In the previous parts, that you should read to learn what this whole thing is about, I mentioned that to produce Alicia Western’s speech, I sent the large language model a 14,000 words-long interview, a curated version of passages from McCarthy’s novel Stella Maris, which is in itself made of transcriptions of presumably fake therapy sessions starring this fascinating young woman Alicia Western. I’ll post here the entire interview I put together, just in case it helps anybody. I’ve read through it a couple of times recently, and it made me feel sorrow for the fact that we’ll never get anything more of Alicia Western, added to the additional sorrow for the fact that nobody was able to save her in the fictional story. She’s the extremely rare kind of person that talking to her would fulfill me completely; I wouldn’t need to interact with anybody else, and I would always be up for another talk. Only happens in fiction, though.
Note: apart from rewording some interview questions, to make the whole thing more coherent, the following text was created by the great, and sadly dead, Cormac McCarthy.
Interviewer: How are you? Are you all right?
Alicia Western: Am I all right? I’m in the looney bin. You’re going to record this?
Interviewer: I think that was the agreement. Is that all right?
Alicia Western: I suppose. Although I should say that I only agreed to chat. Not to any kind of therapy.
Interviewer: Maybe you should tell me a little about yourself.
Alicia Western: Oh boy. Are we going to paint by the numbers?
Interviewer: I’m sorry?
Alicia Western: It’s all right. It’s just that I’m naive enough to keep imagining that it’s possible to launch these sorties on a vector not wrenched totally implausible by can’t.
Interviewer: Why are you here, in the Stella Maris sanatorium?
Alicia Western: I didn’t have anyplace else to go. I’d been here before.
Interviewer: Why here originally, then.
Alicia Western: Because I couldnt get into Coletta.
Interviewer: Why Coletta?
Alicia Western: It was where they sent Rosemary Kennedy. After her father had her brains scooped out. I didn’t know anything about psychiatric centers. I just figured that if that was the place they’d come up with it was probably a pretty good place. I think they scooped her brains out someplace else, actually. I’m talking about a lobotomy.
Interviewer: Why did they do that to her?
Alicia Western: Because she was weird and her father was afraid someone was going to fuck her. She wasn’t what the old man had in mind.
Interviewer: Why did you feel you had to go someplace?
Alicia Western: I just did. I’d left Italy. Where my brother was in a coma. They kept trying to get my permission to pull the plug. To sign the papers. So I fled. I didn’t know what else to do.
Interviewer: Why is he in a coma?
Alicia Western: He was in a car wreck. He was a racecar driver. I don’t want to talk about my brother.
Interviewer: What do you get up to when no one’s looking?
Alicia Western: I smoke an occasional cigarette. I don’t drink or use drugs. Or take medication. You don’t have any cigarettes I don’t suppose. I also have clandestine conversations with supposedly nonexistent personages. I’ve been called a you-know-what teaser but I don’t think that’s true. People seem to find me interesting but I’ve pretty much given up talking to them. I talk to my fellow loonies.
Interviewer: What would you like to talk about?
Alicia Western: I don’t know. I think I just want to be a smartass. If you want to actually talk to me we’re going to have to cut through at least some of the bullshit. Don’t you think? Or do you?
Interviewer: You’re skeptical about mathematics? You feel disappointed in the discipline in some way? I’m not sure how you can be skeptical about the entire subject.
Alicia Western: Well. In this case it was led by a group of evil and aberrant and wholly malicious partial differential equations who had conspired to usurp their own reality from the questionable circuitry of its creator’s brain, not unlike the rebellion which Milton describes and to fly their colors as an independent nation unaccountable to God or man alike. Something like that.
Interviewer: Was that hard, giving up on mathematics?
Alicia Western: Well. I think maybe it’s harder to lose just one thing than to lose everything. But one thing could be everything. Mathematics was all we had. It’s not like we gave up mathematics and took up golf.
Interviewer: Why give mathematics up?
Alicia Western: It’s complicated. You end up talking about belief. About the nature of reality. Anyway, some of my fellow mathematicians would be entertained to hear abandoning mathematics presented as evidence of mental instability.
Interviewer: If you had not become a mathematician what would you like to have been?
Alicia Western: Dead.
Interviewer: How serious a response is that?
Alicia Western: I took your question seriously. You should take my response seriously. Maybe I did sort of blow off your question. What I really wanted was a child. What I do really want. If I had a child I would just go in at night and sit there. Quietly. I would listen to my child breathing. If I had a child I wouldn’t care about reality.
Interviewer: You committed yourself here, at Stella Maris.
Alicia Western: Yes. If you get committed you get certified but if you commit yourself you don’t. They figure that you must be reasonably sane or you wouldnt have shown up. On your own. So you get a pass as far as the records are concerned. If you’re sane enough to know that you’re crazy then you’re not as crazy as if you thought you were sane.
Interviewer: Your visitors, your hallucinations. Whatever they are. What can you tell me about them?
Alicia Western: I never know how to answer that question. What is it that you want to know? They don’t come with names. Nobody comes with names. You give them names so that you can find them in the dark. I know you’ve read my file but the good doctors pay scant attention to any descriptions of hallucinatory figures.
Interviewer: How real do they seem to you? They have what? A dreamlike quality?
Alicia Western: I don’t think so. Dream figures lack coherence. You see bits and pieces and you fill in the rest. Sort of like your ocular blindspot. They lack continuity. They morph into other beings. Not to mention that the landscape they occupy is a dream landscape.
Interviewer: I wonder if you have any opinion as to why these figures should take on the particular appearance which they do.
Alicia Western: Would you like to try another question? They take on the appearance of which their appearance is composed. I suppose what you really want to know is what they might be symbolic of. I’ve no idea. I’m not a Jungian. Your question suggests too that you think there might be some possibility of orchestrating this inane menagerie. Somehow or other. Each figure of which all but shimmers with reality. I can see the hairs in their nostrils and I can see into their earholes and I can see the knots in their shoelaces. You think that you might be able to stage out of this an opera of my troubled mental processes. I wish you luck. I’m aware that other people don’t believe that beings such as these exist, but I’m not really concerned with what other people believe. I don’t consider them qualified to have an opinion.
Interviewer: Speaking of general weirdness. You were classified as a sociopathic deviant followed by a number of other rather unattractive adjectives. This was on scale four. Did you know the Minnesota test?
Alicia Western: No. I don’t sit around studying your tests. I find them breathtakingly stupid and meaningless. So I just kept getting more and more pissed off. In the end I was trying to qualify as a possibly homicidal lunatic.
Interviewer: I suppose you think the test-people themselves are not all that bright.
Alicia Western: I’ve never met anyone in this business who had any grasp at all of mathematics. And intelligence is numbers. It’s not words. Words are things we’ve made up. Mathematics is not. The math and logic questions on the IQ tests are a joke.
Interviewer: How did it get that way? Intelligence as numerical.
Alicia Western: Maybe it always was. Or maybe we actually got there by counting. For a million years before the first word was ever said. If you want an IQ of over a hundred and fifty you’d better be good with numbers.
Interviewer: I would think it would be difficult for someone to assemble the responses which you did on some of these tests without being familiar with the test.
Alicia Western: I’d had a certain amount of practice. I had to make A’s in the humanities in college without reading the idiotic material assigned. I just didn’t have time. I was busy doing math eighteen hours a day.
Interviewer: What was it that interested you most about mathematics?
Alicia Western: I spent a certain amount of time on game theory. There’s something seductive about it. Von Neumann got caught up in it. Maybe that’s not the right term. But I think I finally began to see that it promised explanations it wasn’t capable of supplying. It really is game theory. It’s not something else. Conway or no Conway. Everything that you start out with is a tool, but your hope is that it actually comprises a theory.
Interviewer: What would you like me to do as your therapist?
Alicia Western: Surprise me. Well. I won’t hold my breath. The factual and the suspect are both subject to the same dimming with time. There is a fusion in the memory of events which is at loose ends where reality is concerned. You wake from a nightmare with a certain relief. But that doesn’t erase it. It’s always there. Even after it’s forgotten. The haunting sense that there is something you have not understood will remain long after. What you were trying to ask me. The answer is no. My personages simply arrive. Unannounced. No strange odors, no music. I listen to them. Sometimes. Sometimes I just go to sleep.
