Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [77]
“Hard to imagine the evolutionary history of that,” Frank noted. “A tendency to write things down?”
“Presumably it’s just a variant of hyperlogia,” Kenzo said, “which would explain Edgardo’s interest too.”
“Ha ha, but no that’s a different part of the brain. Talking is in Broca’s and Wernicke’s, hypergraphia is in the epilepsy region, and it actually creates a kind of style. There is a suite of stylistic habits that can be abstracted and quantified by computer to make the diagnosis. Of course sheer mass of output is still the first clue, and it must have been useful to several very prolific novelists, this is a nice match of problem and solution. But even with the hypergraphic greats like Balzac or Dick it seems to have been as much a pain as a benefit, like a kind of priapism, but what I noticed immediately is that these stylistic tics common to hypergraphics are all evident in both the Book of Mormon and the writings of Mary Baker Eddy, and then of course the Quran, and I thought, of course, all these prophets, writing down the truth at great length—and the religious center of the brain is also tightly bound with the epilepsy center! It’s all one complex! So these scribbling prophets were all suffering from a form of epilepsy, they wrote under the spell of a convulsion.”
“Mohammed dictated the Quran.”
“Is that right? Well, maybe hyperlogia is also implicated.”
“How many religions do you think you could offend at once with this book?”
“I would think many, but that would not be the point. Explanation of our behavior is the point. Besides humanism too could be included here. Sartre was clearly hypergraphic, especially when he used amphetamines.”
“You’re going to have quite a tour promoting this one!” Kenzo said.
On other lunchtimes Frank went out and ate with Anna and Drepung at the Food Factory. Drepung would come in with the latest from the embassy, shaking his head as he ate. Every week it seemed clearer that they had lost Khembalung for good. Salvage plans had replaced restoration in his talk.
“Did you have any flood insurance?” Anna asked.
“No. I don’t think anyone would underwrite it.”
“So what will you do?”
Drepung shrugged. “Not sure yet.”
“Ouch,” Anna said.
“I do not mind it. It seems to be good for people. It wakes them up.”
Frank nodded at this, but Anna only looked distressed. She said, “But you’re making arrangements?”
“Yes, of course. Such freedom from habit cannot last, people would go mad.” He glanced at Frank and laughed; Frank felt his face get hot. “We’re talking with the Dalai Lama, of course, and the Indian government. Probably they would give us another island in the Sundarbans.”
“But then it will only happen again,” Frank pointed out.
“Yes, it seems likely.”
“You need to get to higher ground.”
“Yes.”
“Back to the Himalayas,” Anna suggested.
“We will see. For now, Washington, D.C.”
“Go higher than that for God’s sake!”
Sometimes Drepung would leave on errands and Frank and Anna would order another coffee and talk a few minutes more before taking the coffees back up to work. They shared their news in a desultory fashion. Anna’s was usually about Charlie and the boys, Frank’s about something he had done or seen around the city. Anna laughed at the discrepancy between their tales: “Things are still happening to you.”
Frank rolled his eyes at this. For a while they talked in a different way than they usually did, about how things felt; and they agreed that lives were not easily told to others. Frank speculated that many life stories consisted precisely of a search for a reiterated pattern, for habits. Thus, one’s set of habits was somehow unsatisfactory, and you needed to change them, and were thereby thrown into a plot, which was the hunt for new habits, or even, but exceptionally, the story of the giving up of such a hunt in favor of sticking with what you have, or remaining chaotically in the existential moment (not adaptive if reproductive success were the goal, he