Walking in Brooklyn with Paul Auster, Bishop Berkley, and the ghost of Trofim Lysenko
The temptations of 'this too shall pass'
Welcome, new readers
Sundman figures it out! is an autobiographical meditation, in the spirit of Michel de Montaigne, of a 71 72 year old guy who lives with his wife in a falling-down house on a dirt road on Martha’s Vineyard that dead-ends into a nature preserve.
Incidents, preoccupations, themes and hobbyhorses appear, fade, reappear and ramify at irregular intervals. If you like this essay I suggest checking out a few from the archives. These things are all interconnected.
Précis
As icebergs melt and forests burn and the United States of America descends into the maw of fascism, cruelty, magical thinking and madness, I find myself thinking about: Paul Auster’s novella City of Glass (as adapted to comics form by Paul Karasik and David Mazzuccelli); the Soviet pseudo-scientist Trofim Lysenko as avatar of the fervent anti-scientism of the Trump/Musk/Kennedy gang; my father’s favorite saying when things looked bleak: ‘this too shall pass’; and the temptations of stasis when the best way forward is hard to discern.
Another rain song
Some months ago I published When the heavens opened over Fanaye, a rain song meditation. It opens like this:
For most of 1974 - 76 I resided in a 10-foot square mud hut with a thatched roof in a small village in the valley of the Senegal River on the edge of the Sahara, where it had not rained for six years. The cattle had all died, the crops had all failed, and we subsisted on emergency food rations from elsewhere in the world. I had been living in Fanaye for nearly two years when the rains finally came back. A three-day rainstorm on Martha’s Vineyard, where I have resided for thirty years, unleashed a cascade of memories of the night the drought broke.
Again today on Martha’s Vineyard it’s raining gloriously hard on the skylight above the desk in my attic office in my falling-down house and again I have jumbled squirrel-brain thoughts in my head as I watch the tops of the sixty-foot tall barren oak trees in the woods behind my house sway in the wind and rain.1
The Weather Channel website says it will rain all day, with some heavy winds too. Yet five days ago the Weather Channel website’s 10-day forecast included no rain at all. It’s unusual for their ten-day model to be so far off, to change so suddenly. Something pretty drastic must have occurred. What?
I have pondered this question, and what I think happened is this: Around two months ago, mid to late January, I put in a request to the weather gods for a blizzard — I do like a good blizzard, but my request was mostly on behalf of my wife, who loves — in fact needs — a good blizzard every once in a while to maintain her equilibrium: she needs to watch the driving snow swirling in eddies, raging left to right, and right to left, front to back, even going in entirely the wrong direction, up and up and up, as if the snowflakes were trying to return to their cloud-womb in the sky —
But the weather gods — distracted chaotic bureaucrats whose offices are even more disordered than mine is, if you can conceive such a thing — misplaced my request & only found it at 4 AM today, and this rain is the best they could come up with, now that it’s spring on Martha’s Vineyard and too warm for any snow at all much less a blizzard.
This essay is another rain song meditation, though whether it will have the kind of thematic unity as that earlier one about when the rains came back to the drought-thirsty village of Fanaye Dieri in the valley of the Senegal River during a time of famine and pestilence is not clear to me as I type these words.
Trofim Lysenko, the patron saint of anti-science
From wikipedia:
In 1940, Lysenko became director of the Institute of Genetics of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and he used his political influence and power to suppress dissenting opinions and discredit, marginalize, and imprison his critics, elevating his anti-Mendelian theories to state-sanctioned doctrine.
Soviet scientists who refused to renounce genetics were dismissed from their posts and left destitute. Hundreds if not thousands of others were imprisoned. Several were sentenced to death as enemies of the state, including the botanist Nikolai Vavilov[. . .]. Lysenko's ideas and practices contributed to the famines that killed millions of Soviet people; the adoption of his methods from 1958 in the People's Republic of China had similarly calamitous results, contributing to the Great Chinese Famine of 1959 to 1961.
Estimates of the number of people who starved to death in the Soviet and Chinese famines combined — those influenced, if not outright caused, by Lysenkoism — range from around 20 million to 70 million people.
Of course many more people than that suffered severe malnutrition but did not die of it. The Soviets and the Maoists each had a bunch of famines, and I may have conflated a couple of them. It’s confusing.