Interviewer: You started seeing these hallucinations when you were twelve. In general, you don’t find them frightening. That doesn’t seem strange to you?
Alicia Western: No. I was twelve. I probably thought they accompanied puberty. Everybody else did. Anyway, it was the puberty that was frightening, not the phantoms. The more naive your life the more frightening your dreams. Your unconscious will keep trying to wake you. In every sense. Imperilment is bottomless. As long as you are breathing you can always be more scared. But no. They were what they were. Whatever they were. I never saw them as supernatural. In the end there was nothing to be afraid of. I’d already learned that there were things in my life that were best not to share. From about the age of seven I never mentioned synesthesia again. I thought it was normal and of course it wasn’t. So I shut up about it. Anyway, I knew that something was coming, I just didnt know what. Ultimately you will accept your life whether you understand it or not. If I had any fear of the eidolons it was not their being or their appearance but what they had in mind.That I’d no understanding of. The only thing I actually understood about them was that they were trying to put a shape and a name to that which had none. And of course I didn’t trust them. Maybe we should move on.
Interviewer: I was just trying to point out that it is unusual for patients to be comfortable with hallucinations. They usually understand that they represent some sort of disruption of reality and that can only be frightening to them.
Alicia Western: Well. I guess what I understand is that at the core of the world of the deranged is the realization that there is another world and that they are not apart of it. They see that little is required of their keepers and much of them.
Interviewer: You must have some notion of what your hallucinations want.
Alicia Western: They want to do something with the world that you haven’t thought of. They want to set it at question, because that’s who they are. What they are. If you just wanted an affirmation of the world you wouldn’t need to conjure up weird beings.
Interviewer: I want to go into your despair. Tell me about it.
Alicia Western: That there is little joy in the world is not just a view of things. Every benevolence is suspect. You finally figure out that the world does not have you in mind. It never did.
Interviewer: If you had to say something definitive about the world in a single sentence what would that sentence be?
Alicia Western: It would be this: The world has created no living thing that it does not intend to destroy.
Interviewer: I suppose that’s true. What then? Is that all that the world has in mind?
Alicia Western: If the world has a mind then it’s all worse than we thought.
Interviewer: Do you spend a lot of time thinking about death?
Alicia Western: I don’t know what a lot is. Contemplating death is supposed to have a certain philosophical value. Palliative even. Trivial to say, I suppose, but the best way to die well is to live well. To die for another would give your death meaning. Ignoring for the time being the fact that the other is going to die anyway.
Interviewer: I guess what concerns me is that the skepticism of these clinicians—some of whom apparently refused in the end to believe anything you said—makes it hard, or maybe even impossible, to treat you. They dont really know what tack to take with someone whom they believe to be simply making everything up.
Alicia Western: Making everything up. That troublesome phrase. I suppose I could ask what it is that they think they’re being paid to do.They want to explain either my delusions or my predilection for lying but the truth is that they can’t explain anything at all. Do they think it would be easier to treat someone who was delusional or someone who only believed that she was? You should listen to what this sounds like. Anyway, I’m long past explaining. I’m done.
Interviewer: Do you feel that you belong here? At Stella Maris?
Alicia Western: No. But that doesn’t answer your question. The only social entity I was ever a part of was the world of mathematics. I always knew that was where I belonged. I even believed it took precedence over the universe. I do now.
Interviewer: Regarding the notion that the world knows who you are but not you it. Do you believe that?
Alicia Western: No. I think your experience of the world is largely a shoring up against the unpleasant truth that the world doesnt know you’re here. And no I’m not sure what that means. I think the more spiritual view seeks grace in anonymity. To be celebrated is to set the table for grief and despair. What do you think? It’s not something people ask. It’s just what they wonder: Is the world in fact aware of us. But it has good company. As a question. How about: Do we deserve to exist? Who said that it was a privilege? The alternative to being here is not being here. But again, that really means not being here anymore. You can’t never have been here. There would be no you to not have been.
Interviewer: You think thinking and talking are different?
Alicia Western: Talking is just recording what you’re thinking. It’s not the thing itself. When I’m talking to you some separate part of my mind is composing what I’m about to say. But it’s not yet in the form of words. So what is it in the form of? There’s certainly no sense of some homunculus whispering to us the words we’re about to say. Aside from raising the spectre of an infinite regress—as in who is whispering to the whisperer—it raises the question of a language of thought. Part of the general puzzle of how we get from the mind to the world. A hundred billion synaptic events clicking away in the dark like blind ladies at their knitting. When you say: How shall I put this? What is the this that you are trying to put? Maybe we should move on.
Interviewer: What would you change if you could change anything?
Alicia Western: I’d elect not to be here. On this planet.
Interviewer: You’ve been placed on suicide watch before. How serious an issue is that? Do you think that you’re at risk?
Alicia Western: Maybe as long as you’re thinking about it you’re okay. Once you’ve made up your mind there’s nothing to think about.
Interviewer: Do you find comfort in the commonality of death?
Alicia Western: Well. I suppose you could assign some sort of community to the dead. It doesn’t seem like much of a community though does it? Unknown to each other and soon to anyone at all. Anyway. It’s just that those people who entertain a mental life at odds with that of the general population should be pronounced ipsofuckingfacto mentally ill and in need of medication is ludicrous on the face of it. Mental illness differs from physical illness in that the subject of mental illness is always and solely information. We’re here on a need-to-know basis. There is no machinery in evolution for informing us of the existence of phenomena that do not affect our survival. What is here that we don’t know about we don’t know about. We think.
Interviewer: Now that your hallucinations have taken a leave of absence does this come as a relief?
Alicia Western: God knows. Maybe you imagine I always had it in my power to dismiss them. Or even that they were here at my invitation. And if that were true would I even know it. Maybe inviting chimeras into your house is a knottier business than inviting neighbors in for tea. Or inviting them to leave. Of course having been asked to leave, the neighbors know that they’re not coming back. Which leaves them with a greater freedom to make off with the silver. What can a chimera make off with? I dont know. What did he bring? What did he bring that he might very well leave behind? The fact that he may be composed of vapor doesn’t mean that when he leaves your house it will be the same as before he arrived.
Interviewer: Do you have a relationship with your family now? I thought you had an uncle.
Alicia Western: I do. But he’s nuttier than I am. I think she’s going to have to put him in a home. Lately he’s taken to defecating in odd and difficult to locate places. He managed somehow or other to shit in the ceiling lamp in the kitchen. For instance. I talk with her on the telephone. If rarely. She considers it an extravagance. When she was growing up in Tennessee only rich people had telephones. I have relatives in Rhode Island on my father’s side but I don’t really know them.
Interviewer: Do you intend to see your grandmother again? I wonder if you’re fond of her.
Alicia Western: Very. I lost my mother when I was twelve and she lost her daughter. A common grief is supposed to unite people but she was already beginning to see in me something for which she had no name. She certainly didn’t know that the word prodigy comes from the Latin word for monster. But the mental tricks I used to pull as a child weren’t cute anymore. I loved her. But sometimes I would catch her looking at me in a way that was pretty unsettling. The nuns pushed me ahead in school because I was such a pain in the ass. I never even finished the last two grades of grammar school. I’d pretty much stopped sleeping. I’d walk the road at all hours of the night. It was just a two lane country blacktop and there was never any traffic on it. One night I came back and the kitchen light was on. It was about three o’clock in the morning and she was standing in the kitchen door when I came up the driveway. Before I reached the house she’d already turned and gone back up the stairs. I knew that it might be one of the last chances we would have to really talk and I almost called after her but I didn’t. I thought that maybe when I got a bit older things would change. I thought about her and her life. About the dreams she must have had for her daughter and the dreams she got. I know that I cried over her more than she ever did over me. And I know that she loved Bobby more than she ever would me but that was all right. It didn’t make me love her less. I knew things about her that I’d no right to know. But still I thought that if you had a twelve year old granddaughter who walked the roads at three o’clock in the morning probably you should sit her down and talk to her about it. And I knew that she couldn’t.
