ERIC WENNINGER

  • Branching Realities

    A Purkinje neuron from the human cerebellum – Image via The Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal

    Last week’s newsletter was about branching realities.

    It started out like this:

    Lynda Barry is a cartoonist and professor at UW-Madison who teaches a class called The Unthinkable Mind. In the class, Barry combines neuroscience, psychology, and drawing to help students build the skill of creativity and apply it to their life’s work. Last week I saw this Instagram post by Barry and it reminded me of the incredible link between art and science. Santiago Ramón y Cajal, widely considered to be the father of neuroscience, also understood this connection. Cajal’s work drew inspiration from both the sciences and the arts, and his drawings of the brain beautifully communicate its complexities.

    In addition to his work on circle visualizations, Manuel Lima has also worked with branching. In The Book of Trees: Visualizing Branches of Knowledge, Lima documents the use of tree diagrams from throughout history to categorize a wide variety of information:

    I like how this work is both artistic and scientific. Referencing visuals and producing them ourselves has always helped us understand the world better. Branching in particular is helpful, I think in part, because it’s all around us. Its reproductions and reflections are seemingly endless, as Barry’s lesson plan highlights.

    I’ve enjoyed watching Angie study medicine these past few months. To me, her notes look like works of art to and I’ll often ask her to send me pictures of them, like this one, which of course reveals some branching:

    Angie’s notes

    As we wrap up 2024, thinking about branching has me thinking a lot about the big decisions we make in life. Looking into our past, we might envision a fork in the road that was created in the moment of deciding—one path branching off to the left and another off to the right, each leading to a separate reality that was created by our choice.

    Or maybe we can envision a separate reality that was created simply by circumstance, as is the case in the 1998 movie Sliding Doors, where Gwyneth Paltrow’s character experiences two alternate realities based on whether or not she successfully catches a subway train. Throughout the rest of the movie we see her life play out along these two separate paths.

    The idea of alternate realities has always fascinated me. Even more fascinating is the theory suggesting they may actually be real. The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics proposes that every possible outcome of every event creates a new universe or world that runs parallel to our own. Physicist Aaron O’Connell talks about the feasibility of this idea in his 2011 TED Talk.

    Alternate realities have long been the subject of some of the best science fiction. If you love speculating about these branching realities as much as I do, here are some great stories to check out:

    Ted Chiang has a short story entitled “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom,” from his book Exhalation, that looks at this idea. It’s somewhat of a redemption story in which characters use a device called a prism that allows them to communicate with versions of themselves from alternate realities—realities that stem from divergent past decisions the characters have made. You may already be familiar with Chiang’s work from the movie Arrival, which was based on his short story “Story of Your Life,” from Stories of Your Life and Others. It dawned on me that one of my family’s favorite holiday movies, It’s a Wonderful Life, also deals with alternate realities. Blake Crouch’s book Dark Matter (recently made into an Apple+ series) was first described to me as an “It’s a Wonderful Life” for the 21st century. And then, of course, there’s a wealth of amazing works by the Spanish-speaking world that dive into choice and the alternate realities it produces. Check out Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths” (also see this TED Ed video on his mind-bending work) and the Spotify podcast Case 63 (based on the Chilean Caso 63).

    You can read the whole newsletter here.

  • On Making Difficult Decisions

    Choice is powerful. One of my favorite quotes about choice comes from the Austrian neurologist and psychologist Viktor Frankl. In his book Man’s Search for Meaning, he writes:

    Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

    The realization that we always have a choice as to how we will respond to those things going on around us, even if we can’t control them, is an empowering one. Frankl should know. As a Holocaust survivor, he faced unimaginable horrors, yet never forgot his power to choose. When everything was stripped away from him, he held to that power closely.

    Frankl addresses choice in terms of how we respond to circumstances beyond our control, when our freedom has been reduced to a minimum. But what about choice in terms of the many circumstances within our power to control, when freedom abounds? I think we tend to view a choice like this:

    As in the old Robert Frost poem, we consider the two roads diverging before us in the woods, and try our best to choose which one we’ll travel upon. In her book Transformative Experiences, philosopher LA Paul suggests a different way of looking at choice. She asks us to imagine having to choose whether or not we’d like to become a vampire, gaining immortality with the caveat of not having to hurt anyone. It’s a thought experiment that gets to the heart of Plato’s question, “How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?” She writes:

    When you find yourself facing a decision involving a new experience that is unlike any other experience you’ve had before, you can find yourself in a special sort of epistemic situation. In this sort of situation, you know very little about your possible future, in the same way that you are limited when you face a possible future as a vampire. And so, if you want to make the decision by thinking about what your lived experience would be like if you decided to undergo the experience, you have a problem… You find yourself facing a decision where you lack the information you need to make the decision the way you naturally want to make it—by assessing what the different possibilities would be like and choosing between them. The problem is pressing, because many of life’s big personal decisions are like this: they involve the choice to undergo a dramatically new experience that will change your life in important ways, and an essential part of your deliberation concerns what your future life will be like if you decide to undergo the change. But as it turns out, like the choice to become a vampire, many of these big decisions involve choices to have experiences that teach us things we cannot know about from any other source but the experience itself.

