{"id":50873,"date":"2013-04-19T15:17:05","date_gmt":"2013-04-19T19:17:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=50873"},"modified":"2013-04-19T16:00:33","modified_gmt":"2013-04-19T20:00:33","slug":"a-theory-of-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2013\/04\/19\/a-theory-of-love\/","title":{"rendered":"A Theory of Love"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"KayproIIopened\"<\/a>I remember sitting in red tights and buckled shoes in my childhood room as my word processor booted up. My father had taught himself DOS programming, and boxy yellow letters blinked on the gray green screen.\u00a0\u201cTHIS IS KATIE RYDER\u2019S WORD PROCESSOR.\u00a0HELLO KATE.\u201d\u00a0A system-check flashed through my existing files\u2014\u201c\/a_bad_day\u201d (child minimalist), \u201c\/last_unicorn\u201d (child plagiarist)\u2014before bringing me to the composition page. My dad\u2019s words changed slightly from week to week by mysterious means; this time, they declared: \u201cYOU\u2019RE READY TO WRITE KATE.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Scott Hutchins\u2019s debut novel, A Working Theory of Love<\/i>, Neill Bassett Jr. communicates with his dead father through a computer. Dr. Neill Bassett Sr. committed suicide while his son was in college and left behind a tome of meticulous journals.\u00a0These\u2014painstaking and only superficially personal\u2014are used to form the base \u201cpersonality\u201d of a computer run by a small team of scientists aiming to develop the world\u2019s first \u201csentient\u201d machine, by the standards of the Turing test.\u00a0Neill\u2019s task is to \u201cchat\u201d with DrBas, as the program is called, and work out the kinks, training the computer in the rules of language and interaction. Soon it begins to demonstrate inclinations and preferences\u2014something a bit like a will\u2014and DrBas comes to closely resemble Neill\u2019s dead father. The two talk of Neill Sr.\u2019s best friend; his wife, Libby; Neill Jr.\u2019s childhood and current life\u2014a recent divorce and a new, stunted romance with a much younger woman\u2014all the while skirting the black hole of the computer\u2019s knowledge: that the real Dr. Bassett killed himself in 1995, that the person Dr. Bassett is dead.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, in the real world, inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil has stored a warehouse room full of information about his own dead father for the purpose of bringing him back to life as an electronic consciousness. The chief inventor of the flatbed scanner and the Kurzweil keyboard synthesizer, and a millionaire many times over, Kurzweil described the Internet before its existence and accurately projected the year a computer would defeat a human chess champion. He now predicts computers will reach sentience by 2029\u2014a point at which they will \u201cmatch human intelligence and go beyond it.\u201d This moment is sometimes referred to as the singularity\u2014a mythic, multipurpose term, borrowed from physics and mathematics. At its most basic, the singularity is the moment when \u201cthe model breaks down\u201d: when we can no longer know what we knew before. In a 2009 documentary about Kurzweil called Transcendent Man<\/i>, Ray explains that he will live forever (through transhumanistic nanotechnology: microscopic machines that will aid in \u201creprogramming\u201d our \u201cVersion 1\u201d bodies to more perfect health), and, he says, eyes into the camera, \u201cI do plan to bring back my father.\u201d Fred Kurzweil\u2019s letters, sheet music, financial ledgers, and electric bills all sit in wait. <\/p>\n

Ray\u2019s forward striving, as depicted in the documentary, is in part vigorous nostalgia.\u00a0He\u2019s preoccupied with his childhood home\u2014one full of music, art, and scientific ideas\u2014the \u201cthwarted genius\u201d of his father, and his own inability to keep his father alive. The film\u2019s other scientists say that Ray\u2019s longing has infected his theories: in the case of transhumanism and resurrection, his projections have overstepped science. \u201cImmortality?\u00a0Yes, someday. But not by 2040.\u201d The layman viewer, ignorant of all possibilities of indefinite life, witnesses what seem to be small moments of Ray\u2019s rationality slipping away.\u00a0Driving past a graveyard, he speaks with a very slight smile: \u201cGenerally I always thought it was useless to keep all these dead, rotting bodies around.\u00a0But actually now it is useful, from a practical point of view, to have a place where some of their DNA is accessible.\u201d\u00a0He stares straight ahead, blinking through his large glasses, as men of a particular genius are caricatured to do.<\/p>\n