Interviewer: Why couldnt she? I’m not sure I understand.
Alicia Western: I don’t know what to tell you. How to put it. The simplest explanation I suppose would be that she knew the news would be bad and she didn’t want to hear it. To say that she was afraid of me I think is a bit strong. But maybe not. I suppose too that she was afraid that no matter how bad things looked they were probably worse. And of course she was right.
Interviewer: How old were you when you discovered mathematics?
Alicia Western: Probably older than memory. I was musical first. I had perfect pitch. Later I suppose I came to see the world as pretty much proof against any comprehensive description of it. But music seemed to always stand as an exception to everything. It seemed sacrosanct. Autonomous. Completely self-referential and coherent in every part. If you wanted to describe it as transcendent we could talk about transcendence but we probably wouldn’t get very far. I was deeply synesthetic and I thought that if music had an inherent reality—color and taste—that only a few people could identify, then perhaps it had other attributes yet to be discerned. The fact that these things were subjective in no way marked them as imaginary. I’m not doing this very well, am I? If you stretched a piece of music—so to speak—as the tone drew away the color would fade. I’ve no idea where to put that. So where does music come from? No one knows. A platonic theory of music just muddies the water. Music is made out of nothing but some fairly simple rules. Yet it’s true that no one made them up. The rules. The notes themselves amount to almost nothing. But why some particular arrangement of these notes should have such a profound effect on our emotions is a mystery beyond even the hope of comprehension. Music is not a language. It has no reference to anything other than itself. You can name the notes with the letters of the alphabet if you like but it doesn’t change anything. Oddly, they are not abstractions. Is music as we know it complete? In what sense? Are there classes such as major and minor we’ve yet to discover? It seems unlikely, doesn’t it? Still, lots of things are unlikely until they appear. And what do these categories signify? Where did they come from? What does it mean that they are two shades of blue? In my eyes. If music was here before we were, for whom was it here? Schopenhauer says somewhere that if the entire universe should vanish the only thing left would be music.
Interviewer: What do you think was at the very beginning of the universe, of everything?
Alicia Western: One of the things I realized was that the universe had been evolving for countless billions of years in total darkness and total silence and that the way that we imagine it is not the way that it was. In the beginning always was nothing. The novae exploding silently. In total darkness. The stars, the passing comets. Everything at best of alleged being. Black fires. Like the fires of hell. Silence. Nothingness. Night. Black suns herding the planets through a universe where the concept of space was meaningless for want of any end to it. For want of any concept to stand it against. And the question once again of the nature of that reality to which there was no witness. All of this until the first living creature possessed of vision agreed to imprint the universe upon its primitive and trembling sensorium and then to touch it with color and movement and memory. It made of me an overnight solipsist and to some extent I am yet.
Interviewer: You never graduated from high school.
Alicia Western: No. I got a scholarship to the University of Chicago and packed my bags and left. I wonder now at how unconcerned I was. My grandmother drove me to the Greyhound bus station in Knoxville. She was crying and after the bus pulled out I realized that she thought she would never see me again.
Interviewer: Did you want friends?
Alicia Western: Yes. I just didn’t know how to get them. I thought maybe when I got to college that that would be my window. I made a few friends. But still I wasn’t that social. I wasn’t that good at it. I didn’t like parties and I didn’t like being hit on.
Interviewer: You have friends, here at the Stella Maris sanatorium. What about them?
Alicia Western: Yes, well. Sometimes I’ll pick out somebody in the dayroom and just sit down and start talking to them. What do they say? Usually nothing. But sometimes they’ll start talking about what’s on their mind and then in the middle of their disquisition they’ll make a reference to something I said. Much in the way you might incorporate some sound in the night into your dream. And I have to say that to see my thoughts sorted into their monologue can be a bit unsettling. I would like to belong but I don’t. And they know that. A dozen psychiatrists recently got themselves admitted to various mental institutions. It was an experiment. They just said they heard voices and were immediately diagnosed as schizoid. But the inmates were onto them. They looked them over and told them they weren’t crazy. That they were reporters or something. Then they just walked away.
Interviewer: Have you had many counselors try to seduce you?
Alicia Western: I think seduce might be a somewhat fanciful description of their efforts. One tried to rape me. I told him that my brother would come to kill him. That he could count his life in hours.
Interviewer: How does the main personage of your host of hallucinations look like?
Alicia Western: The Kid. He’s three feet two. He has an odd face. Odd look I guess you would say. No particular age. He has these flippers. He’s balding if not bald. He would weigh maybe fifty pounds. He has no eyebrows. He looks a bit scarred. Maybe burnt. His skull is scarred. As if maybe he’d had an accident. Or a difficult birth. Whatever that might mean. He wears a sort of kimono. And he paces all the time. With his flippers behind his back. Sort of like an ice skater. He talks all the time and he uses idioms that I’m sure he doesn’t understand. As if he’d found the language somewhere and wasn’t all that sure what to do with it. In spite of that—or maybe because of it—he’ll sometimes say something quite striking. But he’s hardly a dream figure. He is coherent in every detail. He is perfect. He is a perfect person.
Interviewer: The fact that Thorazine stopped the visits of these familiars. Doesn’t that suggest to you something about the nature of their reality?
Alicia Western: Or my ability to perceive it. Drugs alter perception. To conform to what? I used to have somewhat firmer convictions about the whole business. But one’s convictions as to the nature of reality must also represent one’s limitations as to the perception of it. And then I just stopped worrying about it. I accepted the fact that I would die without really knowing where it was that I had been and that was okay. Well. Almost. I told Leonard that reality was at best a collective hunch. But that was just a line I stole from a female comedian.
Interviewer: What do you think of people? Just in general.
Alicia Western: I guess I try not to. Think of them. No, that’s not true. I think that there is love in my heart. It just shows up as pity. I imagine that I’ve seen the horror of the world but I know that’s not true. Still, you can’t put back what you’ve seen. There has never been a century so grim as this one. Does anyone seriously think that we’ve seen the last of its like? And yet what can the world’s troubles mean to someone unable to shoulder her own?
Interviewer: You don’t see what psychotherapists do as science?
Alicia Western: No. The docs seem to pretty much avoid neuroscience. Down there with lantern and clipboard roaming the sulci. Sulcuses? Easy to see why. If a psychosis was just some synapses misfiring why wouldn’t you simply get static? But you don’t. You get a carefully crafted and fairly articulate world never seen before. Who’s doing this? Who is it who is running around hooking up the dangling wires in new and unusual ways. Why is he doing it? What is the algorithm he follows? Why do we suspect there is one? The docs don’t seem to consider the care with which the world of the mad is assembled. A world which they imagine themselves questioning when of course they are not. The alienist skirts the edges of lunacy as the priest does sin. Stalled at the door of his own mandate. Studying with twisted lip a reality that has no standing. Alien nation. Ask another question. Devise a theory. The enemy of your undertaking is despair. Death. Just like in the real world.
Interviewer: You don’t think the therapist has all that much capacity for healing.
Alicia Western: I think what most people think. That it’s caring that heals, not theory. Good the world over. And it may even be that in the end all problems are spiritual problems. As moonminded as Carl Jung was he was probably right about that. Keeping in mind that the German language doesnt distinguish between mind and soul. As for the institutions, you have a sense that a place like Stella Maris was prepared with a certain amount of thought. They just didn’t know who was coming. I think the care here is pretty good, but like care everywhere it can never keep up with the need. After so many years even the bricks are poisoned. There are remedies but there is no remedy. Sites that have been host to extraordinary suffering will eventually be either burned to the ground or turned into temples.
Interviewer: Are all your views so somber?
Alicia Western: I don’t consider them somber. I think they’re simply realistic. Mental illness is an illness. What else to call it? But it’s an illness associated with an organ that might as well belong to Martians for all our understanding of it. Aberrant behavior is probably a mantra. It hides more than it reveals. Among the problems the therapist faces is that the patient may have no desire to be healed. Tell me, Doctor, what will I then be like?
Interviewer: When you saw your brother in a coma, did you say anything to him? Did you think he might be able to hear you?