    So our choice might be better viewed in the following way:

    “A” represents the space that is completely familiar to us, while “B” represents the space that is completely foreign to us. It’s the known versus the unknown. We only know ourselves on the “A” side of a decision. There’s no real way of knowing who we’d become if we made the choice to leave “A” behind, cross through the doorway, and enter into “B.”

    This is the problem we face when making big decisions. We are biased toward our current experience in life. Going through that door and entering the unknown is often very scary, because both our experiences and who we will become are unknown. In her contemplation of the vampire problem, Maria Popova writes:

    We are simply incapable of imagining ourselves on the other side of a profound change, because the present self doing the imagining is the very self that needs to have died in order for the future self being imagined to emerge.

    When we choose to enter these unknown spaces, in a way, we choose to let our former self die in order for a transformed self to emerge. In her book A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit describes the value of such transformation and the process by which we can obtain it:

    The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration—how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?

    Extending the boundaries of self and becoming someone else is a difficult process. It’s far easier to stay within our comfort zone. Stepping into the great unknown is exhilarating, but it has its costs. Viktor Frankl looked at the problem of restricted freedom—when the door to possibility is closed. Unlimited freedom to open whichever door one chooses can also be problematic. There’s a reason Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard described anxiety as the “dizziness of freedom.” Looking through that open door into the abyss of the unknown can be destabilizing.

    But in life, moving into the unknown is often what’s required of us, and it’s often where we should go. In The Meaning of Anxiety, psychologist Rollo May expands on Kierkegaard’s thoughts about anxiety:

    Because it is possible to create—creating one’s self, willing to be one’s self, as well as creating in all the innumerable daily activities (and these are two phases of the same process)—one has anxiety. One would have no anxiety if there were no possibility whatever. Now creating, actualizing one’s possibilities, always involves negative as well as positive aspects. It always involves destroying the status quo, destroying old patterns within oneself, progressively destroying what one has clung to from childhood on, and creating new and original forms and ways of living. If one does not do this, one is refusing to grow, refusing to avail himself of his possibilities; one is shirking his responsibility to himself.

    In any big decision, the choice we make leads us toward gaining something and losing something else. I think that much is a given. And it’s something I can accept. For me, the important thing is to keep choosing to grow. Growing is how I can create hope in a world that often seems at the brink of losing itself. It’s like what Emerson once wrote: “People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.” I think it’s also important to remember that making small choices can also be unsettling, and if made consistently over time, can lead to big changes in a person’s character and experience of the world. Ted Chiang’s short story “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom,” from his book Exhalation, dives into this idea beautifully.

    But even though we can’t know what’s on the other side of a big decision, I like Walt Whitman’s take in “Song of Myself” (43), on how we can enter those unknown spaces with confidence:

    I do not know what is untried and afterward,
    But I know it will in its turn prove sufficient, and cannot fail.

    It helps to look back into your past as you enter those untried future spaces. The past can provide some finite concreteness that stabilizes you from the infinite possibilities of the future. You’ve faced trials before and prevailed. You will prevail again.

  • Circles

    Last week’s newsletter was all about circles.

    It started off like this:

    They’ve been on my mind as of late. Maybe it’s because I’ve been listening to Mac Miller’s album Circles, or because I just read an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson called Circles. Maybe it’s because there was just an election and it seems as though there are some people within my circle and some outside of it. Then again, maybe it’s the circular movements around me—the changing of the seasons or the cycling of the moon. Whatever the reason, I hope you read on and find something you’d like to circle and add to your list of things to check out.

