” made me think of times lately when I thought I heard m name being called in a noisy environment (a café, a public square). I also remember my cousin Kevin listening to his new Beatles album on headphones back in 1975; when John sings the lines “she’s so……heavaaay,” he heard “she’s so…..KEVIN!” This happens three times in the song, and the third time he grew alarmed, jumped up (it was late at night), opened his attic bedroom door, and proceeded to fall down a very steep set of stairs. And then his mother and grandmother really DID call his name!

The connection I am wondering about, the one that Ramachandran is exploring with his work in the neuroscience of phantom limb pain, is neuroplasticity. This is what Doctors Janata and Ramachandran argue: the brain is able to form new connections in response to changes in the environment. Not surprisingly, the metaphor Janata uses is “wired,” as in the brain becomes wired to the regular sensation of the cell phone vibrating. He goes on to say that "Neurological connections that have been used or formed by the sensation of vibrating are easily activated. They're over-solidified, and similar sensations are incorporated into that template. They become a habit of the brain."

So if the brain can remap itself, create templates/filters (another metaphor) that then become habitual, the phantom vibration might lead to other discoveries about the ways we interact with, and adjust to, continual use of a whole panoply of gadgets and mundane prostheses. The cybernetic organism here would be one in which Kate Hayle’s notion of embodied knowledge is accurate; we incorporate our phones and laptops, and this incorporation is literally embodied in the brain’s neuroplastic response. Not only is the cell phone not simply a tool we use; it may be an example of a wide range of shifts in the human brain generated by the increasingly intimate connection of humans and postwar machines.

Distraction part 1

I have been writing on cyborgs, and on mundane cyborgs in particular. This led me to cell phones as prosthetics, and back to a theme of the Unintended Consequences of technology (as noted so eloquently by Edward Tenner among many others).

Tonight I had an idea: what if the second cyborg book was in some major way about the effect that technology has on our abilities to concentrate and focus our attention? That is, on distraction as a kind of ur-story of contemporary technologies?

There are a lot of pieces that could be included here:

1. First off, an app for the iPhone (and Droid and others) that would keep track of how many times people check their phones; how many calls they get; how many times they use a feature such as text or camera. This app would consciously be a part of this larger project of gathering data; people could opt to have the information sent to a website that then compiled the data and controlled for age gender etc.

2. The novel Distraction by Sterling is a cyborg novel, a novel of (among other things) brain "augmentation" and control and destruction. It has enough themes to make an interesting set of examples for a chapter on distraction technologies.

3. The notion of continuous partial attention, as developed by Linda Stone and then others, seems relevant here. This could be bundled with research on attention, in particular the way web users "attend" differently as so much comes there way. (btw Linda Stone's website is wonderfully productive for me: check it out at http://lindastone.net/).

4. ADD. And of course weighing in on this as a parent for me of an ADD kind of kid (though I thought and still think that we'll come to see ADD in the same way we see the 19th century notions of "nerves" and "hysteria" as explanatory categories of behavior.

5. Back to Linda Stone, the idea of cyborg approaches to mind and attitude. Why not talk more in schools and other areas of learning about attendtion and mind as things to explore, develop, enjoy, etc? The cyborg approach imagines a wide range of activities and prosthetics involved in exploring the mind, and the powers of attention. Here is Linda Stone:

Attention is the most powerful tool of the human spirit. We can enhance or augment our attention with practices like meditation and exercise, diffuse it with technologies like email and Blackberries, or alter it with phamaceuticals. In the end, though, we are fully responsible for how we choose to use this extraordinary tool.

She also writes on October 20, 2010:

With a musical instrument, it’s awkward at first. All thumbs. Uncomfortable. Noise. With practice, instrument and musician become as one. Co-creating music. So it will be with personal technology. Now, a prosthetic of mind, it will become a prosthetic of being. A violinist with a violin. Us with our gadgets, embodied, attending as we choose.

This is fantastic. The cyborg model: our brains are flexible, are instruments, are capable of the most wonderful and also disturbing explorations of/with personal technologies as prosthetics. What will cell phone and iPad 2.0 and 3.0 look like? And will we develop ways to compensate for some of the shadow sides of these personal technologies, their performance inhibiting qualities?

Gotta go. GGLY. But I'm on this app for phones, seriously. I want data. My friend told me he thinks I look at my phone like a tic, maybe 80 times in an hour while we were roaming a disc golf course. And I've developed phantom ring, the sensation that one's phone is vibrating along one's leg, only to find...it wasn't. Instead, the body is vibrating, or the mind is picking up body signals that mimic the phone's (now important) small vibratory signal.

