shock the leaning trees, the smallest storms inside my brain releasing … Mind’s a perilous place, it knows how each horizon crumbles.)
“And there shall be signs in the sun and moon and stars, and upon the earth there shall be distress of nations in perplexity at the roar of the sea and rolling waves …”
“O Lord, increase my perplexity concerning Thee!” wrote Ibn ‘Arabi in the thirteenth century.
He wanted to be guided by bewilderment.
There’s another prayer: Let me be undone, unsewn, disrupted.
For perplexity disables the will, disables tyranny.
Ibn ‘Arabi retells the story of Noah. Only those who refuse the ark are truly holy. Having turned their backs on the ark’s rigid structure, they choose to die instead in the vast waters, the multiplicity that perplexes (as God perplexes): They drown “ecstatically in the wider seas.”
“Perplexity lifts the servant out of his servanthood, causes everything to shimmer and change.”
To be perplexed is to wander truly and well. There’s no single destination to arrive at.
(And yet sometimes I wish for a clear answer, a something that consoles the mind. Maybe the sea can console, how it’s not one single thing but wave upon wave building and dissolving, the way a face wanders through itself all of its life, the quiet deluge of it streaming. Still, some nights when I can’t sleep, or days I think of you, or days I’m frightened by my thoughts, the needled wings inside my fingers, my heart…)
Augustine ended his Confessions with a puzzle: the last word he chose, aperietur, meaning “will be” or “shall be opened.”
Those who later transcribed his text altered its ending to “amen,” as if to shut that perplexing door he had left open.
Disquietude. Perplexity. The words: “perhaps,” “will be,” and “shall be opened.” Endless space …
(Some nights I dream I’m in the sea. Cold slits of light ride miles of viscous black. The water’s full of doors opening and shutting, soft fins or lungs that somehow function underwater. The burlap sack I wear, stitched with every letter of the alphabet, bulges out from my body then flaps back then bulges out again as the letters begin to disintegrate and then drift off, drift away, until I’m alone and drowned but still breathing among the many scattered letters, each gash and sway of them traveling far from the built systems, the built world …)
Notes on Dr. Joseph Vacanti and
Dr. Robert Langer
Dr. Joseph Vacanti directs the Tissue Engineering and Organ Fabrication Laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is also a professor at Harvard Medical School.
Dr. Langer is a professor at MIT. He’s known for his “highly profitable engineering successes,” blurring the lines between engineering and medicine. He won the 1998 Lemelson-MIT Prize, at $500,000 the largest single cash prize for invention in the United States.
They are considered the “fathers of the field of tissue engineering.”
In their lab, they have grown a human ear on the back of a hairless mouse.
(That hunchback, that winged creature in a cage … four-footed, unable to see itself or know, as I didn’t know.)
Specially bred to lack an immune system that might reject human tissue, the mouse nourishes the ear, which is composed of human cartilage cells distributed throughout a scaffolding of porous, biodegradable polyester.
(And if a mind could be bred not to reject?)
(Yet how it breeds desolation even as it thinks this—)
When the ear has fully grown it’s removed from the mouse and transplanted in a human host.
The cells re-create their proper functions, blood vessels attach to new tissue, and the scaffold melts away.
(But there’s that shadow-sense of how it came to get its shape, its beginnings in a cage.)
They have not yet been able to grow human nerve tissue.
They hold many patents. Dr. Langer alone holds over three hundred licensed to over eighty companies.
Their patents include No. 5,759,8305770,193, and No. 5,770,417 These are available for viewing online from the Patent and Trademark Office, Washington, D.C.
Advanced Tissue Sciences, a biotech company in La Jolla, California, has licensed these patents and is preparing clinical trials.
(But what profit was there for you who made me?)
In an interview Dr. Langer mentions a possible collaboration with MIT’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences to control the weather. His only criterion for a project, he says, is that it be done in a reasonable amount of time and have a reasonable impact.
(Reason is a fragile wing. I feel such perplexity when I try to reach and catch it.)
He and Dr. Vacanti met in the mid-1970s as young researchers in the lab of Dr. M.