    Circles are everywhere. Just ask Manuel Lima, who documented them in The Book of Circles: Visualizing Spheres of Knowledge:

    In his essay Circles, Emerson writes:

    The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world. St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere, and its circumference nowhere. We are all our lifetime reading the copious sense of this first of forms.
    (…)
    Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning

    It made me think about circle stories I’ve read or seen, where the ending circles back around to the beginning, like in the movie 12 Monkeys. I recently learned that 12 Monkeys was based on the 1962 French film La Jetée, a minimalist 28-minute movie consisting of nothing more than 422 photos, a voiceover, and a score. This video provides a beautiful analysis of the film that doesn’t move (yet still moves in a circle):

    You can also draw circles around circles, and zoom in and out on them. I thought about how Prezi allows you to do this and it led me to compare Joni Mitchell’s song “Both Sides Now” with something Walt Whitman wrote in Leaves of Grass:

    Do I contradict myself?
    Very well then I contradict myself,
    I am large, I contain multitudes.

    Mitchell zooms out to find differing perspectives while Whitman zooms in to also find differing perspectives. Whether you zoom in or out, life is still complex.

    You can read the whole newsletter here.

  • Home Is People

    My dear friend Matt Neely introduced me to David Berman in the fall of 2003. Matt and I attended grad school together and one day he lent me his CD of the album Bright Flight, by Berman’s band Silver Jews. Their current Spotify bio describes them as “a beautiful mess of indie rock, country-rock and lo-fi with lyrics both witty and profound.” After a few listens I was hooked. Beyond the scratchy guitar rifts and straightforward, yet often fractured folk-rock melodies, I really connected with Berman’s songwriting and shaky vocals. He was a lyricist who could turn a phrase like no other. His crackly deadpan delivery only added to his effectiveness as a storyteller.

    One of my favorite lyrics of Berman’s comes from his song “Time Will Break The World.” I repeat it to myself each year when winter grows long and I grow tired of yet another snowfall:

    The snow falls down so beautiful and stupid

    Couple this with Phil Connor’s prediction from Groundhog Day and you have perfectly summarized the late-winter, early-spring feels of Wisconsin.

    Berman struggled with depression and drug addiction throughout his life. Tragically, he died by suicide in August of 2019, just one month after having released his first new music in a decade, under the new moniker Purple Mountains. A close listen to the self-titled album reveals a version of David Berman who was still very much struggling with his demons.

    Purple Mountains (via Pitchfork)

    I had been planning on seeing Berman perform live for the first time later that summer. The news of his death shook me, as it did so many others. His impact was widespread, among fans and fellow musicians alike, and an outpouring of love and heartfelt condolence seemed to flow from every corner during the weeks to follow. In an article titled “David Berman Changed the Way So Many of Us See the World,” Mark Richardson writes:

    It feels important to note that his lyrics, which seemed to be beamed in from another dimension, were used in service of songs that were generally sturdy and sounded good wherever they were needed.

    Still, though, those words. Jazz critic Gary Giddins, writing about the work of Ornette Coleman, once noted ‘the music hits me in unprotected areas of the brain, areas that remain raw and impressionable,’ and Berman’s words functioned like that too. He had a gift for writing that, ironically, and in a very Berman-esque way, is hard to talk about. His use of language is so specific, it’s hard to find some of your own to describe it in a way that doesn’t diminish what you’re trying to convey. ‘The meaning of the world lies outside the world’ is how he put a related idea, in another context, in his song ‘People.’ But the way I’m describing it now makes it sound like something heady and tangled and complicated. It was the opposite. Berman had a knack for representing what was right in front of you in a way that made you see it as if for the first time.

    I find myself relating to Richardson’s words, as I try to find the right words, to describe David Berman’s words. You’re better off just accessing his music directly. Even if Berman’s suffering was clearly expressed through his songs, he conveyed it in a tone that was both warm and oftentimes comical. There was a therapeutic lightness toward life’s difficulties that he wove into the fabric of his songs. It was a quality that I think genuinely helped a lot of people.

    In another song touching on winter’s theme, “Snow Is Falling in Manhattan,” he writes the ghost of himself into the very song, allowing for visitors to gather round and warm themselves by the fire he creates:

    Songs build little rooms in time
    And housed within the song’s design
    Is the ghost the host has left behind
    To greet and sweep the guest inside
    Stoke the fire and sing his lines

    The song builds a room, presumably within a house, where the songwriter continues to live, and hosts whichever guest might appear with a need for warmth and companionship.

    Berman wrote a book of poetry called Actual Air, originally released in 1999, but reissued in 2019, also just weeks before his death. As is the case with his songs, Berman’s witty insights about life, in all its wonder and bleakness, can be found in this brilliant collection of poems.

