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Homo sapiens, the most complex animal, the only animal who believed he had transcended his Kingdom, as one of my high school biology teachers used to say. That belief, that transcendence, was held within this organ itself. Infinite, unknowable, soulful, perhaps even magical. I had traded the Pentecostalism of my childhood for this new religion, this new quest, knowing that I would never fully know.
“If you are living a godly life, a moral life, then everything you do can be a prayer,” my mother said. “Instead of trying to pray all day, live your life as prayer.”
At times, my life now feels so at odds with the religious teachings of my childhood that I wonder what the little girl I once was would think of the woman I’ve become—a neuroscientist who has at times given herself over to equating the essence that psychologists call the mind, that Christians call the soul, with the workings of the brain. I have indeed given that organ a kind of supremacy, believing and hoping that all of the answers to all of the questions that I have can and must be contained therein. But the truth is I haven’t much changed. I still have so many of the same questions, like
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Nana’s addiction had become the sun around which all of our lives revolved.
But how do you know when you are nearing a true end instead of a dead end? How do you finish the experiment? What do you do when, years into your life, you figure out that the yellow brick road you’ve been easing down leads you directly into the eye of the tornado?
Can an animal restrain itself from pursuing a reward, especially when there is risk involved?
I couldn’t imagine living the way she lived, free, like an exposed wire ready and willing to touch whatever it touched.
I started laughing, a mean laugh, a laugh I’d never heard before. I didn’t know where it had come from, and when it escaped my lips, I thought, What else is inside of me? How dark is this darkness, how deep does it go?