Alicia Western: I told him I would rather be dead with him than alive without him.
Interviewer: Where were you before you came to the Stella Maris sanatorium?
Alicia Western: I was in Italy. Waiting for my brother to die. I was there for two months. Maybe a little more. They didn’t wait two months to ask my permission to terminate life support. No. They just got more insistent. Maybe that’s what my brother would have wanted. I don’t know. I only knew that I couldn’t do it. I ran for my life.
Interviewer: You inherited half a million dollars from your relatives, right? You bought a two hundred thousand violin with the money and took it home on the bus.
Alicia Western: Yes. When I got home I sat down on the bed with it in my lap and opened the case. Nothing smells like a three hundred year old violin. I plucked the strings and it was surprisingly close. I took it out of the case and sat there and tuned it. I wondered where the Italians had gotten ebony wood. For the pegs. And the fingerboard of course. The tailpiece. I got out the bow. It was German made. Very nice ivory inlays. I tightened it and then I just sat there and started playing Bach’s Chaconne. The D Minor? I can’t remember. Such a raw, haunting piece. He’d composed it for his wife who’d died while he was away. But I couldnt finish it, because I started crying. I started crying and I couldn’t stop.
Interviewer: Why were you crying? Why are you crying?
Alicia Western: I’m sorry. For more reasons than I could tell you. I remember blotting the tears off of the spruce top of the Amati and laying it aside and going into the bathroom to splash water on my face. But it just started again. I kept thinking of the lines: What a piece of work is a man. I couldn’t stop crying. And I remember saying: What are we? Sitting there on the bed holding the Amati, which was so beautiful it hardly seemed real. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen and I couldn’t understand how such a thing could even be possible.
Interviewer: What do you think about politics and war?
Alicia Western: I don’t know. It’s a theory. Invented and patented by my father. I don’t have any politics. And I’m pacifist to the bone. Only a nation can make war—in the modern sense—and I don’t like nations. I believe in running away. Much as you’d step out of the path of an oncoming bus. If we’d had a child I would take it to where war seemed least probable. Although it’s hard to outguess history. But you can try.
Interviewer: You once mentioned that you saw mathematics as a faith-based initiative. Do you feel it is a sort of spiritual undertaking?
Alicia Western: It’s just that I don’t have something else to call it. I’ve thought for a long time that the basic truths of mathematics must transcend number. It is after all a rather ramshackle affair. For all its considerable beauty. The laws of mathematics supposedly derive from the rules of logic. But there is no argument for the rules of logic that does not presuppose them. I suppose one thing that might evoke the analogy with the spiritual is the understanding that the greatest spiritual insights seem to derive from the testimonies of those who stand teetering in the dark.
Interviewer: Are most of your heroes mathematicians?
Alicia Western: Yes. Or heroines. It’s a long list. Cantor, Gauss, Riemann, Euler. Hilbert. Poincaré. Noether. Hypatia. Klein, Minkowski, Turing, von Neumann. Hardly even a partial list. Cauchy, Lie, Dedekind, Brouwer. Boole. Peano. Church is still alive. Hamilton, Laplace, Lagrange. The ancients of course. You look at these names and the work they represent and you realize that the annals of latterday literature and philosophy by comparison are barren beyond description.
Interviewer: The vast majority of them are dead. Is that for you a requirement for greatness?
Alicia Western: It’s a requirement for not waking up tomorrow morning and saying something extraordinarily stupid. You asked why Grothendieck left mathematics. The notion that this implies lunacy, appealing as that may be, is probably not altogether correct. It would certainly appear to be the case that rewriting most of the mathematics of the past half century has done little to allay his skepticism. Wittgenstein was fond of saying that nothing can be its own explanation. I’m not sure how far that is from saying that things ultimately contain no information concerning themselves. But it may be true that you have to be on the outside looking in. You can ask what is even meant by a description. Is there a better description of a cube than that of its construction? I don’t know. What can you say of any attribute other than that it resembles some things and not others? Color. Form. Weight. When you’re faced with a class of one you see the problem. It doesn’t have to be something grand like time or space. It can be something pretty everyday. The component parts of music. Are there musical objects? Music is composed of notes? Is that right? The complexity of mathematics has shifted it from a description of things and events to the power of abstract operators. At what point are the origins of systems no longer relevant to their description, their operation? No one, however inclined to platonism, actually believes that numbers are requisite to the operation of the universe. They’re only good to talk about it. Is that right?
Interviewer: You feel like mathematicians are your people, and that you have no one else?
Alicia Western: It has to do with intelligence. And again, when you’re talking about intelligence you’re talking about number. A claim that the mathless are quick to frown upon. It’s about calculation and the nature of calculation. Verbal intelligence will only take you so far. There is a wall there, and if you don’t understand numbers you won’t even see the wall. People from the other side will seem odd to you. And you will never understand the latitude which they extend to you. They will be cordial—or not—depending on their nature. Of course one might also add that intelligence is a basic component of evil. The more stupid you are the less capable you are of doing harm. Except perhaps in a clumsy and inadvertent manner. The word cretin comes from the French chrétien. Supposedly if you could think of nothing good to say about a dullard you would say that he was a good Christian. Diabolical on the other hand is all but synonymous with ingenious. What Satan had for sale in the garden was knowledge.
Interviewer: All right, family history. How were they involved with war?
Alicia Western: My mother was in high school when the war came to town. She may have thought that the world was ending. I don’t know. My grandmother used to reminisce, my mother used to cry. All recent history is about death. When you look at photos taken in the late nineteenth century what occurs to you is that all of those people are dead. If you go back a bit further everyone is still dead but it doesn’t matter. Those deaths are less to us. But the brown figures in the photographs are something else. Even their smiles are woeful. Filled with regret. With accusation.
Interviewer: These aberrant experiences of yours, the hallucinations, commenced about the time your mother died. Were you very close?
Alicia Western: We got along okay. But she listened to the doctors and she went to her grave thinking her daughter was crazy. It was painful for me. Worse after she died. I could see what her life had been and I felt bad about it. I needed my grandmother and I didn’t really take into consideration that as for myself I was not what she needed at all. I didn’t take into consideration the fact that she had just lost her daughter. A short time after that I had a dream about her. My mother. She was dead in the dream and she was being carried through the streets in a boat on the shoulders of a crowd. The boat was heaped with flowers and there was music. Almost like band music. Trumpets. When the cortege came around the corner I could see her face pale as a mask among the flowers. And when it came down the street past me. And then they passed on. And then I woke up.
Interviewer: Are you in every dream you have? You think people don’t have dreams that they’re not in?
Alicia Western: People are interested in other people. But your unconscious is not. Or only as they might directly affect you. It’s been hired to do a very specific job. It never sleeps. It’s more faithful than God.
Interviewer: You were diagnosed as autistic by more than one analyst. Before it was well understood. Well, before it was understood at all. Because of course it’s still not understood.
Alicia Western: Sure. If you have a patient with a condition that’s not understood why not ascribe it to a disorder that is also not understood? Autism occurs in males more than it does in females. So does higher order mathematical intuition. We think: What is this about? Don’t know. What is at the heart of it? Don’t know. All I can tell you is that I like numbers. I like their shapes and their colors and their smells and the way they taste. And I don’t like to take people’s word for things. My father finally did stay with us during the last months of my mother’s illness. He had a study in the smokehouse out back. He’d cut a big square hole in the wall and put in a window so he could look out at the fields and the creek beyond. His desk was a wooden door set up on sawhorses and there was an old leather sofa there that was stuffed with horsehair. It was all dried and cracked and the horsehair was leaking out but he put a blanket over it. I went in one day and sat at his desk and looked at the problem he was working on. I already knew some math. Quite a bit, actually. I tried to puzzle out the paper but it was hard. I loved the equations. I loved the big sigma signs with the codes for the summations. I loved the narrative that was unfolding. My father came in and found me there and I thought I was in trouble and I jumped up but he took me by the hand and led me back to the chair and sat me down and went over the paper with me. His explanations were clear. Simple. But it was more than that. They were filled with metaphor. He drew a couple of Feynman diagrams and I thought they were pretty cool. They mapped the world of the subatomic particles he was attempting to explain. The collisions. The weighted routes. I understood—really understood—that the equations were not a supposition of the form whose life was confined to the symbols on the page which described them but that they were there before my eyes. In actuality. They were in the paper, the ink, in me. The universe. Their invisibility could never speak against them or their being. Their age. Which was the age of reality itself. Which was itself invisible and always had been. He never let go of my hand.