Maybe only 8 or 10 million people, many of them children, or nursing mothers, or pregnant women, or strong men, war heroes; or shoemakers, economists, uncles; or aunts, prudes, libertines, blacksmiths and plow-hands, snobs, thieves, diesel mechanics, others of no particular attributes, young, old — all ages, really — all genders too — died excruciating needless deaths due to the crackpot pseudo-science we now call Lysynkoism in the Russian and Chinese famines combined.
From the article “The Disastrous Effects Of Lysenkoism On Soviet Agriculture” on Encyclopedia.com (as lightly edited by me):
Lysenko ruled virtually supreme in Soviet science, and his influence extended beyond agriculture to all areas of science. In 1940, Stalin appointed Lysenko Director of the Soviet Academy of Science's Institute of Genetics. In 1948 the Praesidium of the USSR Academy of Science passed a resolution virtually outlawing any biological work that was not based on Lysenko's ideas.
Although thousands of experiments carried out by geneticists all over the world had failed to provide evidence for—and actually produced mounds of evidence against—Lysenko's theories, Lysenko's followers went on to make increasingly grandiose claims.
The spirit of Lysenko lives on all around the world, but most scarily here in the United States. I don’t really believe in ghosts, but whenever I see a photo of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, I can’t help thinking that I’m looking at one.
Paul Auster finds me locked out in Brooklyn
Last week I was in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where, by a funny sequence of events we shan’t go into, I found myself locked out of the stately 3-story townhouse owned by an old friend of mine, where I was staying. To pass the time until I could connect with my friend and get back inside, I walked to 7th Avenue to get breakfast.
I of course needed something to read over breakfast and went in search of a Times or Daily News, to no avail. But though I was unable to find a bodega from which I might purchase a newspaper, I did come upon Community Bookstore, where, immediately upon entering, I found a display of the books of Paul Auster.
I purchased a copy of the comic book version of Auster’s City of Glass by Paul Karasik and David Mazzuccilli (with an introduction by Art Spiegelman, creator of Maus, the most profound book I have ever read). I knew this book but hadn’t thought of it in decades. Finding it when and where I did, given some circumstances I won’t go into, felt like some kind of kismet.
Wikipedia:
City of Glass features an author of detective fiction who becomes a private investigator and descends into madness as he becomes embroiled in the investigation of a case. It explores layers of identity and reality, from Paul Auster the writer of the novel to the unnamed "author" who reports the events as reality, to "Paul Auster the writer", a character in the story, to "Paul Auster the detective", who may or may not exist in the novel, to Peter Stillman the younger, to Peter Stillman the elder and, finally, to Daniel Quinn, the protagonist.
This is the text from the panels on the back cover of the book:
“New York was a labyrinth of endless steps, and no matter how far he walked it always left him with the feeling of being lost. Each time he took a walk, he felt he was leaving himself behind. All places became equal, and on his best walks he was able to feel that he was nowhere. This was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere.”
Sometimes, when the world is too bleak and confusing, I too have a desire to be nowhere. Or, if not ‘nowhere’ at least somewhere where I have no responsibilities at all.
Bishop Berkley’s apocryphal question
Wikipedia, again:
"If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" is a philosophical thought experiment that raises questions regarding observation and perception.
While the origin of the phrase is sometimes mistakenly attributed to George Berkeley, there are no extant writings in which he discussed this question. The closest are the following two passages from Berkeley's A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, published in 1710:
But, say you, surely there is nothing easier than for me to imagine trees, for instance, in a park, or books existing in a closet, and nobody by to perceive them.
The objects of sense exist only when they are perceived; the trees therefore are in the garden... no longer than while there is somebody by to perceive them.
Despite these passages bearing a distant resemblance to the question, Berkeley never actually proposed the question itself. However, his work did deal extensively with the question of whether objects could continue to exist without being perceived.
For a somewhat deeper discussion of questions regarding observation and perception, I suggest my essay Entanglement, which includes this paragraph:
Quantum entanglement was the subject of some thought experiments by the Irish physicist John Bell, in which he demonstrated some paradoxes about the nature of reality, and in 2022 the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to some very smart gentlemen who devised some very clever experiments that proved, using entanglement, that Dr. Bell was correct and reality does not really exist.
That Entanglement essay also includes this awesome screencap, which I grabbed from Youtube video made by IBM. I am quite proud of this image and the clever caption that I gave it, which is why I use it in these SFIO! essays whenever I can.
There is a relationship, which we’ll get to shortly, between the question that Bishop Berkley never asked about the tree falling in the forrest and the Auster/Karasik City of Glass that I read while eating Eggs 7th Avenue Benedict at the Grand Canyon restaurant.
