The Echo Maker

“A flock of birds, each one burning. Stars swoop down to bullets. Hot red specks take flesh, nest there, a body part, part body. Lasts forever: no change to measure. Flock of fiery cinders. When gray pain of them thins, then always water. Flattest width so slow it fails as liquid. Nothing in the end but flow. Nextless stream, lowest thing above knowing. A thing itself the cold and so can’t feel it.”

This passage is an example of stream-of-consciousness. It mimics Mark’s confusion and disorientation by running words and phrases together in Mark’s confused brain. Without access to conscious thought, Mark can’t fuse scattered sensory input into a coherent story.

“Her mother used to call long-distance, just to listen to her phone-receptionist voice. ‘How’d you learn how to sound like that? That’s not right! That can’t be good for your vocal cords.’ From Chicago she went to Los Angeles, the greatest city on earth. She tried to tell Mark: […]Your parents aren’t your fault, […] You could come out here and nobody would ever have to know about them.”

Karin has always tried to help Mark find an identity that fits him. Karin herself has fled Kearney and the shadow of their parents in search of an identity she could live with. She finds that the problem isn’t other people knowing about her parents but rather that she hasn’t formed a satisfactory identity for herself.

“Nothing had the power to hurt her except for what power she gave it. Every barrier she’d ever chafed against was no more than a Chinese finger lock that opened instantly when she stopped pulling. She could simply watch, learn about the new Mark, listen to Daniel without having to understand him. Other people were about themselves, not about her.”

Karin is learning to let go of the stories she has imposed on other people and herself in relation to them. She has no control over Mark’s recovery or who Daniel is. Karin has been trapped in a story she has created around her life, a story that gave her meaning but not happiness or a satisfactory identity.

“Living things, always talking. How you know they’re living. Always with the look, with the listen, with the see what I mean. What can things mean, that they aren’t already? Live things make such sounds, just to say what silence says better. Dead things are what they are already, and can shut up in peace.”

As Mark makes progress toward recovery, he is able to recognize and repeat words, but he hasn’t connected his pre-frontal cortex to the other layers of his brain, so he still doesn’t have a sense of time or higher meaning. Things exist with no narrative or meaning layered over them, which allows him to experience the world differently than he did before the accident.

“She began to see Daniel with new eyes. Some part of her had always dismissed him, a neo-hippie inclined to righteousness, a little too organically pure, hovering above the herd. Now she felt her long unfairness. He simply wanted people to be as selfless as they should be, humbled by the million supporting links that kept them alive, as generous with others as nature was with them.”

The “million supporting links” in nature are equated to the billions of interconnecting neurons of Mark’s healing brain. Daniel sees the attrition of the cranes’ habitat as an Ecosickness. Just as nature is a metaphor for Mark’s brain, Mark’s injury is a metaphor for the injured environment.

“‘[Meditation] […] Frees up my beliefs, so that every new idea, every new change isn’t so much…like the death of me.’

‘You want it to make you more fluid?’

His head bobbed, like she’d just met him halfway. She found the idea almost hideous. Mark had become fluid. She could not be any more fluid than Mark’s accident now forced her to be. What she wanted—what she needed from Daniel—was dry land.”

When Mark’s accident changes him, he undergoes a symbolic death. Using meditation, which has long been explored by neuroscientists for its ability to influence brain function, helps him navigate these deaths in a way that minimizes his resistance to the changes that are taking place. The fluidity he desires scares Karin because it means she too will be forced to change.

“Mental space is larger than anyone can think. A single brain’s 100 billion cells make thousands of connections each. The strength and nature of these connections changes every time use triggers them. Any given brain can put itself into more unique states than there are elementary particles in the universe.”

This passage from Gerald Weber’s book parallels the hundreds of billions of connections within nature itself. It also refers to brains putting themselves into unique states. There is a hint here that Mark’s brain has put itself into its current state for some reason of its own. It also suggests that people’s brains are not fully under their control.