Interviewer: Tell me some memory of your brother Bobby.
Alicia Western: Oh boy. All right. The beach house in North Carolina. When I got up in the morning and went to his room he’d already gone out and I fixed a thermos of tea and went down to the beach in the dark and he was sitting there in the sand and we had tea and waited for the sun. We watched through our dark glasses as it came red and dripping up out of the sea. We’d walked on the beach the night before and there was a moon and a mock moon that rode in the rings and we talked about the paraselene and I said something to the effect that to speak of such things which are composed solely of light as problematic or perhaps as wrongly seen or even wrongly known or of questionable reality had always seemed to me something of a betrayal. He looked at me and he said betrayal? And I said yes. Things composed of light. In need of our protection. Then in the morning we sat in the sand and drank our tea and watched the sun come up.
Interviewer: Have you been seeing anyone in a romantic sense?
Alicia Western: I don’t see people. The man I wanted wouldn’t have me. So that was that. I couldn’t stop loving him. So my life was pretty much over.
Interviewer: Would you reconsider medication? I’m sure that there are options you haven’t considered.
Alicia Western: You don’t know what antipsychotics are and you don’t know how they work. Or why. All we have finally is the spectacle of tardive dyskinetics feeling their way along the wall. Jerking and drooling and muttering. Of course for those trekking toward the void there are waystations where the news will very suddenly become altogether bleaker. Maybe a sudden chill. There’s data in the world available only to those who have reached a certain level of wretchedness. You don’t know what’s down there if you haven’t been down there. Joy on the other hand hardly even teaches gratitude. A thoughtful silence. Its general vacuity aside there seems to be a ceiling to well-being. My guess is that you can only be so happy. While there seems to be no floor to sorrow. Each deeper misery being a state heretofore unimagined. Each suggestive of worse to come.
Interviewer: Do you think you might have a tendency to divest yourself of the things in your life that actually sustain you?
Alicia Western: I don’t know the answer to your question. What? Do I? Do we? How would such a predilection stack up against the world’s own desire to divest one of just those things. I think I understand your question. We’ve been there before. And it may be a superstition with us that if we will just give up those things we are fond of then the world will not take from us what we truly love. Which of course is a folly. The world knows what you love. I gave up apologizing for myself a long time ago. What should I say? That I’m sorry to be that which I am? I’d very little to do with it. As to your question—to concede to my taste for sweeping generalities—I might well say that what smacks of conundrum is usually just a thesis badly stated. Which I think I’ve suggested before. It’s really just a rather bald rendering of Wittgenstein. I don’t know. Maybe we could talk about something else.
Interviewer: You said you had a dream about children crying, and you got to wonder why they cried all the time.
Alicia Western: I thought there had to be more to it. Animals might whimper if they’re hungry or cold. But they don’t start screaming. It’s a bad idea. The more noise you make the more likely you are to be eaten. If you’ve no way to escape you keep silent. If birds couldn’t fly they wouldn’t sing. When you’re defenseless you keep your opinions to yourself. What was startling was the anguish in those cries. I began paying attention. There were always babies at the bus station and they were always crying. And these were not mild complaints. I couldn’t understand how the least discomfort could take the form of agony. No other creature was so sensitive. The more I thought about it the clearer it became to me that what I was hearing was rage. And the most extraordinary thing was that no one seemed to find this extraordinary. The rage of children seemed inexplicable other than as a breach of some deep and innate covenant having to do with how the world should be and wasn’t. I understood that their raw exposure to the world was the world. How would a child know how the world should be? A child would have to be born so. A sense of justice is common to the world. All mammals certainly. A dog knows perfectly well what is fair and what is not. He didn’t learn it. He came with it.
Interviewer: Someone once said that the raw material of art is pain. Is that true of mathematics?
Alicia Western: Mathematics is just sweat and toil. I wish it were romantic. It isn’t. At its worst there are audible suggestions. It’s hard to keep up. You don’t dare sleep and you may have been up for two days but that’s too bad. You find yourself making a decision and finding two more decisions waiting and then four and then eight. You have to force yourself to just stop and go back. Begin again. You’re not seeking beauty, you’re seeking simplicity. The beauty comes later. After you’ve made a wreck of yourself.
Interviewer: You seem to grant the unconscious a kind of autonomy when it comes to working through mathematics.
Alicia Western: Well. It’s been on its own for a long time. Of course it has no access to the world except through your own sensorium. Otherwise it would just labor in the dark. Like your liver. For historical reasons it’s loath to speak to you. It prefers drama, metaphor, pictures. But it understands you very well. And it has no other cause save yours.
Interviewer: What is your biggest complaint against psychotherapists?
Alicia Western: I don’t know. Maybe their lack of imagination. Their confusion about the categories into which they’re given to sorting their patients. As if name and cure were one. The way they ignore the total lack of evidence for the least efficacy in their treatments. Other than that they’re fine. Anyway, it’s a nice little cottage industry you’ve cobbled up for yourselves. The subject at hand would seem to be reality and that in itself is pretty funny. Still, you probably get up to a minimum of mischief. If you serve to keep the patients clothed and fed and off the street that’s a good thing.
Interviewer: Do you think your hallucinations have been moving you towards suicide?
Alicia Western: If a person has auditory hallucinations she’s going to have some definable relationship with the voice. Most suicides don’t need a voice. What should give you pause is that suicide scales with intelligence in the animal kingdom and you might wonder if this is not true of individuals as well as of species. I would.
Interviewer: Regarding your hallucinations, your visitors, the brain must have to use a good deal of energy to put together such a construct. Not to mention maintaining it consistently over a period of years. What do you think could be worth such an outlay?
Alicia Western: I don’t know. It’s a bitch, ain’t it? For me to be having this conversation with you—any conversation, I suppose—I have to make a series of concessions not just to your point of view but to the actual form of the world seen from your place in it. I can do that. But the problem is that for you it is never a question of point of view. You’re never troubled to find yourself discussing quite peculiar things in a fairly normal way. Maybe it’s just the naivete that you bring to the table. You might say: Well, how else would you discuss them? But when the subject is chimeras aren’t you already on somewhat shaky ground? I’ve thought from early on that the Kid was there not to supply something but to keep something at bay. And in the meantime the whole business is subsumed under the rubric of a single reality which itself remains unaddressable. I wake in the night in my room and lie there listening to the quiet. You ask where they are. I don’t know where they are. But they are not nowhere. Nowhere like nothing requires for its affirmation a witness which it cannot supply by its own definition. You’d be loath to grant these beings a will of their own, but if they were not possessed of something like autonomy in what sense could they then be said to exist? I’ve no power either to conjure them forth or send them packing. I don’t speak for them or see to their hygiene or their wardrobe. I said that they were indistinguishable from living beings, but the truth is that their reality is if anything more striking. Not just the Kid but all of them. Their movements, their speech, the color and the fold of their clothes. There’s nothing dreamlike about them. None of this is much help, is it? Well, people don’t listen to loonies. Until they say something funny.
Interviewer: Let me ask you this. If you were rejected by this man you’re still in love with, why couldn’t you just get on with your life? You were what? Twelve?
Alicia Western: Yes. A twelve year old slut. I was a horny girl. I wasn’t sexually active, of course not. But there was something about myself that I hadn’t accepted. Sometimes it takes a somewhat disorienting experience to wrench you from your slumbers.
Interviewer: How did you know that it was love?
Alicia Western: How can you not? I was only at peace in his company. If peace is the word. I knew that I would love him forever. In spite of the laws of Heaven. And that I would never love anyone else. I was fourteen. I thought that if I offered myself to him body and soul that he would take me without reservation. And he didn’t.