Sally Applin, Cloaked Cyborgs, and David Sedaris

I've been writing about cyborgs for a while, and just discovered some other promising sites, including a Cyborg Camp in Portland, Oregon.

Sally Applin gave a talk at this 2010 Cyborg Camp on “cloaked” or invisible cyborgism, which I think merges nicely with some things I am thinking regarding the mundane cyborgs among us. The website for Cyborg Camp [http://portland.cyborgcamp.com/category/cyborgs-4/] includes a description of her talk that mentions examples of cyborgs – an ankle with a titanium plate, Dick Chaney’s heretofore invisible artificial heart (now “seen” due to the external device he has mounted on his chest; shades of Iron Man!). These are reasonably straightforward material examples, and more are easily imagined. But she goes on to discuss what Gray et al call meta cyborgs, such as government policies on extreme genetic engineering, which will have effects both large and largely invisible to most people. She cites Slavoj Žižek on “”trillion-dollar organisms” – patented bugs excreting biofuels, generating clean energy or producing tailor-made food. There are ideas of synthesising new viruses or other pathogens.” This talk seems promising because it marks both more or less mundane cyborgs and links their “invisibility” to the larger and more potentially dangerous invisibility of less mundane, more technologically sublime and massive cyborg projects.

In addition I came across the work of Applin’s colleague Dr. Michael D. Fischer. Besides being an anthropologist at Kent in England, Dr. Fischer founded Anthropunk, “a movement that examines how people promote, manage, resist and endure change; hack their lives (and those of others); and create the context of the individuation of their experiences.” Sally is a founding member of Anthropunk her larger research again sounds promising for my project: she looks at impacts of “technology on culture, and the consequent inverse: specifically the reifications of Virtual Space in Personal Space.”

This work seems promising in a number of ways. First off, I’m interested in the notion of “living” for long periods of time in virtual space (posting and chatting on Facebook, surfing the endless waves of web shopping and information, adopting the almost monk-like position of the serial texter as you hold asynchronous “conversations” with one or ten people) and how these activities in this kind of space might come back, as they say over and over on sports shows, to haunt us. Another quasi-virtual version of this is television and film; we begin to live our lives “as though” they were a film, or being filmed. We take movies of things we do and watch them literally right after the actual event. The amazing golf shot comes to mind; we race to the hole (or basket if like me we are playing disc golf) to retrieve our ball or disc, and all the while moving past the actual event to its reproduction as a video file on our friend’s phone camera.

I sometimes think we begin to feel more real if and when we see ourselves on “TV” – video, or pictures, or audio, or other digital reproductions of daily life. And in turn we have devices to help us achieve filmic reality (or excitement, or meaning) in our lives: headphones for theme and background music; clothing purchased with certain characters and shows in mind; mobility enhancers like skateboards, skis, bikes, cars, that mimic films in which these devices play a central role.

It would be useful to see if there is research in this area, and/or who has written on these topics. The payoff might be considerable, and might include some political implications of how what Applin calls “reifications” affect our ability to make sense of reality.

This term has several meanings, and I’m assuming she is referring to both the simple meaning, i.e., the fallacy of treating an abstraction as if it were a real thing, and the Marxist definition, which I’ve lazily stolen from Wikipedia:

Marx argues that reification is an inherent and necessary characteristic of economic value such as it manifests itself in market trade… [It] reflects a real practice where attributes (properties, characteristics, features, powers) which exist only by virtue of a social relationship between people are treated as if they are the inherent, natural characteristics of things, or vice versa, attributes of inanimate things are treated as if they are attributes of human subjects. This implies that objects are transformed into subjects and subjects are turned into objects, with the result that subjects are rendered passive or determined, while objects are rendered as the active, determining factor.

This notion of reification, and its attendant concepts of alienation and commodity fetishism, is both problematic and productive. The short version for me in writing here might be: when the computer goes from being a person who computes to a machine, something important begins to happen both to the erstwhile human “computer” and to the way humans look at the machines we now call computers.

What cyborg theory does is problematize the idea that you can have a relation with labor, machines, each other, even one’s “self,” that is not in some ways alienated, or complicated. Marx’s concepts are Capital Letter concepts (no pun on capital I promise!) and often imply dualisms that cyborg theory (and especially Donna Haraway’s writings) tries to overcome or move past.

