The Real Me

I read a book in the late 70s that completely altered my experience of myself. It startled my sense of identity so dramatically that I have wondered since if such a thing as a self or a personhood exists in the realm of nature. I believe it does, or I probably wouldn't be writing this, but in a mode far more fictive and imaginary than I’d previously imagined.

The book is called The Lives of a Cell, Notes of a Biology Watcher, by Lewis Thomas, and has has been in my possession for 50 years. Thomas was an American physician and poet who became Dean of Yale Medical School and New York University School of Medicine and President of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute. He writes in a style that is both eminently accessible and highly engaging, scientific marvels seasoned with a gracious and dulcet touch. There’s a gentleness to the words, and a quiet lyricism, which makes them all the more an unlikely vehicle for mind-blowing epiphanies, but I would put it in a class with hallucinogenic substances such as peyote and psilocybin. It’s that transformative, that revelatory.

This is the paragraph that did it:

A good case can be made for our nonexistence as entities. We are not made up, as we had always supposed, of successively enriched packets of our own parts. We are shared, rented, occupied. At the interior of our cells, driving them, providing the oxidative energy that sends us out for the improvement of each shining day, are the mitochondria, and in a strict sense they are not ours. They turn out to be little separate creatures, the colonial posterity of migrant prokaryocytes, probably primitive bacteria that swam into ancestral precursors of our eukaryotic cells and stayed there. Ever since, they have maintained themselves and their ways, replicating in their own fashion, privately, with their own DNA and RNA quite different from ours. They are as much symbionts as the rhizobial bacteria in the roots of beans. Without them, we would not move a muscle, drum a finger, think a thought.

Who am I, then, the little homunculus in my brain gazing out at the world like Captain Kirk gazing at the screen on the deck of the Starship Enterprise, talking to a hostile alien emperor or Howard Stern or Buddha? The void. The voiceless void, which is the birthplace of us all. We come from nothingness and return to nothingness. Interesting thought. But is it me thinking this thought or the collectivity of cells that comprise the body I’m riding around in that is thinking this thought? In a word, yes. The human body contains around 50 to 100 trillion cells, and they have a lot to say: right now they’re busy writing these words, while simultaneously listening to “Where Is My Mind” by the Pixies, and feeling the warmth of a cat on my lap. A symposium of mitochondria, blood cells and osteocytes and myofibers and satellite cells and neurons creating my self-image, my self- esteem, my curations for the museum that is me, this carnival of neurochemicals, dopamine, GABA, histamine, serotonin and so on.

Most of cognition goes on in the brain, which is steeped in an electrical and chemical circus of neurons and glia. Neurons galore. Roughly 100 billion. These are the largest cells in the body and make up the nervous system. They’re busy little buggers. My nervous system is always busy. It always feels wonderful when it slows down and I can get a break from being myself. From everything, but mostly from me. Yours truly. This congregation of vapors and adipocytes and fibroblasts and fabrications and fingers and blisters and bone.  

It's weirdly reassuring to know I’m not a single entity but a multitude of entities. I feel less lonely. But when I am lonely, who is doing the loneliness? My cells are busy exchanging fluids between compartments and from place-to-place within the body, doing everything they can to keep me alive, keep me going, keep me erect, keep me vertical and dramaturgical.

I wonder if it’s possible, like some yoga master, to feel the cells teeming and vibrating the body, tingling in the mind like chimes. But when I say “in the mind,” what do I mean by mind? That energy in my head that busies itself like a rat in a hamster wheel creating narratives and fantasies and bouts with remorse?  Remorse doesn’t sound like something that a cell would bother with. So where does remorse come from? This is the trouble with empiricism. Its factual actualities make it literal and leaden. People in white lab coats peering into microscopes. Whose minds might be dancing crazily in their heads, witnessing mitochondria on a glass slide. Are cells familiar with inner and outer? They must be: they’re cells. What’s more inner and outer than a cell? The walls of these cells, however, don’t imprison: they emit signals into extracellular space.