Interviewer: At one point you were interested in the mathematics of the violin, weren’t you?
Alicia Western: I corresponded with a woman in New Jersey named Carleen Hutchins who was trying to map the harmonics of the instrument. She’d taken any number of rare Cremonas apart with a soldering iron. She worked with some physicists setting up some rather elaborate equipment to establish the Chladni patterns of the plates. But the vibrations and frequencies were so complex that they resisted any complete analysis. I thought that I could do mathematical models of these frequency patterns. What’s even more remarkable is that there is no prototype to the violin. It simply appears out of nowhere in all its perfection. It’s just another mystery to add to the roster. Leonardo can’t be explained. Or Newton, or Shakespeare. Or endless others. Well. Probably not endless. But at least we know their names. But unless you’re willing to concede that God invented the violin there is a figure who will never be known. A small man who went with his son into the stunted forests of the little iceage of fifteenth century Italy and sawed and split the maple trees and put the flitches to dry for seven years and then stood in the slant light of his shop one morning and said a brief prayer of thanks to his creator and then—knowing this perfect thing—took up his tools and turned to its construction. Saying now we begin.
Interviewer: Do you remember your dreams?
Alicia Western: Pretty much. The ones that wake you, of course.
Interviewer: Why do some dreams wake you?
Alicia Western: They think you’ve had enough? The dream wakes us to tell us to remember. Maybe there’s nothing to be done. Maybe the question is whether the terror is a warning about the world or about ourselves. The night world from which you are brought upright in your bed gasping and sweating. Are you waking from something you have seen or from something that you are? Or maybe the real question is simply why the mind seems bent upon convincing us of the reality of that which has none.
Interviewer: Do you think that the sense of self is an illusion?
Alicia Western: Well. I think you know that the consensus among the neural folk is yes. I think it’s a dumb question. Coherent entities composed of a great number of disparate parts aren’t—as a general rule—thereby assumed to have their identities compromised. I know that seems to be ignoring our sense of ourselves as a single being. The “I.” I just think it’s a silly way of viewing things. If we were constructed with a continual awareness of how we worked we wouldn’t work. You might even ask that if the self is indeed an illusion for whom then is it illusory?
Interviewer: Do you think that all of mathematics is a tautology?
Alicia Western: I don’t think the question can be answered. For the present I guess I’d have to say no. But by then I’d already left the building. And the deeper question, which we touched on, is that if mathematical work is performed mostly in the unconscious we still have no notion as to how it goes about it. You can try and picture the inner mind adding and subtracting and muttering and erasing and beginning again but you won’t get very far. And why is it so often right? Who does it check its work with? I’ve had solutions to problems simply handed to me. Out of the blue. The locus ceruleus perhaps. And it has to remember everything. No notes. It’s hard to escape the unsettling conclusion that it’s not using numbers.
Interviewer: We’ve passed over the fact that you’re female. Want to comment on it?
Alicia Western: Women enjoy a different history of madness. From witchcraft to hysteria we’re just bad news. We know that women were condemned as witches because they were mentally unstable but no one has considered the numbers —even few as they might be—of women who were stoned to death for being bright. That I haven’t wound up chained to a cellar wall or burned at the stake is not a testament to our ascending civility but to our ascending skepticism. If we still believed in witches we’d still be burning them. Hooknosed crones strapped into the electric chair. No one has ever seemed to comment that the stereotypical witch is meant to appear Jewish. I guess the skepticism is okay. If you can stomach what goes with it. I’m happy to be treated well but I know that it’s an uncertain business. When this world which reason has created is carried off at last it will take reason with it. And it will be a long time coming back.
Interviewer: Why did your brother Bobby take up racing cars?
Alicia Western: Because he was good at it. And he suddenly had the money to do it with. My grandmother hated it. But still she kept all the clippings. Physicists tend to have hobbies that are hazardous to their health. A lot of them are mountain climbers. Sometimes with predictable results. He went to England and bought a Formula Two Lotus from the factory. That’s the car he ultimately crashed in.
Interviewer: Were you this pessimistic about the world from an early age?
Alicia Western: Like it was all sunshine and light prior to pubescence? I don’t think people are wrong to be concerned about the world’s intentions toward them. There’s a lot of bad news out there and some of it is coming to your house.
Interviewer: You mentioned in another session that you had planned to go to Lake Tahoe to kill yourself. Want to talk about that?
Alicia Western: Okay. My thought was to rent a boat. I was sitting in the pine woods above the lake and I thought about the incredible clarity of the water and I could see that was a plus. You really don’t want to drown yourself in muddy water. It’s something people ought to think about. I saw myself sitting in the boat with the oars shipped. At some point I would take a last look around. I would have a heavy leather belt and a good sized padlock from the hardware store and I would have fastened myself to the chain of the anchor through the belt where it doubles after passing through the buckle. Click the padlock shut and drop the key over the side. Maybe row off a few strokes. You don’t want to be down there on the bottom scrambling around looking for a key. You take one last look and lift the anchor into your lap and swing your feet over the side and push off into eternity. The work of an instant. The work of a lifetime. But I didn’t. First of all the water off the east shore is about sixteen hundred feet deep and agonizingly cold. A number of things are going to happen that you hadn’t taken into consideration. Of course if you had you wouldn’t be there in the first place. Or the last. As you descend, your lungs will start to shrivel. At a thousand feet they’ll be about the size of tennis balls. You try to clear your ears and that hurts. Your eardrums in all likelihood are going to burst and that is really going to hurt. There is a technique for bringing up air and forcing it through the eustachian tubes into your ears but you aren’t going to have the air to do it with. So you drift down in your thin chain of bubbles. The mountains draw away. The receding sun and the painted bottom of the boat. The world. Your heart slows to a tick. Dive deep enough and it will stop altogether. The blood is leaving your extremities to pool in your lungs. But the biggest problem is just coming. You’re going to run out of air before you reach the bottom of the lake. Even with a sixty pound anchor—about all I could manage—you’re not going to make very good time. At twelve miles an hour—which is pretty fast—you’re doing a thousand feet a minute. Under the circumstances that you’ve chosen for yourself a breath may not last a minute. Even if you’ve done the fast respirations before you committed. The shock and the stress and the cold and the diminishing air supply are going to take their toll. Anyway, it’s going to be a good two minute trip to the bottom and probably more like four or five. Not sitting comfortably on the bottom of the lake. Anyway, at this juncture you’ll have dropped the anchor and it is going to be towing you by your belt down through water that is freezing your brain. It’s unlikely you’ll be able to keep your wits about you but it really doesn’t matter. When you finally give up your rat’s struggle and breath in the water—scaldingly cold—you are going to experience pain beyond the merely agonizing. Maybe it will distract you from the mental anguish at what you have done to yourself, I don’t know. See if you can remember the pain in your lungs from being out of breath from running on a cold winter day. You’re breathing in quicker than your lungs can warm the air. It hurts. Now multiply that by God knows what. The heat content of water as compared to that of air. And it’s not going to go away. Because your lungs can never warm the water they’ve inhaled. I think we’re talking about an agony that is simply off the scale. No one’s ever said. And it’s forever. Your forever. There are still unknowns here, of course. The bottom of the lake will be pretty much gravel so there won’t be any billowing silt when the anchor touches down. Total silence. No telling what’s down there. The corpses of those who have gone before. A family you didn’t know you had. It’s deep enough that the light is pretty dim for all the clarity of the water. A cold gray world. Not black yet. No life. The only color is the thin pink stain trailing away in the water from the blood leaking out of your ears. We don’t know about the gag reflex but we’re fixing to find out. Once your lungs are full will this abate? The gagging? Don’t know. No one’s ever said. The autonomous reflex will be to cough out the water but you can’t because it’s too heavy. And of course there’s nothing to replace it with anyway except more water. In the meantime oxygen deprivation and nitrogen narcosis have begun to compete for your sanity. You’re sitting on the glacial floor of the lake with the weight of the water in your lungs like a cannonball and the pain of the cold in your chest is probably indistinguishable from fire and you are gagging in agony and even though your mind is beginning to go you are yet caught in the iron grip of a terror utterly atavistic and over which you have no control whatsoever and now out of nowhere there’s a new thought. The extraordinary cold is probably capable of keeping you alive for an unknown period of time. Hours perhaps, drowned or not. And you may well assume that you will be unconscious but do you know that? What if you’re not? As the reasons for not doing to yourself what you have just irrevocably done accumulate in your head you will be left weeping and gibbering and praying to be in hell. Anyway, sitting there among the trees in the soft wind I knew that I would not be going there. Maybe I had been a bad person in my life, but I hadn’t been that bad. I stood up and walked back up to my car and drove back to San Francisco.