“[Weber] forced himself to ignore the file and listen to Karin Schluter’s version. Through three successive books, he’d championed the idea: facts are only a small part of any case history. What counted was the telling.”

This passage applies to the theme of Stories and Meaning. Weber’s books are primarily accounts of case histories in story form, turning the symptoms of various conditions into intimate, meaningful experiences for the reader. Weber is also exposing his waning interest in individuals by fictionalizing and depersonalizing them for the sake of a good story.

“How did a Capgras patient see character? Could logic, stripped of feeling, see past the performance of personality? Could anyone?”

This is the motif of feeling versus reason. People generally assume that logic is the opposite of emotion, but at least in Mark’s case, he uses reason as a way of justifying emotion, not the other way around. The Negotiation of Identity also plays a role in this passage. Part of our ability to understand other people is founded on our ability to interpret their feelings. Weber wonders if Mark’s inability to connect to his feelings about Karin enhances or inhibits his ability to make accurate judgments about her.

“His sister represents the most complex combination of psychological vectors in his life. He stops recognizing his sister because some part of him has stopped recognizing himself.’”

Concerning The Negotiation of Identity, Weber is referencing the way in which people constantly negotiate their identities with respect to the people around them. A large part of Mark’s identity was formed in relation to his sister.

“What we think of as a single, simple process […] is in fact a long assembly line. Vision requires careful coordination between thirty-two or more separate brain modules. Recognizing a face takes at least a dozen […] Only: the many, delicate hardwires between modules can break at several different spots.”

This passage from one of Weber’s books offers a clear explanation of what has gone wrong with Mark’s mental processing. It shows the complexity of the brain, consciousness, and how easily that consciousness can be broken.

“What was it about the species that would save the symbol and discard the thing it stood for?”

Weber is thinking of his daughter playing the old game of Pong on her computer. The symbol (the computer game) is more satisfactory than playing ping pong in real life. The computer simulation is an echo of the real game, and the players prefer the echo, perhaps because it gives them more control.

“Consciousness works by telling a story, one that is whole, continuous, and stable. When that story breaks, consciousness rewrites it. Each revised draft claims to be the original. And so, when disease or accident interrupts us, we’re often the last to know.”

Speaking to the theme of Stories and Meaning, Weber is describing the process of consciousness and confabulation. When our perception of reality aligns with reality, stories provide a way to predict cause and effect and make rational decisions. When Mark’s perception no longer matches reality, he must confabulate, producing ever more elaborate and unlikely stories to explain his inner reality. This leads him to make mistakes.

“In what would surely be the final stage of his intellectual development, [Weber] now hoped to find, in the latest solid neuroscience, processes that looked like old depth psychology: repression, sublimation, denial, transference. Find them at some level above the module.”

Weber feels a loss of meaning—story—in modern neuroscience and longs to find the human consciousness in the science. His focus on meaning prevents him from seeking a genuine treatment for Mark’s Capgras, a treatment provided by Mark’s neurologist, who focuses on healing the brain. Weber’s focus on personality paradoxically leaves him disconnected from other people.

“Mark took his pet’s paws and danced her, a waltz with little conviction. ‘Look at this pathetic thing! It doesn’t even know who it isn’t. Somebody trained it to be my dog, and now it doesn’t even know what else to be. I guess I’m going to have to take care of you, aren’t I, girl? Who else will, if I don’t?’”

Mark’s relationship with Blackie is intimate enough to trigger his Capgras reaction, but the dog is also the least threatening intimate relationship in Mark’s life. Whereas Karin appears to be intentionally deceiving him, he recognizes that Blackie isn’t capable of deception. She depends on him rather than the other way around, as is the case with Karin.

“[Weber] returns here with his familiar and slightly cartoonish tales, hiding behind an entirely predictable if irrefutable plea for tolerance of diverse mental conditions, even as his stories border on privacy violations and sideshow exploitation…Seeing such a respected figure capitalize on unacknowledged research and unfelt suffering borders on the embarrassing.”