So when we spend hours texting, phoning, web surfing, chatting online, driving, watching films and television shows…what happens to our mundane lives? I’ll end this reflection with a David Sedaris story that I particularly like. He tells a hilarious story of a family that doesn’t own or “believe in” TV (his time period is the 60s) but which is subsequently rehabilitated in the neighborhood’s eyes by buying a used boat. They take the boat out on Halloween, then proceed to trick or treat with their kids on the day AFTER Halloween. Sedaris’s mother demands that the kids offer up some of their candy, and he proceeds to go to his room, perform immediate triage on the loot (including in the A list chocolate bars that give him horrible migraines). When his mother enters she finds him breaking candies to make them un-givable, and stuffing bars of chocolate into his mouth. When his mother goes t grab some of his candy, he tries to speak but ends up spitting bits of chocolate onto his mother’s cashmere sweater.

"Not those," I pleaded, but rather than words, my mouth expelled chocolate, chewed chocolate, which fell onto the sleeve of her sweater. "Not those. Not those."

She shook her arm, and the mound of chocolate dropped like a horrible turd upon my bedspread. "You should look at yourself," she said. "I mean, really look at yourself."

And he begins to feel bad about what he’s done. And then his parents relent, and he and his sisters join the rest of the family as they watch television, a series of stories that allow you to escape from and ignore your own story. Here is the final paragraph (they are watching a Western):

The only alternative was to do as my mother had instructed and take a good look at myself. This was an old trick, designed to turn one's hatred inward, and while I was determined not to fall for it, it was hard to shake the mental picture snapped by her suggestion: here is a boy sitting on a bed, his mouth smeared with chocolate. He's a human being, but also he's a pig, surrounded by trash and gorging himself so that others may be denied. Were this the only image in the world, you'd be forced to give it your full attention, but fortunately there were others. This stagecoach, for instance, coming round the bend with a cargo of gold. This shiny new Mustang convertible. This teenage girl, her hair a beautiful mane, sipping Pepsi through a straw, one picture after another, on and on until the news, and whatever came on after the news.

There are certainly times and places to escape into narrative. I wonder, though, if the sheer number of narratives available to “us” (those who have all the enabling gadgets, and we are legion, if not universal) does something reality-disturbing to the ways we see our own story. Or the way we find ourselves in a world of hurt and reification, where we know to judge ourselves based on cultural narratives more and more loaded with commodities, lively objects, and objectified viewers always more or less dissatisfied with their own lives and more or less wishing for the lives of the narratives they consume at a faster and faster pace.

Some thoughts on Kate Hayles, the posthuman, and the cyborg

I'm moving through a stack of books I've been reading, to pull together the ideas I'll want to use, abuse, play with, weave in, respond to, steal.

One key book is N. Katherine Hayles' 1999 How We Became Posthuman. This book is a critique of the very notion of "information" as somehow digitalizing all of reality, including cells and ecosystems and human bodies. She looks at Turing's test and concludes, "Here at the inaugural moment of the computer age, the erasure of embodiment is performed so that "intelligence" becomes a property of the formal manipulation of symbols rather than enaction in the human lifeworld...Aiding this process was a definition of information, formalized by Claude Shannon and Norbert Wiener, that conceptualized information as an entity distinct from the substrates carrying it" (xi). She mentions Hans Moravec - whose notions of downloading consciousness I heard her debate live at U of Washington when I was a grad student there - as the heir of the Turing Test and of this disembodiment of (a very problematic notion of) information.

How to use her? Well first she is wonderful, clear and thoughtful in her arguments. Her argument with "cyborg" as a term is that for her it signifies just this disembodiment of knowledge. When we merge machine and human into cyborg, she says, we imagine that this merge can happen as information, but this is wrong. She imagines the posthuman and the cyborg as mostly bad things, icons of an erroneous way of imagining human and telecommunicative "information."

In my dissertation I also take on this slippage of information from Shannon's reasonably constrained electrical engineering definition (in a rhetoric of WW 2 radios, noise, signal, and so on). David Porush makes this point as well; you can't move from information as it relates to radio signal strength to information in the larger sense and keep the same "hard science" elements of the initial use. You just can't. And it is intellectually sloppy to do so. Norbert Wiener does this in his book The Human Use of Human Beings, as well.

But on the other hand: something happened when we learned about the human gene, the double helix. Notice this discovery occurs at the same time period as we are thinking in terms of "information" and so the genetic process of in-forming the cell etc is seen as naturally a version of the new view of the body as simply a product of information.

There is another obvious element here: for Hayles the idea that Turing's first test was not between human and computer, but between a man and a woman, gives her a terrific way to get at some of the gender issues brought about by the notion of the posthuman and the cyborg. For her the male/female performed boundaries ARE changing, shifting, and policing these boundaries back to patriarchal values isn't going to cut it. The Enlightenment model of the human, at once putatively universal and at the same time arguably massively masculine and gender inflected and racial, is being undercut by multiple notions of embodiment and mind, the enacted body and the represented body.