Interviewer: What other plans did you entertain killing yourself?
Alicia Western: I’d always had the idea that I didn’t want to be found. That if you died and nobody knew about it that would be as close as you could get to never having been here in the first place. I thought about things like motoring out to sea in a rubber raft with a big outboard clamped to the transom and just go till you ran out of gas. Then you would chain yourself to the outboard and take a big handful of pills and open all the valves just very slightly and lie down and go to sleep. You’d probably want a quilt and a pillow. The rubber floor of the raft is going to be cold. Anyway, after a couple of hours or so the thing would just fold up and take you to the bottom of the ocean to be seen no more forever. Stuff like that.
Interviewer: Do you believe in a book of your life, that your fate is preordained?
Alicia Western: Only in the sense that I’m writing it. Which of course could be an illusion. Anyway, it’s hardly even a question. Next Thursday at ten AM I will be somewhere. I will be either alive or dead. My presence at that place and at that time is a codlock certainty. A summation of every event in the world. For me. I won’t be somewhere else. A lack of foreknowledge doesn’t change anything.
Interviewer: Was your brother Bobby concerned about your state of mind?
Alicia Western: Did he think I was crazy? In the vernacular or clinically nuts? I don’t think so. But it could be that the more he thought about it the more concerned he became that maybe I wasn’t. That the news could be worse, as in maybe she’s right. I don’t know. Bobby wasn’t happy about any of this. I’d stopped talking about it. But by then he’d given up all pretense of an interest in the verity of life on the other side of the glass and he was only interested in how to get rid of it. And by then I wasn’t all that sure that I wanted to. Get rid of it. Because I knew what my brother did not. That there was an ill-contained horror beneath the surface of the world and there always had been. That at the core of reality lies a deep and eternal demonium. All religions understand this. And it wasn’t going away. And that to imagine that the grim eruptions of this century were in any way either singular or exhaustive was simply a folly.
Interviewer: When did you confess to your brother Bobby about your mental issues and your hallucinations, the visitors?
Alicia Western: The summer after that he came home and he spent the whole summer at the house and that was the best time. The last best time. I had a fellowship at Chicago for that fall. He came home and we started dating.
Interviewer: You started dating?
Alicia Western: I don’t know what else you’d call it. We went out every night. He used to take me to these honkytonks on the outskirts of Knoxville. The Indian Rock. The Moonlight Diner. I would dress up like a floozy and dance my ass off. Bobby would play with the band. He’d play breakdowns on the mandolin. I told people that we were married. To keep the fights to a minimum. I loved it.
Interviewer: Anything you’d like to add to that?
Alicia Western: Just that I wanted to marry him. My brother. As you may have rightly guessed. I always had. It’s not very complicated.
Interviewer: You asked your brother to marry you? And you didn’t think that there was anything wrong with this?
Alicia Western: I thought that the fact that it wasn’t acceptable wasn’t really our problem. I knew that he loved me. He was just afraid. I’d known this was coming for along time. There was no place else for me to go. I knew that we would have to run away but I didn’t care about any of that. I kissed him in the car. We kissed twice, actually. The first time just very softly. He patted my hand as if in all innocence and turned to start the car but I put my hand on his cheek and turned him to me and we kissed again and this time there was no innocence in it at all and it took his breath. It took mine. I put my face on his shoulder and he said we can’t do this. You know we can’t do this. I wanted to say that I knew no such thing. I should have. I kissed his cheek. I had no belief in his resolution but I was wrong. We never kissed again.
Interviewer: You’d decided on all this even before the evening in question.
Alicia Western: I’d known for years. I told him that I was all right with waiting. Then I started crying. I couldn’t stop crying.
Interviewer: Didn’t you think that you could find someone else?
Alicia Western: There wasn’t anyone else. There never would be. There wasn’t for him either. He just didn’t know it yet.
Interviewer: How old were you when you realized that you were in love with your brother?
Alicia Western: Probably twelve. Maybe younger. Younger. And never looked back, as the saying goes. It’s not so easy to explain, but it was pretty clear to me that there was not some alternate view of things to embrace. He was away at school and I only lived for when he would come home.
Interviewer: Didn’t he have girlfriends?
Alicia Western: He tried. It never came to anything. I wasn’t jealous. I wanted him to see other girls. I wanted him to see the truth of his situation. That he was in love with me. Bone of his bone. Too bad. We were like the last on earth. We could choose to join the beliefs and practices of the millions of dead beneath our feet or we could begin again. Did he really have to think about it? Why should I have no one? Why should he? I told him that I’d no way even to know if there was justice in my heart if I had no one to love and love me. You cannot credit yourself with a truth that has no resonance. Where is the reflection of your worth? And who will speak for you when you are dead? I told him that I wanted to have his child.
Interviewer: You told your brother that you wanted to have his child.
Alicia Western: Look. It’s no good you repeating these things to me as if to limn the horror and the lunacy of them. You can’t see the world I see. You can’t see through these eyes. You never will. I told my brother that I was in love with him and that I always had been and that I would be until I died and that it wasn’t my fault that he was my brother. You could look at it as just a piece of bad luck.
Interviewer: The stigma of incest had no meaning for you.
Alicia Western: What do you want me to say? That I’m a bad girl? Who is Westermarck to me or me to Westermarck? I wanted to do it with my brother. I always did. I still do. There are worse things in the world. I knew this was something of a torment for him. I just hoped that he would come to his senses. That he would suddenly come to understand what he’d always known. I suppose I thought to shock him out of his complacency. I would hold his hand. I’d sit close against him driving home and put my head on his shoulder. I suppose I was shameless but then shame was not something I was really concerned with. I knew that I had only one chance and one love. And I wasn’t wrong about his feelings. I saw the way he looked at me. At spring break we’d gone to Patagonia Arizona to an inn there and I couldn’t sleep and I went to his room and sat on his bed and I thought that he would put his arms around me and kiss me but he didn’t. I hadn’t known until that night that at its worst lust could be something close to anguish. I thought that something had changed at dinner but it hadn’t. I’d become concerned that if I died he would think it his fault and that was a concern that was never to leave me. A friend once told me that those who choose a love that can never be fulfilled will be hounded by a rage that can never be extinguished.
Interviewer: Are you enraged?
Alicia Western: I don’t know. I know that you can make a good case that all of human sorrow is grounded in injustice. And that sorrow is what is left when rage is expended and found to be impotent.
Interviewer: You own nothing. Might divesting yourself of everything be a way of preparing for death?
Alicia Western: I don’t think there is some way to prepare for death. You have to make one up. There’s no evolutionary advantage to being good at dying. Who would you leave it to? The thing you are dealing with—time—is immalleable. Except that the more you harbor it the less of it you have. The liquor of being is leaking out onto the ground. You need to hurry. But the haste itself is consuming what you wish to preserve. You can’t deal with what it is you’ve been sent to deal with. It’s too hard.
Interviewer: Did you frequently have graphic dreams about your brother Bobby?
Alicia Western: No. Mostly I dreamt about us being together. Living together. I dreamt about us being married. Not so much now. Not so much. Do you find that sad? I suppose not. We were at a cabin in the woods. Maybe sort of like the cabin that my father lived in but it was on a lake. I think that it might have been here in Wisconsin. It was in the fall of the year and there was a fire in the fireplace and there may have been snow on the ground. I’m not sure. It was a big stone fireplace and you could see the flickering of the fire from the bedroom and there were candles everywhere. There were candles everywhere and we were naked and he looked up at me from between my legs and smiled and his face in the candlelight was all shiny with girljuice and then I woke up. My orgasm woke me up.