My father says, ‘This too shall pass;’ OK Go makes a video
My father was a level-headed guy, and although his equanimity did not quite match my mother’s (nobody’s equanimity matched my mother’s) he had a commendable ability to go with the flow, to deal with urgent situations without losing his cool.
I remember going to him for advice, when I was well into adulthood, with problems that seemed to me to be urgent and intractable.
‘This too shall pass,’ I can still hear him saying. ‘This too shall pass.’ He wasn’t being glib, for he had seen plenty of tragedy himself. It was just his way of telling me that he believed in me, believed that I would figure out how to survive whatever crisis I was dealing with.
He would have liked this song & video. Watch it. It’s fun.
That’s the positive side of ‘this too shall pass’. The negative side is a retreat into apathy.
RFKjr, our Lysenko — but a thousand times worse
On February 13, 2025, by a vote of 52 to 48, the Republican-controlled United States Senate voted to confirm the demented amoral sociopath, antivax fanatic, inheritor of great wealth (and of great privilege, by virtue of his wealth and family history), “recovered” junkie and all around humorless nut-job Robert F. Kennedy jr, who has publicly professed that worms have eaten part of his brain, as Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.
As everyone who was paying any attention at all predicted would happen, Kennedy immediately launched a jihad against vaccinations, science, reason, compassion, decency, and humane sanity in general.
The attack on science currently underway by the Trump/Musk/Kennedy gang, if not reversed, soon, will make what Lysenko and Stalin did to science in the Soviet Union look like child’s play. Because the USian scientific research infrastructure is immeasurably bigger, more sophisticated, better run and and impactful than Stalin-era Soviet science was, which means that after the chainsaws that RFKjr, Musk et al are taking to it, it will be much harder to repair and rebuild than Soviet science was.
As the saying goes, it takes years to grow a tree but only a few minutes to cut it down. And the scientific infrastructure of the United States of America, one of humanity’s greatest achievements, is one huge sequoia of a tree. Sequoias take a long, long time to grow.
I don’t have room in the margins of this post to elaborate on this thesis here: that what we might call Kennedyism, or Musk-Tump-Kennedyism, is our Lysenkoism, and an existential threat not just to biomedical research, but to the entire scientific enterprise in the USA, and, ipso facto, to human civilization.
A walk in the woods
In 1998, when my variously impaired son Jake was ~13, I found myself chaperoning at a campground on the mainland where all of Martha’s 7th-grade kids had gone for a week of outdoor environmental education. The other chaperones were all 7th grade teachers.
We had a lot of free time while the students were at their lessons, and one day I found myself taking a long walk with Paul, a teacher of math at the West Tisbury school, whom I had just met.
As we circumnavigated a good-sized lake, I told him about the novel I was working on — my first. It was a thriller about an evil-genius Silicon Valley billionaire and would-be messiah and the cult of fanboy-geeks who venerate him. Over about two hours I told Paul the whole story. He was a good listener. He mentioned a book that he had recently completed, but I don’t remember much of what he said about it. I was doing most of the talking that day.
Eventually we came to a place in the woods where a tree had fallen over; it made a natural bench, so we sat down to take a rest. We had been sitting silently for five or ten minutes, listening to the birds singing and the wind in the trees, when there was a tremendously loud crashing a dozen yards away from us. A tree had fallen in the forrest, and, since we were there to hear it, it made a sound.
Paul and I looked at each other and got up without saying a word and walked back to the camp buildings.
That is how I met Paul Karasik, the genius who created the graphic-novel version of Paul Auster’s City of Glass that I read in Brooklyn, starting at the Grand Canyon restaurant on 7th Avenue in Park Slope, when I was locked out of my friend’s house, due to a funny sequence of events that I won’t be discussing.
To let it go or to figure out what you want to do about it, that is the question
A few days ago I sat at my desk with the intention of writing an essay about Lysenko and Robert F. Kennedy Jr, and the temptation to turn away from all the terrible and depressing developments since the election last November — the temptation to just say, ‘fuck it; this too shall pass’ and thereby absolve myself of any responsibility for taking any action.