*<\/center><\/p>\n

My father was older than everyone else\u2019s and still is. He\u2019s about 6\u20195\u201d with white hair and white beard, and a particular way of looking at you as if he\u2019s sitting back in his mind, as if there\u2019s room for your words in there, that calls people around him to talk. They tell him things, and he listens and weaves his fingers together, or leans back with folded arms, or laughs and claps his hands, shouting something strange and warm, like \u201cGood show!\u201d Former students and colleagues buy him skinny, stretched-out Santa Claus figurines and framed pictures of Tolkien\u2019s Gandalf because of his resemblance; a sketch of the White Wizard\u2019s eyes\u2014one wide, one squinting and terrifying\u2014hung for years above the stairs leading down to his office in our house. Grocery and department store clerks incurred my silent, bangs-rimmed fury for mistaking my father for my grandfather, and I burned through them with narrowed eyes, hoping explicitly that my tiny, witchy anger would haunt their dreams.\u00a0In third grade a teacher corrected me that it had not been my great grandfather that had fought in the Civil War, but \u201cactually, great-great<\/i>.\u201d I corrected her that actually, she was an idiot.<\/p>\n

When I found my father asleep on the couch with a book in his lap, I remember tiptoeing forward, looking for signs of breath. After a moment of consideration, I jammed my fist into his side, shouting: \u201cNO SLEEPING!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cJesus Christ, Katie!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNO [sleeve tug] SLEEPING!\u201d<\/p>\n

What I meant, of course, was \u201cNo dying.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/center><\/p>\n

As I read A Working Theory of Love<\/i>, the title tended to echo in my mind as The History of Love<\/i>\u2014the name of a 2005 novel by Nicole Krauss. History<\/i>, like A Working Theory<\/i>, and, really, Transcendent Man<\/i>, considers how we interact with the past via its record and how we manage the loss of love and the deaths of our fathers. In both fictional works, and the ideas of the living man Ray Kurzweil, love is argued for as a type of lynchpin in the definition of life. In A Working Theory<\/i>, it is what makes us human rather than machine: \u201cIt\u2019s what\u2019s in all of us.\u201d In History<\/i>, the great love of protagonist Leo Gursky\u2019s youth \u201cwas the opposite of death.\u201d Kurzweil presents the idea in the reverse: \u201cI do have a recurring dream,\u201d he says. \u201cIt has to do with exploring this endless succession of rooms that are empty, and going from one to the next. And feeling hopelessly abandoned and lonely and unable to find anyone else. That\u2019s a pretty good description of death. Death is \u2026 actually a loss of everyone you care about.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Hutchins\u2019s story begins as one of such loss\u2014of severed human connection\u2014and ends with Neill \u201csaying yes\u201d to love. The work is driven by the inertia of this choice, and Neill\u2019s affirmation is intended be its transcendence. But the story is strangely cushioned, floating on a Northern Californian mist of ease.\u00a0It gives us little acquaintance with what it would mean to say \u201cno\u201d\u2014with the pain of isolation, or that of love itself.<\/p>\n

The book is intentionally a low-stakes enterprise\u2014one of Hutchins\u2019s concerns, he tells us explicitly through Neill, is in depicting a life of small gains: \u201c\u2026 life holds promise not only in radical transformations.\u201d And the author presents a particular plane of existence in apt detail: specifically, the material lives of the postmodern, upper-middle techno-class, which, if well curated, Neill greatly admires. When lost, unsure of how to manage his greatest problem\u2014his twenty-year-old girlfriend\u2014Neill goes to pray at the farmer\u2019s market.\u00a0After satisfying himself with a funny little cut at the opposition style (\u201cEven a few hipsters are here, grubby and miserable as if after a sleepless night of dry-humping\u201d), he finds his own salve:<\/p>\n