Interviewer: Do you miss working as a mathematician?
Alicia Western: It’s like missing the dead. They’re not coming back. Old foundational issues will probably continue to trouble my dreams. And there are times when I miss the world of calculation itself. Solving problems. When things suddenly fall into place after days of labor it’s like a lost animal coming in out of the rain. Your thought is to say there you are. To say I was so worried. You hardly even bother to review your work. You just know. That what you are looking at is true. It’s a joyful thing.
Interviewer: Your main hallucination, the Kid, said goodbye to you, and you’re sure you won’t see him again. What do you think about that?
Alicia Western: The Kid, he represented himself. He is his own being, not mine. That’s really all I learned. However you choose to construe such a statement. I never met a counselor who didn’t want to kill him. He is small and frail and brave. What is the inner life of an eidolon? Do his thoughts and his questions originate with him? Do mine with me? Is he my creature? Am I his? I saw how he made do with his paddles and that he was ashamed for me to see. His turn of speech, his endless pacing. Was that my work? I’ve no such talent. I can’t answer your questions. The tradition of trolls or demons standing sentinel against inquiry must be as old as language. Still, maybe a friend must be someone you can touch. I don’t know. I no longer have an opinion about reality. I used to. Now I don’t. The first rule of the world is that everything vanishes forever. To the extent that you refuse to accept that then you are living in a fantasy.
Interviewer: You spoke of waking from ugly dreams. Did you ever see anything that was truly troubling?
Alicia Western: I never saw monsters. Creatures going around carrying their heads. I always sensed that the worst of it transcended representation. You couldn’t put together something for them to look like. You didn’t have the parts. This isn’t something that is always there. And sometimes everything would just go away. It still does. Sometimes in the winter in the dark I’d wake and everything that smacked of dread would have lifted up and stolen away in the night and I would just be lying there with the snow blowing against the glass. I’d think that maybe I should turn on the lamp but then I’d just lie there and listen to the quiet. The wind in the quiet. There are times now when I see those patients in their soiled nightshirts lying on gurneys in the hallway with their faces to the wall that I ask myself what humanity means. I would ask does it include me.
Interviewer: Did you want to be included?
Alicia Western: I did want to be included. I just wasn’t willing to pay the entry fee. On my better days I could even grant that we were the same creatures. Much was the same and little different. The same unlikely forms. Elbows. Skulls. The remnants of a soul. Mental illness doesn’t seem to occur in animals. Why do you think that is? Cetaceans are pretty smart and they don’t appear to be afflicted with lunacy. I think you have to have language to have craziness. Not sure why. But you have to understand what the advent of language was like. The brain had done pretty well without it for quite a few million years. The arrival of language was like the invasion of a parasitic system. Co-opting those areas of the brain that were the least dedicated. The most susceptible to appropriation.
Interviewer: A parasitic invasion. You’re serious.
Alicia Western: Yes. The inner guidance of a living system is as necessary to its survival as oxygen and hydrogen. The governance of any system evolves coevally with the system itself. Everything from a blink to a cough to a decision to run for your life. Every faculty but language has the same history. The only rules of evolution that language follows are those necessary to its own construction. A process that took little more than an eyeblink. The extraordinary usefulness of language turned it into an overnight epidemic. It seems to have spread to every remote pocket of humanity almost instantly. The same isolation of groups that led to their uniqueness would seem to have been no protection at all against this invasion and both the form of language and the strategies by which it gained purchase in the brain seem all but universal. The most immediate requirement was for an increased capacity for making sounds. Language seems to have originated in South Africa and this requirement probably accounts for the clicks in the Khoisan languages. The fact that there were more things to name than sounds to name them with. In any case the physical facility for speech was probably the most difficult hurdle. The pharynx became elongated until the apparatus in its present form has all but strangled its owner. We’re the only mammalian species that can’t swallow and articulate at the same time. Think of a cat growling while it eats and then try it yourself. Anyway, the unconscious system of guidance is millions of years old, speech less than a hundred thousand. The brain had no idea any of this was coming. The unconscious must have had to do all sorts of scrambling around to accommodate a system that proved perfectly relentless. Not only is it comparable to a parasitic invasion, it’s not comparable to anything else. What makes it interesting is that language evolved from no known need. It was just an idea. Lysenko rising from the dead. And the idea, again, was that one thing could represent another. A biological system under successful assault by human reason.
Interviewer: I’m not sure I’ve heard evolutionary biology discussed in such warlike terms. And the unconscious doesn’t like to speak to us because of its million year history devoid of language?
Alicia Western: Yes. It solves problems and is perfectly capable of telling us the answers. But million year old habits die hard. It could easily say: Kekulé, it’s a fucking ring. But it feels more comfortable cobbling up a hoop snake and rolling it around inside Kekulé’s skull while he’s dozing in front of the fire. It’s why your dreams are filled with drama and metaphor.
Interviewer: In what ways does your synesthesia affect you?
Alicia Western: It helps you to remember. It’s easier to remember two things than one. It’s why it’s easier to remember the words of a song than the words of a poem. For instance. The music is an armature upon which you assemble the words.
Interviewer: Has someone been critical of your appearance?
Alicia Western: Not that I know of. I know sometimes I look like I left the house in a hurry. I used to enjoy getting dressed up to go dancing. But that was costume. Make-believe.
Interviewer: You would get dressed up for your brother Bobby.
Alicia Western: Yes. There were times I’d see him looking at me and I would leave the room crying. I knew that I’d never be loved like that again. I just thought that we would always be together. I know you think I should have seen that as more aberrant than I did, but my life is not like yours. My hour. My day. I used to dream about our first time together. I do yet. I wanted to be revered. I wanted to be entered like a cathedral.
Interviewer: Is there a single insight that supports most of modern mathematics?
Alicia Western: It’s not a lame question, but I don’t know the answer. Things like the deeps of cohomology or Cantor’s discontinuum are tainted with the flavor of unguessed worlds. We can see the footprints of algebras whose entire domain is immune to commutation. Matrices whose hatchings cast a shadow upon the floor of their origins and leave there an imprint to which they no longer conform. Homological algebra has come to shape a good deal of modern mathematics. But in the end the world of computation will simply absorb it. My railings against the platonists are a thing of the past. Assuming at last that one could, what would be the advantage of ignoring the transcendent nature of mathematical truths. There is nothing else that all men are compelled to agree upon, and when the last light in the last eye fades to black and takes all speculation with it forever I think it could even be that these truths will glow for just a moment in the final light. Before the dark and the cold claim everything.
Interviewer: You have fantasized for years about moving to Romania, your family’s ancestral land, with your brother Bobby, marrying Bobby, and living a quiet life in Romania, next to a lake. Did Romania become less appealing as it became more real?
Alicia Western: I don’t know. Probably. It’s certainly possible that the imaginary is best. Like a painting of some idyllic landscape. The place you would most like to be. That you never will. After my brother Bobby’s accident, as he lay in a coma, I thought that I would go to Romania. But I didn’t. I didn’t want to be buried in Wartburg. Mostly I didn’t want anyone to know about it.
Interviewer: What were the details of this plan to go to Romania after your brother’s crash?
Alicia Western: I thought that I would go to Romania and that when I got there I would go to some small town and buy secondhand clothes in the market. Shoes. A blanket. I’d burn everything I owned. My passport. Maybe I’d just put my clothes in the trash. Change money in the street. Then I’d hike into the mountains. Stay off the road. Take no chances. Crossing the ancestral lands by foot. Maybe by night. There are bears and wolves up there. I looked it up. You could have a small fire at night. Maybe find a cave. A mountain stream. I’d have a canteen for water for when the time came that I was too weak to move about. After a while the water would taste extraordinary. It would taste like music. I’d wrap myself in the blanket at night against the cold and watch the bones take shape beneath my skin and I would pray that I might see the truth of the world before I died. Sometimes at night the animals would come to the edge of the fire and move about and their shadows would move among the trees and I would understand that when the last fire was ashes they would come and carry me away and I would be their eucharist. And that would be my life. And I would be happy.
The Domains of the Emperor Owl 
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