Cell membranes are thin, flexible layers of lipids and proteins, with the fundamental structure being a phospholipid bilayer, amphipathic molecules made up of two fatty acid chains that are hydrophobic coupled with a phosphate-containing hydrophilic head group. A head group is an atom or group of atoms taking the place of another atom or group of atoms occupying a specific position in a molecule. Sounds like a typical worksite, people working together in a shared space, combining talents and skills to achieve a certain goal. I think of ants. I think of bees. I think of chorus lines and infantries and acting troupes. All this organizational effort to keep the cruise ship afloat, the cruise ship being me, with me (ostensibly) at the wheel.

It all makes so much sense. When I’m hungry, it’s not me creating the sensation of hunger. Nor is it me creating all the right digestive juices to extract protein and vitamins from the food I’ve chosen to eat. I didn’t invent my fingers. I didn’t invent my eyes. Or knees or mouth or feet. When I first entered this world there were people to take care of me, and growth hormones to help me evolve into a semi-autonomous being. Had the entire process been up to me I wouldn’t have made it. Nobody would. Cells do it all. We’re just along for the ride.

When I breathe, I’m not really doing the breathing; something is breathing me. And when – some years ago in my carefree and libidinous past – I’d be consumed with the urge to get intimate with another constellation of cells, it wasn’t me – that phantasmal homunculus in my skull who thinks he’s Leonard Bernstein conducting Mahler’s fifth - but a libidinal confluence of hormones – testosterone in particular - that made me dance like a puppet whose strings were manipulated by a propagative goddess named Aphrodite.

Or so I’d like to believe. It’s tempting and easy to blame those crazy behaviors on instinct, as if I’d been some primordial swamp creature like Shakespeare’s Caliban. But that would be a distortion. I did draw on a store of cortical resources that took the form of foresight and planning, scheming, plotting, coining witticisms and putting on a show. But a truck can’t move without diesel, and I had plenty of diesel in the form of gonadocorticoids and gonadal steroids to power my rig down the highway. Oftentimes, my expeditions were buffoonish and mad, but sometimes Cupid’s arrow hit its mark, and choruses of angels ascended to the heavens in song.

It's what cells do. They interrelate. They seek reciprocity. Give and take. Networking. Bonding. Forming connections. For the last 30 years I’ve been married to a woman of marvelous affinities, for which I give thanks; thanks to the orchestra of cells that provided the juice, the oomph, the elan vital, the instincts and intuitions necessary to commingle so wonderfully with another constellation of cells. What a communion of cells doesn’t explain is the uniqueness of such a rapport. At what point does the immaterial enter? The sublime. The transcendent. Are there neurochemicals for romance? In her essay “The Neuroendocrinology of Love,” Krishna G. Seshadri writes:

Love may be defined as an emergent property of an ancient cocktail of neuropeptides and neurotransmitters. It appears that lust, attachment and attraction appear to be distinct but intertwined processes in the brain each mediated by its own neurotransmitters and circuits. These circuits feed on and reinforce each other. Sexual craving is mediated by testosterone and oestrogen and has the amygdala as an important centre. Attraction is mediated by hormones of stress and reward including dopamine, norepinephrine cortisol and the serotinergic system and has the nucleus accumbens in the ventral tegmental area as key mediators.

This description disappoints because it’s so reductive. Love is bigger than hormones. This is where my epiphany bursts like a puffball mushroom, words adrift like spores in a forest understory. Cellular biology is only a part of the puzzle. There’s also a thing called hylozoism, the idea that all matter is living. Or pantheism, the idea that everything is God. It’s a boundless space where nothing is quantifiable or subject to systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, or the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses. In musical terms, it’s the intervals in a symphonic structure that give it life, the silences between the notes that create the music. It’s a breeze carrying and dispersing seeds. It’s a phenomenon of consciousness, where the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity dissolves. As Leibnitz said, evolution is involution. Sounds and silences. The neural interface between a cell and a soul.