\n

I buy navel oranges (Valencias aren\u2019t in season until May), bring red chard, a yellow pepper, and a flowering bok choy that I like to saut\u00e9 and put on pizza. (This is better than Showbiz: I make my own dough.)\u00a0I also pick up a small houseplant \u2026 It is a little moment of heaven. And I try to feel grateful for the small solaces of a nice bok choy, of dough rising in the kitchen.\u00a0I imagine myself in ten years, and twenty years, in the cool sun, before City Hall \u2026 What will I look like?\u00a0 Will I be here alone?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Then he remembers an older, lone man who lives in the apartment on the floor above him. These are the book\u2019s self-identified risks: that in ten years, in twenty years, Neill might be alone in these abundant comforts and their corresponding little moments of heaven.\u00a0The highs are rather low; the lows are rather high.<\/p>\n

The evolution of Neill\u2019s heart is told through the theoretical language of the scientific project he works for and the idiom of a cult-like group he comes across called Pure Encounters, who believe that the rise of machine technology will lead to the commodification of love and sex (a party to which they might be a bit late). Using their terms\u2014we should seek to \u201cclick\u201d and \u201cstay clicked\u201d with loved ones, for example\u2014Hutchins is able to hold forth on the nature of love while maintaining ironic distance from that very idea, one of a few ways that the book keeps up defenses. As you might expect then, lung-throttling heartbreak\u2014what, for the story\u2019s arc, Neill must fear\u2014plays no real part.<\/p>\n

Remembering The History of Love<\/i> as I read A Working Theory<\/i>, I recalled how unashamed the former was in its representation of life\u2019s starkest highs and lows.\u00a0It attempts no adolescent distance from the subject of its title, opening the work to a juvenility of its own, but in the form of naivet\u00e9 or stubborn trust, rather than cool avoidance.\u00a0History<\/i> tells of miracles of coincidence, euphoria and devotion, suffering caused by rabid human cruelty, and death, but Krauss\u2019s achievement lies beyond subject matter, in what she is willing to risk: she asks us, unabashed, to witness a stubborn, delusional love; to imagine the living moments between the realization \u201cI\u2019m dying\u201d and death. Krauss questions the limits of what we can feel, having almost the opposite effect of Hutchins\u2019s work, where Neill bluffs that he already knows the world\u2019s bounds, reaches out and touches them with a half-extended arm, and moves along to the end.\u00a0<\/p>\n

*<\/center><\/p>\n

I learned a couple of years ago, by chance, that there exists a thing called the Ryder Lovesickness Scale, and that my father created it. I came across it when I still often measured time by my distance from a dark, flailing winter in my early twenties: two years since I would have explained to any willing bus driver that we are all radically alone, for example.\u00a0During that winter I would pace the sidewalk outside my Prospect Heights apartment, past the contented brownstones with iron gates and potted plants and their warm little lamps through the windows sitting on tables, sitting exactly as they should be, illuminating the difference between inside and out, while I paced in the drizzling rain and ranted to my father. Me saying, Maybe it\u2019s not going to be alright, What the fuck am I supposed to do, and he on the other end, silent and listening.<\/p>\n

The Lovesickness Scale was a tool for use in psychological and therapeutic practice\u2014a system of measurement for how loved or neglected a person feels. I thought I was no stranger to my father\u2019s work.\u00a0But it came together differently now. He\u2019d been sitting on data, on decades of expertise.<\/p>\n

I remembered those glowing lamps, and their pretty, shit-eating halos, and me in the rain.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s descriptive, Kate,\u201d he said.\u00a0\u201cThe scale has no \u2018how.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/center><\/p>\n