She ends her introduction by imagining that the real "trick" here happens earlier than man or machine, male or female. It happens when we allow the Turing Test (or later versions of its implications that machines can think and that the human/machine boundary is porous) to take some thing embodied - your will, desire, perception - and take that "out" of embodiment and put it rather into "a distributed cognitive system in which represented bodies are joined with enacted bodies through mutating and flexible machine interfaces."

Ok yes she is writing in that language that screams academe. (Full disclosure; I do think there is a role for discipline specific vocabularies, and I don't mind using some of this philosophical and post structuralist language in the service of theory). But what she is saying is that these types of operations are being "done to us" by Others. I think when we begin to connect with others via computer mediated chains, or cell phone or social networks, we also "do" exactly that: we allow parts of ourselves to be distributed, geographically and otherwise. And we escape our "actual" and full embodiment (perhaps we are never fully aware of this embodiment, btw). And this new sense of a distributed self reminds me of a speeded up version of the Modernist novel and its sense of the fragmented and multiple self (Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, et al).

This strikes me as a response similar to Donna Haraway's response to the cyborg. There are crucial questions of embodiment for feminists, for radicals who care about justice, and Hayles wants to make sure we emphasize the org in cyborg, the or rather, the interconnectedness of the cyb and the org. It's not that we want to go back to a past "clarity" about fixed notions of embodiment (gender, class, etc). We don't really have a choice about that. But we need to correct the overvaluation of the cybernetic half of the cyborg equation. In Chapter 3 she argues that the emphasis on information technologies is responsible for the systematic devaluation of materiality and embodiment. Information "theory" and tech values pattern/randomness over the presence/absence of a different era. Instead Hayles imagines going beyond such binaries (ie presence VS pattern as ways to read/see humans) to show how pattern and presence, digital and analogy, are complementary, that they enhance our understanding of each other.

She ends that chapter with the assertion - done forcefully and with some emotion - that information, like humanity, can't exist apart from embodiment, which is always local and specific. You can't she says bring it back when it's destroyed, and using data won't bring it back. (somehow I'm reminded of Sterling's novel Distraction, where Louisiana is the site of a genome bank where the genetic 'data' of the many extinct and almost extinct animals and plants are kept, presumably so that we can do exactly what she says we cannot: reproduce them, embody them. This is of course also the narrative arc of Jurassic Park and other "create life form from genetic information" stories.). And this is as true of the planet as it is of any particular life form; our material world is fragile and cannot be replaced, though we are distracted from this knowledge by the overvaluing of the spaces of the cyber: the net, cell phones, social networking, and so on.

Perhaps this distinction between notions of "information" would be useful to put (in everyday language) into the second, more blog-inflected book. And perhaps I could develop it even more than I do in the dissertation, emphasize it even: Hayles, Porush, Balsamo, Mirowski (esp page 16 of Machine Dreams). And certainly a politics emerges from this analysis of Hayles that she helps support, one that restores valuation to the org half of the cyb-org construction.

Finally, Hayles and Balsamo are particularly focused on role bodies and embodiment ought to play for feminist cultural studies of science and technology. And I'm interested in bringing some of this to life in my writing; that is, allowing the bodies to emerge from the overvaluation and focus on the cybernetic: cell phones, imaging technologies like ultrasound, social networking systems, and so on.

Skiborg 3: Chairlift prosthesis

Skiborg 3: Chairlift observations from a mundane ski cyborg

I posted images from my phone (that boon companion and faithful sidekick) of my ten days at Kirkwood to my Facebook page. Why? Well partly I love the idea of people seeing a few images of sun-drenched snow fields, vistas of snowcaps and wild like-a-giant-did-it-with-a-white-crayon contrail writing in the sky, and then suddenly finding themselves dreaming of renting skis, driving into the mountains, and sliding down whatever runs feel like the perfect balance of safety and risk. And partly I do it because Facebook has become my electronic photo album, my external memory, my public private place to micro journal (status updates anyone?) and scrapbook (photo albums geared to events, holidays, vacations) and be silly (I recently posted a series of bizarre images of raccoons; previously, twisted Valentines Day cards and Visions of Future Technologies from old Popular Mechanics magazines, visions that shall we say didn't quite work out).

One of the photos was just a picture of a lift chair in the air. But it doesn't do justice to the amount of time I spent on lifts during my ten day ski every day streak.