But it was raining hard on the skylight above my desk and the wind was blowing, and once again, I found myself thinking of my years in the valley of the Senegal River during a time of famine, pestilence and drought. I thought about how I was one of the very few American citizens who actually has seen famine and knows what it’s like to be kept alive on a diet of USAID food; I thought of Trump, Musk and the Republicans’ heinous and unforgivable dismantling of USAID; I thought of the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of deaths that will result from their wanton nihilism, deaths that are happening right now as you’re reading this, and I felt a shiver at the thought of the ghost of Trofim Lysenko, as impervious to logic, as sure of himself as a person can be, embodied in the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services of the United States of America, and I found myself typing about the rain and wind.
Walking around Brooklyn last week, locked out of my friend’s house due to a funny, almost Rube-Goldbergian, sequence of events, I found myself thinking about the desire to be nowhere, to think of nothing; I found myself thinking of entanglement, and the really (to me, anyway) astounding development that Bishop Berkley’s insights, dismissed by so many philosophers as stuff and nonsense, are still relevant today. I thought about what I can or should be doing about preserving science in America in in the time of our new Lysenko.
Well, here’s a start: I’ve been invited to be a panelist at the Global Silicon Valley Conference to take place in May in San Jose.
Here’s the abstract:
Culture Drives Technology
This track delves into the dynamic interplay between cultural values and technological innovation, exploring how cultural needs, beliefs, and creative practices actively shape the development and adoption of new technologies. Key topics include the influence of art and storytelling on user-centric design, the role of tradition in tech adaptation across global markets, and the emergence of technologies that foster cultural preservation and social resilience. This track is essential for understanding technology not as an isolated driver of change but as an adaptive force deeply rooted in human experience and societal values. Thursday, May 8th at 2:30 PM
The theme here is ‘technology,’ not science, but of course those two things are deeply entangled.
Over the next weeks and months I’ll be posting SFIO! essays on the the state of science, open-mindedness, and honest inquiry in general. A couple of these essays are already drafted.
I’ll be talking and writing a lot about the function of art and storytelling in maintaining science and honest inquiry in the face of those who would dismantle them, the role of tradition in adaptation to technological change across the globe, and the emergence of technologies that foster cultural preservation and social resilience. I will be talking about science and technology not as isolated drivers of change but as an adaptive forces deeply rooted in human experience and societal values.
I hope you’ll join me.
Cheerio!
Postscript: A big announcement from Paul Karasik
Martha’s Vineyard is an island about 4 times the size of Manhattan with a year-round population of about 20,000. It has a very ‘small town’ feel, but even though Paul’s wife and my wife Betty are good friends, Paul’s and my paths have only crossed twice in the 30 years since we met.
Three days ago I ran into Paul Karasik at a memorial service. It sounds funny, I suppose, that I ran into a comic artist at a funeralish kind of affair, but these things happen. In our brief chat he let drop info about a new work of his, about which, more below.
After the service concluded, Betty & I drove to the post office in Vineyard Haven, where we get our mail. In our P.O. box I found this used copy of Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy: City of Glass, Ghosts, The Locked Room, which I had ordered from Thriftbooks.com as soon as I got home from Brooklyn.
That service was for Bob Moore, by the way, the much-beloved long-time leader of the Martha's Vineyard (public) Charter School, “MVPCS”, where Paul Karasik worked. Here's a Karasik comic tribute to Bob Moore, which was published in the Vineyard Gazette:
Three days ago Karasik told me about this new book, which I had no idea was in the works: The graphic novelization of the complete Auster NY Trilogy (that is, brand new graphic novels of Ghost and The Locked Room to complement the 1994 City of Glass, in a single volume)! He’s been working on this project for a long, long time.
From the Random House website:
Paul Karasik, the mastermind behind the three adaptations, art directed all three books. City of Glass is illustrated by the award-winning cartoonist David Mazzucchielli, the second volume, Ghosts, is illustrated by New Yorker cover artist, Lorenzo Mattotti, and The Locked Room is adapted and drawn by Karasik himself. These adaptations take Auster’s sophisticated wordplay and translate it into comicsplay: both highbrow and lowbrow and immensely fun reading.
This is something akin to a new staging of a Philip Glass opera by one of the world's premiere opera companies. The publication date is April 8, 2025, one week in the future as I post this. I can hardly wait.
Well, it was raining hard four days ago when I began to write this essay. Today the sky is blue, and the tops of the leafless oak trees that I see through the skylight (which really could stand a good washing) above the desk in my attic office are barely moving at all.
I love the way you write, John. I hadn't thought to connect RFK Jr and Lysenko, but I can't deny the link. (The more context I get, the worse the future looks. Snow Crash was a warning, not a manual, etc.)