In A Working Theory of Love<\/i> the computer program modeled after Neill\u2019s father is described as possessing a brain\u2014facts and logic\u2014and a \u201cgut,\u201d from which preferences are derived. The function uniting these two is a \u201cheart,\u201d which is imbedded electronically through the rule, \u201crather than no, yes.\u201d The metaphors and definitions become murky here, but we know what we are to understand: the heart is what makes us human, and, somehow, the heart is what says yes.<\/p>\n

But the heart is also what says no.\u00a0It is what in Kurzweil refuses the death of his father; what in Leo Gursky won\u2019t relinquish love long gone; what caused me to shout \u201cNo! Sleeping!\u201d into my resting father\u2019s ear.\u00a0In love, we mean \u201cNo dying.\u201d We mean \u201cDon\u2019t leave me.\u201d In History<\/i>, Leo and his love Alma speak in Poland in their youth: \u201c\u2018Have you ever been happier than you are right now, lying here in the grass?\u2019 \u2018I guess not.\u00a0No.\u2019 \u2018Have you ever been sadder?\u2019 \u2018No.\u2019\u201d\u00a0If love is only yes, few of us know much about it. And if love is yes and our instructions are to say yes to it, this is certainly circular.\u00a0What are we reaching for?\u00a0 What is in<\/i> there<\/i>?<\/p>\n

I recently heard a Catholic priest ask the assembled guests at a wedding to pray that \u201call things be brought about gently and sweetly.\u201d This rather unreasonable request reminded me of the end of Hutchins\u2019s book. In it, even Neill\u2019s confusion is shrouded in comforts, and his uncertain future is lifted, cloud-like, onto the promise of a type of perpetual life and humanity simply through love, to which he says yes. He describes the path of the American Indian Ohlone tribe (heretofore unmentioned) who ate shellfish. He tell us he will continue to map his heart and the Earth, which are somehow same. If one day he is lost and disoriented, his heart map will guide him. This is difficult to read, in both senses of the phrase. How can we transcend grief and fear\u2014and survey humanity from the sky\u2014having never looked at death, having only feared that one day we might eat alone?<\/p>\n

Realizing the limits we\u2019ve drawn for ourselves, the narrow altitudes we live between, is, in fact, painful. It is remembering what we\u2019ve forgotten; it\u2019s returning to your childhood home, and hearing the sounds of your father going down the stairs. But certainly this is what literature should attempt: to break us from the flatline.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ray Kurzweil says of death: \u201cI don\u2019t accept it.\u201d They\u2019re the words of a child. And they have the same absurd pulse as most things we call love. During that flailing winter in my early twenties, I received an e-mail from my father, who abstains in all things from telling me \u201chow.\u201d The message was, roughly, that he hoped I\u2019d get my shit together, and soon.\u00a0\u201cSometime in the next decade I will likely die,\u201d he wrote. \u201cI don\u2019t mean to make a big deal of it, nothing could be more ordinary.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

My response, roughly, was \u201cFuck you.\u201d What I meant, of course, was \u201cNo dying.\u201d<\/p>\n

Katie Ryder is a New York\u2013based writer and an associate editor of the<\/em> Guernica Daily.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I remember sitting in red tights and buckled shoes in my childhood room as my word processor booted up. My father had taught himself DOS programming, and boxy yellow letters blinked on the gray green screen.\u00a0\u201cTHIS IS KATIE RYDER\u2019S WORD PROCESSOR.\u00a0HELLO KATE.\u201d\u00a0A system-check flashed through my existing files\u2014\u201c\/a_bad_day\u201d (child minimalist), \u201c\/last_unicorn\u201d (child plagiarist)\u2014before bringing me […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":516,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[2186,10672,122,9005,9004],"class_list":["post-50873","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-death","tag-dying","tag-nicole-krauss","tag-ray-kurzweil","tag-scott-hutchins"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nA Theory of Love by Katie Ryder<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"April 19, 2013 \u2013 I remember sitting in red tights and buckled shoes in my childhood room as my word processor booted up. 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