So skiing is sliding down hills, carving shapes on the surface of steep pitches of white, going kind of fast and then going faster. But skiing is also waiting (not so much at Kirkwood though occasionally the line feels like a very cold Post Office line at Christmas). And skiing is sitting on a big iron bench as it lifts into the air and then climbs hundreds of yards up the mountain. Sometimes this is a real challenge; you dress for the skiing part, so you don't want to overdress and be too hot, yet often when it is cold out the lift part reminds you that you could have used one more layer, a neck gaiter, in extreme weather a blood transfusion or a portable large fireplace.

The long slow ride up the mountain is a chance, if you so desire, to pause the Doing part of the brain and engage the Being part. So I thought a lot, reflected a lot, spaced out a lot. Hard to say how much of each since I find reflection and spacing out blend at some point. And the hot sun helped too; no primal chilling blasts of icy wind in the face, no fiendish Jack Frost eight degree nose-pinching, no Jack London am I going to die before the lift reaches the top revisitings of To Build A Fire. No, it was mostly incredibly sunny, and the lift on a Tuesday or Wednesday is as good as it gets for meditating. And there is a fixed time, too; at some point the meditation ends, you mentally note the takeaway, and then you keep your tips up and pop off the lift and (and isn't this what we all hope from deep meditations, long reflections on life and love and liberty) there you are: on Top of the World. Literally.

Another thing about chairlifts: chair lifts are big metal arms for lifting humans as if they were children; that is, they do what amusement park rides do. Remember when you are little and your dad or mom lifted you up and spun you around? Threw you up in the air and caught you (hopefully every time)? I have body memories of my dad as a Huge Person picking me up and throwing me; I remember holding my son when he was the size of Mister Peanut from the ads, holding him up Kunta Kinte style as we stood at the edge of the Puget Sound and thinking "This is probably what I felt like back in the day when I was the peanut; someone godlike can pick me up and it feels more or less safe, like I'm literally in good hands, strong hands." Well I think amusement park rides are partly nostalgias for those days when Big People ran the show and took care of you, and when they were in a good mood even amused you and excited you. And chairlifts are a very mellow version of that. It's like your mom picking you up and putting you way way up on that slide that you can't quite climb yet.

And chairlifts are the slowing down of the pace of the day, forcing even the adrenaline junkies to do nothing, stare out at the mountains, feel the change of weather from low to high. They are chances to put your arms around your girl or guy, chances to look up at the sky and not down at the extremely interesting because at high speeds fairly dangerous whipping below and in front of you ground.

I'm not saying most people see lifts like this. But I am saying that there is something about the very nature of powerful reliable dependable iron hands hauling you up a mountain. And perhaps for some - for many? - you only notice when the powerful reliable iron hands aren't reliable. On Tuesday Chair 2 stopped for what felt like forever (probably less than ten minutes, more than five). We were hanging fifty feet in the air; people grew restive, a guy yelled a couple of times (that sure helped); our Inalienable Right to being hauled up the hill by our metal parent was being abrogated. For me, I got to talk to the two Argentinian girls in front of me (they asked if I'd seen the movie Frozen, where skiers get stranded on a lift after dark and terror ensues), feel a moment of panic (stomach drops a little looking down), more than a few moments of envy (the people who'd gotten off the lift just before it shut down were happily scampering down the hill on their prosthetics and singing happy not stuck on a lift songs). The song in my bowling ball helmet sound system shifted to an old timey tune with banjo by Union Station, about going off to the Civil War. I listened, trapped dangling and looking over forbidding mountains; I imagined what this place would have been like in 1860, what it would look like to a man or woman on foot, on horseback, pulling a wagon. And the song sang its plaintive words:

From the bright sunny south to the war, I was sent,
E'er the days of my boyhood, I scarcely had spent.
From it's cool shady forests and deep flowing streams,

Ever fond in my mem'ry and sweet in my dreams.

I couldn't go anywhere. The mountains changed from playthings to obstacles to uncanny symbols of what divided here from an unimaginable there, where I might have to go, to fight and kill, to buy and till.

Then the lift shuddered, slowly we moved as if the horses hitched to the wagon were finally, and with much complaint, shuffling forward. The line gave a cheer, the Argentinian girls yelled "Watch Frozen!" and in a minute I was hopping off the lift and hauling over to the Ski Patrol hut with the big dogs sleeping in the sun, the bucket of Pepsis and waters and Mountain Dews. The bucket has a sign $1 and you put the money in a cast in the shape of an arm. Someone's cast, it seems, now just a memory of a fracture, a break.