    Actual Air, by David Berman

    One of my favorites is “The Homeowner’s Prayer.” It’s a poem that considers the circular and linear nature of time. We move through the stages of life on a path toward our imminent demise, as the seasons continue to circle back around, obscuring the fact that one day they no longer will, at least not for us. And the time they take to come around seems to get ever faster as we get older. This is a sad poem about a man’s untaken opportunities and unlived experiences that are eventually lost to him. They were never really his to begin with because he did not live them. Time, as it were, passed him by.

    But this poem reminds me that we ought to think of “home” as the people more so than the place. The title seemed incongruent to me at first, but maybe that is the prayer—let me value people above place. I have moved enough in my life to understand that my true home is the people I get to experience life with. Everything loses its flavor when you take away the people for whom you care about the most. We often confuse this simple truth in a modern society that confuses simple facts. What if, as a “homeowner,” the first thing that came to mind were the people who inhabit my heart, rather than the house I inhabit? Berman’s poem helps me to be mindful of the moments I get to spend with my people and to value the immaterial over the material.

    I think David Berman knew that home was more than a place. He saw his own songs as a home, not just for him to live in, but also for any guest who would enter them to listen. Here is the poem in its entirety:

    The Homeowner’s Prayer – by David Berman

    The moment held two facets in his mind.
    The sound of lawns cut late in the evening
    and the memory of a push-up regimen he had abandoned.

    It was Halloween.

    An alumni newsletter lay on the hall table
    but he would not/could not read it,
    for his hands were the same emotional structures
    in 1987 as they had been in 1942.

    Nothing had changed. He had retained his tendency
    to fall in love with supporting actresses
    renowned for their near miss with beauty

    and coffee still caused the toy ideas
    he used to try out on the morning carpools,
    a sweeping reorganization of the company softball leagues,
    or how to remove algae from the windows of a houseboat.

    He remembered a morning when the carpool
    had been discussing how they’d like to die.
    The best way to go.

    He said, why are you talking about this.
    Just because everyone has died so far,
    doesn’t mean that we’re going to die.

    But he had waited too long to speak.
    They were already in the parking garage.
    And now two of them had passed away.

    It was Halloween.

    Another Pennsylvania sunset
    backed down the local mountain

    spraying the colors of a streetfighter’s face
    onto the narrative wallpaper of a boy’s bedroom.

    Once he thought all he would ever need
    was a house with time and circumstance.

    He slowly made his way into the kitchen
    and filled a bowl with apples and raisins.

    The clock was learning to be 6:34.

    The willows bent to within decimals of the lawn.

    It was Halloween.

    The years go round and round. Halloween just passed and soon it will again. The 52 weeks that make up a year bring us back to this same spot pretty quickly. Add up a life’s worth and you only get 4,000 weeks, on average. How will you spend the time?

    “Time,” by David Shrigley (via Austin Kleon)

  • Beautiful Puerto Rico

    Bad Bunny’s Un Verano Sin Ti album cover on a towel, gifted to me by some very thoughtful students

    When I was in college, I took a semester-long class on the history of Puerto Rico. It was fascinating—such a rich and nuanced history, filled with the ongoing struggle of living through colonialism’s legacy, but also with the pride of overcoming it in the celebration of life as a Boricua, or Puerto Rican.

    Last week’s newsletter included the following with respect to Puerto Rico:

    You may have heard what the comedian said about Puerto Rico at the Trump rally that took place in Madison Square Garden on October 27. I wanted to share some resources that say otherwise. Puerto Rico Strong is a “comics anthology that explores what it means to be Puerto Rican and the diversity that exists within that concept, from today’s most exciting Puerto Rican comics creators.” Since Hurricane Maria devastated the island in 2017, all sales of the book have gone to support ongoing relief efforts. La Brega is a podcast from WNYC Studios that looks at the history and music of Puerto Rico. There are both English and Spanish versions of each episode. From the website:

    There’s no direct translation of la brega in English, but for Puerto Ricans, it’s a way of life. To bregar means to struggle, to hustle, to find a way to get by and get around an imbalance of power. It’s got a creative edge, a bit of swagger; as Puerto Rican scholar Arcadio Diaz has observed, it’s a word that belongs to the underdog.

    A good example of la brega comes from Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny, who released El Apagón – Aquí Vive Gente (click on CC for English subtitles)—part music video, addressing the challenge of constant power outages while celebrating the pride of being Puerto Rican, and part documentary, addressing the dual problems of foreign real estate investments on the island and the reduction of public beach access. For further reading on the beautiful complexities of Puerto Rico, as often revealed through Bad Bunny’s music, check out The Bad Bunny Syllabus.

    You can read the whole newsletter here.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Eric Wenninger is an educator and writer. He teaches language and culture and writes about his thoughts and experiences here.

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