This passage from the Harper’s review of Weber’s latest book pinpoints Weber’s personal and professional failings. He dismisses the physical treatment of Mark’s Capgras because he has a nostalgic longing for psychoanalytic explanations. The reviewer has also noticed Weber’s lack of genuine connection with his subjects. Weber feels the bite of the criticism because he has already suspected this.

“The Capgras was changing [Karin], too. She fought against her habituation. For a little while longer, she still saw it: his laughter, eerily mechanical. His bouts of sadness, just statements of fact. […] For a little while longer, she knew the accident had blown them both away, and all the selfless attention from her in the world would never get them back. There was no back to get them to. For each new day, her own integrating memory increasingly proved that my brother was always like that.”

Both Mark’s and Karin’s identities are in the process of negotiation. The passage illustrates the mutability of memory and the way in which our internal stories rewrite themselves to correspond to new realities.

“None of the bizarre neurological insights acquired over the course of his professional life unsettled him more than this simplest one: baseline experience was simply wrong. Our sense of physical embodiment did not come from the body itself. Several layers of brain stood in between, cobbling up from raw signals the reassuring illusion of solidity.”

Mark’s experience illustrates the point that we can be sure that we exist in some form, but nothing else can be proved. Paradoxically, his pathology helps him arrive at a truth about human existence.

“She understood him now. Saint Daniel: needing to transcend the rest of the race. Needing to prove that a human could be better than humans, could be as pure as an instinctive animal. But he needed her confirmation. […] But his glance of doubt, of vague disappointment, that constant looking for something a little more worthy and shining…Virtuous, sacrificial, long-suffering: and slowly choking her.”

Daniel illustrates the tension between humanity and the ecosystem. No matter how hard he tries, he can never be perfect or perfectly in tune with the world, nor can he force the rest of humanity to achieve his definition of perfection. His intransigence makes it hard for him to make intimate connections.

“[Karsh] had ten times the self-knowledge Daniel had. He’d always almost relished admitting all the women he lusted after. I’m a man, Rabbit. We’re programmed to look. Everything worth looking at. Brutal truth was why she was sitting with him now, in the center of town, in front of the war memorial, in plain view of everyone. His voice chilled her—the sound of time starting up again […] Something nagged at her, some small difference. Maybe just a matter of pacing. He’d grown just two clicks slower, more open, peaceful. A touch of the acid, neutralized. Less slick, less aggressive, less self-satisfied. Or maybe he was just on his best behavior. Anyone could be anything, for an hour.”

Karsh is a foil for Daniel. He admits the truths about himself, including his failings, and doesn’t try to sacrifice or starve himself to a higher cause. In that sense, he is more in touch with nature than Daniel, who rejects humanness and idealizes the environment. At the same time, Karsh is destructive, placing humans above the ecosystem that sustains life. He acknowledges Karin’s animal nature by calling her “Rabbit”.

“No one saw his own symptoms. No one knew who others knew him to be.”

In regard to negotiation of identity, Weber, like Mark, is unable to see what is going wrong with himself. Some part of his identity is defined by others. This means that even though he is alienated from himself, he cannot see himself objectively from a distance.

“‘Save the birds, you say?’ He nodded stoically at the utter insanity of the race. ‘Save the birds and kill the people.’”

In the theme of Ecosickness, the characters see an irresolvable conflict between humanity and the natural world. Humans are seen as an unnatural disaster. Mark is making a metaphorically similar choice. To restore his former self, he risks destroying the person he is right now. Only one Mark can survive.

“Once, he’d studied an otherwise healthy man who thought that stories turned real. People spoke the world into being. Even a single sentence launched events as solid as experience. Journey, complication, crisis, and redemption: just say the words and they took shape. For decades, that case haunted everything Weber wrote about. That one delusion—stories came true—seemed like the germ of healing.”

In regard to Stories and Meaning, humans are inclined to organize their experience into classical narratives, making it easier to understand. Decisions are easier to make when there are distinct goals and oppositions. This is what Mark tries to do by creating conspiracies to explain his confusion. Like Weber’s patients, Mark tries to turn his stories into reality.